Well it depends. Open standards are created to hopefully catch on by multiple manufacturers and make the interoperability better to make it easier for both consumers and manufacturers.
Proprietary standards are just simply to lock you into their ecosystem.
I fucking love the psychotic concept of using “stone” as a measurement, even though a real stone can weight anywhere from milligrams to … thousands of tonnes?
Everyone in the UK under 40 never used imperial in their education, but everything is still imperial.
Even stuff that’s not supposed to be. Milk is sold in pints but labelled in ml. Sometimes it’s litres because these are smaller. Timbre is all sold in a metric equivalent, but it isn’t consistent. You don’t know if the piece you’ve had delivered is 2.4m or 2.44m. Rulers have both metric and imperial, unless you pay extra for a single system - which makes them harder to use.
The worst thing is recipes, many recipes are imperial online because of the USA. American imperial measurements aren’t the same as UK ones.
It is all driven by ignorance. The royal family (TV show) summed this ignorance up best. They complained it took them longer to get to the destination because their sat nav was in kilometres and there’s more kilometres than miles so everything is further away.
It’s better. Because metric is still an option, but it’s not as good as it could be.
If the English speaking world fully committed to metric DIY, maker stuff and cooking online would be much better. But I’d much rather this than a fully imperial system. It much easier to work in metric and convert between than work in imperial. Imperial requires a lot more knowledge of the measurement system your working with than metric does. Because everything scales in metric the same and you can use exponentials or prefixes to express sizes. Though the US imperial system does simplify this system by using pounds for everything rather than stones.
It is surprising that the US still clings to imperial measurement despite being the first Anglosphere country to adopt metric/decimal currency. Along with the metric system being associated with liberty and enlightenment that was a big part of the philosophy behind the start of the US.
When it comes down to, in the UK and the US both imperial systems are quantified by metric standards. So it’s purely a mirage, because all reference lead back to metric measurements. Not brass yardsticks installed in the town centre. Imperial is now just a middle man maintained for nostalgia. The cost to switching is every decreasing as all series industry uses metric.
I avoid volumetric measurement whenever I can. I’ve found weight based measurement to be vastly superior, especially when you have a 0.1g digital scale. It’s much easier to weight 100g of water than check the line on 100ml.
We use US Standard, not Imperial. Americans took Imperial and changed the measurements but kept the names, because “fuck you, Britain” but “fuck you even more, everyone else!”
Americans took Imperial and changed the measurements but kept the names,
Not accurate. Imperial and US customary were designed side by side. They share a common history en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_units but US did not come from imperial
Soccer was an abbreviation used by posh people. Associate football -> sociate -> soccer. Much like rugby is called ruggers by the same group of people today. It was an informal term.
Association football was popular amongst the working class in the UK, who didn’t use the same types of abbreviations. So it wasn’t referred to as soccer by the them. When radio/TV became common the presenters wouldn’t use abbreviations like soccer and so it was referred to as Association Football or Football.
In the US the posh abbreviation took over, likely because many British travellers to the US would be posh and not working class. At least the ones traveling for leisure and taking part in sports activities. Working class would mostly be immigrants and wouldn’t be brushing shoulders with those in sports media.
American call the rugby like sport, American Football because it is played on foot and not horse. It would also share a common ancestry of completely moving a ball from one place to another on foot, like football and rugby.
I’m on team inch. I think the metric system has been pushed by Big Socket to sell more wrenches. If they made a meter equal a yard we could be bilingual and use the most appropriate system for the job.
Are there really Britons doing this? I lived there from birth until just shy of my 30th and I’ve never witnessed it. I’ve seen plenty of people make fun of Americans for getting the British flag wrong, though, I’m suddenly reminded.
No, not at all. My best guess is that the OP is confused with mainland Europe, who actually do use metric a lot more… the UK uses a mix of imperial and metric.
My point is that if I give someone directions in meters they’re going to look at me like I have two heads, it’s literally like speaking two different languages.
They made fun of that on For All Mankind. An incident on Mars because Russia and America were doing calculations using different systems and someone forgot to convert.
While I don’t disagree with that, that’s just a convention. Metric is inherently superior, solves issues that other systems have and is used by, well basically the whole world.
There is a reason. When you grow up with people around you using imperial units to describe things, you think in terms of it. If you tell me 10 ft., I can picture that in my head, I have an idea of how much that is in real terms. If you tell me 10m, I have no mental idea of how much that is, even if I can convert it. It’s like a language you grow up speaking, versus one you learn later in life.
I do think metric the sole system used in schools, to be honest.
The good thing with metric though is it’s easier to visualise other measurements once you know one of them, cause you just know that each other measurement is just a multiple or division of the one you know. Like if you know roughly how long a centimetre is then you can take a good estimate of how long a meter is knowing that it’s 100cm
It was much more mixed when i was in primary school but by the time I left secondary school it was fully metric. It might’ve fully changed before I noticed though just cause I was little and parents and grandparents would still be using imperial. I do remember having to learn imperial in school though.
I mean, yeah, I’m not arguing that imperial is a better system. Metric is superior, absolutely. I’m just arguing against the statement that there’s no reason to use it.
That’s true, but it’s also a double edged sword: you can easily learn metric just by switching to it.
Try setting a weather widget on your phone to only show you Celsius and don’t convert it to Fahrenheit, over time you will get an intuitive understanding of what feels cold to you.
The biggest block to learning a new system is insulating yourself with conversions IMO, imagine trying to learn a new language by just having everyone speak into Google translate
That’s a good idea that I think I will try out. To be honest, I have a pretty hard time visualizing distance, even with imperial, so sadly I don’t think that help will help me in that area.
Yep, that’s my life, pretty much. OTOH, my kids don’t have to live under the curse of arbitrary units of measurement and only have a vague idea of what a foot is.
In the meantime to “take advantage of Brexit” it will be possible to sell wine by the pint… A push to go back to the imperial system was axed though. Maybe brexiters should move to the US if they like the imperial system so much.
Nah, the brits have it even worse, I don’t think even they know what system they use. Like the US just uses the imperial system but brits use like every system randomly plus some stuff that no one else uses, like boulders or some caveman shit like that.
Also brits got like nothing left to make fun of at this point: They fucked their healthcare system bad enough they may as well be in the US, they got 2 viable parties that are even more the same than the US and they left the one thing that kept the country economically relevant to name a few things.
With metric and imperial though, you’re damned right.
We use both systems pretty randomly… personally, I far prefer the metric system, but I have a much better idea of how far a mile is compared to a kilometre. Which makes little sense, as a metres and kilometres are so much more logical than miles and fucking yards!
There is an argument to made that very few people care about the actual distance anything is from themselves anymore. What they are about is “how long will it take to get there”.
You very probably have little to no clue what the actual distance from your front steps to your favorite grocery or pub. But you DO know how long it takes to get there.
I use the metric system for both, and I’m from the UK. I don’t even know my weight in stone anymore, but a stone is just 14 pounds, like how 16 ounces fit into a pound. It has about as much to do with a real stone as a foot in distance has to do with the foot on your leg. Or a metre with a parking meter.
Within the US government it’s still all metric measures, has been since Carter, but Reagan made a social cause and used it against the Dems (along with a secret “guns for hostages” negotiation) to win the presidency. And it’s been downhill ever since.
People don’t get that part. The US was one of the early adopters of the metric system. Mostly thanks to the French supplying Charleville muskets for the fledgling US army during the revolutionary war. And we kept making French pattern muskets, (in metric measurements), for about the next 40 years I think.
Depends what you mean by fucked up. Long waits for some NHS treatments, but if I get any kind of serious injury like cuts or broken bones, it’ll be seen in A&E (Accident & Emergency) at the hospital, they obviously treat the more serious injuries first, but I’ve never waited longer than 4 hours - and that was on a Saturday night about ten years ago, with a minor cut than only needed 5 stitches or so…
As a kid, my broken arm and the few times I needed stitches, it was sorted pretty much straight away or with an hour or two wait. That’s probably doubled or tripled nowadays.
Mental health turnaround is not great, as that’s through my doctor (the NHS). Although I got treatment for depression a couple of years back, meds (Sertaline) and referral to therapy, after a week or so waiting for an appointment and answering a few waves of questionnaires. A couple of months later, after a lengthy conversation with a medical health triage nurse (which was just a random follow up call - that lasted an hour!), I went on an 18 month waiting list for the ADHD test, and about the same for ASD(Autism Spectrum Disorder) as well.
Not great, but they’re understandably swamped with the spike of mental illness, or people becoming aware of it anyway, after covid and the lockdowns.
Still waiting on the NHS for the ASD diagnosis, but I actually ended up going private for my ADHD, that was ~£800, was seen in a week, and the meds for that was £100 a month for Elvanse(Vyvanse in the US). I was able to transfer back to my GP after a few months though, so it’s just the standard prescription price of £9.65 / month, which is much better.
Other than that last paragraph, everything else was entirely free… so, nah, I don’t reckon our health care system is as fucked as yours and we certainly don’t have it “even worse”!
I’m from Estonia so my healthcare is fine. Mental health waiting times are on the longer side (longest I saw was 6 months) in less populated areas here but private option for that is like 20 euros per session and meds are still free.
Didn’t you guys have like a day of waiting time for ambulances at some point? I remember seeing that in the foreign news.
I’m in a similar boat to you regarding mental healthcare. The reason we don’t complain as much as we ought to is because we don’t have much to compare. Our system looks equitable next to America but that one really is the worst. Our healthcare is orders of magnitude worse than our European neighbours, in almost every metric. In Slovakia you don’t need to beg them to see a psychiatrist and wait months or years while the NHS gaslights you. You say, I feel bad and I want to speak to a specialist. That’s it. You get your treatment.
British society is breaking down. We would rather wave flags for an ultra privileged royal family or invade sovereign nations or build aircraft carriers, than take care of our own health. These people are bigoted and hypocritical morons who chose to leave the EU, even though this is the only institution that is safeguarding their rights.
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