by liberal japonicus
Over here, I don't think much about the price of gas. No really critical uses of the car, and gas is sold in liters. For me, there is some sort obsfucation constant that is added whenever you translate something from imperial to metric. "It's 39 degrees celsius" and I yawn. 'It's 103 degrees Farenheit' and I think 'geez, that's hot!'
For gas, that's exacerbated by the rule of thumb (i.e. lazy) conversions I use. So I figured that my liter was roughly half a gallon, give or take. Hell, maybe my liter is half a gallon, and everyone's liter is different. Thank god for post-modernism!
Anyway, here, a liter of gas is 145 yen and is right now 79 yen= $1, which makes that $1.88/liter. However the quick and dirty conversion that most folks do here is 100 yen to the dollar, even though that 80 yen range has been going on since before the tsunami. So my crappy 2l=1 gallon conversion, along with my lazy yen to dollar then gets you $2.90 a gallon. Hey, I can live with that, it's not like it's California, right?
However, the discussion about $5 a gallon gas made me re-realize (i.e. look up) that 1 gallon is actually 3.785 liters, so doing it all by the book, you get
.....
.....
.....
1 x $1.88 x 3.785 which gives you $7.11 a gallon.
Geez, that's expensive!
So now I'm left with the question of whether this arose because I'm just lazy at conversions or if this was a psychological denial mechanism. I suppose both things could be true. So talk about that, or the price of gas, or anything else that metaphorically fills your tank.
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