Actual poster from 1917 that made me laugh. A lot.

Also, those motherfuckers are measuring the weight of those balls in kilograms, aren’t they?

  • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
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    4 months ago

    Americans really dislike learning and being inconvenienced.

    it’s worse than that-- we have gallons of milk, but liters of soda. we drive in mph, but run in 5K. science and medicine weights are grams, but recipes call for ounces. want to fix an american car–hope you have both metric and “standard” wrenches

    more like we’d rather stay with the stupidness and inconvenience we know rather than change anything, no matter how much better it would be

    • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️@lemmy.world
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      4 months ago

      want to fix an american car–hope you have both metric and “standard” wrenches

      I will point out that with the singular and shining exception of lugnuts, at least this one has not been the case since at least the 1970’s. All fasteners on current(ish) American cars are metric nowadays and have been for quite some time. I’ve never seen a single one that isn’t on any car that’s not old enough to qualify for historic plates.

      This used to piss off the oldheads to no end back when I managed a hardware store because they would absolutely insist, sometimes literally screaming in my face about it, that their dang old good old boy red blooded American Ford that they just bought didn’t have no Jap pinko metric bolts in it anywhere not nohow, and 100% of the time they were wrong. (This annoyed me only slightly less than the people who showed up needing a bolt, didn’t know what it was, didn’t bring the old one with them, and the only information they had was “I took it off with a 9/16 wrench.” Hombre, the head size tells me absolutely nothing about the diameter, thread pitch, or length. Then they would claim that it’s just a “standard” bolt, as if there’s any such thing. Also, a 9/16" wrench will usually fairly easily remove a bolt with a 14mm head, so that really tells me nothing. Or 5/8" on 16mm. Etc.)

      Harleys, however, take it as some kind of point of pride that they actually do use fractional inch fasteners everywhere.

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        4 months ago

        didn’t know what it was, didn’t bring the old one with them, and the only information they had was

        LOL the library equivalent is “i’m looking for a book but don’t remember the title or author, but it was about a woman who fell in love, and it had a red cover!” which describes a not-insignificant percentage of all books in existence

      • PriorityMotif@lemmy.world
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        4 months ago

        The differential bolts on my ford 8.8" are 1/2". Also the lower intake manifold bolts on a gm 3.8l were 3/8" even though everything else was metric. I’m sure there’s also oil drain plugs that are not metric.

    • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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      4 months ago

      We are used to 2 liter bottles, so we still use them. We run 5ks because its been a standard distance to run for a long time. Other countries also do similar things, old habits die hard.

      We use metric for science and medicine because the benefits of metric are much more pronounced for those use cases.

      Honestly, using both really isnt that hard. Its only really an inconvenience if you aren’t already used to it. We aren’t changing it because we’re getting along just fine the way things are, and there are much bigger problems to be solved.

      • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
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        4 months ago

        for one thing, there will always be “bigger problems to solve,” just like with getting rid of DST, which also needs to fucking die a horrible death already

        for another thing, thank you for providing a perfect example of my last sentence

        • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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          4 months ago

          American are willing to change things, we just pick what to change, and we aren’t being inconvenienced by this nearly enough to change it.

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            4 months ago

            thank you, again, for illustrating my point. again. care to say the same thing a third time? for the people who just aren’t getting it?

            • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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              4 months ago

              By continuing to act like this you are preventing any actual conversation from taking place. You might as well just say “you’re wrong, no I will not elaborate”. If you’re not interested in having a conversation then don’t respond, no one is forcing you to do this.

              If you would like to have a less sarcastic and rude discussion, I’ll be here.

              • solsangraal@lemmy.zip
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                4 months ago

                i made a point:

                more like we’d rather stay with the stupidness and inconvenience we know rather than change anything, no matter how much better it would be

                and you’re agreeing with it. repeatedly. though i don’t know what you think the “debate” here is. are you trying to get me to agree with “no, we shouldn’t change to metric”? because that’s not going to happen. but you can keep trying if that makes you feel better

                • sanpedropeddler@sh.itjust.works
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                  4 months ago

                  I don’t care that you think we should switch to metric, you said that Americans aren’t switching purely because they hate change, and they don’t care about the potential benefits just because they hate change so damn much. This is what I’ve been arguing against. I honestly have no idea how you could have read all of that and come to the conclusion I’m arguing against the metric system. Every word of it is about why Americans don’t think the switch is worth it.

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                    4 months ago

                    Every word of it is about why Americans don’t think the switch is worth it.

                    and your premise is flawed. lots of americans think the switch is worth it, and have thought that for over 100 years. so far i’ve ignored your “my opinion = america’s opinion” fallacy, but this has to end at some point. so, think what you want. i concede nothing.