Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.
Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren't they?
From John Bazell “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”
But we're supposed to use Joules, not calories
I believe the calorie is a derived unit while the Joule is a base unit.
Somebody correct me if I'm wrong.
I mean, 1btu is required per pound of water per degree Farenheit. About 8lbs/gal and raising it 142°f would mean 1136btus
that's a lot of words and numbers for, "go fuck yourself"
There's a popular argument against religion that essentially says that if any trace of a specific religion were wiped off the face of the Earth, it would never come back. As in there'd probably be something in its place, but there'd be no way that the specific beliefs practiced by that religion would ever return. Whereas if a piece of scientific knowledge were similarly wiped from human knowledge, it would eventually be rediscovered.
A similar argument can be made with the metric system: I think that if standardized measurement systems disappeared from the face of the Earth today, something extremely similar would eventually be invented and adopted. It's just too internally consistent and human mental math too grounded in decimal for it not to be. You'd probably even end up with a prefix-based (probably even Greek) naming scheme.
Now consider USC: the units fail to fit together in basically any meaningful way. They try but fail to be base-2, so you can't even come at it from the already-tenuous angle of base-2 being better than base-10 (e.g. volume skips what two quarts would be, weight is more like base-16 (???), and distance just does something so insane that probably 95% of American adults couldn't tell you how many feet there are in a mile). There are dozens of completely arbitrary, unintuitive, antiquated-sounding names (e.g. "horsepower"). Although the bases for metric measurements are rather arbitrary, they are extraordinarily precise, so much so that USC bases its own measurements off of insane but precise multiples of metric units. That's not to say that humans would jump straight to metric or anything, but moreso that whatever would fill USC's role as an intermediary between nothing and the metric-like system would likey be unrecognizable from current USC.
1917 shitpost with obstinate opinions held to this day. Brilliant!
I don't think anyone believes the current system to be better, rather too much of a pain to replace. Americans really dislike learning and being inconvenienced.
Americans really dislike learning and being inconvenienced.
it's worse than that-- we have gallons of milk, but liters of soda. we drive in mph, but run in 5K. science and medicine weights are grams, but recipes call for ounces. want to fix an american car--hope you have both metric and "standard" wrenches
more like we'd rather stay with the stupidness and inconvenience we know rather than change anything, no matter how much better it would be
want to fix an american car–hope you have both metric and “standard” wrenches
I will point out that with the singular and shining exception of lugnuts, at least this one has not been the case since at least the 1970's. All fasteners on current(ish) American cars are metric nowadays and have been for quite some time. I've never seen a single one that isn't on any car that's not old enough to qualify for historic plates.
This used to piss off the oldheads to no end back when I managed a hardware store because they would absolutely insist, sometimes literally screaming in my face about it, that their dang old good old boy red blooded American Ford that they just bought didn't have no Jap pinko metric bolts in it anywhere not nohow, and 100% of the time they were wrong. (This annoyed me only slightly less than the people who showed up needing a bolt, didn't know what it was, didn't bring the old one with them, and the only information they had was "I took it off with a 9/16 wrench." Hombre, the head size tells me absolutely nothing about the diameter, thread pitch, or length. Then they would claim that it's just a "standard" bolt, as if there's any such thing. Also, a 9/16" wrench will usually fairly easily remove a bolt with a 14mm head, so that really tells me nothing. Or 5/8" on 16mm. Etc.)
Harleys, however, take it as some kind of point of pride that they actually do use fractional inch fasteners everywhere.
didn’t know what it was, didn’t bring the old one with them, and the only information they had was
LOL the library equivalent is "i'm looking for a book but don't remember the title or author, but it was about a woman who fell in love, and it had a red cover!" which describes a not-insignificant percentage of all books in existence
That, and different editions and prints of the same book can and will have different covers.
I don't think anyone believes the current system to be better,
Check our ShitAmericansSay (on Reddit, ew) and you'll find plenty who argue that metric is worse.
Australia joined the metric system on the 14th February 1966. It took about two weeks before it was running trouble free. Everything changed, including currency, on a single day. The system is pretty easy.
The idea that a simpler system of weights and measures that operate in base-10 will somehow cripple America is somehow fucking hilarious.
What was the point of this propaganda? To keep products incompatible somehow?
Capital owners that don't want to retool for a bullshit reason like "common good".
It literally costs them more money to not use the global standards!
In the long run, maybe. short term is all that matters. And short term it costs money
Relabeling is such a chore.
Replacing all your tools and machines is super easy, though. /s
FWIW I only work in metric, Imperial is utter trash, tbh.
Try farming in Canada. I will actually use liters per acre as a unit to measure in liquid fertilizer into a sprayer, spray it at gallons per acre and drive the sprayer at kph with a pump pressure in PSI on a field that was surveyed in rods.
It'll get harvested by a machine that has all metric bolts and uses a 30' cutting platform, the grain will be measured in bushels on the yield monitor and sold in $/bushel with the selling agent but the contract will be in tonnes and delivered that way.
How awful. Making someone divide things by 10 instead of 12, 16, or fucking 64.
10 can only be divided evenly by 2 and 5. 12 can be divided evenly by 2, 3, 4, or 6. The Babylonians were right, base12 is superior to base10.
"Hey could I borrow a drill bit?"
"Sure, what size?"
"Seventeen sixty-fourths"
"Fuck you"
Sorry man I think in 2024 you're objectively wrong.
Exactly. What we did was backwards. We shouldn't have changed our measurement system to base10, we should've changed our counting system to base12.
In retrospect I definitely would have liked a duodecimal metric system, but we have what we have at this point. It's good enough and a DAMN sight better than imperial.
I stopped caring about British units in 1776! Metric all the way, baby! 🇺🇸 We decimalized their dumb ass currency and we need to finish the job with weights and measures! A vote for imperial units is a vote for red coats! Vote for me for President and I will liberate us from British tyranny! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🦅🦅🦅
Poster shows the metric system giving Uncle Sam giant balls of steel?
Imperial emasculates.
One kilometer is 1000 meters, one meter is 1000 millimeters. One square meter is 1,000,000 millimeters, one cubic meter is 1000 liters.
1 liter of water is 1 kilograms, so 1 cubic meter is 1000 kilograms. Sand is about 2.3 times heavier than water, so 1 cubic meter of sand is 2300 kilograms, or 2.3 metric tonnes.
I'm 1.96 meters tall, or 1 meter and 960 millimeters, or 1 meter and 96 centimeters. I weigh about 85 kilos, or 85.000 grams. Being 65% water, I carry about 55.25 kilograms of water, which will fill a little over 55 one liter water bottles
I can do this all day
Now let's do the same with imperial units! You first, cuz I'm not going to touch that shit with a 10 foot pole...
It's possible! We can switch! I'm US born and raised and I voluntarily switched to metric in college. It took me maybe we few months to start building an intuition for Celsius, grams, liters, and meters. And that was with me in isolation. I would imagine it would be much faster if everyone else was also transitioning.
Over the years, other people have asked me about this and I've been shocked at how many people don't realize most of the world uses metric. Someone asked why I was using "Mexico units" once... Also, I've met lots of people who think the US invented inches, pounds, etc, which is... uh... interesting. The arguments y'all are having here are way more advanced than what I've run into.
For anyone who wants to voluntarily switch, I highly recommend not to convert between imperial and metric. Just read the metric number and that's it. The weather says it's 25c outside? Don't convert to F. Go outside, experience 25c. Over time you'll build an intuition. Smartphones and computers have made the switch easier these days.
Of course, until we all switch you'll really end up being bilingual...
It's also helpful to remember that water boils at 100C and your body temp is about 36-37C. Helps me when I see the weather or something.
The more I read about America, the more I realise what a fucking stupid country it was, is, and will probably keep on being.
uncle sam you dense motherfucker go to SCHOOL
As an American who lives and travels on a sailboat, it's sooooo much easier to just be normal and think in metric.
Foreigners (who aren't sailors) are always amazed when they meet an American that can speak metric.
Why the US refuses to get in bed with the rest of the world is beyond me. Stupid AF I guess .....
There are multiple copies of this posted in the cabinet shop where I work. In Canada.
1l of (4°C) water weighs 1kg. 1kg (of anything) is 1000g. 1g of water is 1cm³. Stack 1000 1cm³ blocks to get a 10m high column. This column exerts 100kPa of pressure on its base. To heat it by 1°C requires 1kcal. And 1N would accelerate it by 1m/s every second.
I've posted this before on my mastodon, and on feddit.de, before the instance was shut down, but I think it's still a nice showcase how SI units interact with one another.
The worst thing we have in the metric system is kWh/1000h. It's just watts, but whoever designed the energy labels thought a bunch of zeros would be funny or something.
Ugh, who wants to change to a base-10 system when we keep what ever we have now?
How many centimeters in a kilometer?
How many inches in a mile?
American answer: "Shut up, Euro-freak. I'm trying to watch Big Bang Theory reruns."
Metric is just easier and the founders of the US actually considered it but wars -obviously- distracted them from switching to it.
The US Government is entirely metric. It’s just the US Citizens that aren’t. So there’s this entire separation where no one uses metric, so nothing is made for metric, since nothing is made for metric, no one uses metric.
Obviously that’s changing over time plenty of people use a mixture of both systems all the time. The machines are mostly driving adoption at this point. 3D printers, cars, etc.
Fuck that, we should be measuring everything in Stone.
I'll take a seventh stone of chicken please.
And lengths in Royal cubits.
If we're gonna go weird we need to go all the way.
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