📄 rule

Now it makes even more sense!

Well, Germans are pretty anal about standards (thankfully) and they do them right, so why not copy them?

Sadly, ISO in recent decade started to do bullshit. They don't pay for standard development, they don't employ anyone for standard development, they collect membership fees from national standards organizations, require payment to download most standards and don't allow to copy published standards. Also they retroactively paywalled a lot of standards.

Ngl as a Canadian, I implicitly thought 8.5x11 was A4. Well that's dumb, we should switch.

Also, I'm pretty sure A4 runs through an American printer just fine.

Philippines makes sense, being a former US colony

Tbf, I can see the use case for some "non-standard" sizes, like Legal, where having more height to the page without the extra width might be useful for readability of long documents.

...can't think of an excuse for the rest, though.

I think Mexico too, or at least the paper name is "carta" and "oficio" which would translate to letter and legal (kinda)

Make it quick there's an important call coming in about my auto warranty

How many have yours got? More or fewer?

I have seen legal/letter sized clipboard with two rings, for the short end of the paper.

11x17 is incredibly common too. Usually it is oriented landscape and z folded to get a large diagram into a document. It's kind of irritating that the most typical large format size is 24x36, which is a different aspect ratio than 11x17, for a variety of reasons. If you're designing something you need to know what aspect ratio to design for. Most copiers can do 11x17, and if the standard large format size was 22x34 it would be exceedingly easy for most offices to produce good working copies of large documents. Best compromise I've seen is when people put a logo or header on the side that can be omitted when you switch aspect ratios.

Wtf?

Also are banks just dumb or what? Has it crossed their greedy minds that they also can charge to make transfers?

Your comment is all true, except - we CAN all imagine it, but as you pointed out, our unchecked hyper capitalism prevents it

We have a fee-free bank-to-bank transfer system that is based on pre-digital technology that takes 2-3 business days. We often call it "direct deposit" or automated clearing house (ACH).

Ah, right, kinda like SEPA Credit Transfer. You do need a persons IBAN which is a bit long, but their name is validated so you usually send it to the right person.

Now, we could probably make this payment system instantaneous relatively effortlessly

Ooh, cool, kinda like SEPA Instant Credit Transfer, which transfers money within ten seconds to bank accounts using the above mentioned number.

This is all fine and dandy for most people because they simply can't imagine doing things a more consumer-friendly way

And that's why, in the Netherlands, Tikkie took the country by storm. It is an app that allows you to use iDEAL (a web-based payment system, soon rolled out in Germany and Belgium as Vero) to send money to friends. Usually takes one pin and three taps to send it, and have it instantly appear on the account of the recipient.

I imagine it has also something to do with safety? Like, if it was instantaneous, that means you can do damage instantaneously, or a hacker might have fewer hurdles to go through.

And the ACH only takes three business days!

ACH transfer to a friend’s bank account?

Like most things, it depends on which state you're in.

Brasil enters the chat

No fees transfer takes seconds, as long as it's not international. People use it for buying groceries, clothes or paying for whatever they buy in the middle of the street from other people who are not businesses. Confirmation of payment from receivers end is immediate with a push on your phone.

All sellers can produce a QR code including receiver address and price to be payed. All bank apps scan and pay seamlessly.

In Canada we have Interact e-Transfer. Basically all the banks colluded to make a system that allows for instant money transfer between banks using email or phone number as the recipient identifier, along with options for comments and security questions.

I felt like this was a huge step up compared to all the hoops and third party apps I had to use in Europe.

Idk what all this talk is about - we have wire transfers in the US. I don't need a third party to do it either, it's exactly as you've described, I can do one through the bank's app or on their website, and it's free. It's not as common though since the information required is: Name of the recipient's account exactly as it is, account #, routing #, and exact name of the bank tied to the routing #. You can save that info though to make it easier to transfer the next time around - it's very useful for close family and friends.

EDIT: Turns out I have two different ways of transferring money. One is just moving money between accounts, can be at the same or a different financial institution, has the same functionality as a wire transfer, is free, and doesn't rely on third party apps. A wire transfer is apparently done via some federal system and does require paying $20 or so, but I haven't had to do a wire transfer in forever. I'm not sure why anyone would want to do a wire transfer.

Isn't sepa the eu system?

Sorry but bank transfers are not 1st world exclusive, it's common place in 3rd world as well.

Ackchyually...

Japanese use JIS but A size is the same with ISO so there's no confusion here. For B size there's slight difference in JIS and ISO, but as end user I hardly print anything other than A4 so haven't encountered problems myself.

A Sharp?

This sounds like our bad, sorry.

Interesting, no photos of that message come up.

That’s going to make some driver developers very upset. And sensors in printer cartridges that can sense both A4 and Letter.

I say we just balls the whole thing. Screen or pencils.

Good thing Americans don't use metric, that sure would be an awkward size.

No it's 8.5 by 11.

See? Easy. Also you really have to try to get your hands on something that's a different size. 99 percent of printer paper is Letter.

Excuse me, I believe you meant to say:

215 ⁵⁷/₆₄mm x 279 ³⁸/₉₆ mm

so year over year, you quickly learn that A4 is 22:29.7, and the slightly bigger standard notebooks are 24:32

Pretty sure you just justified Americans using Fahrenheit ;)

Isn't the ratio of length and width of A-papers square root of 2 and not the golden ratio?

But that's not something i have ever actually needed.

yeah, this is a great thing!

i usually make class notes recap on A4 pages, and can then print 2 A5-sized pages side by side on a single standard A4 paper, no need to rework the formatting. messing with the printer options, you can pretty easily get it to do a small booklet off of your standard A4 word document, just need to staple it together!

It's also quite convenient that pretty much anyone has a common understading of what A3/A4/A5/A6 is, when talking about areas in real life.

We know “the size of a sheet of printer paper” and also that size when “folded hot dog” or “folded hamburger”.

Y'all can’t fold ‘em fish ‘n’ chips, ever heard any food terms used to refer to length/wide folding?

US printers also do this, just using larger ANSI sizes instead of larger A sizes. Or they just use rolls.

It takes less paper to print 1 page of legal if that's what your text fits on than it does 2 pages of normal paper if said text doesn't take up all of the second piece of paper.

When you're printing large documents (10 or more pages let's say) that starts to be significant savings in thickness of a stack, too.

It's not one huge page, it's an extra 2 inches, or ~25% longer

Not all US banks are created equal

I think that's the issue. Also how common direct deposit for paycheques in the US? I hear it's rare but in Canada, it's the norm and all our banks here can do e-transfers.

Most annoying is cars. We buy fuel in litres but measure our cars efficiency in miles per gallon, meaning I either have to calculate how many gallons I put in my car or how many kilometres I've driven to work out if I'm being more or less economical.

And Canada. I hate that map of the US and Burma. The US uses metric as it is part of customary units anyway. I also wish metric was base 12 or 16.

Americans aren't consistent either. 2 liter and similar bottles (and it's not even the same bottle, like they aren't reusing molds or anything, it's just an American 2 liter bottle). Sharp edges and points like on mechanical pencils are in millimeters. So are many nuts and bolts. Stuff like electricity and power are measured in metric units. Generally electronics/computer parts are in metric, the main exception that comes to mind is screen size, which even the rest of the world does in inches (LIKE WTF!?!).

There's plenty of examples of metric units in the daily life of an American.

Uh, I've never used inches, nor know anyone who does - a South African

I should've looked it up 🙈 I heard it once and didn't have the countries in mind anymore.

Except for the UI.

During the Apollo program they had very limited computer capacity in the capsule and lander. Computers were huge machines back then and they had to fit one in a spaceship.

The Apollo computers used metric internally for all calculations. Anything shown to the astronauts however was in imperial, as metric was apparently too complicated for astronauts to comprehend. They had to waste precious computer capacity converting to imperial because even astronauts can’t handle anything else.

That was just ONE aspect of the adoption of the metric system. And that was done to make backwards compatibility easier because of long lasting legacy systems. Because some systems, like say plumbing in a home or city, last for a very long time before they get replaced or repaired. New plumbing installations often use Tubing like PEX which is metric. I designed and fabricated a dozen brackets for a US customer over the weekend for delivery today. They were made using millimeters as specified.

And if you actually pay attention to how the metric systems compares to the US customary, you would see just how closely they are related from the start. Which makes sense since what we call Imperial measurements predate the metric system by several hundred years.

Well, milk is still sold by the gallon, butter is still divided into tablespoons, nutrition facts are still defaulted to cups and ounces. Wood is still sold by the foot or yard, cars still measure speed in miles per gallon, people still know their height and weight in feet and inches and pounds.

Could be worse but could be a lot better, too.

The 10s are being held hostage by the 12.5/48.78 wrenches

There must be some invisible 10mm black hole just vacuuming up all the 10mm sockets and wrenches in the world. I can’t even tell you how many damn 10mm sockets and wrenches I’ve bought and I still only have one of each. Probably none. I haven’t needed to wrench anything in a couple weeks.

There are easier ways to find us! (get a map, ask strangers to point at anywhere but North America; the first incorrect answer or anger response will probably be one of us)

What an idiotic thing to say in a comment to a post not written by an American, that's complaining about Americans.

I love how that OP’s solution requires an inexact technique to achieve an even less exact measurement. Like Americans really out here being proud of the stupidest shit

Tiny nitpick: I think you meant 0.5 by 0.5 cm (or 5 by 5 mm).

I use it a lot if i need to draw something that is x long. If you do a lot of graphs for example you can use the measurements on your ruler.

21x29.7

This number is permanently stored in my memory, just like 1€ = 6.55957F