> This is the interesting finding I'd think, by putting the subject in un-natural settings, to see what can happen at extremes.
Interesting, maybe. Deeply unethical, certainly. I'm not against animal experimentation (although I'd never have the stomach for it myself), but it's hard to see what could be learned from these experiments except for how rats behave when placed in these strange prisons.
The UK also does for some God awful reason (especially infuriating considering it's sold by the litre at the petrol station).
In the United States and some other countries, a gallon is equal to 128 fluid ounces or 3.785 liters. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom and some Commonwealth countries, a gallon is equal to 160 fluid ounces or 4.546 liters.
In fairness the fluid ounces are also different, an Imperial (english) fluid ounce is 28.41306mL, while a US Customary fl oz is 29.5735mL. So the Imperial floz is 96% the US customary, not enough to account for having 25% more of them in a gallon, but it does lead to the Imperial gallon only being 20% larger than the customary gallon.
But wait there’s more! The US also has the “food labelling” fluid ounce which is not the customary one, instead it’s exactly 30mL.
And yet we claim to live in a science based society.
I mean, there are a million things, that do not need universal standards, but standards are imposed anyway.
But where one standard would be really helpful, like scientific values, we have many. And some people would rather go to prison, than adopt. (I think that happened in the UK, after they force switched to metric)
The UK also uses pints for dairy milk, but litres for plant-based milks. UK must be completely disregarded if you're looking to make sense about what units to use.
The UK may be the most confusing; fuel is sold in litres, but fuel efficiency is expressed in MPG, and furthermore the gallons aren't the same as US gallons. I guess at least the miles are the same!
Only since the 1958 International Yard and Pound Agreement tho. Before then the US used what is now known as the Survey Mile, which is why the survey mile exists (and survived until this year).
I suspect the British fuel system is designed to hide the cost per mile of driving, at least tacitly. At present it's difficult to work out without some external tool.
It's more like once it's established it's hard to change - if you started listing 'miles per litre' that would be like it was 'designed to hide the cost of driving', because I would have no idea how that compared.
(Quite normally for my age in the UK I think, I'm familiar with both metric & Imperial measurements, but generally fairly bad at converting. Except I know 568ml = 1 (UK! Not US!) pint - for which I can thank my alma mater Imperial and its student bars: Metric, and FiveSixEight. I could probably guess effectively at lbs and kg from butter/flour. Of course I know 2.54cm = 1". A yard is 'a bit' less than 1m. It's the bigger ones that seem more obscure/are harder to work out from familiarity I suppose.)
> It's more like once it's established it's hard to change - if you started listing 'miles per litre' that would be like it was 'designed to hide the cost of driving', because I would have no idea how that compared.
1. I think with liters, people typically reverse the relationship so it's liters/100km. Which is a much more intuitive unit.
2. If you're buying gas in liters, I think it'd be a lot easier to switch over to using liters for efficiency. You may not be able to compare easily to other vehicles, but you'd be able to estimate your personal fuel more easily.
I think it's the other way around. Distance per quantity of fuel is the intuitive measurement that humans understand and can relate directly to how much fuel they purchase. It could be argued that it is less intuitive when comparing two cars, however. Although better MPG is still strictly better, which is about the level of detail most non-nerds care about.
An other possibility is that the brits like having wonky things, just look at the pre-decimalisation monetary system, or the counties (https://youtu.be/hCc0OsyMbQk).
We only switched to selling by the litre in the early 90s (presumably for the sake of EU alignment), it was sold in Gallons until then. Expressing efficiency in MPG is just something that had "stuck" by then.
Not quite. The EU directive said that governments should if they wanted pass a law to say metric units should be displayed. The UK government chose to ratify that law, but with the caveat that imperial units could be displayed as well if shops wanted to display them (and most did).
At no point was it ever illegal do display the old units. There were no martyrs; there were only idiots.
What I absolutely love about this fact is that America is still using British Imperial units. After literally having a war over whether or not the US should be independent of British rule, you're still holding on to our measuring system despite the rest of the world moving on.
Clam down, we are just talking about how measure systems. And the previous ones existed not because of cultural differences, but because every king and tyrant wanted to decide which stick their vassals should use to measure the world.
They absolutely started by stealing things and then figuring out how to make them on their own. But that's no different than how the US built its rocket industry, or how Apple built their OS, or any number of other non-Chinese entities doing the same thing.
Let's not forget the "how it started, where it is now" meme of the whole thing
The United States has invaded more countries than China while having a significantly higher incarceration rate. If anyone is brutal and aggressive, it's the US.
China is sort of doing the same thing with its contemplation of export controls of rare earths and the like.
The British empire tried to enforce no home-grown industries in certain industries among its colonies by law and by dumping or taxes. Didn't work out so well for either the UK or the colonies. This sort of forced competition through export controls may be for the best all around in the long-term.
I worked for a company that had both Slack and Workplace and... Workplace wasn't a Slack replacement at all? It felt like a separate instance of Facebook for our company. How would it act like a Slack replacement?
WP Chats could be vaguely similar to Slack -- there can be chats associated with a group, which is sort of like Slack named channels. But I agree it's not a perfect replacement.
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