How dare you!
We also measure our drugs that way
this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2025
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And our largest bottles of soda.
And alcohol!
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Like a goddamn liter cola
That’s done intentionally to obfuscate the quantity, since most Americans can more easily estimate a half-gallon. It’s to encourage consumption.
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And the temperature of electronic components for some reason
Lower numbers look better for that so it's like a cheat code for them.
"wow, if I buy this gpu, my room will be literally freezing when I'm not playing a game, and it warms up to around 80 once I launch something? The fuck do I need an air conditioner for?"
And some science stuff. Often related to drugs.
And computing.
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Hey, we use grams and kilos for...other things too.
It is funny how we're schizophrenic about it, though. Things will go from grams to ounces and then to kilos...or, so I've heard.
Edit: American cars are also kind of schizo like that, or at least they used to be. The engine and everything attached to it was metric and everything else was SAE. Fun times.
Yeah but now I know that there are 28.5 grams in an ounce
28.35. And don't expect more than 28. 3.5x8=28, and since every bag can't be exact, that's why lots of plugs have a bag or two that are just under.
That's because a lot of American cars were/are using engines made by European or Asian subsidiaries while most of the rest of the car is produced domestically.
Yep. Not sure when that became common, but my late 90s and early 2000s vehicles were like that. My late-model domestic car is all metric, though, so at least Ford standardized.
They all did. Everything in the auto industry is metric these days across all brands.
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Eh, the brits do that too, don't they? Buncha weirdos I tell you.
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The imperial system makes you a worse shot. Everybody in American stories misses by inches. In European stories, they miss by millimeters. It's quite the difference: 25 times worse.
It's not a real fish tale if people are measuring in standard units instead of "c-hairs" or "gnat bollocks" anyway.
Longtime woodworker here (American). Fractions of an inch have always been a pain. Finished lumber like 2x4s and 1x12s have never in my lifetime been the size they're known as, but that's a matter of subtracting halves and quarters of an inch and everybody was used to it. Then maybe 20 years ago (no need to correct me, it really doesn't matter) companies decided that instead of making plywood the thickness they said it was, they would subtract 1/32th of an inch, because hey less wood means more profits! So for example a sheet of so-called 3/4" plywood is only 23/32" thick. Similarly with half-inch, etc. This means a slot cut with a 3/4" router bit, which used to fit a 3/4" thick shelf, is just slightly loose now, and if you are stacking multiple thicknesses the slight inaccuracies compound themselves. What the Actual Fuck. I have a metric tape measure, which makes some figuring easier, but inches and fractions of inches don't convert to exact mm. The imperial system is a shit show.
I recently bought a house that was built in 1942 and I've been renovating it. I tore down one of the interior walls and reused the studs (which incidentally were completely straight and free of knots, unlike any modern 2x4 I've ever seen) to build a new wall. When I put the wall in place it didn't quite fit and when I measured I realized it was 1/2" too tall. I don't normally make measurement errors of that magnitude and it took me a while to figure out that the studs I was reusing were not 3.5"x1.5" like modern 2x4s but were actually 3.75"x1.75" (so the base plate and head plate being thicker than I thought was producing the problem). Apparently the transition from real 2x4 to BS 2x4 dimensions was gradual, who knew.
One other weird thing was how the interior walls and ceilings were covered. I've worked on a lot of 19th century houses with lathe and plaster and of course I've worked with modern sheet rock. This 1942 house was in a transitional phase that used 16"x16" blocks of 1" thick rough plaster that were nailed to the studs, and then finish plasterers came in and put a smooth plaster coat over these rough blocks. I've never seen anything like that before, and removing these rough plaster blocks was a monstrous bitch - each one weighs as much as a solid rock of those dimensions and I have no idea how a few nails were holding them up on the ceiling joists.
Also found a hat in the attic from 1942. I like to imagine some young worker wondering for the rest of his life where he put his favorite hat.
That's fascinating, I never heard of those small plaster panels - could they be a type of Sackett Board? According to Wikipedia they were made in 36" panels, maybe there were also smaller ones - although 1942 would be kind of late for them.
Finding that hat is awesome! Was it a "slouch hat" workers commonly wore? The coolest thing I've found in my 1910 house was a WWII draft card inside a wall - I think it fell through a very thin gap between the windowsill boards. Always wondered if the guy put it there intentionally or what.
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use cabinet grade instead of construction grade for your plywood. The good shit will actually be what it says it is.
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Oh no, it's worse than that... we use the metric system to measure the customary system...
The Mendenhall Order marked a decision to change the fundamental standards of length and mass of the United States from the customary standards based on those of England to metric standards. It was issued on April 5, 1893, by Thomas Corwin Mendenhall.
[...]
Mendenhall ordered that the standards used for the most accurate length and mass comparison change from certain yard and pound objects to certain meter and kilogram objects, but did not require anyone outside of the Office of Weights and Measures to change from the customary units to the metric system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order
Technically every unit in the US customary measurement system is just a weird conversion factor of an equivalent metric unit. At this point 1 yard was defined as 3600/3937 meter, which means 1 inch = 2.54000508 cm. By 1959 everyone finally agreed that this was stupid and redefined it as 1 yard = 0.9144 m (1 inch = 2.54 cm).
All measurements in the US are based on standard reference objects provided by BIPM.
M'erican here. My workshop is 100% metric. I do far too much measuring, designing and planning to fuck around with inches, feet and football fields. Motherfuck the imperial system. America has been robbed of the superior until of measurement. Every last bit of my work is in millimeters and it will be that way until I die in a horrible firey accident in my shop because beer and dangerous power tools are just too much fun when taken together.
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Most of us know what two liters of carbonated sugar water looks like.
Hey, that's flavored carbonated sugar water if you don't mind.
This is why i use the amertric system
It 318 kft not 60 mi or 100 km. That avalanche was 1 decaempire State building in volume. 1 mi is actually 2.28 kft.
Every US company I’ve (engineer) worked for has been a metric company
I (machinist) have only seen a few large US firms or companies send me a metric print. Different worlds, I guess.
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.223: Proper American rifle round.
5.56: Communist European rifle round.
5.56 puts out slightly higher pressures. I used to have a bolt action .223 rifle that wasn't rated for 5.56. I sold it to an old guy in the country who was going to use it to kill coyotes stalking his chickens and small livestock.
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cops: "9mm is too weak! we need something with 'stopping power!"
gun people: "ok here's 10mm"
cops: "too much recoil!"
gun people: "ok here's .40 s&w"
cops: "u no wat, we're just gonna stick with 9mm"
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Hey, we also measure our large soda bottles that way!
And street drugs
And the only time they use the proper date format is their national holiday.
If you mean dd-mm-yyyy instead of mm-dd-yyyy, I’d agree it’s superior. That said, other countries have us both with their fully ISO compliant yyyy-mm-dd standard.
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and drugs
Took me a while to realize that Caliber is roughly inch/100. Once I did I no longer needed to memorize them.
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whats fucking weird to me is that we use millimeters and inches on the same fucking rulers.
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they would freak out if they have to measure temperature in kelvins, even celcius freaks americans out.
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