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?
This is his punishment for war crimes.
The metric system is a threat to our way of life - Kyle
Ugh, who wants to change to a base-10 system when we keep what ever we have now?
I mean there’s really only four ways people use imperial over metric
For cooking, For weighing themselves, For measuring distances, For measuring temperature.
For most other purposes, especially where scientific accuracy is called for, Americans are perfectly aware of and capable of using metric, and mostly do so.
Metric pushing at this point is basically bashing non academics for continuing to use a colloquial measurement that serves them just fine for what they actually need to measure and visualize on a daily basis.
Well, yeah. We are trying to make things easier for You.
Oh yeah, because constantly forcing a change it’s obvious nobody you’re trying to force it on cares about is definitely making things easier for them.
You forgot one: Fasteners, i.e. nuts and bolts, when all the rest of the world has been metric for decades and whatever it is you’re taking apart almost certainly uses metric bolts (car, appliance, electronic device, whatever). But your local hardware store still gives you attitude over metric being ‘’‘’‘’‘‘specialty’’‘’‘’‘’ and the majority of their selection of bolts and machine screws are fractional inch which will not fit approximately 9.98% of all manufactured goods from the last century, let alone this one.
At least be consistent with it too! I don’t know what it’s like in the States but internationally we don’t get 7/16" bolts or whatever, we get 10-gauge or 8-gauge etc. What the fuck does that mean?? And wiring too: no 8mm wire, no no let’s have 6AWG. Jesus christ it’s like they enjoy making life difficult.
Having two sets of wrenches and sockets is absolute worst. Especially when it seems like 10mm does 80% of the work but is missing 100% of the time
Those 10mm are pros at hide-and-seek.
I found a 10 pack of 10mm once. Bought it immediately thinking I’d never need another 10.
That was 5 years ago. I have 2 left…
Cooking has largely moved to metric (with the exception of spices/seasonings, weighing spices is tedious compared to spoons IMO)
That depends more on the setting, IDK about professional kitchens but most home cooking I’ve seen measures in imperial.
A decent chunk of recipes I use are for baking (where weighing is important and grams are standard) so YMMV, though I don’t generally eat a lot of “american” food so my perspective is a bit skewed toward metric.
Tbf a decent amount of “american food” is prepared by intuition rather than by formula
If you’re checking measurements for a burger, it’s for the individual stacked items you’re putting together on the burger and not usually for how much ground meat you need to get off a chuck steak for the burger you want.
I only write down measurements in my own recipes because I’m chronically paranoid I’ll fuck everything up since so much of my stuff is already mishmash of previous recipes (just finished putting together a non dairy Knaffeh recipe so my SO can have it in spite of their allergies, had to figure out how to mimic Arrakawi cheese using fake mozz lol XD)
I’ve seen them chiefly in US Customary.
I have never seen a US cookbook or Internet recipe site that defaults to metric.
I clicked the King Arthur link and the recipes default to English with metric in parenthesis.
Imperial is intermixed woth metric in constructionnand a ton of engineering projects as materials are still manufactured in imperial measurements. Farming is still stuck in imperial too.
Both are still around because an entire industry changing fundamental measurements is a lot of effort.
My second favorite example of the two living in harmony for the average US citizen is the liquir store. Beer comes in ounces but hard liquir and wine comes in metric.
My favorite is soda, which comes in 20 oz and 2 liter bottles on the same shelf. People opposed to the metric system tend to ignore the fact that they are already using it somewhere in their lives and just don’t notice.
Nope, beer is measured in Fluid Ounces which is a measure of volume and is entirely unrelated to ounces except for having the same name. Oh also a fluid ounce is a different amount of volume depending on the context. It’s a greeeeaaaaat system.
That is an interesting clarification, not a correction, because nobody calls them “12 fluid ounce cans.”
Mine is that the most rabidly anti metric folks stateside are likely to be weapons enthusiasts who measure ammo calibur in metric.
My favorite weird imperial/metric oddity in the US is 16.9 ounce bottles. People refer to them as “sixteen point 9 ounce” bottles. They’re 500ml. It’d be so much easier just to say “500 em ell”
uncle sam you dense motherfucker go to SCHOOL
I stopped caring about British units in 1776! Metric all the way, baby! 🇺🇸 We decimalized their dumb ass currency and we need to finish the job with weights and measures! A vote for imperial units is a vote for red coats! Vote for me for President and I will liberate us from British tyranny! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🦅🦅🦅
Lab rat here. I got you fam! Let’s collectively believe that BTU’s are real!
Wait…
I believe in some countries in the world, the year goes first, then the month, then the day (2024/08/08 or 2024, August 8). Seems more logical to me than the literal inverse (08/08/2024 or 8 August 2024).
But yeah, the metric system reigns supreme.
I would’ve mentioned it but I forgot what it’s called. Thanks for reminding me.
Year, month, day is the most logical. I’ll stand by month, day, year as being more logical than day, month, year because it’s somewhat more sorted lol.
I mean, I’m fine with the long form (August 8, 2024), but definitely not the short form, which today looks indistinguishable from DD/MM/YYYY anyway. I often think it’s the other way around and ask “since when was there a 26th month??”.
How in the world is (month/day/year) more sorted than (day/month/year)? I see two use-cases: Sorting things chronologically, in which case you want YYYY/MM/DD, or referring to nearby dates, where the year or even month can be assumed known implicitly, in which case you use DD/MM/YYYY. In no sane world does MM/DD/YYYY make sense.
Because you put big numbers first! Three hundred twenty one is written 321 not 1, 20, and 300. 21 and 300 is more sorted. MM/DD/YYYY only has one element out of place instead of being totally backwards.
Big numbers first is not the only way to sort - look at say how they sort the speeds of runners in a race.
If it is “backwards”, it is sorted, in reverse order. If it has an element out of place it is not sorted.
It’s only when they extend to hh:mm:ss dd/mm/yyyy that it becomes assorted. They need to fully commit and either use tzmm:tzhh+ fff.ss:mm:hh dd/mm/yyyy or just use fucking iso 8601. Fuck everyone who doesn’t; fuck M$, fuck oracle, fuck humans.
Runners use minutes before seconds
Wouldn’t the second one make more sense as an upside down pyramid?
Because the first digit in each of the numbers is larger than the second digit it would be the triple inverted pyramid as shown, where the larger numbers correspond to larger sub-pyramids and larger digits correspond to the larger side of the sub-pyramid.
The colored text and marks on the pyramids are to show that.
I imagined, but I was too lazy to actually look at the colors lol. Thanks for explaining :)
As an American who lives and travels on a sailboat, it’s sooooo much easier to just be normal and think in metric.
Foreigners (who aren’t sailors) are always amazed when they meet an American that can speak metric.
Why the US refuses to get in bed with the rest of the world is beyond me. Stupid AF I guess …
And the most ridiculous (or inclusive) thing are tiresizes in Europe (perhaps somewhere else, too?). 195/55r16 195 is the width in millimeters 55 is the height in percentage of the width R16 is the radius of the wheel in inches
Same in US…
The more I read about America, the more I realise what a fucking stupid country it was, is, and will probably keep on being.
Hence the effort to defund education.
As if people weren’t so fuckin dumb already.
Christ WTF year are we fucking in you guys?
If I could read, I’d probably be insulted by this comment.
There are some pretty smart people in America tho
Indeed, too bad nobody wants to listen to them
1l of (4°C) water weighs 1kg. 1kg (of anything) is 1000g. 1g of water is 1cm³. Stack 1000 1cm³ blocks to get a 10m high column. This column exerts 100kPa of pressure on its base. To heat it by 1°C requires 1kcal. And 1N would accelerate it by 1m/s every second.
I’ve posted this before on my mastodon, and on feddit.de, before the instance was shut down, but I think it’s still a nice showcase how SI units interact with one another.
The worst thing we have in the metric system is kWh/1000h. It’s just watts, but whoever designed the energy labels thought a bunch of zeros would be funny or something.
I’ve heard that kWh/1000h is used as a power rating for light bulbs, because if they just wrote it as watts, people might confuse it with a brightness rating (e.g. “this LED bulb produces as much light as a 100W incandescent bulb”)
The kWh/1000h does convey more information than just W though. If I buy a fridge and it says 100W I wouldn’t know if that’s its max power draw or average over time. With the 1000h in there it’s pretty clear we are talking about the average.
Also people who aren’t technically minded might only know “kWh” as that’s what it states on your power bill and they can directly guess what kind of energy bill this fridge might cause.
So you are technically correct I guess and we all know that’s the best kind of correct.
We do have worse stuff in the metric system though, kcal is not the same as the SI for energy (J) for example. Also everything involving time gets messy quickly. Nothing compared to the imperial measurements obviously
Y’all preach about how much better the metric system is because it’s base ten and super intuitive, then measure weather temperature on a scale from -20C to 40C 🥴
What.
Yeah… We do… everyday. Its not hard
Fair, but that’s pretty much how a lot of people feel about imperial units, too.
Well, yeah. Anything less than 0 is freezing and anything greater than 0 isn’t.
Ezpz
Fahrenheit makes more sense for human experience… 0 to 100 roughly corresponds to what can be survived for a significant amount of time. Below freezing you can survive without shelter as long as you’re dressed for it, but as you approach zero it gets a lot harder, you really need shelter and heat at that point. Same with above 100… 117 won’t kill you right away, but without some sort of man-made cooling device, you’ll be wishing it would. I say this having lived both extremes, mountains of Colorado in winter, and Phoenix in summer… Honestly, given the choice between 115 and -15, I’d rather have the cold.
Exactly! Weather happens at temperatures lower than water’s freezing point, and much lower than it’s boiling point, so using those two reference points to measure weather temps against isn’t very convenient.
One kilometer is 1000 meters, one meter is 1000 millimeters. One square meter is 1,000,000 millimeters, one cubic meter is 1000 liters.
1 liter of water is 1 kilograms, so 1 cubic meter is 1000 kilograms. Sand is about 2.3 times heavier than water, so 1 cubic meter of sand is 2300 kilograms, or 2.3 metric tonnes.
I’m 1.96 meters tall, or 1 meter and 960 millimeters, or 1 meter and 96 centimeters. I weigh about 85 kilos, or 85.000 grams. Being 65% water, I carry about 55.25 kilograms of water, which will fill a little over 55 one liter water bottles
I can do this all day
Now let’s do the same with imperial units! You first, cuz I’m not going to touch that shit with a 10 foot pole…
One mile is 5280 feet, one foot is 12 inches. One square foot is 144 square inches, one cubic foot is 1728 cubic inches.
1 gallon of water is 8.34 pounds, and 1 cubic foot is 7.48 gallons, so a cubic foot of water weighs 62.38 pounds. If sand is 2.3 times heavier than water, a cubic foot of sand weighs 143.5 pounds.
I am 5 feet 10 inches tall, or 5.83 feet, or 70 inches. I weigh about 220 pounds, or 3520 ounces. If I’m 65% water, I carry about 143 pounds of water, or a little over 16 gallons.
Guh
Bit silly to mix decimal with non-base 10 measurements!
It’s worse than that. Inches are base 12, ounces and cups are base 16, machinists use thousandths of an inch, and surveyors use tenths of a foot!
And computers use base 2. Bastards.
Cool.
Also great way to miss the point. And great use of your calculator. The entire thing is that the metric system is not just “arbitrary amounts”, it’s all designed to fit together easily.
Now, no calculator. How many feet is 0.683 miles?
I know that 0.683 kilometers is 683 meters.
I had to check the math because 1 m2 being 2300 kg while 1 cu ft at 143 lbs seemed crazy, but with the volume difference it’s all correct.
Thank you for putting in the effort 🙃
To illustrate, 1m³ = (100cm)³ = 1,000,000cm³ = (1000mm)³ = 1,000,000,000mm³
You go from the single dimensional conversion between m and cm being a factor of 100 and 1000 for m and mm, to the 3 dimensional conversion being a factor of 1 million for m and cm or 1 billion for m and mm. It scales up fast.
Height in imperial is kinda useful. If you say a person is 4 foot tall vs 6 foot tall it immediately paints a vivid picture
You get used to it. 150cm versus 180cm, since I don’t often meet anybody four foot tall.
Classroom supplies for elementary school always included a 30 cm ruler, so you’d immediately know what 30 cm difference is
This isn’t some intrinsic value. What you’re used to makes the most sense. If you were used to measuring people’s height in meters, 1.3 meters vs 2 meters would paint just as vivid a picture.
What a great snapshot of life in Canada
Actually, I think the entire world minus two or three countries,.one of them being the US of A.
By pure coincidence I do live in Canada, but I’m dutch. Also lived in Mexico. Everything is metric and easy, unlike the USA.
Metric is just easier and the founders of the US actually considered it but wars -obviously- distracted them from switching to it.
Doesn’t the reason why the avg US citizen wants imperial units boil down to “sounds cooler”?
Kilometer vs Miles, the former sounds easier and cooler to work with
Centimeter vs inch, same.
How will they now call a two by four?
It’s kind of the same for the pro gun arguments, it all boils down to “but guns are cool toys!”
A 2x4 is actually 1.5" x 3.5" so you are not standing on solid ground with that one.
When you build a wood house, how far apart are the studs? I once tried to hang a shelf made by/for the European market, it had predrilled holes that were far enough apart that I could almost hit two studs, but not quite.
A “five by ten” I would say, doesnt sound to bad.
I think its mostly ingrained into the population at this point.
You forgot that a 2 by four isn’t actually two by four inches .
It is actually 1.5 inches by 3.5 inches. The 2 by 4 references the rough cut lumber before planning.
Planing. Planning wood is very different.
Americans choosing the system with tougher math requirements is suprising.
We see it as sticking to what we’re used to… As conservative as we are overall, is it really that surprising?
It’s all conservatives clinging to really outdated and stupid shit
How will they now call a two by four?
Stud wood.
Then how to differentiate from 2x6? 2x8?
With a wink. Yes, every time.
Between the kilometer vs miles, isn’t the “former” here the kilometer? So you’re saying the metric system sounds cooler? But then you went on to say two by four which is an imperial thing… am I confused?
Yeap, they got former and latter crossed
Yeah my bad. I meant latter there, and fixed it… Thanks!
They’ll be happy to know the metric system also has miles.
10 km = 1 mile (metric mile)
I have never heard of metric miles, did you make that up?
Also known as the Scandinavian mile. It is very commonly used in Sweden and Norway to describe long distances.
Before the introduction of the metric system, there were many local miles. Some a bit shorter than 10km, some a bit longer.
Ah, perhaps not as standard as I thought!
Lol this thread got spicy. Today I learned base 12 is actually superior to base 10 in a myriad of ways.
It seems the most reasonable people in this thread are arguing for a new system, not one or the other. I concur with this thought.
So… Fuck the imperial AND metric system. I’m team new system.
Same. Until then, I use both.
The base 12 system was real popular in Sumeria.
So your new system is akshualy the oldest.
Base twelve would be great if we went all-in, as in new symbols for single digit representation of ten and eleven, then 10 would mean twelve. Having a base that’s divisible by several primes is handy.
