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.
I found them. They are in my shoes. Do you want them back?
Beard, ma’am? Finest in Jerusalem
13 stone and and a pywackett of gravel or twelve stone and three hands?
Use your words, sheesh.
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.
When I was at university, my friends and I used beer for currency. Somehow it was easier to say “you owe me two beers” than say “you owe me 100 kr”
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.
Don’t forget big nut!
Wtf is a yard?
Anyway sure we can make a meter equal a yard, that would be exactly 100cm
3 feet
How many armpits?
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.”
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. ;)
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
We use metric apart from with roads
And milk and beer
Aye, but at least we’re not American
Truly the long game on that joke! Well done, ya got us.
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
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 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.
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
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.
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
They usually give it away.
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.
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.
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”.
“Hoops” is an objectively better name for the sport ever since we got rid of the baskets.
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.
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.
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
Hand egg
retains a currency called pounds
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.
Must be hard, throwing 14 hands at once
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.
