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.
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?”
Canada is a bit of a mess too, although different. We never really use miles, but we do use feet and inches and pounds pretty regularly. The construction industry is a real mess in particular because so many things are measured in either imperial or metric units
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!
Tbh that sounds like a fun project for an app or something, as a backup to gps in case it’s jammed. Just lay your phone on the ground, take a long exposure picture and then use the phones time to calculate where you are. Might need to take the accelerometer into account if the ground isn’t flat.
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.
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.
Doesn’t change the fact that football makes more sense and that while the British did come up with soccer literally every country uses something like football.
this also doesnt change the fact that if we called football football and football football we would be confusing football with football, and football with football, instead of having two succinct names that are clearly identifiable.
And even then most words don’t make very much sense. It’s just english.
There are teams and leagues in Britain and Germany that play “American Football.” They just aren’t at the level of US teams yet. But they are getting better at it.
The NFL has been playing games in Britain for years now. And I think this year they played in Germany also. It’s an open secret that the NFL wants a team based in Britain also. They just can’t quite figure out the logistics.
Like it or not, American Football/Hand Egg is gaining popularity around the world - slowly perhaps but steadily. The NFL is coming for your “football”. In any case, it’s better than Cricket…
Except that football already existed and there were a bunch of variations, including association football which is what we call soccer, Australian football, and its variant Rugby which is what American football was based off of when it was brought to the States in 1870.
They all are called football, technically. We just don’t use that name anymore.
i think the technicality here is that soccer spread to the US initially. And then it transitioned to football, but by that time US football had been established properly, so we just kind of decided to keep using soccer, because it made the most sense. And besides the entire reason the EU transitioned to football, was kind of just irrelevant for the US anyway.
It’s one of those things where you get stuffed into a bit of an awkward spot. And so you do the best you can. And then everyone still yells at you for some reason. Like yes football already existed, and yes it probably should’ve just been football. But this is also the US and europe that we’re talking about, historically known to be good friends, throughout history. Of course.
“Europe” didn’t invent the term soccer. A specific group of people in England did.
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.
If you can’t tell, it’s an obvious nickname for something. The equivalent of one nation deciding to exclusively call basketball “shootin’ hoops”.
Looks like the name is far more confusing than that. Apparently, ‘football’ used to mean multiple types of games, soccer started out as ‘association football,’ and then a British public school took ‘association’ and turned it into ‘asoccer,’ which spread to Oxford and became common there and then everyone else started calling it ‘soccer’ but then they dropped ‘soccer’ in favor of just ‘football’ except in countries which already had a football, which was sometimes the same as rugby.
Of course they are. I expect the number of furlongs in a whatsit has changed at least every week. Who could even pretend to remember the actual values?
Furlongs is a different measuring system all together. Same with miles and inches. We don’t convert between those measurements because it’s not necessary.
To add to that, US customary is a collection of measurement systems with different purposes. Most of the jokes about the US measurements are about the “silly” units like furlongs and acres and whatnot but those are either not at all part of the US customary system or are used to measure different things and are not converted between. Like, there is no reason to measure distance in inches when miles do fine. Anything using precision use a different system altogether or a variation on us customary that is often favored over metric for precision. Not that US customary is better than any other system, just it’s not really as bad as people make it out to be. It’s perfectly serviceable and changing away from it is not really the top of the priority list for this country.
Maybe a mistake NASA made 25 years ago is less influential on the ongoing crises plaguing the US like gun violence, civil and political unrest, and countless other issues are also on the list of things that need to change. Seems silly to argue about how civilians in a country weigh things when those civilians don’t have water because their government gave up on fixing the infrastructure to provide that water in several major cities. You want national change from a country that’s trying to find out if the potential next president will follow through with promises of being a dictator? Cool bro.
Liberia exists because of Americans who didn’t love the idea of freed former slaves in northern states having the right to vote (or rights in general). So they shipped these former slaves back to Africa so they could have their own country. Liberia is the second oldest black republic (Haiti came first). They just kinda kept using US customary units once they got there.
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.
You will find “Hands” still being used as a specialty measurement of how tall a horse is. And I think they measure at the front shoulder. But that is, I think, the only time you might hear it.
For the curious, 1 Hand = 4"/~100mm For example - The mare stood 15 hands tall.
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.
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.
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.
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 (Accident & Emergency) at the hospital, 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 (the NHS). Although I got treatment for depression a couple of years back, meds (Sertaline) and referral to therapy, after a week or so waiting for an appointment and answering a few waves of questionnaires. A couple of months later, after a lengthy conversation with a medical health triage nurse (which was just a random follow up call - that lasted an hour!), I went on an 18 month waiting list for the ADHD test, and about the same for ASD(Autism Spectrum Disorder) 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.
Still waiting on the NHS for the ASD diagnosis, but I actually ended up going private for my ADHD, that was ~£800, was seen in a week, 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, 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”!
I’m in a similar boat to you regarding mental healthcare. The reason we don’t complain as much as we ought to is because we don’t have much to compare. Our system looks equitable next to America but that one really is the worst. Our healthcare is orders of magnitude worse than our European neighbours, in almost every metric. In Slovakia you don’t need to beg them to see a psychiatrist and wait months or years while the NHS gaslights you. You say, I feel bad and I want to speak to a specialist. That’s it. You get your treatment.
British society is breaking down. We would rather wave flags for an ultra privileged royal family or invade sovereign nations or build aircraft carriers, than take care of our own health. These people are bigoted and hypocritical morons who chose to leave the EU, even though this is the only institution that is safeguarding their rights.
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.
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!
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.
I use the metric system for both, and I’m from the UK. I don’t even know my weight in stone anymore, but a stone is just 14 pounds, like how 16 ounces fit into a pound. It has about as much to do with a real stone as a foot in distance has to do with the foot on your leg. Or a metre with a parking meter.
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