this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2024
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Britain hardly had a leg to stand on. They got stuck halfway through making the switch. Still use miles in their cars, feet for height, etc.
It's old people. They vote and don't like change.
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.
I'm European but I have a set of US cups in my kitchen because most recipes are in these stupid American measurements.
Most American recipes; just look for something specific to your country.
Those recipes are gross anyway. Homemade nanna secret cake calls for a box of your favourite cake mix from the supermarket.
I found recipes for soups that list fucking tins of soups in the ingredients. Like you make soup using a can of already made soup?!
I tend to add "grams" to my searches if I'm looking for something in English.
Also tones of butter, sugar and their biscuits are soft.
Why not just convert the units?
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!"
Not accurate. Imperial and US customary were designed side by side. They share a common history https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_units but US did not come from imperial
This sounds worse than just using imperial
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.
Don't forget about stones for body weight
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?
It's like saying you weigh 7 water.
It's generally good to use feet for height. When I use butt for height I'm like a meter shorter.