I think we've been had

Britain hardly had a leg to stand on. They got stuck halfway through making the switch. Still use miles in their cars, feet for height, etc.

It's old people. They vote and don't like change.
Everyone in the UK under 40 never used imperial in their education, but everything is still imperial.
Even stuff that's not supposed to be. Milk is sold in pints but labelled in ml. Sometimes it's litres because these are smaller. Timbre is all sold in a metric equivalent, but it isn't consistent. You don't know if the piece you've had delivered is 2.4m or 2.44m. Rulers have both metric and imperial, unless you pay extra for a single system - which makes them harder to use.
The worst thing is recipes, many recipes are imperial online because of the USA. American imperial measurements aren't the same as UK ones.
It is all driven by ignorance. The royal family (TV show) summed this ignorance up best. They complained it took them longer to get to the destination because their sat nav was in kilometres and there's more kilometres than miles so everything is further away.
- I'm European but I have a set of US cups in my kitchen because most recipes are in these stupid American measurements.
- We use US Standard, not Imperial. Americans took Imperial and changed the measurements but kept the names, because "fuck you, Britain" but "fuck you even more, everyone else!"
- This sounds worse than just using imperial
Don't forget about stones for body weight
- I fucking love the psychotic concept of using "stone" as a measurement, even though a real stone can weight anywhere from milligrams to ... thousands of tonnes?
  It's like saying you weigh 7 water.
It's generally good to use feet for height. When I use butt for height I'm like a meter shorter.

Dont the British weigh things with rocks or some dumb shit?

They're actually finely calibrated stones. For instance, my weight is 13 stones and a packet of gravel.
- I lost twelve gravel and a teaspoon of sand this week.
- Beard, ma'am? Finest in Jerusalem
- 13 stone and and a pywackett of gravel or twelve stone and three hands?
  Use your words, sheesh.
The British have a perfectly logical system that results in us buying fuel by the litre, measuring speed in miles per hour, and measuring fuel economy in miles per gallon. We are doing just fine thank you very much.
- Knowledge is power. Using all of the knowledge at once is surely the most powerful.
When I was at university, my friends and I used beer for currency. Somehow it was easier to say "you owe me two beers" than say "you owe me 100 kr"

This but unironically.
- True we don’t deserve better measurements
- I'm on team inch. I think the metric system has been pushed by Big Socket to sell more wrenches. If they made a meter equal a yard we could be bilingual and use the most appropriate system for the job.
Lmao

FYI: The US doesn't use Imperial, they use US Customary. Volumes are different. Troy weights are usually called Troy (ounces).

Is that supposed to be better?
- No it's worse, because they use the same names for different volumes and weights.
- A standard which is a "newer" version of an old standard, when a new objectively better standard already exists to replace it.
  You tell me.
- Just more confusing!

Making fun for STILL using it. If our navy would navigate by the stars at night, it would be laughed at, right? And rightly so. ;)

GPS can be jammed, try jamming stars.
- Who would win:
  A billion, billion unfathomably massive fusion reactions
  Some steamy bois ☁️🌥
- Urban areas with huge light pollution: "and I took that personally"
- Amazon and Musk are working on it.
- Starlink: hold my Xitter handle
- Actually, don't. The pollution would kill us all.
- "That's no moon."
Tbh that sounds like a fun project for an app or something, as a backup to gps in case it's jammed. Just lay your phone on the ground, take a long exposure picture and then use the phones time to calculate where you are. Might need to take the accelerometer into account if the ground isn't flat.
- Fighter jets have automatic star navigation to augment their GPS navigation features. It's more than a fun project, it's military technology.

Nah, the brits have it even worse, I don't think even they know what system they use. Like the US just uses the imperial system but brits use like every system randomly plus some stuff that no one else uses, like boulders or some caveman shit like that.

Also brits got like nothing left to make fun of at this point: They fucked their healthcare system bad enough they may as well be in the US, they got 2 viable parties that are even more the same than the US and they left the one thing that kept the country economically relevant to name a few things.

Depends what you mean by fucked up. Long waits for some NHS treatments, but if I get any kind of serious injury like cuts or broken bones, it'll be seen in A&E (Accident & Emergency) at the hospital, they obviously treat the more serious injuries first, but I've never waited longer than 4 hours - and that was on a Saturday night about ten years ago, with a minor cut than only needed 5 stitches or so...
As a kid, my broken arm and the few times I needed stitches, it was sorted pretty much straight away or with an hour or two wait. That's probably doubled or tripled nowadays.
Mental health turnaround is not great, as that's through my doctor (the NHS). Although I got treatment for depression a couple of years back, meds (Sertaline) and referral to therapy, after a week or so waiting for an appointment and answering a few waves of questionnaires. A couple of months later, after a lengthy conversation with a medical health triage nurse (which was just a random follow up call - that lasted an hour!), I went on an 18 month waiting list for the ADHD test, and about the same for ASD(Autism Spectrum Disorder) as well.
Not great, but they're understandably swamped with the spike of mental illness, or people becoming aware of it anyway, after covid and the lockdowns.
Still waiting on the NHS for the ASD diagnosis, but I actually ended up going private for my ADHD, that was ~£800, was seen in a week, and the meds for that was £100 a month for Elvanse(Vyvanse in the US). I was able to transfer back to my GP after a few months though, so it's just the standard prescription price of £9.65 / month, which is much better.
Other than that last paragraph, everything else was entirely free... so, nah, I don't reckon our health care system is as fucked as yours and we certainly don't have it "even worse"!
Edit: typo's and explaining a few acronyms!
- I'm in a similar boat to you regarding mental healthcare. The reason we don't complain as much as we ought to is because we don't have much to compare. Our system looks equitable next to America but that one really is the worst. Our healthcare is orders of magnitude worse than our European neighbours, in almost every metric. In Slovakia you don't need to beg them to see a psychiatrist and wait months or years while the NHS gaslights you. You say, I feel bad and I want to speak to a specialist. That's it. You get your treatment.
  British society is breaking down. We would rather wave flags for an ultra privileged royal family or invade sovereign nations or build aircraft carriers, than take care of our own health. These people are bigoted and hypocritical morons who chose to leave the EU, even though this is the only institution that is safeguarding their rights.
- I'm from Estonia so my healthcare is fine. Mental health waiting times are on the longer side (longest I saw was 6 months) in less populated areas here but private option for that is like 20 euros per session and meds are still free.
  Didn't you guys have like a day of waiting time for ambulances at some point? I remember seeing that in the foreign news.
The US is officially metric, they signed the metre convention 149 years ago
- We would have probably been using metric from the start, but pirates stole our kilogram.
- Within the US government it’s still all metric measures, has been since Carter, but Reagan made a social cause and used it against the Dems (along with a secret “guns for hostages” negotiation) to win the presidency. And it’s been downhill ever since.
With metric and imperial though, you're damned right.
We use both systems pretty randomly... personally, I far prefer the metric system, but I have a much better idea of how far a mile is compared to a kilometre. Which makes little sense, as a metres and kilometres are so much more logical than miles and fucking yards!
- There is an argument to made that very few people care about the actual distance anything is from themselves anymore. What they are about is "how long will it take to get there".
  You very probably have little to no clue what the actual distance from your front steps to your favorite grocery or pub. But you DO know how long it takes to get there.
We use metric apart from with roads
- How tall are you, and how much do you weigh?
- And milk and beer
Aye, but at least we're not American

Wait til you find out who taught America the word "soccer".

Soccer was an abbreviation used by posh people. Associate football -> sociate -> soccer. Much like rugby is called ruggers by the same group of people today. It was an informal term.
Association football was popular amongst the working class in the UK, who didn't use the same types of abbreviations. So it wasn't referred to as soccer by the them. When radio/TV became common the presenters wouldn't use abbreviations like soccer and so it was referred to as Association Football or Football.
In the US the posh abbreviation took over, likely because many British travellers to the US would be posh and not working class. At least the ones traveling for leisure and taking part in sports activities. Working class would mostly be immigrants and wouldn't be brushing shoulders with those in sports media.
American call the rugby like sport, American Football because it is played on foot and not horse. It would also share a common ancestry of completely moving a ball from one place to another on foot, like football and rugby.

The US doesn't use imperial units, though. The US customary units share names with imperial units, but they are significantly different.

They're still stupid
- Yeah
Of course they are. I expect the number of furlongs in a whatsit has changed at least every week. Who could even pretend to remember the actual values?
- Furlongs is a different measuring system all together. Same with miles and inches. We don't convert between those measurements because it's not necessary.
I was about to say. Wikipedia has an overview.
TIL! Got to be extra careful when doing conversion then!
- That's why you see units like "US cup" instead of just "cup" when doing conversions in a lot of places.
To add to that, US customary is a collection of measurement systems with different purposes. Most of the jokes about the US measurements are about the "silly" units like furlongs and acres and whatnot but those are either not at all part of the US customary system or are used to measure different things and are not converted between. Like, there is no reason to measure distance in inches when miles do fine. Anything using precision use a different system altogether or a variation on us customary that is often favored over metric for precision. Not that US customary is better than any other system, just it's not really as bad as people make it out to be. It's perfectly serviceable and changing away from it is not really the top of the priority list for this country.
- Remember the time NASA burnt up $200MM in the Martian atmosphere because some chucklehead was using pound-seconds? Maybe let's sort out shit out.

Truly the long game on that joke! Well done, ya got us.

But the UK still uses imperial. I remember playing euro truck sim and being annoyed that the road signs don't match the speed limit shown in the GPS. I first thought this was a bug. Then I remembered that I was in UK and not the Netherlands where I picked up the delivery.

UK is a conplete chaos between the two. You buy liters of milk but gallons of gas. Speeds are in miles per hour. Close distances are in meters, longer ones in miles. I have seen weight both in grams and in pounds. And then the currency is even called pound.
"How many pounds does one pound of apples cost, sir?"
- It's so much worse than anyone outside of the UK can imagine. Milk and beer come in pints but water and wine come in litres (actually, wine and liquor sometimes comes in centilitres which is actually worse) . Most fuel pumps show you the quantity in litres but we still measure speed in miles per hour and efficiency in miles per gallon.
  I know my own weight in kilos but my height in feet. When I go to the barbers I ask for a one mill on the sides and an inch off the top. I try and run a 5k every now and again but could never do a marathon.
  Then there's the generation split. I'm of that weird generation where I'm caught in the middle of older teachers knowing imperial better but trying to teach metric in school.
  My parents always used imperial so I learned some of that early on but then learned metric in school. Went to engineering college where they taught me all the more advanced metric before going to work at a company that almost exclusively uses imperial (thank you American aerospace for that one)
  Shit, even our kettles can't seem to decide on imperial cups or just guessing how big the average mug is. My kettle has both cups and millilitre gradiations on it.
  And don't get me started on single, double, king and queen beds! Turns out there's a euro standard and they're not the same as our standard! You can buy a double sheet that's closer to fitting a queen size bed!
  Idek what's going on at this point lol
- how many pounds of gas does it take to drive 1 kilofoot?
- And they use stone (14 pounds) to measure body weight.
- Canada is a bit of a mess too, although different. We never really use miles, but we do use feet and inches and pounds pretty regularly. The construction industry is a real mess in particular because so many things are measured in either imperial or metric units
- Holy shit. I'm gladdened to learn that someone may be more fucked than us. Today is a first: I am no longer from the most shamed people.
- Nah, you buy petrol in litres, but mileage is calculated in miles per gallon. Which is much worse
- even better is measuring shit in stone.
  no one knows what that means outside of blighty mate, no one's ever fucking heard of stone. it's so hilarious.

Any excuse to take the piss out of the Yanks is fine by me.

Any excuse to take the piss out of the Yanks is fine by me.
So I take it that you approve of catheters then? /s
They usually give it away.

its this EXACT same thing but with soccer and football, granted there is actual history there, im going to ignore it because it's funnier that way.

europe created the term soccer, and then got rid of it, and then took up football, so the US started using soccer, because it had already used football, for well, football. Shocker i know. And so now we still use soccer, but they use football.

This is true only in the vaguest sense.
"Europe" didn't invent the term soccer. A specific group of people in England did.
Those people were upper class posh boys, the same ones who call rugby "rugger". They are not the people who support football today or made football what it is around the world.
If you can't tell, it's an obvious nickname for something. The equivalent of one nation deciding to exclusively call basketball "shootin' hoops".
- "Hoops" is an objectively better name for the sport ever since we got rid of the baskets.
- Looks like the name is far more confusing than that. Apparently, 'football' used to mean multiple types of games, soccer started out as 'association football,' and then a British public school took 'association' and turned it into 'asoccer,' which spread to Oxford and became common there and then everyone else started calling it 'soccer' but then they dropped 'soccer' in favor of just 'football' except in countries which already had a football, which was sometimes the same as rugby.
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Association_football#Name
- why did you have to ruin my funny with logic and reason?
  jokes aside i realize it's a little more complex than i let on, but it's the same spirit as the original post so meh.
Doesn't change the fact that football makes more sense and that while the British did come up with soccer literally every country uses something like football.
- this also doesnt change the fact that if we called football football and football football we would be confusing football with football, and football with football, instead of having two succinct names that are clearly identifiable.
  And even then most words don't make very much sense. It's just english.
- Except we came up with another game we called football so we can't exactly change the name of that game so soccer can be renamed
Hand egg

At least americans dont use stone, or fucking hands, for measurement

We still use hands for exactly one measurement, the height of a horse
- Something like 14 hands tall is what seperates horses from ponies.
But feet are fine?
You will find "Hands" still being used as a specialty measurement of how tall a horse is. And I think they measure at the front shoulder. But that is, I think, the only time you might hear it.
For the curious, 1 Hand = 4"/~100mm For example - The mare stood 15 hands tall.

Are they actually using metric though? Last time I was in London airport I wasn't so sure.

Depends what you're measuring. Also our imperial units are slightly different, and lots have variations depending on what's being measured.
Get britished
- At least our pints are bigger.

Literally no reason not to use metric, idc who or where you are

There is a reason. When you grow up with people around you using imperial units to describe things, you think in terms of it. If you tell me 10 ft., I can picture that in my head, I have an idea of how much that is in real terms. If you tell me 10m, I have no mental idea of how much that is, even if I can convert it. It’s like a language you grow up speaking, versus one you learn later in life.
I do think metric the sole system used in schools, to be honest.
- That's true, but it's also a double edged sword: you can easily learn metric just by switching to it.
  Try setting a weather widget on your phone to only show you Celsius and don't convert it to Fahrenheit, over time you will get an intuitive understanding of what feels cold to you.
  The biggest block to learning a new system is insulating yourself with conversions IMO, imagine trying to learn a new language by just having everyone speak into Google translate
- Plenty of people in Canada had no trouble switching back when we did.
- The good thing with metric though is it's easier to visualise other measurements once you know one of them, cause you just know that each other measurement is just a multiple or division of the one you know. Like if you know roughly how long a centimetre is then you can take a good estimate of how long a meter is knowing that it's 100cm
Literally no reason not to drive on the right side of the street as well but maybe it does matter where you are.
- While I don't disagree with that, that's just a convention. Metric is inherently superior, solves issues that other systems have and is used by, well basically the whole world.
Counterpoint: most imperial units use only one syllable. It's a mistake that we let scientists name things.
Please explain to me why I should use metric when:
My car uses imperial
the weather channels use imperial
the news networks use imperial
My entire country, which takes up about half a continent, ALL JUST USES IMPERIAL
??????
- The funny part is we switch to metric when it's science
- The question isn't why you should use it, but rather why all these things you've listed are still using it.
  We all know that transition isn't easy, but being proud of using the inferior system is weird.

Everyone makes fun of the US for using imperial, but nobody makes fun of Liberia and Myanmar for doing the exact same thing.

At least they don't speak Fahrenheit.

"You don't often think of those other two as having their shit together."
--Sterling Archer
Burma is switching away. Liberia... who knows. That place is almost as fucked up as the US.
- Good to know.

retains a currency called pounds

Iirc a ship was carrying the metric standards to the US in like 1790 and sank and they just said fuck it

Which other colonies use imperial?

Myanmar and Liberia.
Liberia exists because of Americans who didn't love the idea of freed former slaves in northern states having the right to vote (or rights in general). So they shipped these former slaves back to Africa so they could have their own country. Liberia is the second oldest black republic (Haiti came first). They just kinda kept using US customary units once they got there.
No idea why Myanmar uses US units.
- I mean, Myanmar was a british colony… basically they fucked up everything, everywhere.
- TIL thanks!
Samoa I believe
- TIL thanks

In the meantime to "take advantage of Brexit" it will be possible to sell wine by the pint... A push to go back to the imperial system was axed though. Maybe brexiters should move to the US if they like the imperial system so much.

Yeah, how long do you think Jake Mogg would last in the USA?

use English as an official language for EU Brexit

USA should have switched to metric just because they are pals with France.

To be fair - makes fun of them for being the only one that still uses it

The UK still uses imperial for things. For example, the UK buys gasoline in liters but measures the efficiency of the cars by miles per gallon. They also use miles to measure distance for driving. They measure people's weights by stone but only one of the various stone measurements.
Personally, I don't think the UK has any room to make fun of anyone using imperial units.
- I've heard one (of many) caveats in buying an English-made car is the sizes of nuts and bolts when working on it.
- Canada is equally bad. My favorite is air temperature is Celsius but water temperature is Fahrenheit.
Myanmar and Liberia also use it!
- I think even Myanmar is moving away from the old units and to metric https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myanmar_units_of_measurement#Adoption_of_SI_(metric)_system
- Really? 'Cause you never think of those other two as having their shit together.

no backsies

Are there really Britons doing this? I lived there from birth until just shy of my 30th and I've never witnessed it. I've seen plenty of people make fun of Americans for getting the British flag wrong, though, I'm suddenly reminded.

No, not at all. My best guess is that the OP is confused with mainland Europe, who actually do use metric a lot more... the UK uses a mix of imperial and metric.

I still use inches, but I've switched to using sixtieths of an inch as the only subdivision.

1-45/60" is what boring people call 1-3/4"

This post was a great laugh, I'm thankful for you OP!

Yeah, you're right man, who pronounces wodder like that?
I'm gonna calm down with some paasta with toonafish and 'erbs, and watch the ardic circle huvvercraft ternament!
- Nailed it
Are you OK? Did a British hurt you?
IT'S GOING TO BE OKAY