Pirates of the Caribbean hijacked America's metric system (2017) | Hacker News Reader

Pirates of the Caribbean hijacked America's metric system (2017)

npr.org

31 pointsRygian51 comments

> So for now, we're stuck with Quarter Pounders

I think this is part of the reason why the US is so resistant to embrace metric - ridiculous things like pretending you'd have to rename a Quarter Pounder as a "113-Grammer" mean that the mere notion of metric sounds farcical to your average punter and the conversation is over before it can even start.

Meanwhile over in the UK they're quite comfortable using a hybrid of metric and imperial, and here on the European continent you can still buy a "Quarter Pounder" in McDonald's even though that system of measurement (not to mention the words "quarter" or "pound[er]") isn't used at all.

And the UK can still buy a "pint" of beer or milk, which is both technically (and legally) 568ml - but I only know that measure because I looked it up!

Here in France, a "pinte" of beer is 50cl. The other standard serving you can order is a "demi", which is 25cl.

If it requires me to start ordering a glass of warm flat beer using the metric measure of 568ml, i'd start doing that rather than reduce it by 68ml. :)

The warm/flat thing is a peculiar (often American) stereotype and it's a bit of a misnomer - I'm gonna try to dispel it a bit because it's quite an interesting topic.

The beers you're talking about are served cool (though not ice cold as you're actually meant to taste something) and are generally quite good - they're made in smaller breweries often serving local communities and are usually served in pubs that tend to take pride in what they're serving[0] - cleaning the lines between each keg, monitoring temperatures in cellars, discarding kegs that are a bit off rather than serving them. "Flat" implies something was infused with carbon dioxide to become fizzy but then left out accidentally to go stale, whereas these are purposefully only as fizzy as the brewer intended. Sometimes there's a light carbonation, sometimes not.

The beers you want to avoid are those that are mass-produced and what I'd describe as "lager adjacent" - Carling, Fosters, Stella, Kronenbourg and whatever US stuff makes it over. They're served everywhere and are, in my opinion, quite underwhelming if you're used to proper lager-type beer (idk what the preferred English nomenclature is, here it's ležák).

I definitely prefer Czech beer but UK ales are something I do enjoy.

[0] - let's not mention Wetherspoons

> Czech beer

I love a good pilsner. Give us the lowdown on that next!

I’m not sure anything I say will be of great value outside of Czech Republic - you can get Pilsner Urquell and Budvar (sometimes Kozel) in bottles/cans which are fine but not spectacular. The best beer I encounter is Pilsner Urquell or Radegast from tanks rather than barrels (it arrives in special trucks that pump the beer into large tanks usually in the pub’s cellars) or from smaller breweries like Dalešice, Beskydy or Polička and you likely won’t encounter these anywhere else in the world :(

You can also still buy a 8x4ft sheet of plywood (or, as the merchant will call it, a twelve twenty by two four forty!)

> And the UK can still buy a "pint" of beer or milk, which is both technically (and legally) 568ml - but I only know that measure because I looked it up!

Damn, when i was in the UK i thought a pint(of beer) (0.473 liter) is smaller that half liter. But this seems to be the US definition.

This is news to me!

"The imperial pint (≈ 568 mL) is used in the United Kingdom and Ireland and to a limited extent in Commonwealth nations. In the United States, two kinds of pint are used: a liquid pint (≈ 473 mL) and a less common dry pint (≈ 551 mL)." - Wikipedia

Glad I checked back in this thread, I had never heard of the 473ml liquid pint or 551ml dry pint - that’s super interesting!

>and here on the European continent you still buy a "Quarter Pounder" in McDonald's even though that system of measurement (not to mention the words "quarter" or "pound[er]") isn't used at all.

You order a Royale with cheese. Haven't you seen Pulp Fiction?

Not everywhere - if you order a "Royale with cheese" in Norway and Netherlands for example you're going to get asked "Do you mean a Quarter Pounder?"

My point is that it's more of a name/trademark than a measurement, so it doesn't necessarily make sense to convert or change it. To be honest if you measured a Quarter Pounder patty I suspect it'd end up being less than 113 grams anyway.

Nah, In Europe you'll order a cachopo, that is like eight squirreoyals with cheese put on a line.

> pretending you'd have to rename a Quarter Pounder as a "113-Grammer"

Ridiculous indeed. We should just breed smaller cows.

Bigger ones, metric system increments are clear and can’t hide bs behind quarter pounder (marketing terms) etc. 113grams of meat is a baby size. 150g or 200g and we are starting to discuss things/meals seriously.

I think the critical problem the metric system has is that "pound" just sounds like a good, solid, dependable amount of something.

I wager a substantial number of the people who get actually angry about the thought of metric think a pound is more then half a kilo.

idk, but 10kg sledgehammer sound much better when named 22.046 pounds sledgehammer and 10 meters called 32.81 feet. And do those feet smell?

> Meanwhile over in the UK they're quite comfortable

I dunno, the rags like the Daily Mail, Sun and especially the Express still sometimes have an article about something fairly unhinged to do with metric. Like a greengrocer refused to sell someone a pound of potatoes or something. And the right wing occasionally tried to stir some life out of their voters by saying they'll "bring back" the Imperial system.

Meanwhile all I want for Christmas is my satnav app to show me speed limits in MPH like the signage and the speedo, but measure distance to the next junction in metres not thousands of feet. Yards would do.

Heh well yeah the press finding things to be outraged at is nothing new. But in reality the population are quite comfortable describing their height in feet, their weight in stone and distances between towns in miles while also using recipes with ingredients in grams/millilitres or measuring things in cm/mm when doing DIY

I think some of the cousins on both sides of the Atlantic are similar in holding onto institutions in defiance of the world:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_Martyrs

I wonder if any other countries have bothered doing the same with their own systems. Also if there any in Canada, Australia, New Zealand who also want Imperial over metric.

Here in Latin America, or at least here in Colombia, people call 500 grams "a pound" ("una libra") even though we never have used imperial officially

I think of weights in a similar manner, except I think of steak. An 8 ounce steak is about 250 grams. An 16 ounce steak (which is 1 pound) is about 500 grams.

With regards to volume, I am used to 750mL bottles of wine.

Converting distance is still unintuitive to me. The best method I came up with is that driving 60 miles per hour is about 100 km per hour.

Same in the Netherlands. Metric pound, "pond" = 500 g.

Rarely used, yet pretty much universally understood.

https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pond_(massa)

In Brazil, which has never used imperial, the Quarter Pounder is called "Quarteirão", a literal translation would be "big quarter". Most people probably parse it as a "city block", though.

Also, a regular burger here is 130-180g. A Quarter Pounder is smaller than I thought.

Vincent: And you know what they call a... a... a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?

Jules: They don't call it a Quarter Pounder with cheese?

Vincent: No man, they got the metric system. They wouldn't know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.

Jules: Then what do they call it?

Vincent: They call it a Royale with cheese.

Jules: A Royale with cheese. What do they call a Big Mac?

Vincent: Well, a Big Mac's a Big Mac, but they call it le Big-Mac.

Jules: Le Big-Mac. Ha ha ha ha. What do they call a Whopper?

Vincent: I dunno, I didn't go into Burger King.

The quarter pounder is a funny example because even in America, they don't have a "half pounder", they have a "double quarter pounder"

The idea that this would change is so bizarre

Apparently A&W tried to introduce a “1/3rd Pounder” whose failure to gain popularity was attributed to people not realising 1/3 is bigger than 1/4. So I suspect that may have informed that decision

Despite this persistent story, Hardee’s seems to do just fine with their “third pound thick burgers”. I suspect digging into this story would uncover that A&W just didn’t make a good burger that people wanted

It turns out that market research conducted afterwards showed that it was indeed people not realizing 1/3 is bigger than 1/4 [1].

1. https://awrestaurants.com/blog/aw-third-pound-burger-fractio...

The out of context quoting of the owner summarizing an unnamed market research firm hired by the company as published on the company’s website hardly seems the sort of unbiased, well researched and documented evidence one might want for “Americans are confused by fractions they’ve dealt with all their lives”. The same Americans who are ordering their lunch meats from the deli in 1/4 and 1/2 lb increments. The same Americans whose kitchens are full of measuring cups with 1/4 and 1/3 markings and sizes. The same Americans who measure their housing projects in 1/2, 1/4, 1/8 and 1/16 inch fractions.

Especially since at the time the burger in question was launched the company had declined from a high of 2400 franchises to just 500 in the span of 10 years. Maybe some individuals in the focus group were confused, that would not surprise me, since you can find a "lizard people" contingent in any group. But I rather suspect the real answer is just “failing company continued to struggle to find its market”, rather than a significant fraction of Americans who use fractions in their day to day lives forgot in this one specific instance how they work.

It's a "double quarter pounder" because it has two quarter pound patties. It does not have a half pound patty. I don't think this was because they didn't want to say "half" but because it literally has two patties.

The quarter pounder patty is measured as "uncooked weight", so you're unlikely to receive that much anyway, after the kitchen finishes with it.

I mean, people in the US are comfortable with buying a 2 liter of Coke, 9mm ammo, 250 mg ibuprofen, and then running a 5k before driving a few miles to buy a gallon of milk, setting the thermostat to 75°F, and lifting a few pounds before cracking open a 12 oz can.

E pluribus unum.

The big one - what measurement do people use for drugs? When I was at university weed was fractions of something (“an eighth”, “a quarter” - I suspect not of pounds that would be a lot) but now it’s grams

They’re fractions of ounces, and many people can convert between grams and [fractions of] ounces for this reason. But I doubt they’re the people that would oppose the metric system based on ideology.

Ah ounces of course, that somehow totally escaped me. Yeah I have no idea what caused the switch, it could be specific to certain parts of the country or even groups of people/dealers

I assume Americans are resistant to the change because they perceive (rightly, for the most part) that it would require learning a new system for little practical benefit in their personal lives. Most people aren’t doing unit conversions all the time, and they’ve already internalized those they do need.

Use of the Metric System in the US was yet another thing Regan put an end to. Signs were going up in the late 70s, but Regan ripped them all down and put a stop to it.

IIRC, Pres Carter was for the conversion, and for starting work on resolving Climate Change. Too bad he was not re-elected, the US would probably be in a different place.

Carter was a bad president. However he did do at least three good things: promoting the metric system, appointing Paul Volcker, and airline deregulation.

Craft beer:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craft_beer#United_States

Nothing says “it’s the science discussion time” like bringing up McDonald’s, quarter pounder and associated analogies and unit conversions.

The NY State Thruway (I-90) put up metric distance signs between Rochester and Syracuse back in the late 70s. They remained for years but I never saw any evidence of any others being erected. They're gone now.

By 1980, a few California gas stations had metric-labelled pumps -- and these were mechanical, with the units printed in ink or perhaps kiln-fused ceramic. Not sure how long they lasted into the Reagan administration.

I actually have a question about how (home) construction works with the metric system. Is anyone actually building to millimeter precision? Only talking about home construction here.

Here in the US it's mostly 8th (~3mm) of an inch or 16th of an inch (~1.5mm), but there's often some leeway kept because of the imprecise nature of rough lumber, expansion/contraction, etc. And those gaps are usually taken care of more with seals, caulking, etc.

Is stuff built down to the millimeter in Europe and how do you account for rough materials being bent/warped, etc?

I think different tolerances are used for different materials. For some things (eg industrial glass) millimeter tolerance in Europe[1] matches 1/32nd tolerance which is what is used in the US[2]

[1] for example https://www.glastroesch.com/fileadmin/user_upload/Service/Fa...

[2] for example https://a3glassfabricator.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/tol...

Haven't built a house, but some indoor construction notes:

Measurements are specified in mm, yes. How well they're adhered to depends on the application.

Factory-made kitchen cabinets, for example, are usually 600 mm wide, and this is pretty spot on (and since it's chipboard it won't warp much). The doors are specified a few mm under, so 597 mm for example.

Drywall comes in at 1200 mm; again, this is quite accurate. The studs then go on a convenient fraction, usually either 400 mm or 600 mm. However, there's much more leeway in precision since you don't see the studs once the wall is up.

And yes, seals and caulking and floor molding and other such tricks are used to cover up gaps where necessary.

---

Personal anecdote: we recently got new a new fridge and a new freezer. I'd made measurements of the installation location (1200 mm), checked the appliance widths (595 mm), and figure it'd be tight but doable. Turns out the wall was slightly crooked, and I'd measured it near its widest location. Ended up cutting out the (chipboard) wall on one side.

What I think is funny is that lumber and carpentry over there are done in units of 300mm for exactly the same reason we use 12 inches per foot: divisibility. Divisibility by 10 is useless for these types of projects, but divisibility by 3 and 4 are not!. And 300mm is just another name for the foot. You say that you’re using metric, but you’re really not. Your ancestors just uselessly multiplied all the numbers by 25.

Title needs "2017".

Eh I still don’t see too much merit in an argument that we’re “stuck” as if these systems have hobbled us and are unusable in the precision required in daily tasks.

Arithmetic is a pain in the butt though, since it’s a working mainly with fractions.

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