📄 rule
::: spoiler alt-text It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn't use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).
Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America's little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:
The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram
[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]
ISO 216 A series papers formats
AO
A1
A3
A5
A7
A6
Et.
A4
Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We're not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog. :::
Let's not even start with the metric system (used everywhere) and the imperial system (used in the usa and some african countries).
Don't let the UK get away with their bs as well, they use a mix of metric and imperial. Imo that even worse bc at least america is consistent with their bs measuring system
Most annoying is cars. We buy fuel in litres but measure our cars efficiency in miles per gallon, meaning I either have to calculate how many gallons I put in my car or how many kilometres I've driven to work out if I'm being more or less economical.
You've got to be kidding. How can that make any sort of sense?
And Canada. I hate that map of the US and Burma. The US uses metric as it is part of customary units anyway. I also wish metric was base 12 or 16.
OMG! This! I wish our numbering system was base 12 so much! As a species, we're ready to evolve
I never gave any thought to this. Why is base 12 better?
Because it's divisible by 2, 3, 4 and 6, which makes it easier to do fractional values. 10 is only divisible by 2 and 5.
Americans aren't consistent either. 2 liter and similar bottles (and it's not even the same bottle, like they aren't reusing molds or anything, it's just an American 2 liter bottle). Sharp edges and points like on mechanical pencils are in millimeters. So are many nuts and bolts. Stuff like electricity and power are measured in metric units. Generally electronics/computer parts are in metric, the main exception that comes to mind is screen size, which even the rest of the world does in inches (LIKE WTF!?!).
There's plenty of examples of metric units in the daily life of an American.
According to wikipedia: "Some imperial measurements remain in limited use in Malaysia, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and South Africa." - so, not even "some", just one African country, and limited use.
Uh, I've never used inches, nor know anyone who does - a South African
I should've looked it up 🙈 I heard it once and didn't have the countries in mind anymore.
The best part is the US Military and NASA both use metric. I love that fact.
Except for the UI.
During the Apollo program they had very limited computer capacity in the capsule and lander. Computers were huge machines back then and they had to fit one in a spaceship.
The Apollo computers used metric internally for all calculations. Anything shown to the astronauts however was in imperial, as metric was apparently too complicated for astronauts to comprehend. They had to waste precious computer capacity converting to imperial because even astronauts can’t handle anything else.