All Comments on 'The Good Ship Bison'

"America is really stupid sometimes, and imperial measurements still being a thing was proof."

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This is the typical thought patterns of somebody who lacks the mental capacity to comprehend the sheer size of America and the fact that it is largely laid out on a mile based grid system. Even in the cities where the blocks are much less than a mile, they are still typically designed to have a fixed number of blocks per mile so that the rural roads will each align with a city street.

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In summary, it would be an economic disaster to try and actually convert the US infrastructure to the metric system and forcing the usage of metric units to reference the imperial system based infrastructure is an unnecessary complexity that gains nothing but headaches and confusion.

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I would recommend that you keep such irrelevant editorial comments out of your stories, as they detract from the story and make you look like an idiot.

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Very thought provoking. I think we all could agree that some of the ideas might really work but have entrenched groups opposed. We can only hope!

I’m still on Page 6 but I noticed a glaring error — 20,000’ would be flight level 200 not 20.

@HIFranc, thank you, typos occur, apologies. I'm not a pilot so I'm doing my best to copy their lingo and maybe not getting everything right. I appreciate your taking the time to comment, though, at least it sounds like the rest was/is good enough to hold your attention.

@Anonymous Re: Metric system. Thank you for your comment. You presume I am from the USA, I think. I may lack imagination about how hard it is to transition, but Britain did it in the 1970's and it worked out fine? The UK money system even transitioned from farthing/hapenny/sixpence/etc. to just pounds and cents!!

Changing money is arguably much harder than swapping out tools in a toolbox... though, I'm pretty sure most US based auto mechanics (and many/most homeowners) have both metric and SAE tools now.

You say, 'economic disaster' to transition to metric, but I suspect that a by-industry by-product switch with a year lead-time for each thing - milk jugs and gasoline, for instance - would solve this. USA is pretty rich, as a country, this couldn't cost more than a tiny fraction of GDP, and thus wouldn't be a 'disaster', imho.

But, we can disagree. I know, there's a tendency to edit out all opinions from these Literotica stories, but I like the free wheeling aspect of throwing out an opinion about this - or any other thing like cranberry juice tasting better than OJ in the morning - and being able to have a reader say, 'yeah, fun opinion' or 'I disagree' and move on. Not everyone likes anal. I don't. But, no judgement there. I like the idea of the whole world having the metric system, I threw it in. I didn't write in a mandate anal sex for every adult couple. Would that be more weird? LOL. Be well, sir or madame, I'm having fun writing and I hope you have fun reading, even if it's things you disagree with.

@ja99 - Actually, I do not presume that. If you were actually from the USA, you would have a higher chance of understanding the vastness of the country. Sadly, not that much higher, but a bit...

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I have to laugh at your audacity to compare England to the United States. You do realize that the entire country of England is roughly the size of Colorado, which is only our 8th largest state (and one of 50). The United States is roughly the size of Europe, not any one country in it.

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Why would we need to change our money? Are you not aware that our money is already on a decimal system and has been since 1792, as compared to 1971 for England?

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I love how you backed off of your "imperial measurements still being a thing" to picking and choosing things that can more easily be changed. Of course, what you're also admitting without plainly saying it is that we are already switching to metric where appropriate and not overly disruptive. Another thing that you seem to overlook is that even if we did waste the money and force all of our industry to convert to metric, mechanics would still need their SAE and metric tools because the existing vehicle base isn't actually going to be retrofitted with metric bolts, so there's really no benefit there.

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Sadly, you seem to think that switching to metric is a worthy goal on its own and thus does not need any other justification. That is simply not true. Tell me, what is this great benefit to converting our gas pumps from gallons to liters? Do you think that our gas pumps count in gallons, pints, and ounces? No, we're actually smart enough to use fractions and decimals with pretty much any unit of measurement... The average gas pump counts the gas pumped in 1/100 gallon units, multiplies it by a price in 1/1000 dollar units, then rounds and charges in 1/100 dollar units. All without the huge cost and confusion that converting to the metric system would entail. You might also be surprised to note that US car odometers used to count in 1/10 mile units, not feet, before the life span of vehicles made an extra digit on left more important than a fractional digit on the right...

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Of course, all of your comments are pointless unless you retract your original statement. As I pointed out, our road system is laid out on a mile based system. For the most part, our township and county lines are based on that mile based road layout. Property lines are also largely based on this same system (and a federal land survey from 1785). So, to completely eliminate the imperial system, as your original statement claimed had to happen for America to not be stupid, you would have to rip up and replace almost the entire road system, redraw township and county lines based on the new metric system of roads, mediate the land disputes and easement requirements as land parcel sizes change, and generally waste more money than the GNP of the entire planet on a single, worthless project. Otherwise, as I said before, you're just adding unnecessary complexity (in the form of a bunch of math) to hide the fact that we still have an imperial based infrastructure behind a bunch of misleading numbers that are nothing but a conversion of the underlying, and much simpler, imperial measurements.

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As to the story itself, I am mostly enjoying it. Things like this pull me out of the reading immersion I enjoy, so my comment below was made as soon as I got to that line rather than after I had read the whole story. I'm currently just over halfway through it. You did a good job of writing the MC as a high school student. Unfortunately, you also wrote all of the other (much older) characters as high school students. Couple that with your little uninformed rant on the American use of imperial measurements and I'm led to believe that you're probably either still a high school student or have been quite recently. Still, I enjoy this type of story where the MC just gets everything handed to him pretty much drama/conflict free. Sometimes it's nice to read a feel good story without reality interfering. It is a bit frustrating that these stories tend to be a bit juvenile, but they seem to primarily be written by juveniles so...

Whether it can be easily changed or not, I think we can all agree that the imperial system is stupid.

Read the story. You won't be buying gasoline soon.

Anyone who thinks converting land measurements from Imperial units to Metrics means that the thing being measured will vanish has a few marbles missing between their ears. A simple conversion factor with an accepted error (for those last 5/32nd differences you might get, for example) will sort out the conversion. You can look at the efforts of the UK, Australia, New Zealand and Canada to see 4 different but similar solutions to this problem. As a Kiwi I'm happy that my Lot which was originally surveyed in Roods and Perches is now still the same size but my Record of Title now shows a measurement in Square Metres. The change in measurement standard did originally make a bit of work for Land Information New Zealand but I doubt you would find any New Zealand surveyor who would advocate returning to the complex mess of Imperial units as the savings in time and money now made by using Metrics would be lost.

I'm LOVING the fact that the thing the reader above finds most difficult to accept in a story about a high school guy being given a magical alien spaceship and the ability to bang any girl that comes onboard, is... wait for it... The Metric System. LOL. It was a small thing as part of the story, and YES, there's problems with converting, but ... WOW to pick that? Not the no-more-wild-caught-fish thing? Not the universal healthcare? Not having colonies on other planets? Not giving some bar patrons in the Azores their own backyard-welded auto-shop special space station ?

It's all good, people, I care and appreciate ALL of my readers and their comments, and you delight me with reactions that I didn't anticipate. THANK YOU, ONE AND ALL, be well, and Give Love.

So, Mads and Alice, his girlfriend, just disappeared from the story, as did all the original crew? What happened with Jan, the former Marine pilot? They all just sort of disappeared. No epilogue for them? Interesting story idea, but not my favorite of yours by a long shot.

@Falstaff60: I have no proofreaders, my wife finds my work uninteresting. Alas. Comments as on-point as yours are HELPFUL, and thank you kindly!! You're absolutely right. A simple couple of sentences about what their fate is (remaining on the ship as well as being ambassadors/liasons from the ship to various nations), would make a world of difference to resolution and how their lives (together or not) play out. The idea that they form a family with kids both aboard and at a port-of-call, is obvious to me.

I try to give epilogues to many of my stories to ensure there's closure of loose threads. I also want to ensure there's no one thinking, hey, there should be sequels to this, because usually sequels are uninteresting to me as an author. The exception is spinoffs, ancillary action happening alongside that references the main situation but doesn't depend on it. I have some of those stories in a major work that I'm editing now (I wrote most of it between 2011 and 2015 and it needs help). The spinoffs of that work are great by themselves; one of them described situations that are too unfixably feather-edge for Literotica so I'll have to put those works elsewhere. Alas.

Thank you for your suggestion / observation @falstaff60, I am well advised by it. Be well; peace out.

Just an fyi the Falkland Islands belong to the uk not Argentina the uk kicked argentinas ass when they invaded in 1982 which cost hundreds of lives on both sides thankfully many more of the invaders. Please don’t insult their memory by calling it an Argentine colony. Thank you I still love your stories even with this insult lol.