How to measure things like a Canadian? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 2 years ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to c/canada@lemmy.ca

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Saw this recently on a WAN Show (19:12). How true is this? It sounds wild.

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[-] Beaver@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

I wish this was all in metric

[-] i_r_weldr@lemmy.ca 2 points 2 years ago

I find everyone uses time for long distances. I know it’s a 13 hour drive to Edmonton but damned if I know how many kilometres it is.

[-] littlefedidrago@lemm.ee 1 points 2 years ago

As a German I have to ask... why? It's just sad at that point

[-] blargerer@kbin.social 1 points 2 years ago

Basically everything mandated by the government is Metric, so any official labeling (like on roads or foods) and it's what we are taught in school. But we are in a transitionary phase in terms of whats passed on through family and social interactions. And that period is extended by trade with the US leading to lots of things still having both imperial and metric measurements, or in the case of weather, I grew up on the border listening to Detroit news.

[-] Basilisk@mtgzone.com 1 points 2 years ago

Yeah, basically. I think it kind of depends on your age though. I was almost 100% metric with the exception of baking until my teens or so (we never had a pool).

A lot of it comes from getting stuff from the US. Most of the cookbooks you find here come from the US so they use US measurement. Doing construction? The lumber's cut to sell to the US market so you may as well use US measurement when you work with it. Steel lengths are usually available in metric so commercial construction is metric too. I've done a fair amount of construction and land surveying so I can do most length conversions like that in my head.

Temperature, though, I'm hopeless with Fahrenheit. Some older folk will still prefer °F to °C all the time but to me it's just numbers. Most of my life is spent between -30°C and +30°C so it works out very conveniently as a nice symmetrical gauge between "cold winter day" and "hot summer day."

The rest, well, it's mostly just the unitary form of peer pressure. You just sort of pick it up. The really wild thing is that I might say something like "oh yeah, my cat weighs 5 lbs, so she's like half the weight of one of those 5-kilo bags of flour" without irony.

[-] PowerSeries@lemmy.ca 0 points 2 years ago

Forgot about deli meet for the weight. It's always "I want 300 grams of sliced black forest ham", and not whatever that is in imperial. Do they use ounces for that?