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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.

Source: Financial Times

  • nid_do@feddit.de
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    5 months ago

    Let’s not even start with the metric system (used everywhere) and the imperial system (used in the usa and some african countries).

    • OrnateLuna@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      5 months ago

      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

      • Denjin@lemmings.world
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        5 months ago

        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.

      • Overshoot2648@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        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.

      • LANIK2000@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        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.

    • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      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.

      • BorgDrone@lemmy.one
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        5 months ago

        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.