In the United States and some other countries, a gallon is equal to 128 fluid ounces or 3.785 liters. Meanwhile, in the United Kingdom and some Commonwealth countries, a gallon is equal to 160 fluid ounces or 4.546 liters.
But wait there’s more! The US also has the “food labelling” fluid ounce which is not the customary one, instead it’s exactly 30mL.
I mean, there are a million things, that do not need universal standards, but standards are imposed anyway.
But where one standard would be really helpful, like scientific values, we have many. And some people would rather go to prison, than adopt. (I think that happened in the UK, after they force switched to metric)
1 ft = exactly 30.48 cm; One pound is exactly 0.45359237 kilograms as in 0.453592370000000000… kilograms.
At no point was it ever illegal do display the old units. There were no martyrs; there were only idiots.
(Quite normally for my age in the UK I think, I'm familiar with both metric & Imperial measurements, but generally fairly bad at converting. Except I know 568ml = 1 (UK! Not US!) pint - for which I can thank my alma mater Imperial and its student bars: Metric, and FiveSixEight. I could probably guess effectively at lbs and kg from butter/flour. Of course I know 2.54cm = 1". A yard is 'a bit' less than 1m. It's the bigger ones that seem more obscure/are harder to work out from familiarity I suppose.)
1. I think with liters, people typically reverse the relationship so it's liters/100km. Which is a much more intuitive unit.
2. If you're buying gas in liters, I think it'd be a lot easier to switch over to using liters for efficiency. You may not be able to compare easily to other vehicles, but you'd be able to estimate your personal fuel more easily.
I think it's the other way around. Distance per quantity of fuel is the intuitive measurement that humans understand and can relate directly to how much fuel they purchase. It could be argued that it is less intuitive when comparing two cars, however. Although better MPG is still strictly better, which is about the level of detail most non-nerds care about.
Only since the 1958 International Yard and Pound Agreement tho. Before then the US used what is now known as the Survey Mile, which is why the survey mile exists (and survived until this year).
Ironically, we live in a world where all the diversity that used to exist and has been destroyed by these zealots for corporate oligarchs, could have easily been dealt with through computers. We could have had cross-referencing systems that automatically and seamlessly work with any unit of nature, but instead the authoritarian impulses have only gotten worse over there last 100 years and actual, real diversity among humans in every domain is critically endangered.
If someone needs a concrete example, the EU (and the template, the post Civil War US) is a good one. It’s authoritarian, illegitimste by any reasonable definition of democracy, is trying to eradicate and stamp out diversity in Europe, a place that used to have the highest density of human diversity for essentially all of human existence. Millennia of diversity is currently being eradicated in Europe (in America it has largely succeeded) and the EU and its authoritarian dictatorial bureaucratic machine is the primary culprit. While you and your smug and self/righteous indignation about the use of liters is a warrior in the eradication of diversity on the whole planet. As you said, “Everyone else just uses liters” … there will be no diversity once you are done.
There'll be plenty of diversity left, trust me.
The entire world uses metric units apart from America, Libya and Myanmar. https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/countries...
What I absolutely love about this fact is that America is still using British Imperial units. After literally having a war over whether or not the US should be independent of British rule, you're still holding on to our measuring system despite the rest of the world moving on.
They were standardized separately, and vary slightly to considerably from the British Imperial counterparts.