The Brexit thread

[Mr. Dazzle]

Oh boy....centimetres.....I have an irrational hatred of the unit too!

[DefTrap]

. No doubt you have examples.

Sorry buddy but too easy, and surprised anyone would defend it tbh. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/0 ... s-freedom/

Pages of jingoistic twaddle. A couple of facts and a bit of conjecture to enable decades of hatred to pour out. At the end he briefly adds something about China because presumably the editor read it and needed some 'balance'.

[Count Steer]

You've always been able to buy a pound of potatoes, no one ever took that right away from you.

All they ever did was say that everything must be sold in at least the agreed common system. You're free to sell ij other units too, but you must at alwayd show the common system (i.e. metric) as well. I'd have thought the need for a universal national standard system everyone knows is fair.

Only the daily fail ever tried to tell anyone you're not allowed to show prices in lbs too.

I buy 12oz of fish at the fishmonger and the young guy gets a fish - cod, smoked haddock, whatever, weighs it on his metric scales and then cuts it. Gets it completely wrong every time. So, I started asking in metric. Gets a fish, weighs it, cuts it. Completely wrong every time.

The old guy in the shop could do it in baht, because he knows what a typical 12oz/1lb etc looks like.

Being old school I weigh myself in stones/pounds/ounces. Tried to do a little spreadsheet calculating rolling weight loss. God's teeth!
Also being old school we had to do Imperial, MKS, cgs...SI, the works. At uni we had a physics lecturer of great age who said we shouldn't be scared of units so he had us calculating the emf developed by a 20m metal mast travelling NW through the earths magnetic field at 1200 leagues per fortnight or some such.

I note that the swivel-eyed brigade that so loved little Willy Hague and his 'Save the pound' antics, weren't adding 'and the shillings and the pence!'

[Mr. Dazzle]

I run in km but drive in miles. In 5 foot 11 but my scales say I'm 74kg too. My 34 inch trousers are a bit big but my 2 litre engine is just the right size.

Point is, no one has ever banned you from using imperial units. All they have done is say you must also make the common standard available*. We have legally enforced weights and measures to primarily to prevent confusion and to make things fair, I don't know why you'd object to having the same system as most of the rest of the world.

Well, I do know why you'd object, but it has nothing to do with the relative merits of any one system. I have no doubt whatsoever that people came up with all sorts of "reasonable" arguments as to why the foot shouldn't have been standardised a few hundred years ago.

*hence why cars in the UK talk about BHP and mpg, but in the small print they always mention kW and litres/km too. The latter is the standard but the former is allowed to appear front and centre

[Count Steer]

Bbbut, I demand the right to buy 'half a dozen' eggs.


Oh.


Well, in that case, I demand that they have a cute little lion on.

[Mr. Dazzle]

Its the 15 egg boxes which get me...seems like such an odd number and I can't explain why. Presumably they're for the builders who have a 3 egg omelette every morning.

[slowsider]

Kicked them out??? Of the supposed 3 million in the UK at the time of the vote, 5 million have applied and been given the right to stay.

Didn't The Lord say 'treat thy neighbour as thy friend', not 'seek to exclude them in the hope of a gaining a small advantage for yourself''?

Very few wanted to exclude them, quite a lot of people wanted to stop rapacious UK industries exploiting foreign workers by paying minimum wage in the UK (which probably sounds like a fortune to an out-of-work Romanian) and then clawing half of it back in 'rent' for sub-standard and often overcrowded accommodation.

Most of the industries bleating about shortage of workers (agriculture, meat processing, care homes, hospitality, truck driving, etc) have used foreign workers to keep wages low, conditions abysmal, and to avoid having to invest in things like training schemes, apprenticeships and career structures.

Yes, there are problems that will bite all of us, but in 20 years time we will hopefully have solved them, and have viable industries that take young people and offer them a decent job, a decent wage, and decent conditions.

All that is predicated on the UK consumer not buying cheap stuff made in China. Good luck with changing that.

[Count Steer]

Very few wanted to exclude them, quite a lot of people wanted to stop rapacious UK industries exploiting foreign workers by paying minimum wage in the UK (which probably sounds like a fortune to an out-of-work Romanian) and then clawing half of it back in 'rent' for sub-standard and often overcrowded accommodation.

Most of the industries bleating about shortage of workers (agriculture, meat processing, care homes, hospitality, truck driving, etc) have used foreign workers to keep wages low, conditions abysmal, and to avoid having to invest in things like training schemes, apprenticeships and career structures.

Yes, there are problems that will bite all of us, but in 20 years time we will hopefully have solved them, and have viable industries that take young people and offer them a decent job, a decent wage, and decent conditions.

They say the winners write the history books. Brexit: a glorious campaign by the magnificent proletariat of Stoke-on-Trent to free the down-trodden east european lorry drivers from the crushing boot of the capitalist running dogs of the English supermarkets and the transport industries.

Bwahahah. You, couldn't make it up.

Oh. You just did.

[Mussels]

Imperial may well have 'evolved' but we don't need to measure in paces, or barleycorns, any more, nor need to divide easily by 2 and by 2 again, or any of that. Because- we have accurate measuring devices and calculations using non metric measurements becomes so quickly retarded, as is so easily demonstrated. Maybe if the world ended, all the measuring devices were destroyed and I needed to quickly build an Ark to sail away from an island of simpletons who were getting on my tits, I might find Imperial measurements more useful.

If only there was a real desire to reinstate something useful and precious it might be a bit more credible. But it's genuinely a lot of old giffers whose only motive is getting back something they've had 'taken'. Truthfully it's just more jingoistic nonsense driven by the likes of the nasty Telegraph, perennial batey opinion 'news' of why we Brits should hate our European cousins.

You forgot the other reason some people don't like the law. It was introduced to stop traders using obscure measurements to confuse customers into paying more than they thought. Without that pubs could start selling beer by the American pint, I know that has its own law but if traders must use a common unambiguous system it wouldn't be needed.

[Mr. Dazzle]

That's been true for centuries though...anyone who's been to Greenwich observatory will have seen the standard measurements on the wall outside for example. They're put there to make sure everyone is playing with a straight bat. Metrifiication is just an extension of that - making sure said bat extends across borders.

All the whining about "imposed from above" is a few years late

[DefTrap]

You forgot the other reason some people don't like the law. It was introduced to stop traders using obscure measurements to confuse customers into paying more than they thought. Without that pubs could start selling beer by the American pint, I know that has its own law but if traders must use a common unambiguous system it wouldn't be needed.

I didn't forget, just that the 'pound police' will be quite happy with 'some apples' even if they haven't got the foggiest whether they've been short changed, so long as they can sit there happily having beaten the French.

[Yambo]

And we got the metre and the kilometre, based on dividing the distance between the equator and the pole by 10 over and over until we got something close to the mile and the yard. I.e. the metric distance measure is based on a quarter of the Earth's circumference.*

Hmmm... a quarter, that's not very decimal, is it?

However, the metric system is great for engineers, scientists and simpletons who get flummoxed by simple arithmetic and can only mange very simple arithmetic.


* Although they didn't measure it accurately so the metre is slightly smaller than it "should" be.

You are so living in the past SL. Everyone knows that things have moved on.

The metre is currently defined as the length of the path travelled by light in a vacuum in 1/299 792 458 of a second.

[Noggin]

Only the daily fail ever tried to tell anyone you're not allowed to show prices in lbs too.

And a ton of other things the fail decided to write about - but think that Johnson was one of the early reporters to write those sort of 'reports/stories' in newspapers. Sells copy but isn't true. One of the reasons I try not to get too involved with the 'news' nowadays

ep 19, 2021 6:57 am

Fuuuuuuuuuuk me, you lot are still arguing over inches vs centimetres.

You can still use the metric system, but if you want to buy a pound of potatoes you can now without it being illegal.
That's all.
You don't even need to argue which is best, you're free to choose which one you want and use that - how the fuck can you turn that into a moan or an argument?

But, funnier than 'just' politics!!

[Noggin]

I measure in mm, inches and metres. My SDad taught me both cos he'd been taught imperial but was changing to metric due to various jobs and because we were learning that at school. What always helps is that a 30 cm ruler is basically 12 inches. So when I talk to someone that doesn't 'get' the value I'm using I can pretty much convert. But in generally - mm for small stuff, metres for big stuff (never did learn yards! Except they are three feet??)

Trying to convert to kms for driving cos most here don't know what a mile is. TBF, I'm rubbish at distances, so just know a mile takes x amount of time at y speed!! LOL. And I'm about the same with kms too

Dress measurements in cms I'm struggling with a bit - the numbers are so much bigger!!

Height I still think of in feet and inches but have to have the conversion in metres/cms to tell anyone medical that wants to know cos they don't understand how tall I am if I say 5' 7!!

Weight - again, I use pounds and stone. But have to be able to translate current weight to metric for medical folks.

I do cook in imperial or metric and quite often mix them. But then, at home I learnt to cook in oz/lbs and at school they used grammes - so I learnt how to convert, roughly but simply!!


I never ever understood the furore about selling in kgs/lbs. As Mr Dazzle says above, you could always sell in both/either - you just had to have the Kg price displayed with the lbs price.

In a country that, in some areas, has old celtic languages on road signs (mostly) as well as the standard 'english', what on earth was the issue with displaying both weight values on produce??

[Mussels]

I never ever understood the furore about selling in kgs/lbs. As Mr Dazzle says above, you could always sell in both/either - you just had to have the Kg price displayed with the lbs price.

In a country that, in some areas, has old celtic languages on road signs (mostly) as well as the standard 'english', what on earth was the issue with displaying both weight values on produce??

Because as well not being able to use apostrophes greengrocers are rubbish at maths but don't want to admit it.

[Mr. Dazzle]

They just need to read a different number on they're scale's

[irie]

You've always been able to buy a pound of potatoes, no one ever took that right away from you.

All they ever did was say that everything must be sold in at least the agreed common system. You're free to sell ij other units too, but you must at alwayd show the common system (i.e. metric) as well. I'd have thought the need for a universal national standard system everyone knows is fair.

Only the daily fail ever tried to tell anyone you're not allowed to show prices in lbs too.

Bit tricky buying a pound of potatoes when "Weighing machines that use pounds and ounces remain illegal", but the below doesn’t make it clear whether that applies only to single scale imperial weighing machines or also to dual scale metric and imperial weighing machines. Not that I care tbh.

https://ukma.org.uk/why-metric/myths/co ... indefinite

[Mr. Dazzle]

Interesting that you didn't choose to mention the previous paragraph...

In September 2007, the European Commission proposed authorising the use of supplementary indications indefinitely which was subsequently adopted and the Directive revised accordingly. This was widely reported as a return to imperial.

So "they" made it permanently OK to use the dual system. So while it may not be explicitly stated, its pretty implicit that that "ban" on imperial only applies to systems which ONLY show imperial. Almost as if they want to make sure everyone has access to a universal agreed system

[Count Steer]

you're still going on about it, multiple pages later moaning and posting...

Et tu Brute.

[Count Steer]

Et tu Brute.

When you're at the zoo, laughing and pointing at the monkeys throwing their own shit at each other, it doesn't make you smell of shit too.

It makes you a bit odd when you climb in with them to tell the to stop though, 'cos then you do get to smell of it too.....and the monkeys are the ones having fun.