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?
1917 shitpost with obstinate opinions held to this day. Brilliant!
What has he done to deserve this?
Submitted 3 months ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to [deleted]
https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/883860ec-4cea-4198-841f-11a92f709115.png
Comments
randomdeadguy@lemmy.world 3 months ago
JoMiran@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
I don’t think anyone believes the current system to be better, rather too much of a pain to replace. Americans really dislike learning and being inconvenienced.
solsangraal@lemmy.zip 3 months ago
Americans really dislike learning and being inconvenienced.
it’s worse than that-- we have gallons of milk, but liters of soda. we drive in mph, but run in 5K. science and medicine weights are grams, but recipes call for ounces. want to fix an american car–hope you have both metric and “standard” wrenches
more like we’d rather stay with the stupidness and inconvenience we know rather than change anything, no matter how much better it would be
Tar_alcaran@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
I don’t think anyone believes the current system to be better,
Check our ShitAmericansSay, and you’ll find plenty who argue that metric is worse.
slickgoat@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Australia joined the metric system on the 14th February 1966. It took about two weeks before it was running trouble free. Everything changed, including currency, on a single day. The system is pretty easy.
CaptainPedantic@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It has nothing to do with disliking learning. Trying to learn and use a system of measurement without being immersed in it is really hard. For years, I’ve set all my temperature measurements on my phone and thermometers to Celsius, but because I’m surrounded by people and systems that don’t use metric, I have to convert back and forth between the two. It’s a lot of mental effort for basically no gain.
Every day, customary speed and distance units and my intuitive understanding of them are reinforced when driving and seeing street signs. I know how long a kilometer is, but if you say “My brother lives 45 kilometers away”, I’d have a difficult time truly understanding that. I wouldn’t be able to estimate how long it would take to drive there, for example.
Another issue is cost. In my job, it would take weeks or months to update all of the documentation and code to metric. Then customers would have to approve of all those changes. A whole bunch of machinery still uses customary units too, so they would have to be replaced or updated.
I say all of this as a metric lover and evangelist. It’s not trivial to convert an entire massive country to metric. Countries that have converted already should be hugely proud of themselves for accomplishing a difficult task.
someguy3@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Hundreds of millions of people learned the new units when their countries switched.
Stovetop@lemmy.world 3 months ago
All I can say is that the metric system was predominantly taught in my American school experience, with US units mainly limited to math class. The only thing that sucked about using metric in science class is the short unit we had where we needed to convert measurements between metric and US, which I think was arguably the point.
It’s corporations, really, that seem to insist on having their products and tools still defaulting to US customary units, and I can’t fathom why. Even when you go abroad and try to buy a TV, they’re all still labeled in inches, which boggles my mind.
randomdeadguy@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Inconvenienced might be right. The tagline from the poster treats metric implementation as a punishment. “What did he do to deserve this?” Has the same victimized tone like, “Look what they done to my boy” which completely disregards the merits of either system in favor of nationalism. It almost seems like a cold-war era ideal.
hime0321@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Except that it has been replaced, or is not the preferred unit for trade and commerce. The SI has been the “preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce” since 1975 according to United States law. Too bad most other Americans are too scared of change to use it everywhere else.
Preflight_Tomato@lemm.ee 3 months ago
I have a friend who argues that “it’s just as good, there’s no difference really”. Then we go camping and have to do a unit conversion on how much water to boil and it takes 2 minutes and a phone calculator.
abbiistabbii@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 months ago
The idea that a simpler system of weights and measures that operate in base-10 will somehow cripple America is somehow fucking hilarious.
abfarid@startrek.website 3 months ago
What was the point for this propaganda? To keep products incompatible somehow?
interdimensionalmeme@lemmy.ml 3 months ago
Capital owners that don’t want to retool for a bullshit reason like “common good”.
DragonTypeWyvern@midwest.social 3 months ago
It literally costs them more money to not use the global standards!
meliaesc@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Relabeling is such a chore.
RedEyeFlightControl@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Replacing all your tools and machines is super easy, though. /s
FWIW I only work in metric, SAE is utter trash, tbh.
ikidd@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Try farming in Canada. I will actually use liters per acre as a unit to measure in liquid fertilizer into a sprayer, spray it at gallons per acre and drive the sprayer at kph with a pump pressure in PSI on a field that was surveyed in rods.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 3 months ago
And you have to do it in two languages too.
ikidd@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Well, chances are the Quebecers will have to learn English because I think ag equipment is exempt from dual language laws. At least I’ve never seen a part number for French manuals.
ramenshaman@lemmy.world 3 months ago
How awful. Making someone divide things by 10 instead of 12, 16, or fucking 64.
the_crotch@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
10 can only be divided evenly by 2 and 5. 12 can be divided evenly by 2, 3, 4, or 6. The Babylonians were right, base12 is superior to base10.
ramenshaman@lemmy.world 3 months ago
“Hey could I borrow a drill bit?”
“Sure, what size?”
“Seventeen sixty-fourths”
“Fuck you”
Sorry man I think in 2024 you’re objectively wrong.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Exactly. What we did was backwards. We shouldn’t have changed our measurement system to base10, we should’ve changed our counting system to base12.
rbos@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
In retrospect I definitely would have liked a duodecimal metric system, but we have what we have at this point. It’s good enough and a DAMN sight better than imperial.
tuhriel@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
That would be an argument…IF it would be consistently 16 between each unit
Il leave this one here to see if it’s 16 every time: youtu.be/r7x-RGfd0Yk
Spoiler: it’s not!
jg1i@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I stopped caring about British units in 1776! Metric all the way, baby! 🇺🇸 We decimalized their dumb ass currency and we need to finish the job with weights and measures! A vote for imperial units is a vote for red coats! Vote for me for President and I will liberate us from British tyranny! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🦅🦅🦅
AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Lab rat here. I got you fam! Let’s collectively believe that BTU’s are real!
Wait…
Bgugi@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Uuummm… Ackshually Americans don’t use imperial units, they use united States customary units. Which are similar, but just a smidge different.
FatherGascown@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The more I read about America, the more I realise what a fucking stupid country it was, is, and will probably keep on being.
modus@lemmy.world 3 months ago
If I could read, I’d probably be insulted by this comment.
RubyRhod@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Hence the effort to defund education.
As if people weren’t so fuckin dumb already.
Christ WTF year are we fucking in you guys?
renzev@lemmy.world 3 months ago
There are some pretty smart people in America tho
exanime@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Indeed, too bad nobody wants to listen to them
pachrist@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Poster shows the metric system giving Uncle Sam giant balls of steel?
Imperial emasculates.
MewtwoLikesMemes@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Actually, I suspect those are balls of iron.
jg1i@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It’s possible! We can switch! I’m US born and raised and I voluntarily switched to metric in college. It took me maybe we few months to start building an intuition for Celsius, grams, liters, and meters. And that was with me in isolation. I would imagine it would be much faster if everyone else was also transitioning.
Over the years, other people have asked me about this and I’ve been shocked at how many people don’t realize most of the world uses metric. Someone asked why I was using “Mexico units” once… Also, I’ve met lots of people who think the US invented inches, pounds, etc, which is… uh… interesting. The arguments y’all are having here are way more advanced than what I’ve run into.
For anyone who wants to voluntarily switch, I highly recommend not to convert between imperial and metric. Just read the metric number and that’s it. The weather says it’s 25c outside? Don’t convert to F. Go outside, experience 25c. Overtime you’ll build an intuition. Smartphones and computers have made the switch easier these days.
Of course, until we all switch you’ll really end up being bilingual…
HasturInYellow@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It’s also helpful to remember that water boils at 100C and your body temp is about 36-37C. Helps me when I see the weather or something.
AgentOrangesicle@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Room temp is ~21 degrees. That helped me a lot.
uis@lemm.ee 3 months ago
36.6°C. 37°C is on edge of healthy.
LarmyOfLone@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Of course, until we all switch you’ll really end up being bilingual…
Biunitated?
bitchkat@lemmy.world 3 months ago
We actually were transitioning to metric when Carter was president and making progress. We did a lot of dual markings like highway signs, weather reports, etc.
The we ejected Reagan. And metric is used for pop and drugs.
uis@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Drug dealers just know what units system is superior
lightnegative@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Oh is THAT why every American knows how big 9mm is
creditCrazy@lemmy.world 3 months ago
For me it was particularly easy as it’s only Chevy and Ford cars that still use the imperial system for nuts and bolts so I’ve been making use of the metric system for pretty much every car I’ve worked on and I never really understood ferinhight to start off with as I only really cared about is it going to snow temperature wise so why memorize a number for something your only going to check one time in the year now that I’ve gotten accustomed to Celsius I’m now paying attention to if it’s going to rain or not
SwingingTheLamp@midwest.social 3 months ago
Question: I know that Celsius is one of the accepted SI units, but is it really metric? (SI includes a number of definitely non-metric units.) And, if being expressed as a decimal number is enough to qualify it as metric, then isn’t the Fahrenheit scale also metric? It is also decimalized, and also defined in terms of the SI unit (Kelvin).
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
One kilometer is 1000 meters, one meter is 1000 millimeters. One square meter is 1,000,000 millimeters, one cubic meter is 1000 liters.
1 liter of water is 1 kilograms, so 1 cubic meter is 1000 kilograms. Sand is about 2.3 times heavier than water, so 1 cubic meter of sand is 2300 kilograms, or 2.3 metric tonnes.
I’m 1.96 meters tall, or 1 meter and 960 millimeters, or 1 meter and 96 centimeters. I weigh about 85 kilos, or 85.000 grams. Being 65% water, I carry about 55.25 kilograms of water, which will fill a little over 55 one liter water bottles
I can do this all day
Now let’s do the same with imperial units! You first, cuz I’m not going to touch that shit with a 10 foot pole…
CommissarVulpin@lemmy.world 3 months ago
One mile is 5280 feet, one foot is 12 inches. One square foot is 144 square inches, one cubic foot is 1728 cubic inches.
1 gallon of water is 8.34 pounds, and 1 cubic foot is 7.48 gallons, so a cubic foot of water weighs 62.38 pounds. If sand is 2.3 times heavier than water, a cubic foot of sand weighs 143.5 pounds.
I am 5 feet 10 inches tall, or 5.83 feet, or 70 inches. I weigh about 220 pounds, or 3520 ounces. If I’m 65% water, I carry about 143 pounds of water, or a little over 16 gallons.
Guh
DeanFogg@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Height in imperial is kinda useful. If you say a person is 4 foot tall vs 6 foot tall it immediately paints a vivid picture
macaroni1556@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
What a great snapshot of life in Canada
Bakkoda@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
This guy/gal specific gravities.
HipsterTenZero@dormi.zone 3 months ago
uncle sam you dense motherfucker go to SCHOOL
Luccus@feddit.org 3 months ago
1l of (4°C) water weighs 1kg. 1kg (of anything) is 1000g. 1g of water is 1cm³. Stack 1000 1cm³ blocks to get a 10m high column. This column exerts 100kPa of pressure on its base. To heat it by 1°C requires 1kcal. And 1N would accelerate it by 1m/s every second.
I’ve posted this before on my mastodon, and on feddit.de, before the instance was shut down, but I think it’s still a nice showcase how SI units interact with one another.
The worst thing we have in the metric system is kWh/1000h. It’s just watts, but whoever designed the energy labels thought a bunch of zeros would be funny or something.
litron3000@feddit.org 3 months ago
The kWh/1000h does convey more information than just W though. If I buy a fridge and it says 100W I wouldn’t know if that’s its max power draw or average over time. With the 1000h in there it’s pretty clear we are talking about the average.
Also people who aren’t technically minded might only know “kWh” as that’s what it states on your power bill and they can directly guess what kind of energy bill this fridge might cause.
So you are technically correct I guess and we all know that’s the best kind of correct.
We do have worse stuff in the metric system though, kcal is not the same as the SI for energy (J) for example. Also everything involving time gets messy quickly. Nothing compared to the imperial measurements obviouslyrenzev@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I’ve heard that kWh/1000h is used as a power rating for light bulbs, because if they just wrote it as watts, people might confuse it with a brightness rating (e.g. “this LED bulb produces as much light as a 100W incandescent bulb”)
parapsyker@startrek.website 3 months ago
There are multiple copies of this posted in the cabinet shop where I work. In Canada.
ShaggySnacks@lemmy.myserv.one 3 months ago
Ugh, who wants to change to a base-10 system when we keep what ever we have now?
PhlubbaDubba@lemm.ee 3 months ago
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.
DMBFFF@lemmy.world 3 months ago
How many centimeters in a kilometer?
How many inches in a mile?
fne8w2ah@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Fedizen@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The medical system ended up using the metric system anyway
ninekeysdown@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The US Government is entirely metric. It’s just the US Citizens that aren’t. So there’s this entire separation where no one uses metric, so nothing is made for metric, since nothing is made for metric, no one uses metric.
Obviously that’s changing over time plenty of people use a mixture of both systems all the time. The machines are mostly driving adoption at this point. 3D printers, cars, etc.
PanArab@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Metric is just easier and the founders of the US actually considered it but wars -obviously- distracted them from switching to it.
AnarchoSnowPlow@midwest.social 3 months ago
Fuck that, we should be measuring everything in Stone.
I’ll take a seventh stone of chicken please.
someguy3@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
My comparison is that the metric system is like color vision. It’s like colors for traffic lights, but USC people insist it’s fine memorizing which light is which location. In metric you just see the world in a way USC can’t, but USC people insist they’re just fine.
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 months ago
Doesn’t the reason why the avg US citizen wants imperial units boil down to “sounds cooler”?
Kilometer vs Miles, the former sounds easier and cooler to work with
Centimeter vs inch, same.
How will they now call a two by four?
It’s kind of the same for the pro gun arguments, it all boils down to “but guns are cool toys!”
probableprotogen@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 months ago
This is his punishment for war crimes
vga@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
Jesus this is dumb.
Trigger2_2000@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Uncle Sam couldn’t handle the success the metric system would bring. /s
JeffKerman1999@sopuli.xyz 3 months ago
Imperial US system is defined using the metric system…
polle@feddit.org 3 months ago
And the most ridiculous (or inclusive) thing are tiresizes in Europe (perhaps somewhere else, too?). 195/55r16 195 is the width in millimeters 55 is the height in percentage of the width R16 is the radius of the wheel in inches
Lucidlethargy@sh.itjust.works 3 months ago
Lol this thread got spicy. Today I learned base 12 is actually superior to base 10 in a myriad of ways.
It seems the most reasonable people in this thread are arguing for a new system, not one or the other. I concur with this thought.
So… Fuck the imperial AND metric system. I’m team new system.
FelixCress@lemmy.world 3 months ago
From John Bazell “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
bravesirrbn@lemmy.world 3 months ago
But we’re supposed to use Joules, not calories
MewtwoLikesMemes@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I believe the calorie is a derived unit while the Joule is a base unit.
Somebody correct me if I’m wrong.
stoly@lemmy.world 3 months ago
It’s demonstrative anyway
Cort@lemmy.world 3 months ago
I mean, 1btu is required per pound of water per degree Farenheit. About 8lbs/gal and raising it 142°f would mean 1136btus
finley@lemm.ee 3 months ago
that’s a lopt of words and numbers for, “go fuck yourself”
AntEater@discuss.tchncs.de 3 months ago
So intuitive!
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Just remember to keep track of which BTU you’re using
TheTechnician27@lemmy.world 3 months ago
There’s a popular argument against religion that essentially says that if any trace of a specific religion were wiped off the face of the Earth, it would never come back. As in there’d probably be something, but there’d no way that the specific beliefs practiced by that religion would ever return. Whereas if a piece of scientific knowledge were similarly wiped from human knowledge, it would eventually be rediscovered.
A similar argument can be made with the metric system: I think that if standardized measurement systems disappeared from the face of the Earth today, something extremely similar would eventually be invented and adopted. It’s just too internally consistent and human mental math too grounded in decimal for it not to be. You’d probably even end up with a prefix-based (probably even Greek) naming scheme.
Now consider USC: the units fail to fit together in basically any meaningful way. They try but fail to be base-2, so you can’t even come at it from the already-tenuous angle of base-2 being better than base-10 (e.g. volume skips what two quarts would be, weight is more like base-16 (???), and distance just does something so insane that probably 95% of American adults couldn’t tell you how many feet there are in a mile). There are dozens of completely arbitrary, unintuitive, antiquated-sounding names (e.g. “horsepower”). Although the bases for metric measurements are rather arbitrary, they are extraordinarily precise, so much so that USC bases its own measurements off of insane but precise multiples of metric units. That’s not to say that humans would jump straight to metric or anything, but moreso that whatever would fill USC’s role as an intermediary between nothing and the metric-like system would likey be unrecognizable from current USC.
Omgpwnies@lemmy.world 3 months ago
The “intuitiveness” of imperial measurements is that they’re sorta human-scaled, at least for human-sized measurements. An inch is about the same length as the tip of my thumb, a foot is about as big as my foot, a yard is a single pace if I stretch a bit, etc. which makes it easier for a person to picture it.
Once you get out of that scale it really starts to break down though.
metallic_z3r0@infosec.pub 3 months ago
I would agree with you that something similar to metric would eventually arise, but I would consider duodecimal to make more sense than decimal, as 12 is a superior highly composite number and the terminating representation is much shorter for more commonly used fractions (e.g. 1⁄4 would be represented as 0.3, 1⁄3 as 0.4, 1⁄2 as 0.6, etc). I would also argue that groupings in powers of 12² make more sense than 10³.
I would also argue that it would make more sense for measurements to be based on natural units (such as Planck length) for all the basic measurements (second, metre, kilogram, ampere, kelvin, mole, and candela), such that the anthropic unit (the one you’d most commonly refer to without prefixes) would be some multiple of 12 away from the natural unit.
backgroundcow@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Not only was this never true - the sentence would have to have say “An amount of carbon-12 atoms weighing 12 times this amount has exactly 1 mole atoms in it” (far less elegant) – but not even this is true any longer after the fuckup in redefining the mole in 2019, after which all these relations between amount of substance and mass are only approximate.
repungnant_canary@lemmy.world 3 months ago
termain@programming.dev 3 months ago
Or they answer in BTUs. But ask them which BTU they’re using, and they won’t know.
uis@lemm.ee 3 months ago
Calorie? Are they part of metric system? Everyone uses Joule.
FelixCress@lemmy.world 3 months ago
Calories are metric but not SI.
user134450@feddit.org 3 months ago
and he was doing so well until this abomination 😡
BastingChemina@slrpnk.net 3 months ago
Applied to a real situation I’ve been through :
The answer to one is 1.5 bag, the answer to the other one is “fuck that, I’m getting 8 bags at the store and it should be good enough”