Honestly I don’t know what a ton looks like. I’ve bought stuff like gravel and even the guy selling it had no idea. I asked for half a ton which is the legal limit on my trailer and because the skid-loader didn’t have a scale in the grapple he said “I’m just gonna eyeball it”. Then on the scale where they do the payment it showed 2 ton, so I had to manually shovel 1.5 ton of gravel off.
Sure I can visualise a ton of water because it’s such a nice unit, but everything else makes no sense. Cubic metres is a much better measurement to visualise.
Jam0758@szmer.info 1 year ago
I do not think this is a good take. I buy kilograms of sugar, wheat, I measure my body weight in kilograms and I do not need these measurements to be accurate to one thousandths.
And yeah, I have bought a ton of something, coal.
It’s a ton (or metric tonne, fine) because people are just used to it, I wouldn’t have a problem if everybody started using megagrams, but most people wouldn’t even know what it means, especially elderly or people raised with SI but not “getting” SI (“centigrams? do you mean centimeters?”).
It’s just a well known alias, nothing else.