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.
Don’t forget about stones for body weight
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.
It’s generally good to use feet for height. When I use butt for height I’m like a meter shorter.
But the UK still uses imperial. I remember playing euro truck sim and being annoyed that the road signs don’t match the speed limit shown in the GPS. I first thought this was a bug. Then I remembered that I was in UK and not the Netherlands where I picked up the delivery.
UK is a conplete chaos between the two. You buy liters of milk but gallons of gas. Speeds are in miles per hour. Close distances are in meters, longer ones in miles. I have seen weight both in grams and in pounds. And then the currency is even called pound.
“How many pounds does one pound of apples cost, sir?”
It’s so much worse than anyone outside of the UK can imagine. Milk and beer come in pints but water and wine come in litres (actually, wine and liquor sometimes comes in centilitres which is actually worse) . Most fuel pumps show you the quantity in litres but we still measure speed in miles per hour and efficiency in miles per gallon.
I know my own weight in kilos but my height in feet. When I go to the barbers I ask for a one mill on the sides and an inch off the top. I try and run a 5k every now and again but could never do a marathon.
Then there’s the generation split. I’m of that weird generation where I’m caught in the middle of older teachers knowing imperial better but trying to teach metric in school.
My parents always used imperial so I learned some of that early on but then learned metric in school. Went to engineering college where they taught me all the more advanced metric before going to work at a company that almost exclusively uses imperial (thank you American aerospace for that one)
Shit, even our kettles can’t seem to decide on imperial cups or just guessing how big the average mug is. My kettle has both cups and millilitre gradiations on it.
And don’t get me started on single, double, king and queen beds! Turns out there’s a euro standard and they’re not the same as our standard! You can buy a double sheet that’s closer to fitting a queen size bed!
Idek what’s going on at this point lol
And they use stone (14 pounds) to measure body weight.
how many pounds of gas does it take to drive 1 kilofoot?
centipounds
Holy shit. I’m gladdened to learn that someone may be more fucked than us. Today is a first: I am no longer from the most shamed people.
Nah, you buy petrol in litres, but mileage is calculated in miles per gallon. Which is much worse
even better is measuring shit in stone.
no one knows what that means outside of blighty mate, no one’s ever fucking heard of stone. it’s so hilarious.
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.
Starlink: hold my Xitter handle
“That’s no moon.”
Who would win:
- A billion, billion unfathomably massive fusion reactions
- Some steamy bois ☁️🌥
Tbh that sounds like a fun project for an app or something, as a backup to gps in case it’s jammed. Just lay your phone on the ground, take a long exposure picture and then use the phones time to calculate where you are. Might need to take the accelerometer into account if the ground isn’t flat.
Fighter jets have automatic star navigation to augment their GPS navigation features. It’s more than a fun project, it’s military technology.
USA should have switched to metric just because they are pals with France.
I still use inches, but I’ve switched to using sixtieths of an inch as the only subdivision.
1-45/60" is what boring people call 1-3/4"
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?
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.
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!
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.
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.
We use metric apart from with roads
How tall are you, and how much do you weigh?
Like 77kg 175cm kinda weird question though
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.
