Britain Signals Intent to Revert to the Imperial System
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Have you ever done thermodynamics in US/Imperial units? Horrifying, enough to make you swear off everything heat- and steam-related for life.
The imperial system is a system good for humans, metric is good for standardization.
"citation needed".
Meh. It's good for humans that already know it. I find measuring length in centimeters awkward as an American, however, plenty of people all over the world can do it just fine as naturally as I can with inches.
Temperature is another great example.
The important thing is what you were taught as a child and learned to interpret the world with. The only reason this continues to be an issue, is that it is painful for the current generation to adapt to the new standards, causing a self-fulfilling prophecy of not moving because you don't want to alienate the society around you.
IMO, we should transition things in daily home life to metric as quickly as possible, but where the table stakes are low. Food is actually a great area to start with, because you don't care what the number on the package is. Eventually, you'll buy that thing over and over again and build those neural pathways and associations.
Here's an example: do you know how big a 2L bottle of soda is? How about a 1L bottle? Most likely, you've seen these in the world before, probably a lot. If we do that for everything else, in a few years, everyone will have a much better handle on things. Older people might still use an internal conversion back to imperial units, but now we are no longer holding back new generations from adopting these concepts natively.
Once food is sold in metric, recipes will be adapted to match those conversions (if they aren't already for an international audience) and the world will move on.
I always find it difficult to follow cooking recipes from the US or tutorials DIY projects (where even screws are completely different!).
But it's not something I do on the regular so I just can't imagine.
If the UK wants to use pints for milk and beer, pounds for sugar and flour, miles per hour on road signs, who the hell is entitled to have a problem with that?
Do we want every country to be exactly the same as every other one just for the convenience of global commerce.
My point is, what ever system you use is good for you because you learnt it.
I have not said one thing about England and it's choice to revert systems. I don't care about that.
So I say they think differently about it, but they all know.
Maybe someone from UK can elaborate further.
Draught beer, on the other hand, is obliged to be sold in 1/3 and/or 1/2 pint measures or multiples thereof. So that's strictly Imperial. But bottled beer is labeled in ml and is now routinely 330ml or 500ml. [Edit: but you can sell pint bottles if you want to - you just need to label them 568ml as well! There are a lot of 454g jars of jam out there for the same reason...]
This has always been a niche issue for the baby boomer generation, I don't know anyone of my generation that gives a damn other than metric being more sensible for international compatibility.
Much like Brexit certain parts of the older and more politically powerful / numerous generation go off the deep end about this stuff, e.g. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs
I'm somewhat aware that milk might still be sold in pints - I just find it interesting that the word has in common usage really lost the connotation of being a measurement and just mostly means "a beer" now.
E.g. "I'm going out for a pint", "I've had a couple of pints", "I'm not much of a drinker, but I'll have a pint or two a month".
I think where stuff is still normally discussed in pints it's due to that still being the standard measure for retail. For whatever reason milk and beer retained the pint. Also volume of blood in pints weirdly seems to be standard, e.g. when talking about medical stuff informally.
The only measure that seems to have gone fully metric in day to day life outside of a few holdouts is temperature.
It's basically a bit of a sticky mess, but one with a clear direction of travel. And this announcement is for cheap popularity amongst older voters, who use metric less. The number of items that will be marked in Imperial only is going too be very small, because it'll confuse the young and mean different packaging is needed to sell abroad. A few cantankerous market traders will probably do it, but it's always been legal to give prices for both measuring systems simultaneously so there's not really much of an issue to solve.
Letting each individual shop decide what measurement of weight to use will work out great.