They so stupid, they unconsciously use it everyday for example to calculate medicines' dosages or measuring time (miliseconds), it only shows how backwards and limited their measurement system really is.
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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Time is mostly base 60. It goes against the metric system based 10.
It's like saying milifoot. For 1/1000th of a foot. Doesn't make it a metric unit.
M'erican here. My workshop is 100% metric. I do far too much measuring, designing and planning to fuck around with inches, feet and football fields. Motherfuck the imperial system. America has been robbed of the superior until of measurement. Every last bit of my work is in millimeters and it will be that way until I die in a horrible firey accident in my shop because beer and dangerous power tools are just too much fun when taken together.
And the only time they use the proper date format is their national holiday.
If you mean dd-mm-yyyy instead of mm-dd-yyyy, I’d agree it’s superior. That said, other countries have us both with their fully ISO compliant yyyy-mm-dd standard.
Who certifies the "proper" format? Im fairly sure it isnt dd-mm-yy
This is why i use the amertric system
It 318 kft not 60 mi or 100 km. That avalanche was 1 decaempire State building in volume. 1 mi is actually 2.28 kft.
they would freak out if they have to measure temperature in kelvins, even celcius freaks americans out.
whats fucking weird to me is that we use millimeters and inches on the same fucking rulers.
Hey, we also measure our large soda bottles that way!
And street drugs
The imperial system makes you a worse shot. Everybody in American stories misses by inches. In European stories, they miss by millimeters. It's quite the difference: 25 times worse.
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How dare you!
We also measure our drugs that way
And our largest bottles of soda.
Literally all of your food and drinks in America are sold by the metric unit. That's why it is on the packaging. Your "fifth" of vodka is actually 750ml and is not 1/5 of a gallon.
Like a goddamn liter cola
And alcohol!
And my axe!
And my Glock!
And my crippling medical debt.
Glock is Austrian. They just love the US market.
That’s done intentionally to obfuscate the quantity, since most Americans can more easily estimate a half-gallon. It’s to encourage consumption.
Doubt intensifies
And distances in track and field events
And the temperature of electronic components for some reason
Lower numbers look better for that so it's like a cheat code for them.
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Longtime woodworker here (American). Fractions of an inch have always been a pain. Finished lumber like 2x4s and 1x12s have never in my lifetime been the size they're known as, but that's a matter of subtracting halves and quarters of an inch and everybody was used to it. Then maybe 20 years ago (no need to correct me, it really doesn't matter) companies decided that instead of making plywood the thickness they said it was, they would subtract 1/32th of an inch, because hey less wood means more profits! So for example a sheet of so-called 3/4" plywood is only 23/32" thick. Similarly with half-inch, etc. This means a slot cut with a 3/4" router bit, which used to fit a 3/4" thick shelf, is just slightly loose now, and if you are stacking multiple thicknesses the slight inaccuracies compound themselves. What the Actual Fuck. I have a metric tape measure, which makes some figuring easier, but inches and fractions of inches don't convert to exact mm. The imperial system is a shit show.
I recently bought a house that was built in 1942 and I've been renovating it. I tore down one of the interior walls and reused the studs (which incidentally were completely straight and free of knots, unlike any modern 2x4 I've ever seen) to build a new wall. When I put the wall in place it didn't quite fit and when I measured I realized it was 1/2" too tall. I don't normally make measurement errors of that magnitude and it took me a while to figure out that the studs I was reusing were not 3.5"x1.5" like modern 2x4s but were actually 3.75"x1.75" (so the base plate and head plate being thicker than I thought was producing the problem). Apparently the transition from real 2x4 to BS 2x4 dimensions was gradual, who knew.
One other weird thing was how the interior walls and ceilings were covered. I've worked on a lot of 19th century houses with lathe and plaster and of course I've worked with modern sheet rock. This 1942 house was in a transitional phase that used 16"x16" blocks of 1" thick rough plaster that were nailed to the studs, and then finish plasterers came in and put a smooth plaster coat over these rough blocks. I've never seen anything like that before, and removing these rough plaster blocks was a monstrous bitch - each one weighs as much as a solid rock of those dimensions and I have no idea how a few nails were holding them up on the ceiling joists.
Also found a hat in the attic from 1942. I like to imagine some young worker wondering for the rest of his life where he put his favorite hat.
That's fascinating, I never heard of those small plaster panels - could they be a type of Sackett Board? According to Wikipedia they were made in 36" panels, maybe there were also smaller ones - although 1942 would be kind of late for them.
Finding that hat is awesome! Was it a "slouch hat" workers commonly wore? The coolest thing I've found in my 1910 house was a WWII draft card inside a wall - I think it fell through a very thin gap between the windowsill boards. Always wondered if the guy put it there intentionally or what.
I don't think they're Sackett Board as they're much thicker and heavier than 1/4" and they're not layered in any way. They are preformed plaster and they have sort of tongue-and-groove edges like modern ceiling tiles so that two edges are supported by neighboring panels so as they're installed they only have to be nailed off on two edges. Installation must have been a two-man job, at least on the ceiling. The houses in my neighborhood were built as temporary housing for shipyard workers and were certainly never meant to last 80+ years, and yet here they all still are - only two of the original 320 are gone and they were torn down intentionally to make room for a baseball diamond. I watch these house inspector videos on Youtube and just laugh my ass off at what pieces of utter shit modern houses are.
The hat wasn't a slouch hat unless that term is broader than I think. It was green waxed canvas with a small front brim and little ear flaps with ties. It even had a tag with the contract number and year on it, which confirmed when the house was built. I was going to wear it but it had a bunch of little moth- or other-critter- holes in it and I stupidly threw it away.
use cabinet grade instead of construction grade for your plywood. The good shit will actually be what it says it is.
I didn't know that. But at this point I can barely afford sanded shop plywood from Home Depot.
Hey, we use grams and kilos for...other things too.
It is funny how we're schizophrenic about it, though. Things will go from grams to ounces and then to kilos...or, so I've heard.
Edit: American cars are also kind of schizo like that, or at least they used to be. The engine and everything attached to it was metric and everything else was SAE. Fun times.
It there some kind of tool lobby out there making Americans buy multiple tools to resolve functionally one identical task?!
Tbf, some other countries are schizophrenic about it, too. The UK uses miles for some distances and km for others, metres for anything more than about a body-length, when it might switch to feet depending on context or location. That doesn’t even broach other (sometimes overlapping) units. Humans are* remarkably inconsistent considering how universally we talk about things relying on measurement.
I think I also recall some comments from somewhere from UK people saying Fahrenheit makes more sense for weather-related temperature.
But yeah, definitely human inconsistency lol.
Eh, the brits do that too, don't they? Buncha weirdos I tell you.
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And by "Americans" you mean the companies that manufacture the firearms, right? Or whatever body, if any, that controls what size ammunition cartridges are measured by?
Both are used. If you see caliber after the number it's in 100 of an inch. If you see mm it's metric. (Though caliber refers to barrel diameter and can be expressed in imperial or metric). So a 45 caliber is 0.45 inches or about 11.5mm.
NATO has standardised on a few round types so they can share supplies between countries. The NATO 7.62×51mm round is very similar to the .308 and they can usually be interchanged.
And when not, kablammo?!
You can fire .223 in a firearm rated for 5.56mm pressure
.308 is the opposite. It has more pressure than 7.62mm
Most any new barrel is going to be rated for both pressures now a days, but always good to doublecheck!
Oh no, it's worse than that... we use the metric system to measure the customary system...
The Mendenhall Order marked a decision to change the fundamental standards of length and mass of the United States from the customary standards based on those of England to metric standards. It was issued on April 5, 1893, by Thomas Corwin Mendenhall.
[...]
Mendenhall ordered that the standards used for the most accurate length and mass comparison change from certain yard and pound objects to certain meter and kilogram objects, but did not require anyone outside of the Office of Weights and Measures to change from the customary units to the metric system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order
Technically every unit in the US customary measurement system is just a weird conversion factor of an equivalent metric unit. At this point 1 yard was defined as 3600/3937 meter, which means 1 inch = 2.54000508 cm. By 1959 everyone finally agreed that this was stupid and redefined it as 1 yard = 0.9144 m (1 inch = 2.54 cm).
All measurements in the US are based on standard reference objects provided by BIPM.
Most of us know what two liters of carbonated sugar water looks like.
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We all use metric. We need to just rip the bandaid off.
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