What has he done to deserve this?

From John Bazell “In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade—which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.”

1917 shitpost with obstinate opinions held to this day. Brilliant!

The idea that a simpler system of weights and measures that operate in base-10 will somehow cripple America is somehow fucking hilarious.

What was the point of this propaganda? To keep products incompatible somehow?

Try farming in Canada. I will actually use liters per acre as a unit to measure in liquid fertilizer into a sprayer, spray it at gallons per acre and drive the sprayer at kph with a pump pressure in PSI on a field that was surveyed in rods.

It'll get harvested by a machine that has all metric bolts and uses a 30' cutting platform, the grain will be measured in bushels on the yield monitor and sold in $/bushel with the selling agent but the contract will be in tonnes and delivered that way.

How awful. Making someone divide things by 10 instead of 12, 16, or fucking 64.

I stopped caring about British units in 1776! Metric all the way, baby! 🇺🇸 We decimalized their dumb ass currency and we need to finish the job with weights and measures! A vote for imperial units is a vote for red coats! Vote for me for President and I will liberate us from British tyranny! 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸 🦅🦅🦅

Poster shows the metric system giving Uncle Sam giant balls of steel?

Imperial emasculates.

It's possible! We can switch! I'm US born and raised and I voluntarily switched to metric in college. It took me maybe we few months to start building an intuition for Celsius, grams, liters, and meters. And that was with me in isolation. I would imagine it would be much faster if everyone else was also transitioning.

Over the years, other people have asked me about this and I've been shocked at how many people don't realize most of the world uses metric. Someone asked why I was using "Mexico units" once... Also, I've met lots of people who think the US invented inches, pounds, etc, which is... uh... interesting. The arguments y'all are having here are way more advanced than what I've run into.

For anyone who wants to voluntarily switch, I highly recommend not to convert between imperial and metric. Just read the metric number and that's it. The weather says it's 25c outside? Don't convert to F. Go outside, experience 25c. Over time you'll build an intuition. Smartphones and computers have made the switch easier these days.

Of course, until we all switch you'll really end up being bilingual...

One kilometer is 1000 meters, one meter is 1000 millimeters. One square meter is 1,000,000 millimeters, one cubic meter is 1000 liters.

1 liter of water is 1 kilograms, so 1 cubic meter is 1000 kilograms. Sand is about 2.3 times heavier than water, so 1 cubic meter of sand is 2300 kilograms, or 2.3 metric tonnes.

I'm 1.96 meters tall, or 1 meter and 960 millimeters, or 1 meter and 96 centimeters. I weigh about 85 kilos, or 85.000 grams. Being 65% water, I carry about 55.25 kilograms of water, which will fill a little over 55 one liter water bottles

I can do this all day

Now let's do the same with imperial units! You first, cuz I'm not going to touch that shit with a 10 foot pole...

The more I read about America, the more I realise what a fucking stupid country it was, is, and will probably keep on being.

uncle sam you dense motherfucker go to SCHOOL

As an American who lives and travels on a sailboat, it's sooooo much easier to just be normal and think in metric.

Foreigners (who aren't sailors) are always amazed when they meet an American that can speak metric.

Why the US refuses to get in bed with the rest of the world is beyond me. Stupid AF I guess .....

There are multiple copies of this posted in the cabinet shop where I work. In Canada.

1l of (4°C) water weighs 1kg. 1kg (of anything) is 1000g. 1g of water is 1cm³. Stack 1000 1cm³ blocks to get a 10m high column. This column exerts 100kPa of pressure on its base. To heat it by 1°C requires 1kcal. And 1N would accelerate it by 1m/s every second.

I've posted this before on my mastodon, and on feddit.de, before the instance was shut down, but I think it's still a nice showcase how SI units interact with one another.

The worst thing we have in the metric system is kWh/1000h. It's just watts, but whoever designed the energy labels thought a bunch of zeros would be funny or something.

How many centimeters in a kilometer?

How many inches in a mile?

The medical system ended up using the metric system anyway

Ugh, who wants to change to a base-10 system when we keep what ever we have now?

Metric is just easier and the founders of the US actually considered it but wars -obviously- distracted them from switching to it.

The US Government is entirely metric. It’s just the US Citizens that aren’t. So there’s this entire separation where no one uses metric, so nothing is made for metric, since nothing is made for metric, no one uses metric.

Obviously that’s changing over time plenty of people use a mixture of both systems all the time. The machines are mostly driving adoption at this point. 3D printers, cars, etc.

Fuck that, we should be measuring everything in Stone.

I'll take a seventh stone of chicken please.

And lengths in Royal cubits.

If we're gonna go weird we need to go all the way.

Jesus this is dumb. And it worked?

Uncle Sam couldn't handle the success the metric system would bring. /s

Doesn't the reason why the avg US citizen wants imperial units boil down to "sounds cooler"?

Kilometer vs Miles, the former latter sounds easier and cooler to work with

Centimeter vs inch, same.

How will they now call a two by four?

It's kind of the same for the pro gun arguments, it all boils down to "but guns are cool toys!"

Edit: fixed a duuuhhh

My comparison is that the metric system is like color vision. It's like colors for traffic lights, but USC people insist it's fine memorizing which light is which location. In metric you just see the world in a way USC can't, but USC people insist they're just fine.

This is his punishment for war crimes.

Imperial US system is defined using the metric system...

And the most ridiculous (or inclusive) thing are tiresizes in Europe (perhaps somewhere else, too?). 195/55r16 195 is the width in millimeters 55 is the height in percentage of the width R16 is the radius of the wheel in inches

Permanently Deleted

The metric system is a threat to our way of life - Kyle

Can't wait for the day when Uncle Sam to turns brown.

Lol this thread got spicy. Today I learned base 12 is actually superior to base 10 in a myriad of ways.

It seems the most reasonable people in this thread are arguing for a new system, not one or the other. I concur with this thought.

So... Fuck the imperial AND metric system. I'm team new system.

What 'has' we done. Well, they didn't go to school, that's for sure. And clearly they didn't send their kids to school either, as it's a damn old poster and it's been more then a hundred years while the US still uses imperial.

Y'all preach about how much better the metric system is because it's base ten and super intuitive, then measure weather temperature on a scale from -20C to 40C 🥴

This is among the dumbest internet arguments ever.

G20/G21. The machines don't care, my digital calipers, micrometers, rulers, and 3D CAD software don't care which system is being used. So why should I have my undies in a bunch about which is better? I use the measurement system best suited for the task at hand - whether that's metric, US customary, or light years.

As for not knowing how many inches are in a mile, that's about the stupidest internet point ever. No one cares about that, well maybe some civil engineer might need to very rarely care in some unusual situation. The scale of measurement is wrong for inches. In fact, most people don't care much about the actual distance away something is, they mostly care about how long does it take to get there. The odds are pretty good you have no idea how far it is from your front door to the grocery store in miles or kilometers. But you DO know how long it takes to get there. Whether by foot, bike, bus, or car.