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?

    • Jo Miran@lemmy.ml
      4·
      2 years ago

      It’s corporations, really, that seem to insist on having their products and tools still defaulting to US customary units…

      I am no corporate fan, but this one is not on them. They already sell the same products in metric everywhere else. If the US switched to metric, most corporations would be able to switch overnight.

    • wjriiEnglish
      2·
      2 years ago

      I doubt the corporations care in any deep way, same as with anything else. It’s just sort of a chicken and egg thing. They’ll resist change as long as resisting is cost-effective, but that very resistance slows adoption. Still, they will likely shrug and adapt if it becomes obvious that people prefer metric, or even simply stop caring.

    • folekaule
      1·
      2 years ago

      Did you go to school in the 70s or 80s? I don’t think it’s like that anymore.

      • hime0321deleted by creatorEnglish
        6·
        10 months ago

        deleted by creator

        • folekaule
          3·
          2 years ago

          That’s probably what it is. I didn’t go to school in the US but my kids went to school in Ohio and my impression was that metric was not the primary system of units used in education, though it was taught.

          The argument I hear most often from people defending the US customary units is that the units are more intuitive. For example, an inch is about the size of a thumb, or 0 degrees is fucking cold and 100 is fucking hot.

          On the whole, people seem receptive to metric, but don’t want the hassle or cost to convert. They seem content to use metric where it’s important (science, military) and keep the old ways elsewhere.

          I currently with in healthcare research and almost everything not patient facing is done in metric, but there are still conversions going on everywhere, leading to data problems that are hard to correct later. People used to thinking in ounces putting those where grams were supposed to go, and so on.