To be fair, also in Europe imperial measurements are still used, for example in plumbing, where inches are used for some reasons still unknown, or in aviation, where they continue to measure, in part, in feet. In nautical matters it is a separate issue, measuring in knots and nautical miles, and has nothing to do with metric measurements either.
Pounds are a measure of weight (force) not mass like grams. Stone is the imperial measure of mass and slug is the standard unit (US unit). In metric Newtons would be equivalent to pounds.
I think in most common usage people use pounds as a measure of mass (convertible to kg). It’s why when you really mean force the abbreviation lbf (pound-force) exists, as opposed to the now more usual pound-mass.
A pound at one gravity is equivalent to 2.2 kg at 1 gravity. Outside of aerospace there’s not really a need to distinguish between mass and weight so it kind of gets used interchangeably.
It just bothers me when people complain about units and then use the wrong kind of unit.
My point is that in common use a pound does refer to mass (not weight). For example the US Code defines that 1 pound = 0.453 592 37 kilogram. See also en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass).
I came here to say this. A chunk of mass that “weighs” 100 grams is still 100 grams on the moon. A chunk of mass that weighs 1 pound does not weigh 1 pound on the moon.
One of the managers at my job does this but with her disc profile. She makes everyone take one when they start as well. She seems to believe she’s the smartest person in the room, yet she’s over here eating up pseudoscience because she thinks it excuses her shitty behavior.
You might want to have the mixing gasket replaced in your shower. It’s responsible for mixing hot and cold water in your shower and can be the culprit of your shower being too hot or too cold. They have a limited lifespan and need to be replaced eventually
But if prices don’t go up, the profits won’t increase! Why doesn’t anybody think of the poor shareholders, trying to barely eke out an income from their holdings?
You’d like to think that oil is going out of style. It’s not. All of the focus is currently on the automotive sector.
I will first say that despite commitments and developments in the right direction from the industry, the commitment to gas and diesel extends a minimum of another decade. It’s a combination of slow-walking changes and taking advantage of lack of replacements for current sectors of transportation, most notably being long-distance transportation.
And that’s not to mention all of the other industries that use petroleum or derivatives thereof.
I wish I could agree that oil is going out of style, but it’s not. There is ongoing work to offer alternatives, but oil is going to ride strong until the end. Then it’ll be someone else’s problem. Just like everything else.
Military, most manufacturing is metric only thing that’s not metric are street signs, building trades and anything else the redcaps interact with daily.
Our entire company wants metric. The guidance folk want to do their modeling in metric. The prop team wants to do fluid/thermo in metric. The structures team wants to do load analysis in metric.
But the boys at the 'pad are imperial only. The water system, fuel tanks, all ground infra is in imperial. If someone runs down to the hardware store they can easily find a fitting, gasket, or o ring in imperial. But metric? Good luck.
So our company decided to support both. The flight computer and ground software did unit conversions, everything was unit-aware, telemetry was occasionally manually converted because the onscreen wasn’t the right unit. We had written our own turing complete, inhouse programming language and we ended up implementing dual-static typing. We had float, int, bool and then we had units where some operations required the units to be the same thing. So cm and inch but not inch and kilogram.
The project was terribly mismanaged. To this day some still wonder why.
There’s nothing nice or consistent about those fractions. A third of one is one of the other, but a third of that is four of the other? Imperial units don’t convert in any meaningful or logical way, you have to memorise the conversions. With the metric system, it’s all tens.
And the fact that there are no usable units smaller than an inch and you have to use fractions should drive any craftsperson up the wall.
I agree there’s nothing consistent, but having 3 as a factor in ratios does make things nicer - it lets you stick with integer numbers for more things. I’m not saying it’s better than metric, but I do think having more small factors in ratios is nicer than having only the factors 5 and 2.
I too think having factors of 3 and 4 would be neat, which just proves we should change our number system to base 12, as somebody else in the thread suggested 😊.
The fractions don’t help me when I go to the grocery store and unit price of one bag of nuts is “per pound” and the unit price of another is “per ounce”. You’d better be good at dividing by 16 in your head if you want to price-compare! And you’d better be good at remembering how many fluid ounces are in a quart when you go to the olive oil aisle (hint: it’s not 16).
Is lemmy big enough that we can rise awareness for a change? Or the other way around, can we use the rallying behind the metric system to make lemmy popular?
I don’t think the majority of Americans have strong feelings about it one way or the other (despite what the internet may say). Honestly it’s just so low on the list of priorities that it doesn’t seem like we’ll ever be in a stable enough place to care about tackling it. Hell we’re still struggling to kill daylight savings time and that would require a fraction of the changes required to adopt metric.
We’re trying, but the Sunshine Protection Act is stuck in congress. They’re tying themselves in knots trying to figure out which time we should settle on. Like, I don’t give a duck, just pick one and move on! Ask the farmers and other outdoor workers what they prefer, the rest of us can deal. They’re concerned about traffic and whatever when we’ve seen that time changes cause lost productivity every single year. So infuriating, can’t help but waste time on the simplest things.
That’s where the social network comes in. Have all farmers in a channel and let them vote.
But let’s not forget powerful people who want sunrise in their breakfast room at a certain time. It’s stupid but those concerns should also be respected, among many others that can be considered when the requirements are collected.
As a European who grew up using only metric I like inches for crafting. It’s a good scale for the things I craft and I prefer fractions over decimals when doing quick math or measurements.
But that doesn’t mean metric shouldn’t be the standard.
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