Han is right. Clearly much of our units confusion--and metrication
problems--result from a deliberate attempt by retailers to hornswoggle--not
to say cheat--the public. For example, irrationally small units are often
used here to create big numbers with lots of zeroes that exaggerate what you
are buying, e.g., heaters with tens of thousands of Btu, bottles in hundreds
of ounces, etc.
The inscrutable US shoe sizes are used to cover up the fact that stores
don't carry your size.
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Han Maenen
> >
> Such things have convinced me that marketing is a clever way to make
> consumers stupid, illiterate and innumerate. That is also the reason why
> marketeers oppose rational reforms of measuring units and why they
> popularized the inch in metric countries when the personal
> computer made its
> debut. They want systems of measurement to be as difficult as possible,
> metric is too userfriendly, so metric countries must be corrupted by
> infecting them with ifp.
