• NotJustForMe@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    Making fun for STILL using it. If our navy would navigate by the stars at night, it would be laughed at, right? And rightly so. ;)

  • someguy3@lemmy.world
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    8 months ago

    FYI: The US doesn’t use Imperial, they use US Customary. Volumes are different. Troy weights are usually called Troy (ounces).

  • Zagorath@aussie.zone
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • ForgotAboutDre@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      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.

      • Holyhandgrenade@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        I’m European but I have a set of US cups in my kitchen because most recipes are in these stupid American measurements.

    • p1mrx@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      It’s generally good to use feet for height. When I use butt for height I’m like a meter shorter.

  • EmperorHenry@discuss.tchncs.de
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    8 months ago

    Fuck the British!

    the land of unnecessary vowels and speech impairment that’s called an accent.

    Water isn’t pronounced Wah-tah. Wrath isn’t pronounced WROTH. A flashlight isn’t a torch. Soda isn’t “fizzy pop” “fizzy pop” sounds like a euphemism for semen.

    • tegs_terry@feddit.uk
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      8 months ago

      Yeah, you’re right man, who pronounces wodder like that?

      I’m gonna calm down with some paasta with toonafish and 'erbs, and watch the ardic circle huvvercraft ternament!

  • KillingTimeItself@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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    8 months ago

    its this EXACT same thing but with soccer and football, granted there is actual history there, im going to ignore it because it’s funnier that way.

    europe created the term soccer, and then got rid of it, and then took up football, so the US started using soccer, because it had already used football, for well, football. Shocker i know. And so now we still use soccer, but they use football.

    • The Octonaut@mander.xyz
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      8 months ago

      This is true only in the vaguest sense.

      1. “Europe” didn’t invent the term soccer. A specific group of people in England did.
      2. Those people were upper class posh boys, the same ones who call rugby “rugger”. They are not the people who support football today or made football what it is around the world.
      3. If you can’t tell, it’s an obvious nickname for something. The equivalent of one nation deciding to exclusively call basketball “shootin’ hoops”.
  • thepiguy@lemmy.ml
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    8 months ago

    But the UK still uses imperial. I remember playing euro truck sim and being annoyed that the road signs don’t match the speed limit shown in the GPS. I first thought this was a bug. Then I remembered that I was in UK and not the Netherlands where I picked up the delivery.

    • HopFlop@discuss.tchncs.de
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      8 months ago

      UK is a conplete chaos between the two. You buy liters of milk but gallons of gas. Speeds are in miles per hour. Close distances are in meters, longer ones in miles. I have seen weight both in grams and in pounds. And then the currency is even called pound.

      “How many pounds does one pound of apples cost, sir?”

      • DrownedRats@lemmy.world
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        8 months ago

        It’s so much worse than anyone outside of the UK can imagine. Milk and beer come in pints but water and wine come in litres (actually, wine and liquor sometimes comes in centilitres which is actually worse) . Most fuel pumps show you the quantity in litres but we still measure speed in miles per hour and efficiency in miles per gallon.

        I know my own weight in kilos but my height in feet. When I go to the barbers I ask for a one mill on the sides and an inch off the top. I try and run a 5k every now and again but could never do a marathon.

        Then there’s the generation split. I’m of that weird generation where I’m caught in the middle of older teachers knowing imperial better but trying to teach metric in school.

        My parents always used imperial so I learned some of that early on but then learned metric in school. Went to engineering college where they taught me all the more advanced metric before going to work at a company that almost exclusively uses imperial (thank you American aerospace for that one)

        Shit, even our kettles can’t seem to decide on imperial cups or just guessing how big the average mug is. My kettle has both cups and millilitre gradiations on it.

        And don’t get me started on single, double, king and queen beds! Turns out there’s a euro standard and they’re not the same as our standard! You can buy a double sheet that’s closer to fitting a queen size bed!

        Idek what’s going on at this point lol

      • some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        8 months ago

        Holy shit. I’m gladdened to learn that someone may be more fucked than us. Today is a first: I am no longer from the most shamed people.

    • activ8r@sh.itjust.works
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      8 months ago

      The British have a perfectly logical system that results in us buying fuel by the litre, measuring speed in miles per hour, and measuring fuel economy in miles per gallon. We are doing just fine thank you very much.

  • Bob@feddit.nl
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    8 months ago

    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.

    • Skipper_the_Eyechild@lemmings.world
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      8 months ago

      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.

  • FluffyPotato@lemm.ee
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    8 months ago

    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.

        • bluewing@lemm.ee
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          8 months ago

          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.

      • pissedatyall@lemmynsfw.com
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        8 months ago

        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.

    • Skipper_the_Eyechild@lemmings.world
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      8 months ago

      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!

      • bluewing@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        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.

    • Skipper_the_Eyechild@lemmings.world
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      8 months ago

      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, 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 through the NHS. Although I got treatment for depression a few years back, meds (Sertaline) and referral to therapy, after a week or so waiting for an appointment and answering a few waves of questionnaires. Once we got to the root cause though, I went on an 18 month waiting list for the ADHD test, and about the same for ASD 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.

      I actually ended up going private for my ADHD, that was ~£800, 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 though, 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”!

      • FluffyPotato@lemm.ee
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        8 months ago

        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.