Change over to Metric

[vdeane]

/quote]Do you ever need that though? I can't see why you would need to.

Oh, yes, I certainly do need to know that kind of thing in my daily life.  We find a recipe that calls for–I don't know, let's say 3.5 cups of beef stock.  Then we go to the store, and find 32-ounce cartons of beef stock.  Is that carton enough?  Should we buy a carton plus a can?  Who the heck knows!

Compare this to metric:  the recipe says 800 mL, the store carries one-liter cartons, we're good to go.

Or you could just eyeball it like the rest of us.

[realjd]

/quote]Do you ever need that though? I can't see why you would need to.

Oh, yes, I certainly do need to know that kind of thing in my daily life.  We find a recipe that calls for–I don't know, let's say 3.5 cups of beef stock.  Then we go to the store, and find 32-ounce cartons of beef stock.  Is that carton enough?  Should we buy a carton plus a can?  Who the heck knows!

Compare this to metric:  the recipe says 800 mL, the store carries one-liter cartons, we're good to go.

Or you could just eyeball it like the rest of us.

That works great with cooking, but not so great with baking.

[hm insulators]

Did you know that there are sixteen ozzes in a lib?

[mgk920]

Did you know that there are sixteen ozzes in a lib?

I thought that there were 12 d in a s and 20 s in a £ (or something like that), at least at one time.

But I do hate it when I see people measuring the lengths of things in minutes and seconds.

Mike

[realjd]

I thought that there were 12 d in a s and 20 s in a £ (or something like that), at least at one time.

But I do hate it when I see people measuring the lengths of things in minutes and seconds.

Mike

You mean as in relaying distance by car in drive time? I'm guilty of that. I know instinctively how long of a drive various places are but have to think about the distance in length units, D=RT and all.

As for British money, I have enough problems with their unnatural 20p coins (not 25? really?), I can't imagine how confused I'd be if they still were using £sd currency.

[kphoger]

Worrying about food/cooking is a bit moot since almost all packaging displays both measurements. Most measurement devices in the kitchen use both, and have graduated markings as well.

But recipes do not.  So, yeah, the carton on the shelf is measured in both customary units and metric units, but neither one is cups, which is what the recipe would call for.  No big deal, you just convert cups to fluid ounces.  Except nobody knows how many fluid ounces are in 3.5 cups (without doing some serious brain exercises.....except for J N Winkler).  However, if the recipe were stated in, say, mL or dL, and the carton were labelled in L, then it would be no problem to do the conversion without brain exercises.  Multiples of 10, not random skips between 2, 4, and 8.

/quote]Do you ever need that though? I can't see why you would need to.

Oh, yes, I certainly do need to know that kind of thing in my daily life.  We find a recipe that calls for—I don't know, let's say 3.5 cups of beef stock.  Then we go to the store, and find 32-ounce cartons of beef stock.  Is that carton enough?  Should we buy a carton plus a can?  Who the heck knows!

Compare this to metric:  the recipe says 800 mL, the store carries one-liter cartons, we're good to go.

Or you could just eyeball it like the rest of us.

That works great with cooking, but not so great with baking.

Not to mention that, even in stovetop cooking, having just slightly too little of something can turn out disastrous, especially when that something is a liquid.  For example, you ever put too little water in the pan of rice?  I eyeball a lot of things in the kitchen, but I always make sure to have plenty on hand just in case I'm off.

[realjd]

Not to mention that, even in stovetop cooking, having just slightly too little of something can turn out disastrous, especially when that something is a liquid.  For example, you ever put too little water in the pan of rice?  I eyeball a lot of things in the kitchen, but I always make sure to have plenty on hand just in case I'm off.

Rice is a special case. I can't think of much else, even stovetop cooking, where the quantities must be exact, even for liquids. It usually has to be close, but not 100% precise.

As for conversions, I tend to have no problem with fluid measurements. 8 ounces is a cup, 16 ounces is a pint (easily remembered for a beer snob like me), and 32 ounces is a quart. For more difficult measurements, Google's built in unit conversion functionality is extremely useful (go search for "1.5 barrels in decaliters" for instance). My problem is typically that dry ingredients like flour are sold by weight but usually measured by volume for cooking. This would be a problem even with metric.

[mgk920]

The problem with the 'dry' ingredients in baking, especially flour, is that when totally dry, they can still change their volume by over 10% depending on how they are handled - that is why they are best weighed.  Baking is an exact science.

In an article that I read several years ago it said that one of the very first things that European bakers learn when just starting out is the ratio of flour to water in making bread - it is two parts flour to one part water by mass.  Metric measures makes that a snap due to 1 mL of water being one gram in mass.  Thus, if you have an unknown amount of flour on hand and you want to use it all up, you simply weigh the flour and then add correct amount of water.  If there is, let's say, 2.46 kg of flour on hand, you then need to add 1.23 liters of water and you're on your way.



Now, OTOH, try scaling a baking recipe up 130% using USCustomary measures.



Mike

[NE2]

Now, OTOH, try scaling a baking recipe up 130% using USCustomary measures.

Huh? I'd much rather multiply 3/8 cup by 1.3 than 88 mL. (And why you'd add on 3/10 rather than 1/4 or 1/3, I have no idea, unless Metric has made you unable to deal with fractions other than tenths.)

[bulkyorled]

Besides its not as if you cant change to metric, make it official and not still use US units for things such as whats been mentioned. You hear Canada, UK, Aus, etc all still say Miles or whatever even if they're not talking to an American or anything.

Expressions such as "a million miles away" are still used ... no one says "a million kilometers away".  Although i found a website advocating that we should change expressions.  I am pro metric conversion but the whole erase from the language is a bit much

Of course.  Conventional units wouldn't, and shouldn't, disappear from the world completely.  Football still has yard lines, even if the official length of football field might be expressed in meters.  Milk can still be sold in pints if you wish, but volume on the carton and in cookbooks would be expressed in mL.  People in American geography class would still be taught that Kansas' township boundaries are expressed in terms of square miles, but properties within those boundaries would still be valued by the hectare; owning a 259-hectare farm instead of a one-section farm doesn't affect your farming practice in the slightest, and you would still talk about the northwest forty with your family and friends.

After all, we still call giving our opinion "putting in our two bits", even though decimal currency was adopted in 1794.

Totally agree. And obviously I meant more than just "a million miles away" haha

[Scott5114]

As for British money, I have enough problems with their unnatural 20p coins (not 25? really?), I can't imagine how confused I'd be if they still were using £sd currency.

But you are ok with $20 bills?

Always wondered why they went with 25¢ for the coin but $20 for the bill. They tried a 20¢ coin at one point but it never took because the quarter was still circulating.

Standard casino chip denominations are 1, 5, 25, 100, 500. In a way this makes somewhat more sense because five chips generally equals the next higher chip (except for the $25s).

[realjd]

As for British money, I have enough problems with their unnatural 20p coins (not 25? really?), I can't imagine how confused I'd be if they still were using £sd currency.

But you are ok with $20 bills?

Always wondered why they went with 25¢ for the coin but $20 for the bill. They tried a 20¢ coin at one point but it never took because the quarter was still circulating.

Standard casino chip denominations are 1, 5, 25, 100, 500. In a way this makes somewhat more sense because five chips generally equals the next higher chip (except for the $25s).

It wasn't a serious complaint. It just always takes a bit of mental adjusting paying for a 45p charge (for instance) with two 20p and a 5p coin instead of a quarter and two dimes. My brain isn't used to counting by 20 for change. FWIW, I regularly hear similar complaints from Brits about how our dimes are not only the same size as their 5p coins but also illogically the smallest coin we have.

[english si]

As for British money, I have enough problems with their unnatural 20p coins (not 25? really?)

We ditched the quarter equivalent on decimalisation. As 5p=1s=12d, 25p would be 5 shillings, which was a crown (and a crown is really a 50c equivalent - Can, Aus, US, etc set dollars at 10s and decimalised the shilling so that 1c was equal to 1.2d. Though not having fixed exchange rates messed about with the exchange rates over time) to fit in better with Europe (Germany had 20pfennig coins, France 20centimes, etc) - and when they had the chance to change, they stuck with it - there's a €0.20 coin, but no €0.25 coin.

We did have the quarter equivalent too - the half-crown, worth 2/6 or 30d.

But we also had the 20p equivalent, the Double Florin (a Florin was two-bob, and worth 10p on decimalisation until they changed the coin size in the 90s), but it didn't catch on as there was still the half-crown, so it was only issued for three years.

I can't imagine how confused I'd be if they still were using £sd currency.

You, probably even now. Brits - at least not now.

The 'confusing'*. period would have extended another 15 years, til the mid-80s (when we abolished the decimal half-penny - so we could basically change it into a de facto £s system with thruppenny bits being quarter-shillings and sixpences being half-shillings) and we'd almost ignore it now, other than, say petrol prices, where it would be 12ths of 1s rather than 10ths of 1d. Given that now our 2p coin is worth less than the 1/2p coin when we abolished it, we'd have abolished it by now, rather than wasted effort on it, if we had the unit of shilling 2.5 times the size to make a nice cut off point. Then again, Canada has finally gotten rid of it's penny (which is roughly equivalent to our decimal half-penny) and there are several Eurozone countries that don't mint smaller than 5c, plus places like France that (a habit dating back to the smaller Franc, which were dime/florin equivalents, so 1 centime was very small) almost always round change to the nearest 5c.

£sd worked when, for centuries, the (few) rich people didn't need to care about d, the poor people didn't usually have to care about £ and only the clerical class needed to use all three and add them up regularly. Then inflation and increased riches meant that more people were using £sd regularly until about 2000, when we would have had no use for anything less than a shilling.

Of course it would be confusing for foreigners to have a base 20 system of currency with the possibility of 1/12s that are rounded to the nearest whole.

*in air quotes as everyone got along with it and many opposed the new system as 'too confusing'. It no doubt was probably confusing to have £sd. But back then we taught our children arithmetic like crazy, so it was like second nature to them from an early age. Most people over 60 is a whizz at arithmetic (dementia not withstanding), those who went to school in the 60s, since the push for metric and who didn't have to deal with a £/s/d economy as by 1971 they were still pre-teen and had little use for pounds (inflation - a pound then was worth rather a lot - perhaps as much as £20 today), the standards have been slipping away. Some of that is, of course, down to the calculator and later the computer. It is, today, a fairly meaningless skill, but if we had kept the once Western Europe-wide £sd currency, we'd have be able to work with it as we'd have kept the skills for it.

[TXtoNJ]

As for British money, I have enough problems with their unnatural 20p coins (not 25? really?), I can't imagine how confused I'd be if they still were using £sd currency.

But you are ok with $20 bills?

Always wondered why they went with 25¢ for the coin but $20 for the bill. They tried a 20¢ coin at one point but it never took because the quarter was still circulating.

The 25¢ coin is more the anomaly in this case. It's a holdover from the old Spanish dollar that was broken into pieces of eight. While the rest of the currency was decimalized into cents and dimes, the Spanish dollar's status as a global currency (legal tender in the US until 1857) had enough of an influence to set the denomination at 1/4 of a US dollar, just as "two bits" were 1/4 of a Spanish dollar.

A 1/5 denomination, such as the Euro 20 cent coin, makes more sense in a decimalized system as it is divisible by 10. Quarters are useful, but they are certainly a throwback to a pre-decimalized era.

[Michael in Philly]

As for British money, I have enough problems with their unnatural 20p coins (not 25? really?), I can't imagine how confused I'd be if they still were using £sd currency.

But you are ok with $20 bills?

Always wondered why they went with 25¢ for the coin but $20 for the bill. They tried a 20¢ coin at one point but it never took because the quarter was still circulating.

Standard casino chip denominations are 1, 5, 25, 100, 500. In a way this makes somewhat more sense because five chips generally equals the next higher chip (except for the $25s).

In pre-Euro Europe (at least the eight or nine countries I was in in the 80s), demoninations of 20 were actually more common than 25, for some reason.

[Michael in Philly]

As for British money, I have enough problems with their unnatural 20p coins (not 25? really?)

We ditched the quarter equivalent on decimalisation. As 5p=1s=12d, 25p would be 5 shillings, which was a crown (and a crown is really a 50c equivalent - Can, Aus, US, etc set dollars at 10s and decimalised the shilling so that 1c was equal to 1.2d. Though not having fixed exchange rates messed about with the exchange rates over time) to fit in better with Europe (Germany had 20pfennig coins, France 20centimes, etc) - and when they had the chance to change, they stuck with it - there's a €0.20 coin, but no €0.25 coin.

We did have the quarter equivalent too - the half-crown, worth 2/6 or 30d.

But we also had the 20p equivalent, the Double Florin (a Florin was two-bob, and worth 10p on decimalisation until they changed the coin size in the 90s), but it didn't catch on as there was still the half-crown, so it was only issued for three years.

I can't imagine how confused I'd be if they still were using £sd currency.

You, probably even now. Brits - at least not now.

The 'confusing'*. period would have extended another 15 years, til the mid-80s (when we abolished the decimal half-penny - so we could basically change it into a de facto £s system with thruppenny bits being quarter-shillings and sixpences being half-shillings) and we'd almost ignore it now, other than, say petrol prices, where it would be 12ths of 1s rather than 10ths of 1d. Given that now our 2p coin is worth less than the 1/2p coin when we abolished it, we'd have abolished it by now, rather than wasted effort on it, if we had the unit of shilling 2.5 times the size to make a nice cut off point. Then again, Canada has finally gotten rid of it's penny (which is roughly equivalent to our decimal half-penny) and there are several Eurozone countries that don't mint smaller than 5c, plus places like France that (a habit dating back to the smaller Franc, which were dime/florin equivalents, so 1 centime was very small) almost always round change to the nearest 5c.

£sd worked when, for centuries, the (few) rich people didn't need to care about d, the poor people didn't usually have to care about £ and only the clerical class needed to use all three and add them up regularly. Then inflation and increased riches meant that more people were using £sd regularly until about 2000, when we would have had no use for anything less than a shilling.

Of course it would be confusing for foreigners to have a base 20 system of currency with the possibility of 1/12s that are rounded to the nearest whole.

*in air quotes as everyone got along with it and many opposed the new system as 'too confusing'. It no doubt was probably confusing to have £sd. But back then we taught our children arithmetic like crazy, so it was like second nature to them from an early age. Most people over 60 is a whizz at arithmetic (dementia not withstanding), those who went to school in the 60s, since the push for metric and who didn't have to deal with a £/s/d economy as by 1971 they were still pre-teen and had little use for pounds (inflation - a pound then was worth rather a lot - perhaps as much as £20 today), the standards have been slipping away. Some of that is, of course, down to the calculator and later the computer. It is, today, a fairly meaningless skill, but if we had kept the once Western Europe-wide £sd currency, we'd have be able to work with it as we'd have kept the skills for it.

Whoa.

I'll have to reread all that once the caffeine's kicked in.  :-)

[formulanone]

Thanks english si for explaining why there seemed to be (essentially) multiple currencies circulating in Great Britain before the 1970s. I never understood why "classes of currency" was ever needed, but that does clear things up...well, somewhat. 

[agentsteel53]

a Florin was two-bob

thruppenny

no, not confusing at all.

which one's the bob again?  and how does that compare to the quid?

it's not the formal system that's confusing... it's all the nicknames!

[Michael in Philly]

^^We do that too, of course.  And to be fair, I don't know of another country that shows the denominations of its coins as "One Dime" or "Quarter Dollar" rather than "10 Cents" or "25 Cents."  An English-speaking person with a brain ought to be able to figure out what a quarter dollar is, but even an English-speaking person from outside North America might not know what a dime is.

[agentsteel53]

in order to figure out what a "dime" is, it may help to not be an English speaker!

that said, I'd put "dime" in the same classification of official names as "shilling".  "quid" is more like "buck", as it is in fairly common use.  I'd never heard of "two-bob" before; I'd always thought "bob" was solely used as an uncle in the colloquial!

I think in general, in the US we have a lot fewer commonly agreed-upon colloquial terms for money.  most people know what a "grand" is, but talking about "Benjamins" puts you squarely in the "I pay too much attention to MTV and advertisements" demographic, and anyone who speaks of "quatloons" is a loon.

[english si]

which one's the bob again?  and how does that compare to the quid?

Bob was a shilling, quid is a pound.

Thruppenny bit and the decimal-tuppence is fairly obvious - three-penny and two-pence mushed together.

it's not the formal system that's confusing... it's all the nicknames!

Yea, like the States is immune from that - dime, nickel, penny, quarter, buck, sawbuck...

IIRC, florin (2s/10p) was written on the coin, just like the dime. No helpful number on them.

You are quite right though, it was both confusing for tourists, and for those of us looking back. I certainly struggled to get used to dimes when visiting the states, especially as smaller than a nickel, the same colour, but worth more. There's other niggles - all coins circular (our 20p and 50p are heptagonal), no common half-dollar coins, etc.

[agentsteel53]

Thruppenny bit and the decimal-tuppence is fairly obvious - three-penny and two-pence mushed together.

it must be the accent - I absolutely did not catch that "three" rhymes with "two"!  I had been visualizing "thru-penny", which made me imagine a very, very cheap fare on a particular New York toll road.

You are quite right though, it was both confusing for tourists, and for those of us looking back. I certainly struggled to get used to dimes when visiting the states, especially as smaller than a nickel, the same colour, but worth more. There's other niggles - all coins circular (our 20p and 50p are heptagonal), no common half-dollar coins, etc.

the other thing is - in the US, you can pretty much get away without needing to look at coins.  Whenever I get any, I simply file them away, and after several years I am shocked to find I have over six hundred dollars awaiting redemption.

I think I have about eighty or ninety pesos (about $6) of Mexican coins in my car, and another similar amount on my nightstand. 

in Europe, I was starting to do the same thing before noting that a two-euro (helpfully marked!) coin actually had substantial value - so on the last several days of the trip I made it a point to start spending them! 

I've never spent British money, but I imagine that the paper is quite intuitive, as it is with all the countries I've been in.  I cannot offhand think of a system where the paper currency isn't easy to file and sort and come up with the right quantity as needed.

[mgk920]

And nowadays, with the inflation and the passage of time, quarters are the smallest USA coins left with any legitimate use in commerce anymore.  The smaller coins (1¢, 5¢ and 10¢) are now only really useful for parsing state and local sales taxes.

Since 1933 (when the USA was taken off of the gold standard) we have had about an 80:1 inflation in real terms (the Feds claim less), adding nearly two full 'zeroes' to the Dollar - the 1¢ coin in the 1910s and 1920s had just slightly less real buying power than the $1 note does today.  Think on the lines of a quarter then being worth about $20 in today's money.  Most everyday commerce into the mid-20th century was done using coins ONLY (1¢ through 50¢ - and half-dollars were more common in circulation than quarters) and to have even one $1 banknote in the wallet was to be carrying 'real' money around.



Mike

[agentsteel53]

assuming that the price of gold is constant and the dollar is what is changing, the 80:1 is roughly correct.  ($20.67/oz to $1580/oz or whatever it is at any given moment.)

that said, other items have not gone up by a multiple of 80.

a lot of this is due to costs diminishing because of technological innovation (Model T: $600, versus about $15000 for a modern compact car: 1/3 the gold price for a significantly more feature-filled vehicle.)

are there any items which have gotten cheaper, but not because their actual costs have gone down? 

as a related exercise: gold was in the low $300s in 2004.  in eight years, have we really had a 5:1 inflation?  intuitively, I feel like it's more like 2:1, based on the products I buy regularly.  beer's about twice as much... 

[realjd]

Thruppenny bit and the decimal-tuppence is fairly obvious - three-penny and two-pence mushed together.

it must be the accent - I absolutely did not catch that "three" rhymes with "two"!  I had been visualizing "thru-penny", which made me imagine a very, very cheap fare on a particular New York toll road.

You are quite right though, it was both confusing for tourists, and for those of us looking back. I certainly struggled to get used to dimes when visiting the states, especially as smaller than a nickel, the same colour, but worth more. There's other niggles - all coins circular (our 20p and 50p are heptagonal), no common half-dollar coins, etc.

the other thing is - in the US, you can pretty much get away without needing to look at coins.  Whenever I get any, I simply file them away, and after several years I am shocked to find I have over six hundred dollars awaiting redemption.

I think I have about eighty or ninety pesos (about $6) of Mexican coins in my car, and another similar amount on my nightstand. 

in Europe, I was starting to do the same thing before noting that a two-euro (helpfully marked!) coin actually had substantial value - so on the last several days of the trip I made it a point to start spending them! 

I've never spent British money, but I imagine that the paper is quite intuitive, as it is with all the countries I've been in.  I cannot offhand think of a system where the paper currency isn't easy to file and sort and come up with the right quantity as needed.

British paper money is quite easy. The green one buys me a beer plus a handful of coins. A brown one buys me two beers plus a bigger handful of coins. Purple ones are the best though because they can often be turned into 5 whole beers!

Other than my difficulty with 20p vs. 25p., and the fact that their 5p coins could pass as an American dime, the coins aren't too difficult to get used to. It's not as easy (for an American) as Canada is where the coins are practically interchangeable with ours, but it's not bad. My big problem is the same one I have in every other country without single bills - I never remember to pull out coins for purchases over £1. I'll burn through £100 of bills fairly quickly, ending up with £25 worth of £1 and £2 coins.

I will say that I have a much easier time with coins in England than I do in places like The Bahamas where their currency is fixed 1:1 with USD, is used interchangeably, is goofy shaped, and includes oddities like 15¢ square coins. There I often end up just dumping a handful of coins on the counter and let the shopkeeper sort it out.

I know "buck" is fairly common in Canada as well as the US as slang for dollars. Does that extend to other dollar currency areas like Australia?