memes

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.

Don't forget about stones for body weight

They're actually finely calibrated stones. For instance, my weight is 13 stones and a packet of gravel.

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.

Is that supposed to be better?

GPS can be jammed, try jamming stars.

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!

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?"

They're still stupid

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?

When you ask a British person how much they weigh and they start talking about rocks

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.

"You don't often think of those other two as having their shit together."

--Sterling Archer

We still use hands for exactly one measurement, the height of a horse