Britain hardly had a leg to stand on. They got stuck halfway through making the switch. Still use miles in their cars, feet for height, etc.
It’s old people. They vote and don’t like change.
Everyone in the UK under 40 never used imperial in their education, but everything is still imperial.
Even stuff that’s not supposed to be. Milk is sold in pints but labelled in ml. Sometimes it’s litres because these are smaller. Timbre is all sold in a metric equivalent, but it isn’t consistent. You don’t know if the piece you’ve had delivered is 2.4m or 2.44m. Rulers have both metric and imperial, unless you pay extra for a single system - which makes them harder to use.
The worst thing is recipes, many recipes are imperial online because of the USA. American imperial measurements aren’t the same as UK ones.
It is all driven by ignorance. The royal family (TV show) summed this ignorance up best. They complained it took them longer to get to the destination because their sat nav was in kilometres and there’s more kilometres than miles so everything is further away.
I’m European but I have a set of US cups in my kitchen because most recipes are in these stupid American measurements.
Why not just convert the units?
Because it’s an annoying extra step I need to take. Also volumetric units are less accurate and don’t convert to well into metric.
I avoid volumetric measurement whenever I can. I’ve found weight based measurement to be vastly superior, especially when you have a 0.1g digital scale. It’s much easier to weight 100g of water than check the line on 100ml.
Yeah grams are way more accurate and I always prefer to weigh, especially when it comes to stuff like coffee.
We use US Standard, not Imperial. Americans took Imperial and changed the measurements but kept the names, because “fuck you, Britain” but “fuck you even more, everyone else!”
Americans took Imperial and changed the measurements but kept the names,
Not accurate. Imperial and US customary were designed side by side. They share a common history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_units but US did not come from imperial
This sounds worse than just using imperial
It’s better. Because metric is still an option, but it’s not as good as it could be.
If the English speaking world fully committed to metric DIY, maker stuff and cooking online would be much better. But I’d much rather this than a fully imperial system. It much easier to work in metric and convert between than work in imperial. Imperial requires a lot more knowledge of the measurement system your working with than metric does. Because everything scales in metric the same and you can use exponentials or prefixes to express sizes. Though the US imperial system does simplify this system by using pounds for everything rather than stones.
It is surprising that the US still clings to imperial measurement despite being the first Anglosphere country to adopt metric/decimal currency. Along with the metric system being associated with liberty and enlightenment that was a big part of the philosophy behind the start of the US.
When it comes down to, in the UK and the US both imperial systems are quantified by metric standards. So it’s purely a mirage, because all reference lead back to metric measurements. Not brass yardsticks installed in the town centre. Imperial is now just a middle man maintained for nostalgia. The cost to switching is every decreasing as all series industry uses metric.
Don’t forget about stones for body weight
I fucking love the psychotic concept of using “stone” as a measurement, even though a real stone can weight anywhere from milligrams to … thousands of tonnes?
It’s like saying you weigh 7 water.
Or you are 6 feet tall.
It’s generally good to use feet for height. When I use butt for height I’m like a meter shorter.
This but unironically.
True we don’t deserve better measurements
I’m on team inch. I think the metric system has been pushed by Big Socket to sell more wrenches. If they made a meter equal a yard we could be bilingual and use the most appropriate system for the job.
Fact: the most often lost socket is a 10mm.
Then why am I finding nothing but 10mm when I need anything else? I swear I have 50.
They’re all going to you. Do you have an unusual amount of single socks too?
Big Socket has us by the short and curlies.
Except when you need a 7/16ths, then they turn into 10mm’s. The reverse is true too.
Don’t forget big nut!
Then we could have two systems with stupid scientific formulas!
Lmao
FYI: The US doesn’t use Imperial, they use US Customary. Volumes are different. Troy weights are usually called Troy (ounces).
Is that supposed to be better?
No it’s worse, because they use the same names for different volumes and weights.
We needed extra room for all the freedom.
But your pints are smaller
Hey.
…shut up.
“They hated him because he spoke the truth.”
To be fair their ounces are larger…
A standard which is a “newer” version of an old standard, when a new objectively better standard already exists to replace it.
You tell me.
It’s like standard in computers. It’s not meant to be better, it’s meant to imprison the user with the company tools.
Except a country doesnt need anything like that. What is the US afraid of? That its people will suddenly move to Zimbabwe and be happy?
If there was a genuine benefit to having different standards than rest of the world, then just like wars, more countries would be having them
US has had millions, if not billions of dollars of losses due to this madness and has itself tried switching to metric system.
The fact the imperial system itself is now based on the metric system tells you enough
Well it depends. Open standards are created to hopefully catch on by multiple manufacturers and make the interoperability better to make it easier for both consumers and manufacturers.
Proprietary standards are just simply to lock you into their ecosystem.
Just more confusing!
Making fun for STILL using it. If our navy would navigate by the stars at night, it would be laughed at, right? And rightly so. ;)
GPS can be jammed, try jamming stars.
Who would win:
- A billion, billion unfathomably massive fusion reactions
- Some steamy bois ☁️🌥
Urban areas with huge light pollution: “and I took that personally”
Land navies hate this.
Light polution, checkmate astronomer
Amazon and Musk are working on it.
Now I wonder if we could launch satellites as artificial stars for celestial navigation. Basically optical GPS.
Starlink: hold my Xitter handle
Actually, don’t. The pollution would kill us all.
“That’s no moon.”
Tbh that sounds like a fun project for an app or something, as a backup to gps in case it’s jammed. Just lay your phone on the ground, take a long exposure picture and then use the phones time to calculate where you are. Might need to take the accelerometer into account if the ground isn’t flat.
Fighter jets have automatic star navigation to augment their GPS navigation features. It’s more than a fun project, it’s military technology.
Wait til you find out who taught America the word “soccer”.
Soccer was an abbreviation used by posh people. Associate football -> sociate -> soccer. Much like rugby is called ruggers by the same group of people today. It was an informal term.
Association football was popular amongst the working class in the UK, who didn’t use the same types of abbreviations. So it wasn’t referred to as soccer by the them. When radio/TV became common the presenters wouldn’t use abbreviations like soccer and so it was referred to as Association Football or Football.
In the US the posh abbreviation took over, likely because many British travellers to the US would be posh and not working class. At least the ones traveling for leisure and taking part in sports activities. Working class would mostly be immigrants and wouldn’t be brushing shoulders with those in sports media.
American call the rugby like sport, American Football because it is played on foot and not horse. It would also share a common ancestry of completely moving a ball from one place to another on foot, like football and rugby.
Dont the British weigh things with rocks or some dumb shit?
The British have a perfectly logical system that results in us buying fuel by the litre, measuring speed in miles per hour, and measuring fuel economy in miles per gallon. We are doing just fine thank you very much.
Knowledge is power. Using all of the knowledge at once is surely the most powerful.
They’re actually finely calibrated stones. For instance, my weight is 13 stones and a packet of gravel.
I lost twelve gravel and a teaspoon of sand this week.
Truly the long game on that joke! Well done, ya got us.
But the UK still uses imperial. I remember playing euro truck sim and being annoyed that the road signs don’t match the speed limit shown in the GPS. I first thought this was a bug. Then I remembered that I was in UK and not the Netherlands where I picked up the delivery.
UK is a conplete chaos between the two. You buy liters of milk but gallons of gas. Speeds are in miles per hour. Close distances are in meters, longer ones in miles. I have seen weight both in grams and in pounds. And then the currency is even called pound.
“How many pounds does one pound of apples cost, sir?”
It’s so much worse than anyone outside of the UK can imagine. Milk and beer come in pints but water and wine come in litres (actually, wine and liquor sometimes comes in centilitres which is actually worse) . Most fuel pumps show you the quantity in litres but we still measure speed in miles per hour and efficiency in miles per gallon.
I know my own weight in kilos but my height in feet. When I go to the barbers I ask for a one mill on the sides and an inch off the top. I try and run a 5k every now and again but could never do a marathon.
Then there’s the generation split. I’m of that weird generation where I’m caught in the middle of older teachers knowing imperial better but trying to teach metric in school.
My parents always used imperial so I learned some of that early on but then learned metric in school. Went to engineering college where they taught me all the more advanced metric before going to work at a company that almost exclusively uses imperial (thank you American aerospace for that one)
Shit, even our kettles can’t seem to decide on imperial cups or just guessing how big the average mug is. My kettle has both cups and millilitre gradiations on it.
And don’t get me started on single, double, king and queen beds! Turns out there’s a euro standard and they’re not the same as our standard! You can buy a double sheet that’s closer to fitting a queen size bed!
Idek what’s going on at this point lol
how many pounds of gas does it take to drive 1 kilofoot?
centipounds
And they use stone (14 pounds) to measure body weight.
Holy shit. I’m gladdened to learn that someone may be more fucked than us. Today is a first: I am no longer from the most shamed people.
Nah, you buy petrol in litres, but mileage is calculated in miles per gallon. Which is much worse
Canada is a bit of a mess too, although different. We never really use miles, but we do use feet and inches and pounds pretty regularly. The construction industry is a real mess in particular because so many things are measured in either imperial or metric units
even better is measuring shit in stone.
no one knows what that means outside of blighty mate, no one’s ever fucking heard of stone. it’s so hilarious.
Nah, the brits have it even worse, I don’t think even they know what system they use. Like the US just uses the imperial system but brits use like every system randomly plus some stuff that no one else uses, like boulders or some caveman shit like that.
Also brits got like nothing left to make fun of at this point: They fucked their healthcare system bad enough they may as well be in the US, they got 2 viable parties that are even more the same than the US and they left the one thing that kept the country economically relevant to name a few things.
Depends what you mean by fucked up. Long waits for some NHS treatments, but if I get any kind of serious injury like cuts or broken bones, it’ll be seen in A&E (Accident & Emergency) at the hospital, they obviously treat the more serious injuries first, but I’ve never waited longer than 4 hours - and that was on a Saturday night about ten years ago, with a minor cut than only needed 5 stitches or so…
As a kid, my broken arm and the few times I needed stitches, it was sorted pretty much straight away or with an hour or two wait. That’s probably doubled or tripled nowadays.
Mental health turnaround is not great, as that’s through my doctor (the NHS). Although I got treatment for depression a couple of years back, meds (Sertaline) and referral to therapy, after a week or so waiting for an appointment and answering a few waves of questionnaires. A couple of months later, after a lengthy conversation with a medical health triage nurse (which was just a random follow up call - that lasted an hour!), I went on an 18 month waiting list for the ADHD test, and about the same for ASD(Autism Spectrum Disorder) as well.
Not great, but they’re understandably swamped with the spike of mental illness, or people becoming aware of it anyway, after covid and the lockdowns.
Still waiting on the NHS for the ASD diagnosis, but I actually ended up going private for my ADHD, that was ~£800, was seen in a week, and the meds for that was £100 a month for Elvanse(Vyvanse in the US). I was able to transfer back to my GP after a few months though, so it’s just the standard prescription price of £9.65 / month, which is much better.
Other than that last paragraph, everything else was entirely free… so, nah, I don’t reckon our health care system is as fucked as yours and we certainly don’t have it “even worse”!
Edit: typo’s and explaining a few acronyms!
I’m from Estonia so my healthcare is fine. Mental health waiting times are on the longer side (longest I saw was 6 months) in less populated areas here but private option for that is like 20 euros per session and meds are still free.
Didn’t you guys have like a day of waiting time for ambulances at some point? I remember seeing that in the foreign news.
The US is officially metric, they signed the metre convention 149 years ago
We would have probably been using metric from the start, but pirates stole our kilogram.
Our money is, and always has been, metric. Was there a decimalized currency before the United States Dollar?
People don’t get that part. The US was one of the early adopters of the metric system. Mostly thanks to the French supplying Charleville muskets for the fledgling US army during the revolutionary war. And we kept making French pattern muskets, (in metric measurements), for about the next 40 years I think.
Within the US government it’s still all metric measures, has been since Carter, but Reagan made a social cause and used it against the Dems (along with a secret “guns for hostages” negotiation) to win the presidency. And it’s been downhill ever since.
With metric and imperial though, you’re damned right.
We use both systems pretty randomly… personally, I far prefer the metric system, but I have a much better idea of how far a mile is compared to a kilometre. Which makes little sense, as a metres and kilometres are so much more logical than miles and fucking yards!
There is an argument to made that very few people care about the actual distance anything is from themselves anymore. What they are about is “how long will it take to get there”.
You very probably have little to no clue what the actual distance from your front steps to your favorite grocery or pub. But you DO know how long it takes to get there.
Aye, but at least we’re not American
We use metric apart from with roads
How tall are you, and how much do you weigh?
I use the metric system for both, and I’m from the UK. I don’t even know my weight in stone anymore, but a stone is just 14 pounds, like how 16 ounces fit into a pound. It has about as much to do with a real stone as a foot in distance has to do with the foot on your leg. Or a metre with a parking meter.
Like 77kg 175cm kinda weird question though
Any excuse to take the piss out of the Yanks is fine by me.
Any excuse to take the piss out of the Yanks is fine by me.
So I take it that you approve of catheters then? /s
Are they actually using metric though? Last time I was in London airport I wasn’t so sure.
When you ask a British person how much they weigh and they start talking about rocks
Is that an imperial rock or a metric rock?
Imperial boulders
Depends what you’re measuring. Also our imperial units are slightly different, and lots have variations depending on what’s being measured.
Get britished
It’s less of an imperial system, and more of an imperial suggestion
The US doesn’t use imperial units, though. The US customary units share names with imperial units, but they are significantly different.
They’re still stupid
Yeah
Of course they are. I expect the number of furlongs in a whatsit has changed at least every week. Who could even pretend to remember the actual values?
Furlongs is a different measuring system all together. Same with miles and inches. We don’t convert between those measurements because it’s not necessary.
TIL! Got to be extra careful when doing conversion then!
That’s why you see units like “US cup” instead of just “cup” when doing conversions in a lot of places.
I was about to say. Wikipedia has an overview.
To add to that, US customary is a collection of measurement systems with different purposes. Most of the jokes about the US measurements are about the “silly” units like furlongs and acres and whatnot but those are either not at all part of the US customary system or are used to measure different things and are not converted between. Like, there is no reason to measure distance in inches when miles do fine. Anything using precision use a different system altogether or a variation on us customary that is often favored over metric for precision. Not that US customary is better than any other system, just it’s not really as bad as people make it out to be. It’s perfectly serviceable and changing away from it is not really the top of the priority list for this country.
Remember the time NASA burnt up $200MM in the Martian atmosphere because some chucklehead was using pound-seconds? Maybe let’s sort out shit out.
Maybe a mistake NASA made 25 years ago is less influential on the ongoing crises plaguing the US like gun violence, civil and political unrest, and countless other issues are also on the list of things that need to change. Seems silly to argue about how civilians in a country weigh things when those civilians don’t have water because their government gave up on fixing the infrastructure to provide that water in several major cities. You want national change from a country that’s trying to find out if the potential next president will follow through with promises of being a dictator? Cool bro.
You’re right, we’d better wait until absolutely everything else is perfect before making any changes whatsoever.
Not at all what I said. Just that it is not a priority.
Everyone makes fun of the US for using imperial, but nobody makes fun of Liberia and Myanmar for doing the exact same thing.
At least they don’t speak Fahrenheit.
“You don’t often think of those other two as having their shit together.”
–Sterling Archer
Burma is switching away. Liberia… who knows. That place is almost as fucked up as the US.
Good to know.
Literally no reason not to use metric, idc who or where you are
There is a reason. When you grow up with people around you using imperial units to describe things, you think in terms of it. If you tell me 10 ft., I can picture that in my head, I have an idea of how much that is in real terms. If you tell me 10m, I have no mental idea of how much that is, even if I can convert it. It’s like a language you grow up speaking, versus one you learn later in life.
I do think metric the sole system used in schools, to be honest.
That’s true, but it’s also a double edged sword: you can easily learn metric just by switching to it.
Try setting a weather widget on your phone to only show you Celsius and don’t convert it to Fahrenheit, over time you will get an intuitive understanding of what feels cold to you.
The biggest block to learning a new system is insulating yourself with conversions IMO, imagine trying to learn a new language by just having everyone speak into Google translate
I’m fluent in metric but I can’t think in anything but imperial, I’m merely converting in my head on the fly
Yep, that’s my life, pretty much. OTOH, my kids don’t have to live under the curse of arbitrary units of measurement and only have a vague idea of what a foot is.
That’s a good idea that I think I will try out. To be honest, I have a pretty hard time visualizing distance, even with imperial, so sadly I don’t think that help will help me in that area.
It’s weird, because small units I think about it cm, not imperial.
I’m the same actually, I’m probably more likely to say 1cm than half an inch
Millimeters as well for you? It’s probably because having to use fractions is so much less intuitive.
Millimeters especially, no way am I saying like “1/24th of an inch”
I’m doing the slow switch with decimal time. It works!
Plenty of people in Canada had no trouble switching back when we did.
The good thing with metric though is it’s easier to visualise other measurements once you know one of them, cause you just know that each other measurement is just a multiple or division of the one you know. Like if you know roughly how long a centimetre is then you can take a good estimate of how long a meter is knowing that it’s 100cm
I mean, yeah, I’m not arguing that imperial is a better system. Metric is superior, absolutely. I’m just arguing against the statement that there’s no reason to use it.
Did you grow up using metric?
It was much more mixed when i was in primary school but by the time I left secondary school it was fully metric. It might’ve fully changed before I noticed though just cause I was little and parents and grandparents would still be using imperial. I do remember having to learn imperial in school though.
Literally no reason not to drive on the right side of the street as well but maybe it does matter where you are.
Counterpoint: most imperial units use only one syllable. It’s a mistake that we let scientists name things.
Please explain to me why I should use metric when:
- My car uses imperial
- the weather channels use imperial
- the news networks use imperial
- My entire country, which takes up about half a continent, ALL JUST USES IMPERIAL
???
The funny part is we switch to metric when it’s science
But only sometimes. Other times, interplanetary probes disappear.
They made fun of that on For All Mankind. An incident on Mars because Russia and America were doing calculations using different systems and someone forgot to convert.
And computer temperatures lol
The question isn’t why you should use it, but rather why all these things you’ve listed are still using it.
We all know that transition isn’t easy, but being proud of using the inferior system is weird.
My point is that if I give someone directions in meters they’re going to look at me like I have two heads, it’s literally like speaking two different languages.
Iirc a ship was carrying the metric standards to the US in like 1790 and sank and they just said fuck it
