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?
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?
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.
Cooking has largely moved to metric (with the exception of spices/seasonings, weighing spices is tedious compared to spoons IMO)
I have never seen a US cookbook or Internet recipe site that defaults to metric.
https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes
https://xkcd.com/1053/
I clicked the King Arthur link and the recipes default to English with metric in parenthesis.
That depends more on the setting, IDK about professional kitchens but most home cooking I’ve seen measures in imperial.
I’ve seen them chiefly in US Customary.
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)
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.
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
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…
Those 10mm are pros at hide-and-seek.
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.
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.
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”
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.
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.