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Anyone bovvered ?


Observer II

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Instead of dealing with fundementals like immigration (now over a million in the UK),  N/I protocol and the breakup of the UK;  seems the Gov are really going to enhance our independence from the EU, by bringing back imperial weights and measures.   Having been brought up on Imperial,  I had a moan when Decimal came in;  but have now got used to, what is, a much simpler system - so why change back ?     :rolleyes:

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Well I still think about milk in terms of pints and I can buy it in bottles from the milkman in pints. At the supermarket I am not allowed to see the marking of 1/2 pint, 1 pint or 2 pints on the cartons. That is what the sizes actually are but the only say the quantity in litres. This is as daft as banning the crown on pint glasses, which I have been given in EU countries in recent years!

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I was in the very last year group educated in imperial units and everyone since has adopted the metric standards but like most these days, I’ve gradually got used to the price of petrol being in litres and the temperature being in degrees C. This wasn’t a real issue before someone came up with this idea and I’m certain there are far more important issues that need addressing.

 

Bill 😊

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My understanding is that there is no intention to use Imperial other than where it is what things are actually sold in but cannot be marked as such. That is why I mentioned Milk. Pints for beer, milk make sense. I expect there is a consultation where the appropriate goods will be highlighted. Manufacturers will no doubt only dual mark where they think it will help. I do not expect many things to get imperial added as that would make it harder to introduce stealthy price changes by reducing product sizes whilst leaving prices unchanged.

I had the joy of doing maths and physics in FPS (Imperial), MKS, CGS and SI (all metric) 

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Well, I’ve just pulled a bottle of milk out of the fridge only to find it’s 1.1361 litres or two pints. I thought they were one litre bottles. Both my wife and myself still refer to a bottle of milk as a pint so when she say’s we need four pints this week, what she means is that we need four bottles. Changing to 1 litre bottles wouldn’t make a lot of difference, I’d still call it a pint, but it’d bring us into line with the rest of the world and makes it easier for the younger folk who make up most of our population.

 

Bill 😊

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i was still at school when they brought the metric system in and struggle even now with it. anything below a foot i can manage in metric, being a machinist for a time taught me that at least. still had to refer to the zeus charts though for some things, especially thread sizes as we dealt with just about every type of thread going including left handed ones.

anything over a foot i still tend to use feet and inches for measurement then plod the sizes into a conversion calculator to change to meters. and vice versa. somehow can't get the hang of visualizing ten meters as opposed to thirty odd foot, and when it comes to kilometers you may as well forget it as far as i'm concerned.

"I've just run a ten kilometer race" i suppose sounds impressive well more so than "I've just a six and a bit miles race"

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You must be a bit younger than me then Sid. I’m three score and 12 pence in old money. 😊

All through my college years we were warned that if we ever failed and had to re-sit the following year, then for sure it’d be another fail because all the units and formula were so completely different.  

Earlier this year wile on holiday in the US you could get stuff in quarts. Who the heck remembers things like this. Some things like pints and miles are possibly worth keeping until us oldies all die out but stuff like pounds ounces and stones furlongs, bushels and groats should be buried along with those that came up with all this pointless nonsense. 😊

 

Bill 😊

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And don't forget ,there are 10 cricket pitches in a furlong.

I was always puzzled at school when one of the monetary values that was taught was that a third of a pound was 6/8d & always wondered what was the point of it. It was only much later when i read that way back when English currency had a  "mark" that was equal to a third of a £.

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Bill, you will have noticed that in the US a quart is two pints but not equal to two Imperial pints. You have in the past said that US gallons and Imperial gallons are different. The fact that the US still uses length and mass (as well as weight) measures that correspond with Imperial measures means that they live on with no prospect of change. They are still useful in many fields. other than space vehicle mirror manufacture!!

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16 hours ago, Bill said:

You must be a bit younger than me then Sid.

i think i reach pension age next year and will then (hopefully) qualify for the bus pass. (should have been this year but they moved the goalpost on me.)....🤦‍♀️

When i was working in engineering anything that came from america was a nightmare to work on as they have their own threads such as ANF, american national fine, ANC american national coarse and the rest being oddball non"standard" ones. spent a lot of time making nuts and bolts for that stuff.

even weights are not standard. imperial ton (long ton) ,american ton (short ton), metric ton (somewhere in between) all have 20 hundredweight in them but the definition of the hundred weight weight varies.

"I'll have a pound of apples" says the woman "it's kilograms now madam " replies the shopkeeper, "in that case I'll have a pound of kilograms"......:rolleyes:

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47 minutes ago, ninearches said:

Isn't an American ton the same as a metric tonne ,2200ibs ?

An American Short Ton is 2000lbs, and a metric Tonne is 2204.62lbs (and defined as 1000kg). An American Long Ton is 2240lbs. The lb is identical between US and Imperial as is the yard etc.

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