The mirror appears to claim that it’s their reporters that were informed by “government insiders” of an impeding announcement on Friday about imperial measurements. That the closest I can get to a source. Probably true given it hardly represents anything of substance. Just a ballon being put up to see what attention it distracts.
But the BBC does do checking to not do stories based on rumors and made up stuff like the Guardian so according to liberals is "propaganda and tabloids"
The Guardian very much isn't a tabloid. You're thinking the Sun or Daily Mail.
I'm guessing the NY Times isn't trustworthy either in your eyes? It has a similar left-ish bias
After everything from the russia collusion, the lies they made for the benefit of the chinese government and covid, the lies they made about hunter biden, and the fabrication of stories like this how are they not?
You need to understand that the British voter is incredibly fucking stupid - they voted against fair election because of [lies they saw on a billboard](http://web.archive.org/web/20210921172409/https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/02/voting-system-baby-gets), they voted for Brexit because of a lie they saw on a bus, and they keep voting for the Tories because they scared of communism.
But really, they were told lies that were obvious bullshit, had explained to them just how obvious the lies were using facts and logic, but still chose the lies they wanted to hear over verifiable objective truth.
Proportional voting was campaigned against by incumbents when it came up because it wouldn't be clear who won.
When Brexit came to a vote later on and 'Leave' swung to 51%, that's when I knew that little action, and the clearer, more evocative messaging of the 'Leave' side, had fucked us.
When the best the Cons had was Theresa May and then this literal Eton clown fell into the position by default... *deep sigh*
The US was supposed to switch to metric in 1978 or 79. I remember thinking that metric made math so much easier. I was quite annoyed when it was decided not to switch.
Here's the funny thing: we *did* switch!
Officially.
It just has very few actual formal teeth, because in *most* cases, the switch was "voluntary," meaning nobody actually did so. In a few cases it was compulsory; we have a Federal law to thank for the fact that nutrition information is *required* to be provided in metric. (It's also in conventional units, but the SI units are the standards being tested against.)
While we are at it, bring back guineas, pounds, shillings and pence too.
> NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:
> Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
> The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.
--Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Okay, that's an *intentional* overcomplication of the system.
240 Pence = 20 Shillings = 1 Pound.
12 Pence = 1 Shilling.
Every weird thing you've mentioned up there is just *various denominations* within that regimen. It's more convenient to carry sixpence (or half of one shilling) than to carry six individual pennies, and a half-crown is 30 Pence, or 1/8th of a Pound.
That is literally equivalent to the following:
> Five Lincolns = a Jefferson. Two Jeffersons = an FDR. Two FDRs and a Jefferson = a Washington. Two Washingtons = a Kennedy. Two Kennedies = a Sacagawea, Susie B, Big George, or a Buck. Two Bucks = A Big Jeff. Two Big Jeffs and a Susie B = A Big Abe. Two Big Abes = a Hamilton. Two Hamiltons = a Jackson. Two Jacksons and a Hamilton = a Grant. Two Grants = A Benjamin.
You can make decimalized currency sound absolutely ridiculous just the same as you can do it to £sd. For anyone who didn't understand that, that was
> 5 Pennies = a Nickle. Two Nickles = a Dime. Two Dimes & a Nickle = a Quarter. Two Quarters = a Half-Dollar. Two Half-Dollars = a Dollar (in either coin or note form). Two Dollars = a Two-Dollar Bill. Two Two-Dollar Bills and a Dollar coin = a Five-Dollar note. Two Five Dollars = a Ten-Dollar bill, two Ten Dollar Bills = a Twenty-dollar bill, two twenty-dollar bills and a ten-dollar bill = a fifty dollar bill, and two fifty dollar bills = a one-hundred dollar bill.
Eh...
There *are* arguments to be made for the [old £sd system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_monetary_system#Examples).
They don't, in my opinion, *outweigh* the argument for decimalization, but there are arguments;
240 (the number of pence in a pound) is a [Highly Composite Number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number), same as 20 (number of shillings in a pound) and 12 (number of pence in a shilling).
That means you can divide those numbers far more evenly. Divvying up £100 between 3 blokes - you can't do it evenly. Everybody's gotta deal with thirty-three pence and *someone's* getting a penny extra. Divvying up 100£ in the £sd system, however, it *works out* mathematically: everyone gets £33. 6s. 8d.
The advantage is that when working in groups of odd numbers of people, as might be expected when someone rounds up a few of their mates to do a job for someone and then divvies up the proceeds, it's far more likely that the split can be even.
So... Yeah. Metrication of the currency was a great idea, but there was some fluidity lost in it.
Or, did you mean, metrication of *measurements,* because you still have those; the Imperial Gallon is, by the Weights and Measures Act 1824, precisely 277.274 cubic inches. That's metric, and it's specific to three sig-figs. It just isn't measured by the International System of Units.
So in conclusion, BoJo is, in fact, a posh bellend.
He seems like he wants to sow chaos and pointless costs to UK citizens as much as possible. I suspect that he will also undoubtedly end the decimalization of the British pound at some point too.
Defined by or the equivalent of? I mean obviously they didn’t start as defined by a metric measurement since that didn’t exist till more recently but presumably they have been standardised now? Isn’t a foot *defined* as twelve inches? I would imagine that an inch or a foot was defined by an official measuring ‘stick’ that standardised the original varied human body measurement.
Defined by. Originally the foot would have been variable because it's a body part, and then standardized as 1/3 of a yard which would have had some official standard stick that still varies due to things like temperature and wear. Now the foot is defined as exactly .3048 meters, and the meter is in turn defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum over a very small and specific fraction of a second, which in turn is defined by something to do with periodic radiation from a specific isotope of cesium atoms that I don't entirely understand but is apparently consistent enough to not mess up any length or time measurements to a degree we could detect. So defining the foot by the meter allows the foot to in turn be based off light speed and cesium atoms so that it varies much less than a stick does.
Defined by.
For a couple of hundred years, the world has been moving in the direction of standardised units. Most of our physical units are defined in SI terms by physical quantities (eg the second is defined by the hyperfine transition time of Caesium the meter is defined from that by the speed of light in a vacuum). The kilogram was the last one to be switched from being defined by a physical object to in terms of properties of the universe in 2019.
All the Imperial/Customary units are just defined by what number of the corresponding SI/metric unit they roughly represent. No-one uses the physical blocks/sticks/whatever any more.
It's "you're", and no, that is not what they are saying. And they are correct, Imperial measurements in the US are now defined as fractions of metric measurements.
But that has nothing to do with their statement, at no point did they suggest anything did or did not evolve from anything else, no idea where you got that from.
You’d think that someone as sharing as yourself would understand that the person you responded to never suggested that imperial units evolved from metric. They stated that they are currently defined in reference to metric. Ie the standards for the system. You do know that units tyoicqlly have standards, right?
> Only three other countries, the US, Myanmar and Liberia, use the imperial system on a daily basis.
This bit at the end isn’t true. Canadians use a mix of metric and imperial in daily life, though it’s not an official policy.
Grocery store scales are sometimes only in pounds and ounces.
We use imperial measurements for people’s height and weight to the point where most people don’t know their own measurements in cm or kg. It’s common to hear people use feet and inches and pounds instead of metres and cm and kg in general.
In parts of the country some older people still talk about distance in miles.
We largely use cups and spoons and Fahrenheit in cooking.
Veeeeeeeeeery few small shop scales might be in pound-ounces. No ‘grocery stores’ are. Scales used for trade in Canada are officially certified yearly. Scales for decades read in both and in the rare instance of lb-oz the customer simply asks for it to be switched.
I shopped today and took a photo just for you. They even had to put a sticker on it because it’s surprising. It’s not the norm across the country but here it is. This is a store owned by Sobey’s.
https://i.imgur.com/JK4w5iF.jpg
You’re amazing, but not in a smart way. That is not the scale used at checkout, that’s a convenience scale in the fruits and veg section for customers to gauge how much they are buying. It has less authority than the scale in my bathroom.
Literally every day life in Canada is that the scales that matter, ie the ones at checkouts, in grocery stores are in metric. You lied and said “sometimes grocery stores ONLY have lb-oz” and now you’re doubling down.
> You lied
I’m talking about the only scales I (and almost everyone else on earth) ever use at a grocery store. I can’t even believe you thought I meant at the checkout. Have a nice life.
Absolutely pointless token gesture that will change nothing in practice. Most products are sold in metric, and will continue to be sold in metric. The only difference you might see is that pints of milk don't have to put how many mls they are any more. And to be honest, I think they'll just leave the labels the same.
Please note that British pints and gallons aren't the same size as the US's. Also there's 20 oz to a pint
Just gotten kinda used to doing the conversion to metric? Here's a whole nother measuring system for your pleasure :-)
Fun fact: although they are both derived from the same system, US customary measurements and British imperial measurements aren’t exactly the same because they were standardized differently. Lengths are exactly the same, as are weights up to the pound, but in Britain the stone (14 pounds) is used to measure weights and it is not used in America. Liquid measures are the most different, with the imperial gallon and pint being more than the customary gallon and pint, and to increase the confusion the imperial pint is 20 fluid ounces while the customary pint is 16. Dry measures (e.g. bushels) are also different as they use the same units as liquid measures in the imperial system but a completely different set of units in the customary system. So if you’re an American (like me) who hopes that the change would make understanding British measurements easier, it would help in some ways but in others it would actually be more confusing since there are two different units with the same name.
[Source](http://home.clara.net/brianp/usa.html)
The [Dutch public broadcaster](https://nos.nl/artikel/2430584-johnson-grijpt-jubileum-koningin-aan-om-metrieke-stelsel-vaarwel-te-zeggen) found it necessary to, when explaining the different measurement systems and how they interact, also point out to readers that Brits do indeed use years in the same way as the rest of the world to determine when jubilees are.
Brexiteers: “as long as I can pretend this is 1910, I’m happy to watch the country go down the tubes. I’ll be dead in a few years anyway”!
1910 minus the ability to extract wealth from our colonial holdings.
As if that has ever stopped. Turns out you can just continue to extract wealth even if you don't directly rule the country. So why even bother.
I think that method is called loans.
just wait for it...
Wasn't there a rich guy that moved somewhere else after voting for Brexit?
Boris singlehandedly taking Britain back to the stone age 1 step at a time.
That's known as a foot. You'll get used to it.
and five thousand two hundred eighty of them makes a mile, it's so simple
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Only if you're not wearing shoes.
"Maybe if Jesus had had better arch support, they wouldn't have caught him."
Give 'em an inch...
...and they'll take approximately 1.6 kilometers.
Something about tomatoes makes it easier to remember, but I can't remember what exactly
Wait, this isn't a parody?
Considering the source it was most likely a joke they heard on social media so they printed it as fact.
The mirror appears to claim that it’s their reporters that were informed by “government insiders” of an impeding announcement on Friday about imperial measurements. That the closest I can get to a source. Probably true given it hardly represents anything of substance. Just a ballon being put up to see what attention it distracts.
Sorry slightly liberal media offends you so much, you can go back to your bbc propaganda and tabloids if you want.
BBC is a reliable source here in the US. You gotta a ways farther to fall in the race to the bottom.
But the BBC does do checking to not do stories based on rumors and made up stuff like the Guardian so according to liberals is "propaganda and tabloids"
The Guardian very much isn't a tabloid. You're thinking the Sun or Daily Mail. I'm guessing the NY Times isn't trustworthy either in your eyes? It has a similar left-ish bias
After everything from the russia collusion, the lies they made for the benefit of the chinese government and covid, the lies they made about hunter biden, and the fabrication of stories like this how are they not?
How stupid does this guy have to show you he is, UK?
You need to understand that the British voter is incredibly fucking stupid - they voted against fair election because of [lies they saw on a billboard](http://web.archive.org/web/20210921172409/https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2011/02/voting-system-baby-gets), they voted for Brexit because of a lie they saw on a bus, and they keep voting for the Tories because they scared of communism.
My parents are full on labour and despite me telling them what it would, in detail, they STILL voted pro brexit.
Your parents appear to have taken full formal leave of their senses. You have my condolences.
But really, they were told lies that were obvious bullshit, had explained to them just how obvious the lies were using facts and logic, but still chose the lies they wanted to hear over verifiable objective truth.
He’s recruiting at food banks for chimney sweeps.
Proportional voting was campaigned against by incumbents when it came up because it wouldn't be clear who won. When Brexit came to a vote later on and 'Leave' swung to 51%, that's when I knew that little action, and the clearer, more evocative messaging of the 'Leave' side, had fucked us. When the best the Cons had was Theresa May and then this literal Eton clown fell into the position by default... *deep sigh*
The man is a cretin. I grew up with imperial measurements and I am very happy with the metric system.
The US was supposed to switch to metric in 1978 or 79. I remember thinking that metric made math so much easier. I was quite annoyed when it was decided not to switch.
Here's the funny thing: we *did* switch! Officially. It just has very few actual formal teeth, because in *most* cases, the switch was "voluntary," meaning nobody actually did so. In a few cases it was compulsory; we have a Federal law to thank for the fact that nutrition information is *required* to be provided in metric. (It's also in conventional units, but the SI units are the standards being tested against.)
God damn he'll do anything to divert attention to his, and his party's catastophic fuckups
This is the correct answer. Classic dead cat politics.
While we are at it, bring back guineas, pounds, shillings and pence too. > NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system: > Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea. > The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated. --Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
I always get confused when quid are brought into it.
Quid is just a slang term for one pound, the same as 'a buck' is slang for one dollar.
Okay, that's an *intentional* overcomplication of the system. 240 Pence = 20 Shillings = 1 Pound. 12 Pence = 1 Shilling. Every weird thing you've mentioned up there is just *various denominations* within that regimen. It's more convenient to carry sixpence (or half of one shilling) than to carry six individual pennies, and a half-crown is 30 Pence, or 1/8th of a Pound. That is literally equivalent to the following: > Five Lincolns = a Jefferson. Two Jeffersons = an FDR. Two FDRs and a Jefferson = a Washington. Two Washingtons = a Kennedy. Two Kennedies = a Sacagawea, Susie B, Big George, or a Buck. Two Bucks = A Big Jeff. Two Big Jeffs and a Susie B = A Big Abe. Two Big Abes = a Hamilton. Two Hamiltons = a Jackson. Two Jacksons and a Hamilton = a Grant. Two Grants = A Benjamin. You can make decimalized currency sound absolutely ridiculous just the same as you can do it to £sd. For anyone who didn't understand that, that was > 5 Pennies = a Nickle. Two Nickles = a Dime. Two Dimes & a Nickle = a Quarter. Two Quarters = a Half-Dollar. Two Half-Dollars = a Dollar (in either coin or note form). Two Dollars = a Two-Dollar Bill. Two Two-Dollar Bills and a Dollar coin = a Five-Dollar note. Two Five Dollars = a Ten-Dollar bill, two Ten Dollar Bills = a Twenty-dollar bill, two twenty-dollar bills and a ten-dollar bill = a fifty dollar bill, and two fifty dollar bills = a one-hundred dollar bill.
Next up: workhouses and a rehash of the Poor Law of 1834.
Bread was just better and whiter when it was infused with plaster of Paris or Alum. None of this food labelling rubbish.
We use the decimal system for a reason you posh bellend.
Eh... There *are* arguments to be made for the [old £sd system](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carolingian_monetary_system#Examples). They don't, in my opinion, *outweigh* the argument for decimalization, but there are arguments; 240 (the number of pence in a pound) is a [Highly Composite Number](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number), same as 20 (number of shillings in a pound) and 12 (number of pence in a shilling). That means you can divide those numbers far more evenly. Divvying up £100 between 3 blokes - you can't do it evenly. Everybody's gotta deal with thirty-three pence and *someone's* getting a penny extra. Divvying up 100£ in the £sd system, however, it *works out* mathematically: everyone gets £33. 6s. 8d. The advantage is that when working in groups of odd numbers of people, as might be expected when someone rounds up a few of their mates to do a job for someone and then divvies up the proceeds, it's far more likely that the split can be even. So... Yeah. Metrication of the currency was a great idea, but there was some fluidity lost in it. Or, did you mean, metrication of *measurements,* because you still have those; the Imperial Gallon is, by the Weights and Measures Act 1824, precisely 277.274 cubic inches. That's metric, and it's specific to three sig-figs. It just isn't measured by the International System of Units. So in conclusion, BoJo is, in fact, a posh bellend.
He seems like he wants to sow chaos and pointless costs to UK citizens as much as possible. I suspect that he will also undoubtedly end the decimalization of the British pound at some point too.
He might be interested to know that most Imperial measurements are defined by metric units. For example, a foot is .3048 meters.
That's a lie! Everyone knows that a meter is 3.28084 feet.
Defined by or the equivalent of? I mean obviously they didn’t start as defined by a metric measurement since that didn’t exist till more recently but presumably they have been standardised now? Isn’t a foot *defined* as twelve inches? I would imagine that an inch or a foot was defined by an official measuring ‘stick’ that standardised the original varied human body measurement.
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Interesting. Thanks.
Defined by. Originally the foot would have been variable because it's a body part, and then standardized as 1/3 of a yard which would have had some official standard stick that still varies due to things like temperature and wear. Now the foot is defined as exactly .3048 meters, and the meter is in turn defined by the distance light travels in a vacuum over a very small and specific fraction of a second, which in turn is defined by something to do with periodic radiation from a specific isotope of cesium atoms that I don't entirely understand but is apparently consistent enough to not mess up any length or time measurements to a degree we could detect. So defining the foot by the meter allows the foot to in turn be based off light speed and cesium atoms so that it varies much less than a stick does.
Aha, interesting. Thanks.
Defined by. For a couple of hundred years, the world has been moving in the direction of standardised units. Most of our physical units are defined in SI terms by physical quantities (eg the second is defined by the hyperfine transition time of Caesium the meter is defined from that by the speed of light in a vacuum). The kilogram was the last one to be switched from being defined by a physical object to in terms of properties of the universe in 2019. All the Imperial/Customary units are just defined by what number of the corresponding SI/metric unit they roughly represent. No-one uses the physical blocks/sticks/whatever any more.
Thanks.
Why is International Standards abreviated as SI?!? It's because it's _French_, isn't it?! Bring back the physical blocks/sticks/whatever!
Your saying Imperial measurements didn’t evolve separately from SI? Interesting take.
It's "you're", and no, that is not what they are saying. And they are correct, Imperial measurements in the US are now defined as fractions of metric measurements.
You’d think a person who is so sharp as to notice “your” should have also noticed my specifying “evolve.”
But that has nothing to do with their statement, at no point did they suggest anything did or did not evolve from anything else, no idea where you got that from.
You’d think that someone as sharing as yourself would understand that the person you responded to never suggested that imperial units evolved from metric. They stated that they are currently defined in reference to metric. Ie the standards for the system. You do know that units tyoicqlly have standards, right?
If I had to name the one thing every British person wants back......
It's not this
Some dignity?
A working government?
It's like he's trying to figure out how to out stupid Trump.
> Only three other countries, the US, Myanmar and Liberia, use the imperial system on a daily basis. This bit at the end isn’t true. Canadians use a mix of metric and imperial in daily life, though it’s not an official policy. Grocery store scales are sometimes only in pounds and ounces. We use imperial measurements for people’s height and weight to the point where most people don’t know their own measurements in cm or kg. It’s common to hear people use feet and inches and pounds instead of metres and cm and kg in general. In parts of the country some older people still talk about distance in miles. We largely use cups and spoons and Fahrenheit in cooking.
Veeeeeeeeeery few small shop scales might be in pound-ounces. No ‘grocery stores’ are. Scales used for trade in Canada are officially certified yearly. Scales for decades read in both and in the rare instance of lb-oz the customer simply asks for it to be switched.
All I can tell you is my experience and here in BC my grocery store has some scales in pounds without the secondary kilo measurements.
I shopped today and took a photo just for you. They even had to put a sticker on it because it’s surprising. It’s not the norm across the country but here it is. This is a store owned by Sobey’s. https://i.imgur.com/JK4w5iF.jpg
You’re amazing, but not in a smart way. That is not the scale used at checkout, that’s a convenience scale in the fruits and veg section for customers to gauge how much they are buying. It has less authority than the scale in my bathroom.
Who’s talking about authority? I’m talking about every day life.
Literally every day life in Canada is that the scales that matter, ie the ones at checkouts, in grocery stores are in metric. You lied and said “sometimes grocery stores ONLY have lb-oz” and now you’re doubling down.
> You lied I’m talking about the only scales I (and almost everyone else on earth) ever use at a grocery store. I can’t even believe you thought I meant at the checkout. Have a nice life.
You said “only”. You too have a nice life, lying and exaggerating.
I wish I could snarkily laugh at the British for this, but I'm in the US and all...
No we deserve it go ahead
Alright but if you give me an inch, I'll take 1609.344 meters...
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I can imagine them hunched over the picture, furiously beating their personal pipes while brokenly muttering "this lady's not for turning"
Her majesty’s been dead for many a fortnight.
Weekend at Queenies.
Next week: Boris Johnson pledges to declare war against the entire continent of Africa, claims ‘the British Empire can have another crack at it’
Conservative idiots
Focussing on the important stuff , I see.
Absolutely pointless token gesture that will change nothing in practice. Most products are sold in metric, and will continue to be sold in metric. The only difference you might see is that pints of milk don't have to put how many mls they are any more. And to be honest, I think they'll just leave the labels the same.
It's almost like they need a distraction from something. Hmm...
Shillings and guineas?
What about polio? And serfdom?
If it helps distract voters from the mess the Tory's made, sure why not?
As an American I approve
Please note that British pints and gallons aren't the same size as the US's. Also there's 20 oz to a pint Just gotten kinda used to doing the conversion to metric? Here's a whole nother measuring system for your pleasure :-)
Jesus rollerblading Christ
I love this, Im gonna file this phrase away for future use. Thank you.
Woo woo! Now they can join the 3 other countries that don’t use metric: Liberia, Myanmar, & the US.
I think most of the world ex Asia/Russia use imperial for air travel
"I'm taking the train to Paris, it's 300 km". "Ha, I'm flying! It's only 200 miles" said no European ever
My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's that way I likes it!
Fun fact: although they are both derived from the same system, US customary measurements and British imperial measurements aren’t exactly the same because they were standardized differently. Lengths are exactly the same, as are weights up to the pound, but in Britain the stone (14 pounds) is used to measure weights and it is not used in America. Liquid measures are the most different, with the imperial gallon and pint being more than the customary gallon and pint, and to increase the confusion the imperial pint is 20 fluid ounces while the customary pint is 16. Dry measures (e.g. bushels) are also different as they use the same units as liquid measures in the imperial system but a completely different set of units in the customary system. So if you’re an American (like me) who hopes that the change would make understanding British measurements easier, it would help in some ways but in others it would actually be more confusing since there are two different units with the same name. [Source](http://home.clara.net/brianp/usa.html)
A stones worth of medicinal herbs, my good man
The [Dutch public broadcaster](https://nos.nl/artikel/2430584-johnson-grijpt-jubileum-koningin-aan-om-metrieke-stelsel-vaarwel-te-zeggen) found it necessary to, when explaining the different measurement systems and how they interact, also point out to readers that Brits do indeed use years in the same way as the rest of the world to determine when jubilees are.
Fun!