Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.
Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren’t they?
Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.
Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren’t they?
What was the point of this propaganda? To keep products incompatible somehow?
Capital owners that don’t want to retool for a bullshit reason like “common good”.
It literally costs them more money to not use the global standards!
In the long run, maybe. short term is all that matters. And short term it costs money
Relabeling is such a chore.
Replacing all your tools and machines is super easy, though. /s
FWIW I only work in metric, Imperial is utter trash, tbh.
Why don’t you want to measure things by parts of a twelfth of a Roman foot?
of an approximation of a derivative of the Roman foot in metric*
The Roman foot was between approximately 0.96 and 1.1 international feet (most commonly about 0.97 ft, except in modern Belgium where it was 1.091 ft/13.1 in, the size of Nero Claudius Drusus’ foot). After that, the foot in Britain was based off the North German foot (~13.2 in), but in the late 13th century it became more like 12 in (so around the same as the modern foot). Later the English foot was between 11.7 and 12.01 in, and the US foot was based on the English foot until the 19th century when they made the US Customary Units and defined the foot as exactly 1200/3937 meters. The British made the British Imperial system and a bit later defined the foot as 1200/3937.0113 meters. They didn’t switch to metric because they saw “French Revolutionary units” (metric) as “atheistic”. Later, we advanced our understanding of physics, and the British adopted a foot of 304.8 mm in 1930, and the Americans followed them in 1933, based on the new “industrial inch” from the now-unused 1927 light wave definition of the meter (which used the International Prototype, made of a standard bar). The modern foot is defined as exactly 0.3048 meters, by international agreement in 1959 between some English-speaking countries, after the newer Kypton standard definition of the meter (which is also now not used).
Now it’s based on the modern meter definition (distance travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299792458 of a second, which is defined based on the uperturbed ground-state hyperfine transition frequency of a caesium-133 atom being 9192631770 Hz)
The really neat thing about those changes to the meter is that it didn’t really change how long a meter was (-ish), it changed the precision of that definition, as well as the ability to reproduce an exact meter, reducing the need for a specific piece of material to define the meter (which changes length based on environment). Now, an exact standard meter can be reproduced independently in any lab with the proper equipment.
What’s especially wild is that the kilogram was still an artifact in 2019! Every single calibrated weight in the world, big and small… They all could be traced back to a single metal chunk in a french vault.
Well we already deal with a mixed system, so they could relabel where possible and just phase out any machines where not, and in the interim just hand out slide rules with conversions on them.