I see this meme beaten to death yet most people I know use the metric system, and my US based company and their nationwide conglomerates use the metric system too and have for over twenty years.
It’s just a pun. They’re both units of mass, hence there would be mass confusion.
It doesn’t work with the pun, but the more confusing part for people would probably be the fact that pounds are used for both mass and force, but in SI, the units are different (kilograms for mass vs newtons for force), though that doesn’t really matter for most people.
Pounds aren’t used for mass. They’re explicitly a measure of weight. It’s just almost always in the context of earth’s gravity so the approximation to mass can easily be made.
That’s incorrect. They are, in engineering contexts, referred to as pounds mass (lbm) or pounds force (lbf) respectively. The US Customary Unit for mass is the pound (lb) (aka pound mass, lbm)
Again, that’s incorrect. Pounds (Lbs) are the US measurement for mass. Feel free to provide a source to the contrary. I specified pounds mass vs pounds force because in an engineering space, it’s worthwhile to be specific, but the Pound (lb) is all that is specified in any documentation as the unit for mass in the US system.
I’m not the same person, but it seems like you’re right. Pound (lb) is a unit for measuring mass. The same is true for kilogram. This actually surprises me to some degree, since it had not been clarified like this to me earlier:
In common usage, the mass of an object is often referred to as its weight, though these are in fact different concepts and quantities. Nevertheless, one object will always weigh more than another with less mass if both are subject to the same gravity (i.e. the same gravitational field strength).
…
Because mass and weight are separate quantities, they have different units of measure. In the International System of Units (SI), the kilogram is the basic unit of mass, and the newton is the basic unit of force. The non-SI kilogram-force is also a unit of force typically used in the measure of weight. Similarly, the avoirdupois pound, used in both the Imperial system and U.S. customary units, is a unit of mass, and its related unit of force is the pound-force.
I think we’re probably confused of this because in common usage, we’ll ask “how much does it weigh” and expect to get an answer in the unit of mass instead of force, just because the mass of the object defines the amount of force it will have in some given gravity condition.
Hey, we have strikt rules on a highway! For example if you’re driving slower than everybody else and your IQ is under 70 you are prohibited to drive on the right lane even if it’s empty.
From Texas. I’m actually kinda surprised to hear how slow people are driving there. Our perspective is largely that the Autobahn is generally people driving closer to 160km/h.
We have roads here that are limited to 136km/h. So it’s kinda surprising to find out that most Autobahn drivers aren’t breaking that speed.
You just drive at how fast feels safe to you. On an empty Autobahn (or on workdays where traffic is usually faster because people driving at that time are more experienced) they do go 150-200 km/h. (90mph - 125mph) But not in the middle lane on a Sunday afternoon…
I personally feel comfortable up until about 150km/h
My driving instructor told me about a Czech guy who drove to Germany to have fun with his expensive car. He reached well over 300km/h and the local government pressed charges. They claimed that although there is no direct speed limit, drivers are supposed to drive at reasonable speed given all circumstances. But because the man made sure to drive at 4 in the morning on the middle of nowhere all charges where dropped.
330km/h is the sound barrier. Sooo you can legally break the sound barrier on the Autobahn.
This is false. Sound barrier is an aerodynamic effect that affects vehicles at speeds close to the speed of sound in air, which is slightly above 1200 km/h (at sea level, normal temperature and humidity).
In a similar situation, someone drove about 400km/hour (I think) I believe for a video.
Charges were pressed, but because he posted people at bridges and regular intervals to assess and communicate the situation, the judge decided he took reasonable precautions and the charges were dismissed.
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.
Origin
On February 12th, 2023, Redditor thereveldune4 posted an image to /r/blursedimages that showed a bear and a wolf staring at each other, using a Kubrick Stare POV of both. The top photo was captured by Peter A. Dettling. The post received more than 36,800 upvotes in five months (shown below).
Spread The post gained iterations after viral reposts surfaced on Instagram months later. For instance, on June 15th, 2023, Instagram user @huge.poop uploaded the photo, receiving more than 45,000 likes in one month. Then, the image grew popular as an object labeling template. For example, on July 13th, 2023, TikTok user @suj7683 uploaded a photo slideshow of the image comparing requirements of Formula 1 in 2007 and 2023. The post received more than 1 million views in one week (shown below, left). On July 15th, 2023, TikTok[4] user @formula_1_freak uploaded a similar slideshow, comparing Formula 1 and Isle of Man TT. The post received more than 1.8 million views in five days (shown below, right).
Eh, I DEFINITELY don’t care about this enough to make a Reddit account, wait two weeks so I can send a private message, wait an indeterminate amount of time for the guy who posted it to find my message and MAYBE reply (assuming his account isn’t banned, which is unlikely since this is Reddit), or post hundreds of spam comments to get enough karma to meet whatever that sub calls their karma requirements. If no one has the source I guess I’ll just never know.
The original image of a bear and wolf facing off against each other comes from an image originally taken and published by Canadian wildlife photographer Peter Dettling. Dettling even managed to capture the bear and wolf looking around as if to check if anyone had seen them lock eyes. Same source…
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.
Still, it’s still used as a measurement that only a small fraction of the world still uses.
That’s a lot of stills 🤔
But coming back to your point, yes, I have no idea why the US insists on keeping the imperial system, it’s outdated, ugly and inconsistent. Plus you cannot easily convert from one unit to another.
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