The UK is never going to drop metric. All that bluster last year was just a weird sop towards a tiny minority of people (market traders, who already bend the rules anyway) and I cannot possibly see us changing to allow imperial-only units on things.
A lot of people don’t realise this but it’s currently completely legal to put dual units on products as long as metric is at least as prominent as the imperial. If there really was a demand for imperial units on products, companies would already be doing it.
TL;DR – “it’s a bit different and a bit foreign and those things scare me”.
I grew up in the 1970s in the UK when metrification was just kicking off. By the time I made it to junior school, we were being taught metric, but pretty much everything else in my life was imperial. I worked in my dad’s shop as a kid and everything was sold in feet or pounds and ounces.
But over the course of the 80s and 90s, more and more of society became metric. It sometimes took a little bit of time to get used to it, but it’s not exactly been difficult. Pretty much nobody still talks about temperature in Fahrenheit, almost everything is now sold in metres and grams/kg etc. The only complaints I ever hear are from people who hate any sort of change.
There’s still a few exceptions – most roads in miles, beer in pints – and for some reason, I still go to imperial for my own height and weight. But everything else has switched and given that metric is clearly a more rational system (how is it sensible that it’s 16oz in a lb, but 14lbs in a stone, 12 inches in a foot, and 3 feet in a yard?), the effort of converting is definitely worth it.
The US military uses metric but call a kilometre a click. Nato standard.
We’re so desperate to stand out and be different, despite being middle-ground and average. So we cling onto what makes us different with force even if it’s ridiculous.
> vigilante group known as Active Resistance to Metrication, or ARM
I needed a good laugh and this one gave it to me.
Imperial for everyday use, metric for physics and engineering. Simple as.
Going by the people trotted out in the article, the answer to the question in its title seems to be fairly simple: delusion. It sets up a parade of conspiracy nuts, populist nationalists and people with otherwise radical beliefs.
It also provides a pretty good overview of the value, purpose and history of units, and why people consider them important and part of their culture. So why does the article fall back on a series of extreme personas to illustrate its point? Why not find moderate people to make a case? There is little reason, for example, why you could not *also* use other systems besides the one the rest of the world standardized on if you’d wanted to (and most countries, including the UK, have taken this route). Surely you could find people who advocate for this because they like using the old measurements and who aren’t simply delusional. The fact that the article insists on focusing on the extremes distracts from the valid points it is trying to make, IMHO.
The UK should go metric entirely Why are speed and distances still measured in miles?
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The UK is never going to drop metric. All that bluster last year was just a weird sop towards a tiny minority of people (market traders, who already bend the rules anyway) and I cannot possibly see us changing to allow imperial-only units on things.
A lot of people don’t realise this but it’s currently completely legal to put dual units on products as long as metric is at least as prominent as the imperial. If there really was a demand for imperial units on products, companies would already be doing it.
TL;DR – “it’s a bit different and a bit foreign and those things scare me”.
I grew up in the 1970s in the UK when metrification was just kicking off. By the time I made it to junior school, we were being taught metric, but pretty much everything else in my life was imperial. I worked in my dad’s shop as a kid and everything was sold in feet or pounds and ounces.
But over the course of the 80s and 90s, more and more of society became metric. It sometimes took a little bit of time to get used to it, but it’s not exactly been difficult. Pretty much nobody still talks about temperature in Fahrenheit, almost everything is now sold in metres and grams/kg etc. The only complaints I ever hear are from people who hate any sort of change.
There’s still a few exceptions – most roads in miles, beer in pints – and for some reason, I still go to imperial for my own height and weight. But everything else has switched and given that metric is clearly a more rational system (how is it sensible that it’s 16oz in a lb, but 14lbs in a stone, 12 inches in a foot, and 3 feet in a yard?), the effort of converting is definitely worth it.
The US military uses metric but call a kilometre a click. Nato standard.
We’re so desperate to stand out and be different, despite being middle-ground and average. So we cling onto what makes us different with force even if it’s ridiculous.
> vigilante group known as Active Resistance to Metrication, or ARM
I needed a good laugh and this one gave it to me.
Imperial for everyday use, metric for physics and engineering. Simple as.
Going by the people trotted out in the article, the answer to the question in its title seems to be fairly simple: delusion. It sets up a parade of conspiracy nuts, populist nationalists and people with otherwise radical beliefs.
It also provides a pretty good overview of the value, purpose and history of units, and why people consider them important and part of their culture. So why does the article fall back on a series of extreme personas to illustrate its point? Why not find moderate people to make a case? There is little reason, for example, why you could not *also* use other systems besides the one the rest of the world standardized on if you’d wanted to (and most countries, including the UK, have taken this route). Surely you could find people who advocate for this because they like using the old measurements and who aren’t simply delusional. The fact that the article insists on focusing on the extremes distracts from the valid points it is trying to make, IMHO.
The UK should go metric entirely Why are speed and distances still measured in miles?
Our [weird usage of both](https://i.redd.it/ovbq4db8kmv71.png) will never not make me laugh.
Note: Not creator of this