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.
Most American recipes; just look for something specific to your country.
Those recipes are gross anyway. Homemade nanna secret cake calls for a box of your favourite cake mix from the supermarket.
I found recipes for soups that list fucking tins of soups in the ingredients. Like you make soup using a can of already made soup?!
I tend to add “grams” to my searches if I’m looking for something in English.
Also tones of butter, sugar and their biscuits are soft.
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
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.
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.
Wtf is a yard?
Anyway sure we can make a meter equal a yard, that would be exactly 100cm
3 feet
Then we could have two systems with stupid scientific formulas!
Lmao
Dont the British weigh things with rocks or some dumb shit?
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.
Beard, ma’am? Finest in Jerusalem
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.
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.
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.
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!
Wait til you find out who taught America the word “soccer”.
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 in a similar boat to you regarding mental healthcare. The reason we don’t complain as much as we ought to is because we don’t have much to compare. Our system looks equitable next to America but that one really is the worst. Our healthcare is orders of magnitude worse than our European neighbours, in almost every metric. In Slovakia you don’t need to beg them to see a psychiatrist and wait months or years while the NHS gaslights you. You say, I feel bad and I want to speak to a specialist. That’s it. You get your treatment.
British society is breaking down. We would rather wave flags for an ultra privileged royal family or invade sovereign nations or build aircraft carriers, than take care of our own health. These people are bigoted and hypocritical morons who chose to leave the EU, even though this is the only institution that is safeguarding their rights.
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.
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.
Aye, but at least we’re not American
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.
I was about to say. Wikipedia has an overview.
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.
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.
Truly the long game on that joke! Well done, ya got us.
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
its this EXACT same thing but with soccer and football, granted there is actual history there, im going to ignore it because it’s funnier that way.
europe created the term soccer, and then got rid of it, and then took up football, so the US started using soccer, because it had already used football, for well, football. Shocker i know. And so now we still use soccer, but they use football.
Hand egg
Doesn’t change the fact that football makes more sense and that while the British did come up with soccer literally every country uses something like football.
this also doesnt change the fact that if we called football football and football football we would be confusing football with football, and football with football, instead of having two succinct names that are clearly identifiable.
And even then most words don’t make very much sense. It’s just english.
One is football the other is handegg or rugby for pussies
Except we came up with another game we called football so we can’t exactly change the name of that game so soccer can be renamed
I my language, we just call it “American Football”. And it works pretty well since only USA plays it. The real football is just “Football” of course.
There are teams and leagues in Britain and Germany that play “American Football.” They just aren’t at the level of US teams yet. But they are getting better at it.
The NFL has been playing games in Britain for years now. And I think this year they played in Germany also. It’s an open secret that the NFL wants a team based in Britain also. They just can’t quite figure out the logistics.
Like it or not, American Football/Hand Egg is gaining popularity around the world - slowly perhaps but steadily. The NFL is coming for your “football”. In any case, it’s better than Cricket…
Except that football already existed and there were a bunch of variations, including association football which is what we call soccer, Australian football, and its variant Rugby which is what American football was based off of when it was brought to the States in 1870.
They all are called football, technically. We just don’t use that name anymore.
i think the technicality here is that soccer spread to the US initially. And then it transitioned to football, but by that time US football had been established properly, so we just kind of decided to keep using soccer, because it made the most sense. And besides the entire reason the EU transitioned to football, was kind of just irrelevant for the US anyway.
It’s one of those things where you get stuffed into a bit of an awkward spot. And so you do the best you can. And then everyone still yells at you for some reason. Like yes football already existed, and yes it probably should’ve just been football. But this is also the US and europe that we’re talking about, historically known to be good friends, throughout history. Of course.
This is true only in the vaguest sense.
- “Europe” didn’t invent the term soccer. A specific group of people in England did.
- Those people were upper class posh boys, the same ones who call rugby “rugger”. They are not the people who support football today or made football what it is around the world.
- If you can’t tell, it’s an obvious nickname for something. The equivalent of one nation deciding to exclusively call basketball “shootin’ hoops”.
Looks like the name is far more confusing than that. Apparently, ‘football’ used to mean multiple types of games, soccer started out as ‘association football,’ and then a British public school took ‘association’ and turned it into ‘asoccer,’ which spread to Oxford and became common there and then everyone else started calling it ‘soccer’ but then they dropped ‘soccer’ in favor of just ‘football’ except in countries which already had a football, which was sometimes the same as rugby.
yeah, pretty much.
“Hoops” is an objectively better name for the sport ever since we got rid of the baskets.
why did you have to ruin my funny with logic and reason?
jokes aside i realize it’s a little more complex than i let on, but it’s the same spirit as the original post so meh.
At least americans dont use stone, or fucking hands, for measurement
We still use hands for exactly one measurement, the height of a horse
Something like 14 hands tall is what seperates horses from ponies.
Or sometimes a crowbar.
If you have a 14 hand tall crowbar then I’m almost certain it wouldn’t be counted as a pony.
But feet are fine?
You will find “Hands” still being used as a specialty measurement of how tall a horse is. And I think they measure at the front shoulder. But that is, I think, the only time you might hear it.
For the curious, 1 Hand = 4"/~100mm For example - The mare stood 15 hands tall.
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
A large boulder the size of a small boulder.
… is completely blocking east-bound lane Highway 145 mm78 at Silverpark Rd. Please use caution and watch for emergency vehicles in that area.
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
At least our pints are bigger.
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.
While I don’t disagree with that, that’s just a convention. Metric is inherently superior, solves issues that other systems have and is used by, well basically the whole world.
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.
That’s based on real incident though
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.
Iirc a ship was carrying the metric standards to the US in like 1790 and sank and they just said fuck it
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 ☁️🌥
Amazon and Musk are working on it.
Now I wonder if we could launch satellites as artificial stars for celestial navigation. Basically optical GPS.
Actually, don’t. The pollution would kill us all.
Starlink: hold my Xitter handle
