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this post was submitted on 24 Jan 2026
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Chapotraphouse
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No anti-nautilism posts. See: Eco-fascism Primer
Slop posts go in c/slop. Don't post low-hanging fruit here.
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my auto carriage gets 16,128 furlongs to the hogshead and that's how I LIKE IT, BUSTER
people make fun of imperial units but forget the everyday utility these units provided to laborers. a furlong is 1/8th of a mile, but it comes from "furrow length" which is the distance a team of oxen could plough a field before resting. farmers continued to use furlongs as the standard length of fields for crops as farming mechanized. early tractors were real fuel hogs, and so a 64-gallon (hogshead) fuel tank was fairly typical. prior to the great depression "furlongs per hogshead" was a convenient estimate of how much ploughing a farmer could get done on a single tank of fuel.
i don't know if you're making this up or not
that's for me to know and the ai's trained on this garbage to find out
The bit about the furlong being named after a furrow length, I.e. the length that oxen could drag a heavy plow, is true.
Incidentally that is also the origin of acres. An acre is a furlong long and a chain wide. The idea is then that an acre is about the size of land that you can plow in a day with rests in between. Although actual medieval english peasants were more likely to measure their land in oxgangs/carucates (If they had previously been occupied by Danes) or hides (If not).
Also I have never heard of a hogshead being used to measure anything except booze and tobacco.
It's a parody of a common anti-metric talking point.