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Comment by _the_inflator | Hacker News Reader

UK is also reversing in parts due to BREXIT.

It isn't really.

The government proposed a consultation on doing so, mostly as a distraction.

I'd eat my hat if anything actually changes, the UK was (partially) metricated over 50 years ago, there's zero appetite for reversing it among people of working age and business concerns will dominate any serious consultation around changing legislation.

There’s also 0 appetite for completing the metrication process.

Sure, but that's little to do with brexit and it's only really Miles (Road Signage) and Pints (of beer) that aren't metricated. Even milk is (legally speaking) sold by the litre.

And 2x4s? (I hear you call them 4×2s over there...)

"two-by-four" is used colloquially in the UK for stuff with that approximate cross section, but wood is generally sold with millimetre measurements.

It’s not even approximate. A typical two by four is around 1.5 by 3.5 inches, which is a full third less material than lumber which literally measures 2 by 4.

IIRC this is because "two by four" refers to the size of the rough-sawn stock, but you buy milled 2x4s, so the difference is simply what's removed in milling. You can get these odd formats (stuff like "78x34 mm") in hardware stores here, too, it's just that they're not used for construction, because construction lumber is "hard metric", i.e. nice round numbers like 40x60 mm etc.

While there's an equivalent size, those are (legally speaking) sold by the mm.

For example: https://www.builderdepot.co.uk/timber-sheets/carcassing-timb...

Note the listing is primarily in mm with the imperial measure along side.

So of course the actual size is still equivalent to the old imperial size because of the history, from a legal perspective it's metric.

Right, the size cannot easily change I suppose, for how could you repair older houses/etc? Or use older building plans?

We (Canada) partially transitioned too, but didn't complete the building supplies part of it.

So food is all metric, roads, speed limits, distances, weights, yet wood is imperial, and tools are metric and imperial.

This makes sense, because with the US so close, and the largest trading partner, imperial cannot fully vanish in some repects, until they get rid of it too.

“Two by four” is a category descriptor, not a measurement. Such products do not have dimensions which equal 2 and 4 in either imperial or metric units.

2x4 is a name of lumber that's not 2 by 4 inches at all.

Are a lot of things still sold as “454g / 1lb” or “568ml / 1 pint” (as I recall from a decade ago)? In most metric countries those would just be “500g” and “500ml”.

The Wikipedia article (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_King...) mentions three legal exceptions: road traffic signs; pints for draught beer and cider, and milk in returnable containers; and troy ounces for transactions in precious metals.

It doesn't mention one product that is very much in the news at the moment: energy. I'm fairly sure they still sell it by the kWh rather than the MJ.

Colloquially, people still talk about calories rather than kJ in food. (And they do that even in Germany, I think, one of the few places where they measure font sizes in mm rather than points, or so I've heard.)

EDIT: Perhaps kWh counts as metric, even though it's not SI?

Everywhere I've lived people also discuss display sizes in inches despite everything else being metric.

display sizes are in inches everywhere (like in the world) indeed - mostly b/c they are produced in such a way...

And air conditioners. Even on mainland Europe they are mostly advertised in BTUs.

kWh is more metric than imperial, although Joules are of course the standard unit of energy.

Watts are a metric unit, as are seconds. Hours are not formally an SI unit, but at least according to Wikipedia [0] are "officially accepted for use with the SI".

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-SI_units_mentioned_in_th...

A kilowatt hour is 1000 joules per second over 3600 seconds, the amount of power a 1kW heater uses in 1 hour. Its as metric as the hectare

And 1 Joule is one Newton-metre (i.e. it takes 1 J to pull with a force of 1 N over a distance 1 m).

You are right. Is say it is metric, if not standard SI.

I guess kWh counts as metric, as W is SI and h is accepted by SI (as, for example, in km/h). The Imperial unit is maybe the calorie (I'm not sure though).

EDIT: According to Wikipedia [0], the Imperial unit of energy is ft⋅lbf.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foot-pound_(energy)

The calorie is also kind of metric: the energy needed to heat 1 gram of water by 1 degree Celsius.

The kcal (kilocalorie) is what most people mean when they refer to calories in food, and that's just the energy needed to heat 1 kg of water by 1 deg C.

Since a person is mostly water this means that, say if you weigh 100 kg, and eat 1000 kcal of food, that food contains (theoretically) enough energy to heat your body mass by 10 deg C. The units do give a kind of intuitive understanding of the energy in food, while also being based on metric quantities.

The non-metric energy measurement in current discussion in Britain is the therm, 100,000 BTU. It seems natural gas is sold in this measure at some of the London exchanges.

It's sold in MWh in the rest of Europe.

>EDIT: Perhaps kWh counts as metric, even though it's not SI?

No need for perhaps, unless it's btu (or some horse power/hour) it's metric.

There is zero appetite for brexit or for the government by working age people either, all the political choices for the last 10 years have matched the result of what the over 65s want, if nobody under 65 votrs there would have been no difference.

On the other hand if nobody over 65 voted every vote would be different.

His point is that elections are cheap.

Business interests align with hard cash. That's going to lean towards metric.

Over 65s don't "vote" much in businesses, they're retired.

Hardly. Britain's converting to metric -- one inch at a time.

Like USA will begin in 2023!? I could hardly believe it when I heard it, it is barely three centuries away!

No, it's not. Any stories about doing so are just dead cats.

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