You laugh, but “Professional” news organizations routinely fuck up kilowatts and kilowatt-hours when they talk about electric power.
We should replace kWh with Joules as harm reduction
You laugh but if you ever take a college physics class you’ll appreciate having the idea of being overly careful of your units drilled into you.
Or anything else really
It’s hell to try to understand something someone gave you if they don’t label things properly. It’s like “I can see there is a number here, but what the fuck does the number mean”
In another thread I was laughing about how U.S. utilities charge for electricity by the kilowatt hour, but charge for piped natural gas by the “therm,” which is 100,000 BTUs. BTUs are the energy required to raise 1 pound of water by 1 degree Fahrenheit, like a shitty imperial calorie.
Confusingly, most gas appliances are marketed as being a certain number of BTUs per hour, but people often omit the implied “per hour” when talking about them, and will talk of their 12,000 BTU stove burner or 30,000 BTU water heater.
Talking through residential energy use without having a solid command of what unit means what would be confusing.
State your units.
Considering this kid didn’t learn which side of the number the dollar sign goes on, maybe they shouldn’t be making fun and should pay more attention.
fucking Christ I hated word problems when I was going to school. This post brought back a lot of bad memories from when I was going to school