It's almost impossible to get people to agree on anything, so having almost the entire world adopting the metric system is crazy, amirite?

Hello from America. Us and our friends Burma and Liberia are still here disagreeing.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

As an American, I hate this joke. Our government uses metric and we're taught metric in school (millennial here). It's just not forced on us to use it outside or scientific uses.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

As an American millennial, I did not learn metric in school… seems regional

by tevinpagac 1 week ago

Idk about regional but in my school it was really dependent on how many science classes you took. Outside of the science classes everything was still imperial. So functionally it was useless. I still need to convert inches and feet mentally to understand the scale of things.

by jamie83 1 week ago

no, you are just forced to use imperial units.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

So, how goes your money again? And gun caliber?

by Stromanmarshall 1 week ago

Lots of it

by montyromaguera 1 week ago

Caliber is inches. A .45 caliber bullet is 0.45 inches in diameter. NATO specs are measured in mm, not inches. .223 caliber and 5.56mm are (essentially) the same bullet size, and used by the same weapon.

by Sad-Cheetah64 1 week ago

"7.62 mm full metal jacket"

by Distinct-Soup 1 week ago

Hey. The brits use pounds in weight measurements. A British Stone is 14 US Standard pounds.

by Miserable_Camel_9849 1 week ago

Work as a civil engineer. We apparently hate metric

by Anonymous 1 week ago

We won in pretty much everything else.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

The one that amazes me is the Gregorian calendar. Of course there's the Hebrew calendar and the traditional Chinese calendar, and hundreds of others. But the world generally recognizes just the one, those others are held for purposes of tradition and culture, but for all practical purposes there's only one calendar today. It's a wonder the whole world got on the same page with that, and would be really problematic if we didn't.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Pure conjecture, but it's likely that we only came to a consensus on this due to the importance of time in relation to trading/commercial logistics, which = money. If the agreement on the calendar itself is unrelated, then I would wager this is why it's still around after whoever enforced it went away.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I'm sure there's a whole history behind it, most likely the British empire dominating global trade so all their colonies and trading partners had to use their calendar. Also pure conjecture, but I think it's a good guess.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

If only we could agree on the date format too... (btw, DD-MM-YYYY or YYYY-MM-DD are the only two correct ones, everything else is mental illness)

by Apprehensive-Gur 1 week ago

Canadian here. DD-MM-YYYY is also an incorrect format, simply because of the existence of MM-DD-YYYY. The only unambiguous format is YYYY-MM-DD.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

YYYY-MM-DD wins because it keeps files in order if used as the file name.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I've never understood this, you could always just sort file by date right?

by Anonymous 1 week ago

As someone who's job involves record keeping MM-DD-YYYY & YYYY-MM-DD are just my muscle memory default

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I use MM-DD-YYYY, but that's only because it's what i grew up with, DD-MM-YYYY is the best

by Anonymous 1 week ago

the entire world adopted the same time system (hour minutes seconds). minor difference for 12 vs 24 hrs, but they're still compatible.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

The US: "what do you mean by 'rest of the world'?"

by Lwehner 1 week ago

It's a pretty good system. There's minimal weird numbers needed to convert between different scales of length and the other units tie together nicely. E.g. 1000 millimetres make a metre. 1000 metres make a kilometre. Under standard atmospheric pressure, a cube of pure water with a 100 milimetre edge weighs at maximum 1 kilogram and has a volume of 1 litre. It also freezes at 0 degrees Celsius and boils at 100 degrees Celsius. By contrast, things smaller than an inch are often measured in non-decimal fractions. 12 inches make a foot. 3 feet make a yard. 1760 yards make a mile. A gallon of the same pure water is 231 cubic inches (equivalent to a cube with a side length 6.1358 inches) and weighs 8.3454 pounds. It freezes at 32 degrees Fahrenheit and boils at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

by Responsible_Act375 1 week ago

Don't bring Fahrenheit into this. He is precious and we love him :(

by Temporary_Food 1 week ago

As a Canadian, it is very annoying. Sales are advertised in $/lb but the regular price shown in store is $/kg. ETA - But don't ask me my weight in kg or my height in cm.

by russel82 1 week ago

Also don't ask me what the temp outside is in F, or what the distance is in miles.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

Here's a trick. Many metric to standard conversions are around 2 so if you can remember that you can make rough estimates. km in a mile? 1.6 Cm in an inch 2.54 Degrees ferenheight to Celsius? 1. 8 Pounds in a Kg? 2.2 Litres in a half gallon? 1.9

by Anonymous 1 week ago

I mean, the UK uses miles, so they never fully went metric. Also let's not forget pints (which are frustratingly different than US pints), heck they measure weight in stones

by Anonymous 1 week ago

It has economic reasons I'd say

by Dismal_Judgment7161 1 week ago

I'm so glad we at least agree on time.

by Anonymous 1 week ago

95 % of mankind is metric - and those who aren't must be left behind. /s

by Anonymous 1 week ago