When I was young I lived in Puerto Rico for a few years (1980’s). Milk was sold in either one litre cartons or one gallon jugs. Distances in road signs and road markers were in kilometers but speed was in miles per hour. Fuel was sold in litres but fuel usage is in miles per gallon.
I believe Canada and the UK do similarly.
Milk yes, car distance no, fuel usage no
Km and L/km are used in Canada.
Gallon jugs aren’t as common as 4L bagged milk here though
Do you say kilometers per litre or miles per gallon?
Edit: re-read. The UK still uses mpg, I believe
No, liters per 100 km, edited because I forgot the 100
But just to fuck with everyone we still refer to it a “mileage” in speech. Cause being a Canadian is suffering.
Seems like a good way to become proficient in both so that you’re more adaptable.
Nah. People just talked distances in fuel tank fractions, fuel dollars or travel time. For example, “how far is the mall?”, ‘about a quarter tank’. Or “how far is San Juan?”, ‘$5 will get you there’. Or " how far is Rio Grande" ’ about ten minutes that way’.
Soda bottles larger than 20 ounces…
Bicycle parts entered the chat
The entirety of the American scientific research community, which happens to be the most productive research community in the world, slides in with a wink 😉
I thought, you were saying that the USA is still researching how to build one of these “bicycles”. 🙃
The instruction manuals got banned.
Oh fuck the bicycle world for that, as much as I like working on my bike, it’s a fucking pain to figure out the size of parts!
At least in this case it’s not America’s but Britain’s fault. I primarily blame the small arms industry in Birmingham! :)
Funnily enough, I’m in a metric company and buy my weed in imperial
You forgot measuring bullets.
Bullets are a weird, dumb one. Yes, kind of. But also: .308, .303, .30-06, .50 BMG .30-30, .45-70, .38, .32, .44, .45, .50AE. Then nonsensically basically all “30 calibre” are the same diameter, which is exactly not quite .3 of an inch. Most of those are calibrated by the metric system (as many imperial measurements are today), but the terminology exists in the imperial system.
And then there’s fuckin gauges for shotguns smh.
Everyone uses guage descriptor for shotgun bores. It’s been around longer than the metric system. And it’s doubtful it will ever change.
Except .410 for some reason. I guess 67 gauge is starting to sound a bit crazy.
But yeah I know. I just think it’s silly.
While it’s pretty much traditional at this point, there was a very good reason for a long time to do it that way. Gauge for muskets/Fowlers is related to the number of round balls of bore diameter that weights 1 pound, (remember this predates the metric system by about 100+ years). And if you owned a firearm, you had to own the proper mold and cast your own lead balls to shoot over an open campfire. You just couldn’t pop down the the sporting goods store and buy some ready made round balls to shoot. Knowing how many round balls per pound lasted into the 1800’s. Because if you were a Longhunter or mountain man fur trapper, it was important to know that your .45 caliber Pennsylvania rifle shot 47 to the pound and a .50 caliber Hawken’s rifle shot about 35 round ball to the pound. so you could easily know how much lead you needed to bring with over the next year in the lonely mountains.
So if you owned a .72 caliber/12gauge musket you knew you would get 12 round balls per pound of lead. If you had a .69 caliber/14gauge, you would have 14 balls. A 20gauge/.62 caliber will give you 20 round balls.
But yes, the era of the metallic cartridges sent things off the rails in naming cartridges. And post WW1, everyone just completely lost the thread. We have .38 Short, Long, Special, and .357 - all the same bullet diameters. And a seemingly infinite number of .22 caliber cartridges that not even god himself can keep track of.
Which sports use metric in the US? Gridiron football uses yards, auto racing uses miles, baseball uses feet, etc. The only sports I can think of that use metric are track and swimming, and those aren’t as popular outside of Olympics time.
Funnily enough most high school swimming pools are 25 yards rather than meters.
Afaik every American high school has a track program, and yeah every event is measured in meters
I literally learned lessons on metric in public school
You didn’t have even liter of milk before school?
I did not
Oh, wow. You misseed out a lot. Are you lactose intolerant?
Not the original commenter, but milk is sold in Gallons, half gallons, and occasionally pints in the US
Yes, this is kinda pun.
Also, isn’t cola sold in liters?
Cola is sold in 2 liter bottles, and you can find 1 liter bottles, but 20 oz bottles and 12 oz cans are much more common.
What?
In the UK, weed is measured in authentic receding British imperial units where an ounce is weighs one less gram every year.
Hah, nice
Ayo the car thing is absolute bullshit.
10mm bolt for the fuckin brake caliper but 3/8 for the fuckin slide bolts?
Get the fuck outta here
GM has been using all metric for years now.
Don’t know what car you’re driving but I think you’re just using the wrong size wrench/Allen key
My last car was a 2012 ford fiesta. The lug nuts are 19mm. The caliper bolts were 10mm and the slide bolts were 3/8.
The car before that was a 2001 cavalier. Not only did it have metric and standard bolts but the slide bolts were fuckin Allen heads.
Like literally why?
It’s usually cost. They have tooling for components that have probably been around decades. The cost of retooling just to change the fastener sizes may not be economically viable. Eventually these legacy components will be phased out and it will be 100% metric.
Probably because they were made by American car manufacturers and couldn’t make a logical or consistent design decision if their lives depended on it.
Like I’m not even an engineer and I’m just screaming about the dumbest decisions made by people who make more in a week than I make in a year 😭
Yeah, but the difference is that they made it so you need an extra socket or an alan wrench. I think you’d have made dumb decisions that were a little bit more deadly.
I especially hate the T series bolts
Yeah, but you still have work tool measurements in 5/8, 7/32, and 13/64 or whatever the fuck dumbass measurements.
I say this as an American that hates the way tools use measurments here.
Depends what kind of work you do, mechanics work in metric only, construction is in Imperial…
Mechanics work in metric mostly. You still come across some imperial sizes occasionally. Though recently that’s been getting standardized a lot better.
Recently?
Metric has been standard in cars for decades…
I mean, that might be true, but I work on a lot of shit that’s right around 20 years old. It’s mostly metric. But I keep a set of standard sockets around that I’ve had to pull out once or twice. Sometimes it’s been because of swollen bolts but sometimes I’m pretty damn sure that’s a 5/16.
I can guarantee it’s either someone that put the wrong bolt there or it’s due to rust.
All American cars have been fully metric since the 90s (with a push during the Carter years as well), Japanese cars since the 60s… Maybe you’ve had to work on a x.5mm bolt but that’s extremely rare.
Then there’s planes, and trains and also ships. Ships can have parts and systems from god knows when
I specifically prefer woodworking in fractional inches. I’ve had this argument on Lemmy before and it basically goes:
“But inches bad! Metric good! Fractions bad! Powers of ten good!”
“I mean yeah okay but I nearly never have to divide by ten in the wood shop, I do have to divide by two or three or four, and since we mill stock to finished dimensions that are usually 3/2*x inches, most commonly 3/4” or 3/2" it’s trivial to do. Cutting mortise one third the board’s width in 3/4" stock ends up being exactly 1/4" wide. Easy. The metric world usually mills boards to 19mm, which is pretty close to 3/4" so it’s suitable for the same applications. Show me the line on a metric tape measure that indicates one third of 19mm."
“But Americans use inches so it must be dumb and bad!”
I use metric for quite a lot of things, I learned chemistry and physics in metric in school, I vastly prefer doing mechanical and engineering things in metric. I learned carpentry (structure building) in inches but I could cope with metric there, I learned how to fly in mostly US customary units (distances in nautical miles, speeds in nautical miles per hour aka knots, altitude and runway lengths in feet, pressures in PSI, temperature in °C) I could cope with different units there. I’m not giving up inches in the furniture shop though, because working in fractions works to well.
But yeah the faster we can erase fractional inch wrenches from the world the better. “What’s one size louder than 3/4?” “Ah shit 6/8…12/16, plus 1…13/16.”
Except there’s an easy way to mark thirds: if you have a, let’s say, 27 cm wide board you take the measuring by skewing a little the tape and measuring 30 cm. You mark 10 cm and 20 cm and there you have it: a third of the wide. You don’t even need the precise measure. If you have something with proportional marks you just use it and you get a third no matter the width. It’s like a center finder but with thirds (or fourths or…)
That will likely work for the length or width of boards, but what about thickness? Mark out a mortise and tenon on a 19mm thick board with that technique and tell me how it goes.
This is the kind of shit I’m talking about. You see these kinds of “Nuh uh, it’s not a problem, you just learn all these hacky workarounds” excuses out of the inch-ounce crowd, where you “just have different measuring cups for that” or “our butter packaging has tablespoon markings on it” but in the wood shop it’s the other way around because the physical tasks are inherently easier to express as fractions rather than decimals, so I’m the one saying “I just measure it with my tape measure or combo square or ruler and it’s right.” and the metric crowd keep going “Nuh uh, it’s not a problem, you just learn all these hacky workarounds.”
Or you can do a division and that’s it.
19mm / 3 = 6.3333mm. Come on over here and show me the six point three three three three millimeter line on my metric tape measure.
2" / 3 = 0.666666666 Show me that point in you tape measure 😜
And both cases can be fixed by just skewing a little the tape (19 mm -> 21 mm and 2" -> 2.1". Close to 20°)
2 inches isn’t a common size for stock. 1.5 inches is though.
And you want to come show me 2.1" on my standard tape measure?
Not to mention that every single food product has metric measurements on the label as well.
That’s ok, your animal welfare standards are so shockingly horrific, you can’t export any food anyway 😂
Oh, man, you got us!
Wait. I’m being told that the US is the largest exporter of agricultural goods in the world, exporting 20% of its agricultural production.
Pisses me off so much that we don’t standardize that in Canada, they still show $/lbs as the main price advertised but the item is weighted in kg with the $/kg written in a smaller font.
- talking to my european friends
- talking to my african friends
- talking to my asian friends
- talking to my south american friends
- talking to my north american friends (exceptions apply)
- talking to my oceanian friends
- talking to my antarctican friends
Alright friend-haver, no need to flex that hard on us
hypothetically
bro measured stuff with his friends
Americans will use anything to measure, except the metric system.
How many friends to a furlong?
what’s better than hanging out with boys, measuring your things?
- talking to my north american friends (exceptions apply)
As a Canadian, boy do they ever
pool
talking to my antarctican friends
Gotta go to [email protected] for that.
Quote from article(translated)
Few years ago I’ve seen post on Pikabu, which was recruitement of sysadmins and penguins flippers.
Are you sure about Antarctica? I wouldn’t be surprised if emperor penguins measured distance in feet and flippers.
Europeans literally see no irony in throwing shade at Americans for hanging onto their traditional measurement system, while also speaking 27 different languages in the span of a few hundred miles.
Maybe come down off your high horse until you get that situation sorted, eh? >.>
well, language is culture, and we all know how cultured the states are.
Whenever I post something on the internet, I do so in English, since that’s a language most people on this world speak. I’d love it if Americans did the same with measurements when writing down recipes on the internet. I’m sorry for this offensive opinion.
–
Als ge liever wilt, kan ik het ook in het Nederlands doen. Op het internet spreek ik over het algemeen Engels, aangezien dat een taal is die nagenoeg iedereen spreekt. Ik zou het vree tof vinden als Amerikanen dat ook zouden doen met maten en gewichten in hun recepten. Sorry om zo kort van antwoord te zijn.
Being colonised be the English does that to your native languages
Source: am Irish
Wine and other liquor bottles too. Go check that sticker, I guarantee you it’s measured in milliliters.
Some of us are comfortable going both ways.
But don’t tell anybody because I live in Texas.
