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Comment by scraft | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, over here in the UK, we have MPH for roads, stones and pounds for peoples weight (kilograms are becoming more popular, in particular for the under 25s), feet and inches for peoples height (meters becoming more popular for under 25s). So we have a bit of a hybrid really, I am 36 so get a bit of both, but my parents need everything converted to "old money" as they call it, they can't imagine what 25cm length is, they would need it in feet and inches. It is less stubborn for them, more, "why bother"? They can get by as is and have other things to occupy their time than trying to work out what familiar distances and weights are using a different scaler. Given that roads are still imperial as are lots of other things (mattress sizes, timber sizes, etc) it isn't like if they switched to metric it would even fix anything useful.

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I think the important distinction here is that the UK is definately on the path to transitioning away sensibly in that imperial units haven't been taught at any school at any level for many years. All product units (litres, kgs etc) in shops are given in both metric and imperial, with the metric part required by law and the imperial part there for old people's convenience.

In an odd way, the US is fully metricized: they’re one of the original signatories of the Treaty of the Metre, and redefined all of their legacy units in terms of SI ones [1]. SI units are used directly in the sciences and most products have the SI equivalent listed alongside the traditional measure. I understand that industries with international supply chains, like the auto industry, are also mostly metric these days.

There just hasn’t been much of a reason for the purely-domestic parts of the market to switch: house builders are looking for 2x4 lumber, and won’t buy from a lumberyard that calls it 50x100mm. Knowing that, the sawmills continue producing the 1.5x3.5 inch profile that’s called “2x4” and anything else is a specialty item. Who has an incentive to push through the change?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order

> and the imperial part there for old people's convenience.

And also because that's what was used to actually design the container. Milk bottles in 1 / 2 / 4 / 6 pints (imperial pints, not US pints), 454 g jam jars.

More U.K. “fun” examples:

• Beer served in pints by on-licenses, millilitres by off-licences

• Even though distances are all in miles, and petrol/diesel sold in litres, fuel efficiency is in either g/km or miles-per-gallon

>• Beer served in pints by on-licenses, millilitres by off-licences

Sure but a pint is defined as 568ml. The only one that really is quirky is how people haven't yet grasped kilometers yet they're the easiest to grok, it's just 1.6 * miles.

Sure but a pint is defined as 568ml.

. . . which I have previously determined to be within 0.5ml of the traditional volume.

The metric fuel efficiency measure is litres per 100km.

This way round makes more sense -- "how much will it cost to travel X km" is a more common question than "how far can I travel with Y litres or £Z".

Huh, I’ve never seen that used. Yes it is better.

I think it's almost always in the small print, such as on page 15 (or 27 if you look at the document's numbers) of this Ford brochure.

MPG (l/100km) Combined: 52.3 (5.4)

https://indd.adobe.com/view/5e31eb47-fa8c-4be9-b739-b19d58c8...

_Personally_ the only time I care about mpg is when looking at how far I can travel on a tank of fuel. Or, when the fuel warning light comes on (you have 5L of fuel left, how far is that going to get you).

In essence I'd argue that most of the use of the any fuel efficiency metric is to simply rank cars, rather than to ever back out a genuinely useful cost/distance number. At which point furlongs per quart would be as effective as anything else...

Canada has gone mostly metric, now, but growing up on a farm a few decades ago, I definitely got a hybrid. People's heights and weights were imperial, other things were mostly metric. Gravel roads were miles, highways kilometres. Oven temperatures were Fahrenheit, human temperatures Celsius. The really perverse one is that when referring to gallons, we had to specify US or imperial.

Heh, it’s funny you use the past tense when listing those.

- People’s heights are, I guess, officially metric. My drivers’s license lists me as 173cm. But at the exit from most convenience stores, there’s a measuring stick on the wall (for the security cameras to have a height reference), and they’re exclusively in feet-inches.

- Peoples’ weights on home scales are still pretty much exclusively in pounds. Doctors may have switched to kilograms, but I’m pretty sure asking someone how much they weigh in kg would result in a blank stare while they try dividing by 2.2 in their head.

- The entire official highway system has moved to kilometres, and you’ll pretty much never see a sign in miles. But... the grid system for gravel roads (from the Dominion Land Survey) is in miles and obviously we can’t go around changing everyone’s property boundaries, so they’ll stay in miles forever. Most rural folks know the 1 mile x 2 mile grid, and directions from one farm to another will almost always be (2 miles east, 3 miles south)

- I think oven temperatures remain in Fahrenheit because of our collective shared culture with the US. Most recipes you’re going to find have cooking temperatures in F. More things have shifted towards C though; growing up I recall house temperatures to generally being in F, and now they’re frequently in C.

- Fuck gallons.

(Source: Saskatchewan resident)

Well, I've found most people younger than me do seem to know their height/weight in metric whereas I don't have a clue even though I use metric for just about everything else. There may still be a bit of an urban/rural divide to it as well as age and perhaps, province or region.

If I'm not mistaken TV's are measured in inches the world over.

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