UK Engineers raise concerns over proposed switch to imperial measurements (opens in new tab)

There is an entire category of fallacies of distraction. People, especially those of the political persuasion, use them when they don't have valid or just arguments to support their position.

Personally, I prefer goat brains, monkey testicles, and the shrunken heads of vanquished enemies.

100% this, all smoke and mirrors. But you can’t argue with it’s effectiveness.

> "As Canadians we typically measure our height and weight in ft and lbs. But temperature in celsius and travel distances and speeds in kilometres and km/h. Except for cooking/recipes, where oven temperature is measured in fahrenheit and we have to deal with recipes with cups and ounces and so on. ... But recipes are also often in litres and grams. So.."

As British we typically measure everything in metric, including oven temperatures and recipes. Except for road distances and speeds, which are miles and mph. Unless it's an e-bike which always seem to be km/h. And most modern cars do have dual units, showing km/h in case you drive over to Ireland or the continent.

Oh, and a few things like milk and beer are sold in pint-sized containers, but must clearly state 568 ml on the bottle.

I’m American and feel like I live in the “in-between” too. I measure people in ft and lbs. I measure wood in ft and inches. I design 3D objects in cm and mm unless I’m building in wood, in which case I’m back to feet and inches. I measure speed in miles per hour. I use tools mostly in metric but sometimes in SAE (depending on where it’s made and what it is).

> As Canadians we typically measure our height and weight in ft and lbs. But temperature in celsius and travel distances and speeds in kilometres and km/h. Except for cooking/recipes, where oven temperature is measured in fahrenheit and we have to deal with recipes with cups and ounces and so on. ... But recipes are also often in litres and grams. So...

These statements always amuse me, as someone who grew up in a purely metric culture. I always wondered: do you ever get confused when talking in so many similar but different units, or is it second nature?

Just to put another datapoint out there from the "anglo-sphere", Australia and New Zealand are completely metric.

The one exception you could say is height, where in casual speech people sometimes say "6 foot", but if it were a medical situation it would again always be in cm.

Also grocery stores sometimes sell fruits, vegetables, etc in lbs, sometimes in kg so it's much harder to compare prices between the different chains. I wish it was mandated to use the metric price first and (optionally) put the imperial price in small print.

Oddly enough all the automotive fasteners and bolts switched to metric some time ago here in the USA. Which makes the (relative) lack of available metric bolts/screws doubly frustrating.

As Americans attempting to be more globally-oriented in these things, we set our thermometers to Celsius and all our GPS maps to kilometers.

It was interesting to watch ourselves slowly become "bilingual" over several months as we got used to what we needed to wear when it was 30° (F or C) outside.

I do wish countries (especially ours) would go all in.

Except for the pint. I always thought that was a good, allowable exception. :)

This phenomenon is neatly captured in the locker-room wisdom for the recommended amount of protein intake for athletes here: 1 gram per pound of body weight.

Moving to Canada from the US was a weird experience. They sell butter in 454g bricks. That's a pound, but it's sold in grams. The wrapper is marked with graduations of whole, half and quarter cups. They sell meat and cheese by the kilogram, 100gram, pound, or ounce, with different brands using different units -- making price comparison between similar products a bit of a chore.

I'm guessing this is less to do with the anglo-sphere and more to do with the amount of trade done with the US.

Australian Civil eng. here. We’re fully metric.

I can almost guarantee that this is being proposed because it performed well among a certain demographic during some focus group. So it’s a way to get a few cheap votes from the “back in my day…” crowd. It has the additional benefit of appearing like the government are doing something, while they somehow still continue to not tackle the other ongoing crises (among other things - energy prices and the recent mini-budget which cost the Chancellor of the Exchequer his job)

The metric system is too "European", and more specifically French for post-Brexit Britain. We need a patriotic system of measurement, not some foreign idea designed to take away our sovereignty.

To distract us.

Yes! Bring back the old coins! 5 farthings to the penny, 11 pence to the shilling, 19 shillings to the pound! Much easier for everyone!

> abandoning the decimal money

That would serve the already-rich like Jacob Rees-Mogg as it would make it more difficult for the masses to measure the broadening inequality gap.

Perhaps that is the plan, including with Brexit: the currently rich maintain as much power as possible and push the rest as far down as possible (to prevent losing their positions at the top of the hill).

The proposal as far as I’m aware requires businesses to also provide imperial units. That at the very least will require labelling changes and to have internal inventory systems to also need support for imperial units. It seems entirely nonsensical.

...not convinced 'fortnight' is actually imperial (as opposed to just old):

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fortnight Middle English fourtenight, alteration of fourtene night, from Old English fēowertȳne niht fourteen nights.

(First Known Use of silver lining - 1871, same source) ...and as for etc (Et cetera), may I offer you my contrafibularities.

That's what a lot of people said/thought about Brexit!

Unfortunately, the more we bury our heads in the sand and ignore things, the more chance they have of actually happening.

Like the festival of Brexit? Or leaving the single market? People said all these things won’t happen and yet they did.

Shit like this keeps happening and people are not pushing back. Because it’s tiring and more comfortable to just let it happen. Yet the UK is quickly degrading as a result of all this mess.

Sadly this would not satisfy - the point of Brexit isn't to make Brexiteers happy; it's to make Remainers unhappy.

We can already do this legally. And some places do. This is just a distraction, red meat for idiots.

>It's constantly reminds me why compulsory voting in Australia is the best thing since sliced bread.

How about letting people decide if they wish, or not, to partake in a system that is rigged on either side? A choice of 'either pile of shit', is not necessarily a choice that is acceptable to those that would prefer their bread without.

I am horribly anti-brexit, it has caused me and so many I know so much grief. I hate everything about it, but you can take your 'actual F' and F yourself if you would like to force me to vote.

> compulsory voting

No. If you don't vote and you country gets destroyed by the politicians you don't get to complain - I agree on that part.

However, if you are required to vote, also people will vote which don't inform themselves very well. Populists will take their votes happily, and populists are often not an improvement for the state of a country.

As a counterpoint: I find the implicit imprecision caused by having poor/no divisibility a constant frustration in my day-to-day life.

For volume: US based recipes very often resort to "1 cup", and I generally find they're rounding a long way from... say... 3/4 cup. In metric, people don't tend to round more than 10ml at a time, so you'll see 120ml, not 100ml when they mean 120ml.

For distance: "About an inch" is the most useless instruction in DIY or crafting.

People seem to be very reluctant to use the awkward and 3 fifths or w/e you end up with in imperial.

When you say "people are better at estimating", are you adjusting for the reduced precision?

French perspective here : everybody uses centimeters and millimeters are common. I just came from a hair cut and the girl doing it asked for my clipper size in millimeters. I have an intuition, and it's usually pretty close, for how much à millimeter, centimeter, meter and kilometer are. All that to say it's got everything to do with habit and not random size body parts.

I am French (so strictly SI) and an ex physicist (so I like powers of 10). And I agree with you, especially for the temperature, and generally speaking for anything related to everyday life.

I think however that we must have only one referential because it simply makes things difficult when communicating (similar to currency rates). We should have chosen °F for temperature because they are more optimal (no changes for science, easier in everyday life) but metric for distances and weights.

Distances and weights are often added, which is a problem for non metric units. We all remember the train starting from one city at 13:45 and the other at 9:12 and the time they meet. Super simple in metrics, super hard in train time.

Pretty sure you're just more used to/think in imperial beacause that's what you've used all your life. I can estimate metric perfectly fine.

The temperature thing is just whichever you're more used to using. We almost never see 30F or 70F, so the idea that it's a natural fit is rather forced.

Unfortunately that would have required a nuanced political discussion, something that traditionally has been lacking in the UK Brexit wars.

The missing piece here is that the referendum was designed by people who wanted and expected remain to win. David Cameron, the PM at the time, was facing a minor rebellion within his own party from a faction of MPs that were anti-EU. They weren't a majority of the party, but they were large enough to cause trouble.

A couple years prior, he had faced a similar problem from Scottish nationalists, so he approved a referendum on Scottish independence. He was against independence, but when Scotland voted to remain a part of the UK, it weakened the arguments of the Scottish nationalists, making his job easier. He figured he could do the same with Brexit. Nobody seriously expected leave to win.

Problem was, it turned out there was a lot of money in leaving the EU. It would make tax dodges easier for the ultra-rich, and it would allow disaster capitalists to make a killing by shorting the market. So money flowed into the leave campaign from wealthy donors hoping to make a killing. As a result, leave ran a much slicker campaign.

All this might not have been enough for leave to win, but people were also pissed off at the government for years of austerity policies and a flagging economy since the 2008 crash. Lots of people, saw the vote as a way to express their displeasure in the government. Some of those who voted leave never expected it to win.

SO yes, you're right. The referendum was poorly worded and poorly planned. This was evident in the immediate aftermath. The House of Commons could not agree at all on what to do. A large chunk still backed remaining, but not a majority. Lots of MPs decided that, even though they knew Brexit was a bad idea, their constituents had voted for it, so they needed to switch sides. They didn't all switch to the same side though. Some wanted a no-deal Brexit. Some wanted to remain in the customs union and single market. Others wanted different arrangements. There was no majority for any course of action, because the referendum didn't describe a course of action, and it paralyzed UK politics for years.

The temperature thing is complete nonsense, nobody uses Fahrenheit here unless we're translating for Americans.

The others are a fairer point, although we do actually sell liquids in litres or millilitres, but for some things it just happens to be some multiple of 568..

Weight is KG, unless it's a person, in which case it's Stones and Pounds.

Distance is fun, It's Miles on journeys, but metric for everything else, unless you're talking about people's height, then it's feet and inches.

It sounds confusing, but when you live here it's not something you really have to think about, you just switch rather effortlessly.

I feel like you're making this up. No one here uses Fahrenheit.

I lived in London and Castletown (IoM) for years and only ever felt like C was used. I remember distinctly because of how often I had to force myself to make the the calculation for conversion between the two whenever any topic of temperature came up early in my time there.

They use Farenheit in the headline when it's hot to make it sound shocking (usually 100+ F).

When it's cold they can instead say the temperatures have plummeted below zero (C).

They just use whatever adds the most drama.

Anyone that isn’t ancient uses Celsius.

That's already legally possible to put imperial measurements on things now.

The consultation asked whether people wanted to switch to imperial measurements only, alongside other less sensible options.

For the same reason they doubled down on trickle-down economics: only dim bulbs in Westminster.

Maybe Kwarteng and Rees-Mogg had a private wager to see who would be the first to be relieved of their post?

It's already not illegal to use them, as long as you use metric alongside them. I don't see the problem this is trying to solve.

Prime-ministers are seleceted by the party in power, and they are selected by a minority of that party when required (Boris losing power - out, Liz losing power - soon out), so they will make as many 180° turns - and returns - as is required by the party that was voted into power so that same party remains in power.

Yes Minister - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FLm2X6sFa48

I would guess that in British system quite many. As the members of party have no interest to move with new election when they aren't sure they are going to win. So PM needs to end up pretty unpopular before they make any moves for replacement.

Also considering current situation, I don't think there is too many that want to be in the shoes just yet.

Nope, it's a genuine proposal from Jacob Rees-Mogg's department.

Leaving aside that, in his mid-fifties, Mogg is probably too young to have learned imperial units at school ...

That was also my first thought. I see only cost and no benefit. Except maybe when you have a cargo cult mindset and think that returning these measures will return Britain‘s glory. Can anyone name one benefit?