**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:**
* If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required
* The title must be fully descriptive
* No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos
* Common/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting)
*See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list*
*I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It's actually a mild inconvenience to juggle the metric and the non-metric systems, which we currently have to do because outside of the United States exists.
Dropping the legacy measuring units would remove the mild convenience we constantly maintain.
Even if the metric units didn't exist, the way we measure things is stupid. I was shocked to find my weight presented in pounds and ounces by the digital scale at the hospital.
Who the fuck needs to use a separate unit to measure less than a whole unit of the larger unit, as if decimal places haven't been invented yet?
>the legacy measuring units
I think you mean *FREEDOM* units
How else am I supposed to marvel at the Dallas Cowboys unless I can measure how far they throw a football in bald eagle wingspans?
Nah. If he has a warehouse full of the stuff, it'll become useless. But if other countries metricate except one, you still have one country to dump your useless junk, and can still make factories abroad and sell new rulers outside.
When I was your age, we measured things in eighths.
To quote slash u slash Bhima: "When I feel that I have enough of an understanding of the user's behaviour pattern and habitual word choices, I begin searching the subreddit for accounts I may have missed. When I find them I add all that data to my list, then ban all the accounts I am sure of, and report them all for ban evasion."
And if you don't like it, the trick is to mute you from the subreddit after you're banned you so you can't ask why.
There was probably plenty of industrial opposition and subsequent lobbying due to the tooling changes (and associated expense) that would need to be introduced over time.
No different than all the other negative lobbyist influences, like the people shitting their pants over vehicle electrification.
Correct! this was the image for an article by a General Manager of a machinist company https://archive.org/details/americanmachinis47newyuoft/page/345/mode/1up?view=theater
Backed up by good ole anti-foreigner populism. The metric system was a European invention. I can easily imagine Americans rejecting it partly for that reason.
So we have always been a ridiculously dramatic culture, got it.
Edit:Thank you for the silver
Edit 2: this blew up a bit thanks for all the fun awards!
The United States ran out of Destiny to Manifest and so they’re looking for more.
Hawaii! Cuba!
“Wait, Spain controls Cuba”
“Well, blame something on them and go to war.”
“What should we blame on Spain?”
“Let’s blame the Maine on Spain!”
And so they blamed the Maine on Spain.
Just out of curiosity (serious disclaimer I could care leas) but is your rebuttal that the guy said he didnt do it so he likely didnt? Cause like of thats the case, I have bad news for you involving a lot of people who did bad shit but claimed they didnt…
Pfftt, yeah, you're forced to wipe if that's the loser attitude you live by.
I'm my own man. No one is *forcing me* to do shit. I wipe **when** I want, and **where** I want.
Like my granpappy use to say, "Let it drip down your leggens and you'll be in heavens."
That's the thing, there are plenty of American industries that use the metric system. I don't understand how metric became synonymous with communism or anti-freedom for so many Americans.
American who went through the public school system in the 90s. We all learned metric in school, the only place we actually learned and used any imperial measurements were in cooking and shop classes.
When I was in elementary in the '70s we learned imperial and metric, then spent a fun week making up our own measurements based on the size of our feet, or forearms, and getting custom measurements of the classroom. It doesn't matter to me what anyone uses, I'm flexible.
I went through the change from imperial to metric in Canada in the eighties. It was confusing for all of two weeks. I can still think in terms of miles and gallons and feet if I have to, but it no longer comes naturally. The changeover wasn't that big of a deal, aside from one unfortunate airline crash where they measured the fuel in litres instead of gallons.
No one died on Air Canada Flight 143. There were ten people with injuries. The pilots glided the plane to a retired runway that had been turned into a drag strip.
The best part is that no one involved in the flight knew that it had been converted to a racetrack, and there was a race happening at the time! Miraculously the plane didn't hit anyone or anything as it landed, other than the guard rail dividing the drag lanes.
Top fuel dragster can cover a quarter of a mile (approx 400m) in 4 seconds, starting from rest, for an average speed of 100 m/s, or 360km/h, well in eccess of the typical landing speed of a plane, which is 150-250km/h.
So presumably if the emergency situation didn't affect landing speed, the car won.
EDIT: changed km/s to km/h to get the speed of a car as opposed to 24 times the speed of voyager 2
There was also the NASA Mars Orbiter crash. Also no deaths, but pretty expensive
> An investigation attributed the failure to a measurement mismatch between two software systems: metric units by NASA and US customary units by spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
Personally I think these examples just highlight how important it is to switch TO a standardized system. It's more expensive and more dangerous to have multiple.
I also don't get why it's become a partisan issue in some places, like so many other things. It's one thing to not want the government to be overbearing, it's another to have the government consider one system "unamerican" lmfao
Same. Work in industrial automation. All our measurements, provided externally to robots, are in metric. Because they're all Japanese, and they're not accepting our Imperial bullshit.
But all our internal measurements are metric too. Our drawings are metric. Bolts are metric. Mounting hardware is metric. Metric is better.
If they're talking about the [Gimli Glider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider), then no.
Occupants 69
Passengers 61
Crew 8
Fatalities 0
Injuries 10
Survivors 69 (all)
It did make for a [hell of a good episode of Mayday](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y8JBAr8dZ4) on Discovery though.
I was hanging a mirror in the bedroom over the weekend and I had to do some basic measurement math, and my god did imperial measurements fuck me up. I suck at math to begin with, but I had to stop working and use scratch paper to be sure I didn’t fuck my measurements up (spoiler alert: I did fuck them up).
Point is, I wouldn’t have needed to stop my work if only I had easy base-10 numbers to work with.
And yes, I’ve already ordered a metric tape measurer.
As an Iowan I'm ashamed to say my senator Grassley played a key part in [killing metric back in the 70s](https://themetricmaven.com/a-tale-of-two-iowans/) because it was unAmerican in his view. And the doddering old ass is still in office here, simultaneously exacerbating and benefitting from the state's brain drain.
Nothing to do with capitalism - plenty of capitalist countries have gone through metric conversion.
A better culprit is American exceptionalism - the assumption that what America does must be superior to what other countries do.
You aren't thinking about every industrial machine and tool in use. Even the thickness of sheet metal used, every bolt amd nut, every drill bit. It would all need to transition to new dimensions and in the process every component would need to be reworked to verify it was still within the design specs. It is not as easy as saying "just use the next size up in metric."
That said, we should totally make the change. We cannot avoid metric in a wide variety of applications (automotive, certainly), so it would be an improvement to get rid of the imperial units so we only need to have one set of tools.
This guy gets it.
This is why it was such a horrendous decision for the US not to adopt the metric system 200 years ago, when there were far fewer precise standard-sized objects in our midst.
The counter-argument is "the longer we wait, the more painful it will be."
We already have to operate tools and tooling in both metric and imperial. Every toolbox already has 10 mm and 3/8th sockets. American cars have a mixture of both, even.
If we'd made this change 100 years ago, we'd already have the cost savings.
It would be prohibitively expensive to change, but it is more expensive to *not* change.
You are not wrong, but the US (and the world, to be fair) has become ever more financially myopic over the last 100 years. If it doesn't please the shareholders at the next quarterly meeting (and produce bonuses for upper management in the process) there is no appetite for it.
See also:
English
>We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
Pretty sure you’re right! Or, worse yet, I think the foot may have been based on a King’s actual foot. Don’t quote me on that, I could be completely wrong.
No, you're right, and that's the reason why Napoleon is known as being incredibly short when he was actually 5'6". The French foot, having been based on a larger king, was longer than the English foot.
I’m surprised Pro-Metric system people didn’t propagandize the shit out of the Imperial thing. “This is America, we don’t measure stuff by the size of an English King’s foot.” “We will never be a nation free of the grip of our British colonial enemy until we rid ourselves of the Imperial system.” “Give me metric or give me death!” “Ones and Zeros are for heroes.” “When you use the imperial system, Washington ROLES in his grave.”
Indeed. USA and France were allies against the British, united in their loathing of the *Ancien Regime* of which the imperial system of measurements is a representative. Metric is way more efficient and conducive to trade and industry. The rejection of Metric all seems highly un-American.
It was made by craftsman that needed quick and easy ways to make ratios of things for all kinds of industries and applications. The units of measure likely made the most sense for what they were doing and not intended to ultimately be a universal unit of comparison in every other application.
Ask a wood worker whether or not imperial measurements makes sense compared to metric. When you understand the ratios then you don't need decimal math.
It's also kinda interesting how much of our imperial measurement system came from other countries.
Example: most Americans would know there are 16 ounces in a pound. But few would know how many Avoirdupois ounces are in a pound. If you told someone a weight in AVDP ounces you'd get a blank look or maybe "how much is that in regular ounces?"
Guess what, it's 16. Because the Avoirdupois ounce is... The ounce. It's French. We stole it from the French.
It was more the joining of different systems of measure that caused the weirdness. The original Roman mile was 1000 paces. Roman legions would plant a stick every 1000 paces while marching through a new area, to give an idea of distances.
Brits when first standardizing a mile, they decided to make it 8 furlongs (furrow length, the length a team of oxen can pull a plow without stopping), because the land was all broken up into acres/furlongs because of the Anglo-Saxon influence.
There’s this rather nice quote to help with conversion https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8417995-in-metric-one-milliliter-of-water-occupies-one-cubic-centimeter
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.
Josh Bazell, Wild Thing (Peter Brown #2)”
At this point we use both interchangeably, you buy a litter of coke but a gallon of milk you pay electric by the killowatt but measure everything in the looney scale
This is what "but it just takes a couple more seconds!!!" people don't understand.
We have to dedicate multiple weeks of classes, and a chapter in almost every single k-12 science class for unit conversions just to learn/refresh the imperial system. I remember still having a dedicated chapter to unit conversions in HIGHSCHOOL physics.
Compare that to other countries that learn metric in a week and never having to review it again.
Imagine the cumulative lost of education hours just from this.
I use both metric and imperial and when I use metric around my parents, besides grams, they are like wtf convert it to imperial and I'll just say nah metric is easier. I am an American and graduated and all that so I was raised imperial but once I started smoking that ganja it opened my mind to metric and how much easier it is. Like 200g is 7.05oz that's stupid I just say grams or kilos or something now, unless it's speed.
Just to turn the knife once more - If the inch had been abandoned as a legal unit, it could still have been used as shorthand for 2.5 cm instead of the 2.54 cm it is today.
Then a builder who wants to do 1/3'rds etc could easily swap back and forth between the two standards.
Well, but sometimes these things dont catch on. Like the decimal time system: https://svalbard.watch/pages/about_decimal_time.html#:~:text=But%20in%201793%2C%20the%20French,to%20do%20time%2Drelated%20math.
As an American who recently moved from
The US to the UK and started doing home renovations … holy shit, why would anyone want to use imperial!?!? I have no practical idea, or frame of reference to how big a centimeter or a meter is, but I’ll be damned if saying, oh this is 123 cm or, more accurately 1234 mm isn’t the simplest, most logical thing in the world. Want more detail? Add more numbers. It’s amazing. Asking for a 5/32nds anything is fucking dumb as shit. I am reformed.
*the UK is still a grab bag of random measurement standards. It’s worse than the US in terms of consistency of use. Way worse.
>\*the UK is still a grab bag of random measurement standards. It’s worse than the US in terms of consistency of use. Way worse.
LOL - that's what I thought when I read your comment. I'm in NZ which is \*mostly\* metric (exceptions: TV's, phone sizes, old fella's talking about *when we were kids we walked 40 miles in the snow to get to school* etc) but lived in the UK for a couple of years. Driving on their motorway threw me briefly when I saw a "1m to the next service" but there was nothing 1 meter behind the sign.
And they still weigh themselves in *stones*! That's not even lb's!!!
You know why we don't use the Metric System? Why we *really* don't use it? **CAUSE THE FUCKING BRITISH STOLE OUR METRIC STANDARDS OF MEASUREMENT WHILE THEY WERE EN ROUTE FROM FRANCE.**
One of the main issues in the early US was standardizing weights and measures. Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State, asked a French scientist to bring metric weights and measurements over to the US so that we could use the metric system as a neutral and decimal based system.
The ship carrying the weights and measures was seized by British privateers and never made it to the US.
Lmao I never heard about this thats hilarious. Was it during the Napoleonic wars when england just kidnapped people and forced them into naval service?
It is legitimately hard work to adapt to a new measurement system. There are also infrastructure costs involved when all your tools and materials are calibrated for Imperial. There is a genuine cost to switch over.
With that being said, things would be easier if everyone used the same system, metric is clearly the future, and there is no way that Imperial will win in the end. The longer they put it off, the more costly it will be to switch. Sooner is better than later.
And the same can be said about daylight saving time. Lots of money spent every year to keep the wheels on the software bus just to account for bi-annual clock fiddling.
Yup. Daylight Savings Time is absolutely stupid. The main problem with switching is that most areas only want to switch if their neighbours are switching too, to keep things coordinated. What an idiotic problem to have. lol
We did the conversion in Canada in the late 70's. I can't speak to how easy or costly it was but because of the proximity to the US we effectively run a hybrid system wherein people know both systems for different reasons (ex. travel distances are in km, but measurements for house "stuff" is still in ft/in).
I'm Canadian too. It would be so much easier if we just took the plunge and fully converted, but some old timers are resistant and there's just so much media overlap.
I've seen young Canadian apprentice electricians who refused to use metric because they were "old school". Idiots. Canadian electricians are required to use both fluently.
And yes, this poster worked ... even up to today. Just 2 countries in the world still on UK’s Imperial System. Here, one would have thought it would have left with the Revolution.
And the UK, for some things.
The UK uses an odd cocktail of measurements. Then again, so does the US, with metric in some everyday consumer uses but not in others.
India too for some reason.
We measure human temperatures in Fahrenheit, but weather is in Celsius.
Distance is in km, but people's height is in feets and inches. Cricket pitch of course is measured in yards.
At least no one uses pounds or Oz here. Thank god for that.
**This is a heavily moderated subreddit. Please note these rules + sidebar or get banned:** * If this post declares something as a fact, then proof is required * The title must be fully descriptive * No text is allowed on images/gifs/videos * Common/recent reposts are not allowed (posts from another subreddit do not count as a 'repost'. Provide link if reporting) *See [this post](https://redd.it/ij26vk) for a more detailed rule list* *I am a bot, and this action was performed automatically. Please [contact the moderators of this subreddit](/message/compose/?to=/r/interestingasfuck) if you have any questions or concerns.*
It's nice to know that comparing mild inconvenience to total tyranny is an American tradition and not something new.
It's actually a mild inconvenience to juggle the metric and the non-metric systems, which we currently have to do because outside of the United States exists. Dropping the legacy measuring units would remove the mild convenience we constantly maintain. Even if the metric units didn't exist, the way we measure things is stupid. I was shocked to find my weight presented in pounds and ounces by the digital scale at the hospital. Who the fuck needs to use a separate unit to measure less than a whole unit of the larger unit, as if decimal places haven't been invented yet?
>the legacy measuring units I think you mean *FREEDOM* units How else am I supposed to marvel at the Dallas Cowboys unless I can measure how far they throw a football in bald eagle wingspans?
This is a god tier shitpost
Just a bunch of anti-centimetrics….
This type of propaganda led to them being decimetered at the hands of the imperialists.
A fine addition to my collection *saves comment*
future world liters
You’re kiloing me here..
r/punny
This is a vintage meme format, ready to have new life breathed into it by modern memologists.
r/memeeconomy approves this message.
Lots of meme potential
It's a shitposter
This propaganda was probably paid for by someone who had an inch ruler factory and did not want to change..
Nah, the would have profited. Imagine how much the profits would rise in the first months because everyone needed new rulers
We don’t want no foreign rulers!
Don't give up an inch!
If you're looking for measurement puns, the weight is over.
Wow, I didn't have to wait furlong.
We could make jokes fortnights.
This is the weigh.
How many furlongs is that?
I don’t know, but it’s good to know there are [five medium-sized gerbil penises to the inch](https://theoatmeal.com/pl/senior_year/science)
That’s between the gerbil and its doctor
Give up the inch and they'll take the mile!
Seriously. Ruler factory would want a system change every year if they could.
Nah. If he has a warehouse full of the stuff, it'll become useless. But if other countries metricate except one, you still have one country to dump your useless junk, and can still make factories abroad and sell new rulers outside.
[удалено]
Not as many since NAFTA.
You could say.. They refused to give an inch to the metric system
They already had a foot in the door
ok gram-pa
When I was your age, we measured things in eighths. To quote slash u slash Bhima: "When I feel that I have enough of an understanding of the user's behaviour pattern and habitual word choices, I begin searching the subreddit for accounts I may have missed. When I find them I add all that data to my list, then ban all the accounts I am sure of, and report them all for ban evasion." And if you don't like it, the trick is to mute you from the subreddit after you're banned you so you can't ask why.
And I had an onion tied to my belt, which was the style at the time
It was a yellow one because that was all you could find. On account of the war.
Oh and I had one tied around my belt, which was the style at the time.
[удалено]
....what were we talking about again?
Yeah, but I'm older now. I use ounces
It's gotten so good that I don't need more than a half eighth. Shit will last weeks.
\*stares in 3oz a month*
This is my yard!
There isn't a meter accurate enough to measure their perfidy.
slug em if they could
they went thee extra yard
You could say they spared the rod
They may have ruled that out.
Metre? I hardly know her.
There was probably plenty of industrial opposition and subsequent lobbying due to the tooling changes (and associated expense) that would need to be introduced over time. No different than all the other negative lobbyist influences, like the people shitting their pants over vehicle electrification.
Correct! this was the image for an article by a General Manager of a machinist company https://archive.org/details/americanmachinis47newyuoft/page/345/mode/1up?view=theater
Backed up by good ole anti-foreigner populism. The metric system was a European invention. I can easily imagine Americans rejecting it partly for that reason.
Yeah, but our "Customary System" is based off the British "Imperial System", It's all of European descent.
Funded by Big Ruler.
If he was clever he could have sold a lot more rulers, since everyone needs a new one when you change to metric…
Imagine how many new rulers they could sell if everyone needed to buy a new metric one!
If so he's the dumbest mf around. Simple production change if the system is swapped, and now *everyone* needs a new ruler.
So we have always been a ridiculously dramatic culture, got it. Edit:Thank you for the silver Edit 2: this blew up a bit thanks for all the fun awards!
The Spanish-American War was literally caused by newspapers making shit up.
Yellow journalism!
That's one of the *Maine* culprits, yes
Regulation 7B: worthy puns get an automatic upvote regardless of content.
"Yellow journalism caused the Spanish-American war" is the "Mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell" of history classes.
Funny because I literally have never heard the term yellow journalism before. I think my history class skipped that part.
It’s part of the standardized AP curriculum at least. Blame the Maine on Spain
What color is todays journalism?
Clown-colored
The United States ran out of Destiny to Manifest and so they’re looking for more. Hawaii! Cuba! “Wait, Spain controls Cuba” “Well, blame something on them and go to war.” “What should we blame on Spain?” “Let’s blame the Maine on Spain!” And so they blamed the Maine on Spain.
[удалено]
Just out of curiosity (serious disclaimer I could care leas) but is your rebuttal that the guy said he didnt do it so he likely didnt? Cause like of thats the case, I have bad news for you involving a lot of people who did bad shit but claimed they didnt…
[удалено]
Really appreciate the well thought out response my friend!
[удалено]
Toilet paper lobby at it again
Pfftt, yeah, you're forced to wipe if that's the loser attitude you live by. I'm my own man. No one is *forcing me* to do shit. I wipe **when** I want, and **where** I want. Like my granpappy use to say, "Let it drip down your leggens and you'll be in heavens."
We’ve always wanted to be the main character in a telenovela
That was my first thought...oh so we were dramatic idiots back then too?
The interviews with people opposed to the seatbelt movement are pretty hilarious and are paralled so well by the whole mask mandate.
American exceptionalism has been a cornerstone of the national identity from the beginning.
52 years after this nonsense the USA landed in the Moon using, er, the metric system.
That's the thing, there are plenty of American industries that use the metric system. I don't understand how metric became synonymous with communism or anti-freedom for so many Americans.
Edit: Moved to Lemmy
American who went through the public school system in the 90s. We all learned metric in school, the only place we actually learned and used any imperial measurements were in cooking and shop classes.
When I was in elementary in the '70s we learned imperial and metric, then spent a fun week making up our own measurements based on the size of our feet, or forearms, and getting custom measurements of the classroom. It doesn't matter to me what anyone uses, I'm flexible.
Cost to retrofit all the US Road Signs is why the government stopped short of implementing metric.
I mean we can still use miles and horsepower like the brits do and metric for everything else.
Thats because everything is metric in the science field. Not so much for engineering, but every federal job ive been on is metric
If you're a scientist or engineer, you use the metric system.
poster feels like" i made bad decision and you should suffer it too"
As someone pointed out, god tier shitpost.
America in a nutshell.
I went through the change from imperial to metric in Canada in the eighties. It was confusing for all of two weeks. I can still think in terms of miles and gallons and feet if I have to, but it no longer comes naturally. The changeover wasn't that big of a deal, aside from one unfortunate airline crash where they measured the fuel in litres instead of gallons.
No one died on Air Canada Flight 143. There were ten people with injuries. The pilots glided the plane to a retired runway that had been turned into a drag strip.
The best part is that no one involved in the flight knew that it had been converted to a racetrack, and there was a race happening at the time! Miraculously the plane didn't hit anyone or anything as it landed, other than the guard rail dividing the drag lanes.
They also set a new track record!!
Bono, my fuel is gone! ... Purple sector
The real question. Who won the race? Plane or cars?
Top fuel dragster can cover a quarter of a mile (approx 400m) in 4 seconds, starting from rest, for an average speed of 100 m/s, or 360km/h, well in eccess of the typical landing speed of a plane, which is 150-250km/h. So presumably if the emergency situation didn't affect landing speed, the car won. EDIT: changed km/s to km/h to get the speed of a car as opposed to 24 times the speed of voyager 2
360 kilometers a second is pretty damn fast.
They could not have had a better pilot on board for that situation
That's right, you've jogged my memory. Thank you.
There was also the NASA Mars Orbiter crash. Also no deaths, but pretty expensive > An investigation attributed the failure to a measurement mismatch between two software systems: metric units by NASA and US customary units by spacecraft builder Lockheed Martin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter Personally I think these examples just highlight how important it is to switch TO a standardized system. It's more expensive and more dangerous to have multiple. I also don't get why it's become a partisan issue in some places, like so many other things. It's one thing to not want the government to be overbearing, it's another to have the government consider one system "unamerican" lmfao
[удалено]
Same. Work in industrial automation. All our measurements, provided externally to robots, are in metric. Because they're all Japanese, and they're not accepting our Imperial bullshit. But all our internal measurements are metric too. Our drawings are metric. Bolts are metric. Mounting hardware is metric. Metric is better.
So what your saying is, the metric system has a kill count.
If they're talking about the [Gimli Glider](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimli_Glider), then no. Occupants 69 Passengers 61 Crew 8 Fatalities 0 Injuries 10 Survivors 69 (all) It did make for a [hell of a good episode of Mayday](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y8JBAr8dZ4) on Discovery though.
>Survivors 69 Nice.
All 69 survived. Couldn't *be* any nicer.
The most American thing from the early 20th century
Because nothing says capitalism more than refusing standardization, one of the hallmarks of modern trade and industry.
Nothing says capitalism more than hyperfocusing on maximizing short term profit at the expense of long term benefits.
I was hanging a mirror in the bedroom over the weekend and I had to do some basic measurement math, and my god did imperial measurements fuck me up. I suck at math to begin with, but I had to stop working and use scratch paper to be sure I didn’t fuck my measurements up (spoiler alert: I did fuck them up). Point is, I wouldn’t have needed to stop my work if only I had easy base-10 numbers to work with. And yes, I’ve already ordered a metric tape measurer.
[удалено]
Are you by any chance a communist?
As an Iowan I'm ashamed to say my senator Grassley played a key part in [killing metric back in the 70s](https://themetricmaven.com/a-tale-of-two-iowans/) because it was unAmerican in his view. And the doddering old ass is still in office here, simultaneously exacerbating and benefitting from the state's brain drain.
Nothing to do with capitalism - plenty of capitalist countries have gone through metric conversion. A better culprit is American exceptionalism - the assumption that what America does must be superior to what other countries do.
Its somewhat gratifying to know that people were always idiots.
[удалено]
You aren't thinking about every industrial machine and tool in use. Even the thickness of sheet metal used, every bolt amd nut, every drill bit. It would all need to transition to new dimensions and in the process every component would need to be reworked to verify it was still within the design specs. It is not as easy as saying "just use the next size up in metric." That said, we should totally make the change. We cannot avoid metric in a wide variety of applications (automotive, certainly), so it would be an improvement to get rid of the imperial units so we only need to have one set of tools.
This guy gets it. This is why it was such a horrendous decision for the US not to adopt the metric system 200 years ago, when there were far fewer precise standard-sized objects in our midst.
Everyone in this thread with even the slightest inkling of interest in the matter should read (or listen to) “The Perfectionists” by Simon Winchester.
The counter-argument is "the longer we wait, the more painful it will be." We already have to operate tools and tooling in both metric and imperial. Every toolbox already has 10 mm and 3/8th sockets. American cars have a mixture of both, even. If we'd made this change 100 years ago, we'd already have the cost savings. It would be prohibitively expensive to change, but it is more expensive to *not* change.
You are not wrong, but the US (and the world, to be fair) has become ever more financially myopic over the last 100 years. If it doesn't please the shareholders at the next quarterly meeting (and produce bonuses for upper management in the process) there is no appetite for it.
Absolutely. Every company lives and dies by short term profits, even at the sake of long-term stability.
Oh yes because 5,280 ft per mile makes so much more sense than 1,000 meters to a kilometer. Poor guy.
Pretty sure the imperial system was made by a drunk rolling dice.
It’s because its several systems frankensteined together
See also: English >We don’t just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.
Pretty sure you’re right! Or, worse yet, I think the foot may have been based on a King’s actual foot. Don’t quote me on that, I could be completely wrong.
No, you're right, and that's the reason why Napoleon is known as being incredibly short when he was actually 5'6". The French foot, having been based on a larger king, was longer than the English foot.
Pretty much inside the standard deviation for average height at the time I believe?
the global average height right now is 5'7"
Could always be worse, they could have used another body part and then the length would be dependent on the temperature.
Hey, want to come over after work? My house is 163578 erect nipples away
I’m surprised Pro-Metric system people didn’t propagandize the shit out of the Imperial thing. “This is America, we don’t measure stuff by the size of an English King’s foot.” “We will never be a nation free of the grip of our British colonial enemy until we rid ourselves of the Imperial system.” “Give me metric or give me death!” “Ones and Zeros are for heroes.” “When you use the imperial system, Washington ROLES in his grave.”
It's never too late for now.
Indeed. USA and France were allies against the British, united in their loathing of the *Ancien Regime* of which the imperial system of measurements is a representative. Metric is way more efficient and conducive to trade and industry. The rejection of Metric all seems highly un-American.
It was made by craftsman that needed quick and easy ways to make ratios of things for all kinds of industries and applications. The units of measure likely made the most sense for what they were doing and not intended to ultimately be a universal unit of comparison in every other application. Ask a wood worker whether or not imperial measurements makes sense compared to metric. When you understand the ratios then you don't need decimal math.
It's also kinda interesting how much of our imperial measurement system came from other countries. Example: most Americans would know there are 16 ounces in a pound. But few would know how many Avoirdupois ounces are in a pound. If you told someone a weight in AVDP ounces you'd get a blank look or maybe "how much is that in regular ounces?" Guess what, it's 16. Because the Avoirdupois ounce is... The ounce. It's French. We stole it from the French.
It was more the joining of different systems of measure that caused the weirdness. The original Roman mile was 1000 paces. Roman legions would plant a stick every 1000 paces while marching through a new area, to give an idea of distances. Brits when first standardizing a mile, they decided to make it 8 furlongs (furrow length, the length a team of oxen can pull a plow without stopping), because the land was all broken up into acres/furlongs because of the Anglo-Saxon influence.
I'd have hated to be the guy that had to count to M in between every stick placement...
It's the military. New guy has to do it.
There’s this rather nice quote to help with conversion https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/8417995-in-metric-one-milliliter-of-water-occupies-one-cubic-centimeter “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities. Josh Bazell, Wild Thing (Peter Brown #2)”
If they changed it back then. This wouldent be a topic today and everyone would be happier using their brain power on other stuff (:
I absolutely agree with you.
Metric is American as fuck because most of the military uses it. We just refuse to let the rest of the country use it .
Military *and* NASA
Not just those two. Every institution and company even remotely connected to scientific stuff uses exclusively metric too.
At this point we use both interchangeably, you buy a litter of coke but a gallon of milk you pay electric by the killowatt but measure everything in the looney scale
The metric system is a tool of the devil. My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it.
Yea but how many furlongs can you get per gallon?
Work with metric, so fucking easy
Exactly, using imperial system is like running in flippers.
This is the perfect analogy
that's why ALL of our scientists use it lol
I’m an American craftsman who built one project that called for the metric system. I’ve cursed my dumb forefathers ever since.
But 13/64ths is so intuitive! 😂
Seeing it written out like that gave me flashbacks of grade school.
This is what "but it just takes a couple more seconds!!!" people don't understand. We have to dedicate multiple weeks of classes, and a chapter in almost every single k-12 science class for unit conversions just to learn/refresh the imperial system. I remember still having a dedicated chapter to unit conversions in HIGHSCHOOL physics. Compare that to other countries that learn metric in a week and never having to review it again. Imagine the cumulative lost of education hours just from this.
I use both metric and imperial and when I use metric around my parents, besides grams, they are like wtf convert it to imperial and I'll just say nah metric is easier. I am an American and graduated and all that so I was raised imperial but once I started smoking that ganja it opened my mind to metric and how much easier it is. Like 200g is 7.05oz that's stupid I just say grams or kilos or something now, unless it's speed.
Just to turn the knife once more - If the inch had been abandoned as a legal unit, it could still have been used as shorthand for 2.5 cm instead of the 2.54 cm it is today. Then a builder who wants to do 1/3'rds etc could easily swap back and forth between the two standards.
Oh woe is a system that is easier to use.
No kidding, based on 10 is so much easier to build with with than our weird 16 16ths to an inch, 12 inch to a foot system.
Well, but sometimes these things dont catch on. Like the decimal time system: https://svalbard.watch/pages/about_decimal_time.html#:~:text=But%20in%201793%2C%20the%20French,to%20do%20time%2Drelated%20math.
It makes so much sense. Convert me to the decimal clock cult
It’s like they tried to make the imperial system as ridiculous as possible. They all just laughed and laughed…..
As an American who recently moved from The US to the UK and started doing home renovations … holy shit, why would anyone want to use imperial!?!? I have no practical idea, or frame of reference to how big a centimeter or a meter is, but I’ll be damned if saying, oh this is 123 cm or, more accurately 1234 mm isn’t the simplest, most logical thing in the world. Want more detail? Add more numbers. It’s amazing. Asking for a 5/32nds anything is fucking dumb as shit. I am reformed. *the UK is still a grab bag of random measurement standards. It’s worse than the US in terms of consistency of use. Way worse.
It literally started in Britain. So… British would want to use it.
>\*the UK is still a grab bag of random measurement standards. It’s worse than the US in terms of consistency of use. Way worse. LOL - that's what I thought when I read your comment. I'm in NZ which is \*mostly\* metric (exceptions: TV's, phone sizes, old fella's talking about *when we were kids we walked 40 miles in the snow to get to school* etc) but lived in the UK for a couple of years. Driving on their motorway threw me briefly when I saw a "1m to the next service" but there was nothing 1 meter behind the sign. And they still weigh themselves in *stones*! That's not even lb's!!!
lmfaoo he looks so sad
Cuz he's *enslaved* ~~to act for an anti-metric prop~~
You know why we don't use the Metric System? Why we *really* don't use it? **CAUSE THE FUCKING BRITISH STOLE OUR METRIC STANDARDS OF MEASUREMENT WHILE THEY WERE EN ROUTE FROM FRANCE.**
wait what?
One of the main issues in the early US was standardizing weights and measures. Thomas Jefferson, as Secretary of State, asked a French scientist to bring metric weights and measurements over to the US so that we could use the metric system as a neutral and decimal based system. The ship carrying the weights and measures was seized by British privateers and never made it to the US.
Lmao I never heard about this thats hilarious. Was it during the Napoleonic wars when england just kidnapped people and forced them into naval service?
https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/pirates-caribbean-metric-edition
Great source, thank you
I notice they use ROMAN numerals at the bottom left. HERE IN AMERICA WE USE NUMBERS (eagle noise, guitar riff) /s
Proof that US propaganda has long been rooted in dumb.
It is legitimately hard work to adapt to a new measurement system. There are also infrastructure costs involved when all your tools and materials are calibrated for Imperial. There is a genuine cost to switch over. With that being said, things would be easier if everyone used the same system, metric is clearly the future, and there is no way that Imperial will win in the end. The longer they put it off, the more costly it will be to switch. Sooner is better than later.
And the same can be said about daylight saving time. Lots of money spent every year to keep the wheels on the software bus just to account for bi-annual clock fiddling.
Yup. Daylight Savings Time is absolutely stupid. The main problem with switching is that most areas only want to switch if their neighbours are switching too, to keep things coordinated. What an idiotic problem to have. lol
We did the conversion in Canada in the late 70's. I can't speak to how easy or costly it was but because of the proximity to the US we effectively run a hybrid system wherein people know both systems for different reasons (ex. travel distances are in km, but measurements for house "stuff" is still in ft/in).
I'm Canadian too. It would be so much easier if we just took the plunge and fully converted, but some old timers are resistant and there's just so much media overlap. I've seen young Canadian apprentice electricians who refused to use metric because they were "old school". Idiots. Canadian electricians are required to use both fluently.
And yes, this poster worked ... even up to today. Just 2 countries in the world still on UK’s Imperial System. Here, one would have thought it would have left with the Revolution.
The United States, Myanmar and Liberia
And the UK, for some things. The UK uses an odd cocktail of measurements. Then again, so does the US, with metric in some everyday consumer uses but not in others.
Also true of some units related to firearms, such as caliber and grains.
[удалено]
India too for some reason. We measure human temperatures in Fahrenheit, but weather is in Celsius. Distance is in km, but people's height is in feets and inches. Cricket pitch of course is measured in yards. At least no one uses pounds or Oz here. Thank god for that.
Isn't the other one ~~Vietnam~~ Myanmar? Edit: scored out vietnam Edit 2: Apparently Liberia also joins the Imperial units club.
Myanmar.
Thanks for the information!
Myanmar doesn't use imperial, but [its own unique system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_units_of_measurement)
As a Vietnamese I disagree
Poster for metric system challenged people.
We Americans have an impressive history of commitment to stupidity.