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Comment by jen729w | Hacker News Reader

Indeed. In my home town we had the ‘metric martyr’, a greengrocer who defied EU law and continued selling bananas in metric measures.

There was a whole court thing, he lost, and then he died aged 39 of a heart attack.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/metric-...

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> continued selling bananas in metric measures.

Probably in imperial measures? Unless bananas were somehow sold in metric grams and the EU imposed some weird unit I don't know about.

Yup, you're right. From the link:

> The prosecution of Sunderland greengrocer Steven Thoburn for selling bananas in imperial measures helped turn public opinion against the EU

Brain fart from me, yep!

To be pedantic though, refusing to comply with a recently-passed law is not whistleblowing; it is civil disobedience.

You’re right, that is pedantic

"The appeal failed in 2002 and Steven returned to work but things for him and the country were never the same again. He died aged 39 after a heart attack in 2004 leaving a widow, Leigh, their young children Georgia and Jay and a son Rhys from a previous relationship. Leigh also passed away in 2017."

To die of the stress caused by (indirectly) being enforced to use a 'new' measurement system must be one of the weirdest causes of deaths i have ever read about.

An actual arrest seems wildly disproportionate for this. Simple administrative fines should have been enough

Even fines seem wildly disproportionate. Its one thing to regulate how one interacts with the gocernment, it is quite a lot less appropriate for government to regulate private transactions when the validity is easily and cheaply verifiable by either party.

Regulating weights and measures is a basic function of government since Babylonian times.

Sure but dictating what units to use is a bit overboard. A pound should be a pound and a kilo a kilo but what units I use in commerce is my business, not the state’s.

While a kilogram is kilogram, a pound has an accepted definition and plenty of unexpected ones.

Is it a troy pound, a tower pound, a london pound, a metric pound?

One of the main roles of governments is regulating private transactions.

Also, he should have done what every supermarket does around here and sell bananas at a flat price per bunch.

It would have been a lot easier for him if he had simply sold the bananas at a flat per-banana price. That's typically how many grocery stores in the US sell them (notably Trader Joe's). Here in Japan, they typically sell them in small bunches for a fixed price, with the small bananas sold at a lower price (for a group of 3 or 4) and the larger ones at a higher price next to them. There's no need to weigh bananas at the point at the point of sale at all.

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