Fuck I wish imperial would just disappear. Metric is 100% better in every single way, bar none.
Can we make it so?
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.
Then we should start with daylight savings time.
The interesting question is if social networks can get stuff done without a stable enough place.
Metric is 100% better in every single way, bar none.
Imperial unit ratios tend to have a greater number of smaller factors, which makes fractions nicer. 1yd/3 = 1ft. 1ft/3 = 4in.
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).
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’m an American who designs PCBs in millimeters instead of thousandths of an inch. I’m doing my part.
Military, most manufacturing is metric only thing that’s not metric are street signs, building trades and anything else the redcaps interact with daily.
Except American aerospace.
Oh my God I have a story about this.
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.
What is 'pad?
After we lost that one expensive spacecraft we’ve been moving towards metric more and more there as well.
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Yeah but what if I don’t have access to a ruler and I only have my feet?
Lmao checkmate euro
I think USA officially switched in the 70s?
it’s in small text on all of your products.
The argument there would be mass confusion is really silly becuse the rest of the world switched and they did just fine.
Is the USA saying it’s not as clever as THE REST OF THE WORLD?
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)
Neither of which were referenced by op. Lb is not a measure of mass.
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.
Source: Wikipedia: Mass versus weight
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.
the imperial units should be the smaller text
If the USA is OP then I guess so
We’ll just call your local coke dealer, duh.
This would be better with one panel right?
Comedy homicide
ba dum tss.
It’s a bit weird that the US uses a measurement that was created in the time where people used their body parts for measurement.
Like, the inch is around the size of a thumb, and a foot could be bigger or smaller depending of who measured.
Still, it’s still used as a measurement that only a small fraction of the world still uses.
a bit weird that the US uses a measurement that was created in the time where people used their body parts for measurement.
Wdym?
What’s so weird about my new monitor which is 7 penis in size?
21 inch diagonal, eh?
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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.
Sorry, english is my second language.
Your grammar is correct and your sentence structure is fine. It just lacks a bit of… pizzazz 😉
You could say
Regardless, it remains in use as a measurement that only a small fraction of the world continues to use.
Which maybe is a little bit too much pizzazz for Lemmy but you don’t really get to have fun with your writing elsewhere!
To be fair, also in Europe imperial measurements are still used, for example in plumbing, where inches are used for some reasons still unknown, or in aviation, where they continue to measure, in part, in feet. In nautical matters it is a separate issue, measuring in knots and nautical miles, and has nothing to do with metric measurements either.
The ICAO has apparently recommended using the international system of units since 2010, but it hasn’t been widely adopted yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation_Organization
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.
What amazes me is that we pretty much are converting, just very slowly, one thing at a time. In school we all learn the metric system, and it’s used all over in industry and government. At the supermarket, everything is labeled in both systems, and some things have started trending towards metric as the default. We are all used to the 2L bottle size. The old fifth of a gallon bottle, though some still call it that, has been replaced by the 750ml bottle. More recently the 20oz bottle has been phased into the .5L, mainly–I’m sure–to shrink the amount while keeping prices the same, but still it’s progress in this regard.
I think the transformation will be effectively complete when highway signs use kilometers. But I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Pounds are a measure of weight (force) not mass like grams. Stone is the imperial measure of mass and slug is the standard unit (US unit). In metric Newtons would be equivalent to pounds.
I came here to say this. A chunk of mass that “weighs” 100 grams is still 100 grams on the moon. A chunk of mass that weighs 1 pound does not weigh 1 pound on the moon.
I think in most common usage people use pounds as a measure of mass (convertible to kg). It’s why when you really mean force the abbreviation lbf (pound-force) exists, as opposed to the now more usual pound-mass.
A pound at one gravity is equivalent to 2.2 kg at 1 gravity. Outside of aerospace there’s not really a need to distinguish between mass and weight so it kind of gets used interchangeably.
It just bothers me when people complain about units and then use the wrong kind of unit.
My point is that in common use a pound does refer to mass (not weight). For example the US Code defines that 1 pound = 0.453 592 37 kilogram. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass).
It would be a weighty decision to be sure.
It weighs on a lot of people’s minds
