Why are Americans so stupid?

Date format: MM/dd/YY => what is this? It‘s not even in order

Length Units: Inch, Feet, Yard, Mile => good luck trying to convert in in a hurry without a calculator

Cooking recipes: cups, tablespoons, pinches => land of the freedom, especially for measurement errors

Temperature: Fahrenheit. => some dude who thought, „oh this is really hot, lets mark it 100“ and the other day „oh this is really cold, I got the 0 mark, sciene“

Weight: ounces ~ 28.34952 g, ton ~ maybe 907.xx kg, it depends

Time: Americans think the week starts on sunday, so they assume it does so for everyone else (f*** you american developer, designer, I mean you)

Football is football. Everywhere. In. The. World.

Politics: Trump, Weapons, health system, worker rights, ...

God, I hate America and their bs.

Fir date its simple, they say their dates as

December 14 2020

And they just transferred that into the computers.

Yes its a bad format in every way for a computer but they for a long time have been very dominating and never had to adapt.

That date thing really grinds my gears though.

Because "the 15th of December 2020" has to many syllables - it's my working theory.

The others 🤷‍♂️it is America right, they wouldn't be American if they didn't rebel and complicate units of measurements which in them selves are not relational.

@Voxera yeah, but its stupid as they are again the exception to the rule.
If you read the 12.20.2020, you just think „stupid“ but know which date is meant. But then you come across: 01.03.2020. Good luck figuring this out...

I prefer Year month date. Just numbers. I don't care about the separator used (as long as there is one).

As for all the measurements, I blame the brits for their creation and the 'murricans for not changing them.

@C0D4 Isn't that (units) the British Empire's legacy? I'm surprised they are driving on the right side of the road.

Fuck off, sincerely USA.

@netikras I get it, the left hand side is scary, next I'll be shot for saying the world is round 😉

@C0D4 actually there's a connection between the side of the road and nation being naval in the past. Applies to Britain and Japan at least.

They have the brits to blame for their inches and yards. Trump, however, is their own fault.

I agree with most of this, but I actually prefer Fahrenheit for measuring air temperature. It’s more precise, and, at least where I grew up, using Celsius meant you regularly had to deal with negative temperatures

@10Dev do you know you can use smaller numbers than integers with Celsius scale?

And having a negative is useful: temperatures above 0 feel very different compared to below zero because you consist of water and you literally feel freezing.

@iiii I absolutely agree that Celsius is better for anything scientific, but if you’re talking to someone about the weather, you’re not gonna say “it’s 19.4444 degrees outside”, you’re gonna say “its 67 degrees outside”

@10Dev 19.5 is precise enough. People generally don't feel a difference of half a degree or even a whole degree (unless it's from above zero to below zero, which is a special case) so precision more than that is redundant at least and obnoxious at most.

There are less months
Than days and years

I guess

But yeah

**** This ****

The real reason is because science is denounced at pretty much every level of our government.

Jesus and Guns are the authority. Not critical thinking.

Also a minor one is time notation. US prefers AM/PM (12h format) to the point that there are grown full adult people who do not understand 17:00 (24h format) so you have to write it as 5:00 pm. I am ok if you like am/pm more. But not being able to convert between these simple formats is baffling.

Yep, we're totally a monolith. You absolutely nailed it. But I'll bite

- date format: comes from a hundreds of years old government standardisation for military correspondence. Because our government is hundreds of years old, unlike yours. It really shouldn't matter if you grok iso dates and locales

- units: we learn, use and reason in both SI and Imperial, because our way of doing things was standardized before SI existed and we have a massive effort to convert everything, so we live in a mixed mode world until enough old people die. We don't have a problem reasoning in different base systems, 2, 8, 10, 12, 16, 60, etc, so maybe you see it as a problem because your math skills are deficient and you're projecting?

- start of week: again, git gud with locales, it's not really a big deal. Even as a mentally deficient american I have been a lead on systems that serve more than 40 international markets, with nearly twice as many regional localisations. It's really not difficult.

- football: it didn't catch on here, and was brought to us by the british, which they called soccer at the time. The british only stopped calling it soccer 35ish years ago, so, yeah. Bc history

- politics: is specifically precluded from the rules, but if you insist

Johnson, thatcher, franco, hitler, mussolini, brexit, the absymal economic state of eastern europe perpetuated by western europe, rampant anti-islamism, rising nationalism/conservatism, belarus, crimea, failing southern european states unable to do a currency reset becoming serf states to Germany and France by way of the EU monetary body, and the UN who is more than happy to sit around and use the US military as their bulldog so they don't have to fund standing militaries of their own.

God you hate america but are more than willing to overlook ridiculous abuses of power and government overreach because you're triggered by the difference between a dozen, a baker's dozen and a newton metre of who gives a fuck.

@SortOfTested Its not hate (at least not for me). Its more of a series of small annoying things I have to deal with.

Also, the political issues rampant in US are just as bad so I don't understand the point you are trying to make... everybody sucks I guess? 😀

@arekxv
Your opinion ignores reality. You're complicit or benefitting from at least half of things you complain about. Our medical system subsidizes your access to drugs and pays for all the testing. Our military effectively is the military for europe, but the member nations have yet to sign a resolution banning it's action in europe. You buy the shit out of our jets, missiles and drones. You can't throw stones when you're complicit.

As for Trump. We voted the asshole out. Most people didn't vote for it the first time. But you don't seem to care about that.

We've fought to reform the electoral college for 50 years. We've been fighting for nationalized healthcare for 50 years. We've been fighting for abolition since before we were formed. Like most remnants of british imperialism, we began and largely remain at least 2 different countries by social interest.

The comments you guys make, are condescending from a superficial understanding of a complex situation. None of you even know what it's like to try and change a government that has 250 years of precedent. We are late stage democracy, even the greeks knew what that means.

It's indeed annoying, especially the dates and temperature. Given what I've seen it would quite hard for them to adapt to what everyone else uses.

@qwwerty a pretty questionable statement considering that ALL countries on american continent use metric except for US.

@ostream
Lawl "23." Bit disingenuous considering we just pulled 700 troops out of somalia, and have had between 700 and 5000 troops there for nearly 30 years. Not to mention having to handle and pay for most of lybia, syria (which russia and china vetoed), and the UN authorized regime changes across the balkans over the same period.

Don't forget to also ignore the 25% of peacekeeping the US funds directly not including troops and equipment. The US has contributory arrears because UN was using it as a blank check in the 90s, which led to a max contribution limit to be added when we hit 30% of overall contribution.

(Holy shit, actual numbers!)
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/...

And then the humanitarian side, where we fund most of the WHO (the second biggest contributor being bill gates himself). Something we will keep doing now that we tossed our national embarrassment. Germany and the UK seem to be the only eurozone nations that even gives a shit about it.

@10Dev WTF HAHAHA

Guys you are a lot of mucho texto when your country's names are mentioned.
Btw countries don't exist.

@10Dev Another case where celsius is better even in common situation is that below zero water freezes which can make roads slippery.

And of cause celsius was created ny the Swedish scientist Anders Celsius so thats an automatic win :P

But in the end its most likely just what your used to. If you grow up with Fahrenheit you know it in you spine and do not need to think about it, same with celsius.

I think it's because the US isn't as hardcore into standardization as Europe is.

Well, I say Europe, and I mean German industry and Swiss science.

Germany even tried to standardize Europe in the 40s.

Otherwise it would still be French pied du roi and Dutch ellebooglengte.

By the way, for anyone curious, we use metric where it matters.

For building, we use imperial (that doesn't matter, building codes don't need to be interoperable with e.g. Europe).

For science (medicine, technology, even the temps in your computer) we all use metric. Using gallons or ounces or whatever in a laboratory or a medical setting would get you weird looks.

Also our dates mimick how we say them. At least, that's what it seems like. We will verbally say "December sixth, twenty-twenty", which mirrors how we write them too. In fact you'd also get a few weird stares by saying "sixth December twenty-twenty". Saying "sixth of December" is okay but less common.

Also, in Germany they say "two-thousand twenty", which would almost certainly get you weird stares in the US at least.

that’s a pretty big generalization about a country entirely made up of immigrants. it’s a lot easier to change things for the better when you live in a country less than 1/5th america’s population and neighbor other countries.

date format? boo hoo. go lose a war.
length units? when am i ever going to need to convert something in a hurry without a calculator?
cooking receipe units? how would that make us more erroneous? we have measures for cups, tablespoons and teaspoons
temperate units? fahrenheit is great. some guy in the comments really said people use decimals when talking in celsius. do you also do that with height? are you 181.3739227484cm tall? i’d rather be precise without using decimals, and you’re almost double as precise with fahrenheit without using decimals. seriously, why isn’t 200C the boiling point?
weight? you’ve got me there.
time? the idea that sunday comes first is from various religions. there’s no reason to change it to monday.

@ostream he did in some religions

@C0D4 idk, we use DD/mm/yyyy and when talking it gets pretty much pronounced as 15 December 2020

I'm dutch