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.
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.
I'm European but I have a set of US cups in my kitchen because most recipes are in these stupid American measurements.
Dont the British weigh things with rocks or some dumb shit?
They're actually finely calibrated stones. For instance, my weight is 13 stones and a packet of gravel.
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.
Knowledge is power. Using all of the knowledge at once is surely the most powerful.
FYI: The US doesn't use Imperial, they use US Customary. Volumes are different. Troy weights are usually called Troy (ounces).
Is that supposed to be better?
No it's worse, because they use the same names for different volumes and weights.
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. ;)
GPS can be jammed, try jamming stars.
Who would win:
Urban areas with huge light pollution: "and I took that personally"
Land navies hate this.
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.
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"!
Edit: typo's and explaining a few acronyms!
The US doesn't use imperial units, though. The US customary units share names with imperial units, but they are significantly different.
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?
Truly the long game on that joke! Well done, ya got us.
Any excuse to take the piss out of the Yanks is fine by me.
Any excuse to take the piss out of the Yanks is fine by me.
So I take it that you approve of catheters then? /s
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?"
Are they actually using metric though? Last time I was in London airport I wasn't so sure.
When you ask a British person how much they weigh and they start talking about rocks
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.
This is true only in the vaguest sense.
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.
Hand egg
At least americans dont use stone, or fucking hands, for measurement
We still use hands for exactly one measurement, the height of a horse
retains a currency called pounds
Everyone makes fun of the US for using imperial, but nobody makes fun of Liberia and Myanmar for doing the exact same thing.
At least they don't speak Fahrenheit.
"You don't often think of those other two as having their shit together."
--Sterling Archer
1. Be civil
No trolling, bigotry or other insulting / annoying behaviour
2. No politics
This is non-politics community. For political memes please go to !politicalmemes@lemmy.world
3. No recent reposts
Check for reposts when posting a meme, you can only repost after 1 month
4. No bots
No bots without the express approval of the mods or the admins
5. No Spam/Ads
No advertisements or spam. This is an instance rule and the only way to live.
