Interesting Links for 29-05-2022

[andrewducker]

1. The UK attorney general is lying about the law around transgender people

(tags:LGBT transgender UK politics conservatives OhForFucksSake )

2. How much money does Jack Monroe make from book sales?

(tags:books publishing money poverty food )

3. Artist Tracey Emin returns from cancer with raw Edinburgh show

(tags:Edinburgh art Scotland )

4. Uber and Lyft Are Out of Ideas, Jacking Up Prices in Desperation for Profit

(tags:taxi business epicfail )

5. Tax Flight Is a Myth: Higher State Taxes Bring More Revenue, Not More Migration

(tags:economics tax )

6. NHS bosses have blocked health advice for pregnant trans people for almost a year

(tags:NHS LGBT transgender pregnancy OhForFucksSake )

7. I'm actually hoping that Boris Johnson holds on until the next election, and drags the whole party down with him

(tags:BorisJohnson Conservatives )

8. Halsey's sold over 150 million records but her record label won't release a new song until it goes viral on TikTok. Is this the future of the music industry?

(tags:music business OhForFucksSake )

9. A weights and measures inspector takes apart the Imperial Measurements nonsense that Johnson has come out with

(tags:measurement UK OhForFucksSake nostalgia politics )

Comments

[mtbc]

I'm not convinced that that "taking apart" is entirely fair. I mean, I'm all for remaining on metric, but overdoing the rhetoric clouds the fact that there are good reasons not to revert, globalization being a massive one. I mean, goodness, the US and UK have different pints, gallons, fluid ounces (slightly), keeping it all straight is a pain. And, really, twelve inches in a foot, fourteen pounds in a stone, sixteen ounces in a pound, twenty fluid ounces in a pint? It's all inconveniently irregular.

E.g., the first bold point, "the UK transferring to metric measures had bugger all to do with our EU membership" — am I the only one remembering all the news stories about court records, food sales, etc., suddenly being constrained? https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2001/apr/10/kirstyscott is the kind of thing that makes the everyday difference and convicted of falling foul of European directives on metrication by weighing and selling a bunch of bananas by the pound doesn't sound to me much like having bugger all to do with our EU membership.

I'm not persuaded by most of the other. Interest in metric is growing in the USA, for instance. I live in the USA. I follow the news closely. I work in a national scientific laboratory and follow their news too. And this growth of interest has been wholly imperceptible to me. There was a push for metric decades ago but it fell about as flat as the attempt to have consumers accept the dollar coin. They've given up on that one too.

[calimac]

As another USA resident, I'll agree with your last point. From my anecdotal pov, there was some slight increase in the use of metric here around the time NAFTA was passed, but there hasn't been much change in the topic since then. (The big failed metric push was long before that.)

[andrewducker]

", "the UK transferring to metric measures had bugger all to do with our EU membership" — am I the only one remembering all the news stories about court records, food sales, etc., suddenly being constrained"

That newspaper article is from 2001. The UK made metric units legal in 1875, and moved to them by default in the early 70s.

In 94, the EU said that things had to be weighed in metric amounts (although they could be sold by the pound the scales had to weigh out the metric equivalent). Saying that the UK transferring to metric is because of the EU seems like a very slanted view indeed.

[mtbc]

The UK may have technically moved to metric units by default in the 1970s but, in practice, you'll find that things like 1980s recipe books tell a very different story. That's why, here in the US, though legislation made metric preferred for commerce in the 1970s, we're still waiting for that to have much effect outside lawyers' imaginations, we still buy petrol in gallons.

It's possible to say that the UK transferring to metric is because of the EU is inaccurate without taking an oppositely inaccurate view. There's a large grey gap between that and had bugger all to do with our EU membership and the tweeter's hyperbole does not serve their argument well (especially if they suggest that our EU membership has nothing to do with our EEC membership which is basically what brought in the 1970s changes). If the EU's subsequent units of membership directives were so irrelevant then they would have not been so very newsworthy and I would have not noticed any impact myself, it's not like they were some phased implementation of the 1970s legislation. They even caused some trouble with interoperation with US food labelling.

You really didn't notice new momentum in UK society's transfer toward metric due to EU directives targeting facets of real life? I don't know if you're suggesting that the post-EU changes like the obligation in retail to express things in metric (a) had bugger all to do with the EU or (b) made bugger all difference to the UK's transfer toward metric; I find both implausible.

I suspect that metric would have gradually won out in the end because schoolkids were all being taught metric from, say, at least the 1980s? But I honestly don't see how the impression cast by that twitter thread at all comports with lived reality, from reading that I'd have imagined that we were buying petrol in litres by 1990 because we'd all long gone metric since then, and if I'm going to consider a piece to be saying something about reality then it helps if it seems to start out from there.

[andrewducker]

I was born in 1972. I've known nothing else *but* metric units*. While I was aware that there had been other things around before I was born (or close to it), and old people still talked in strange units, my entire education, and all shopping, has been metric my whole life. It's clear that membership played some small part in moving over, but things were clearly underway long before that. The Twitter thread matches entirely with my lived reality.

*With the exception of car speeds and petrol prices, the latter of which changed over when I was a kid. Edit: Dammit, and pints! Not that I drink them :-)

[mtbc]

Goodness, I'm a bit younger than you but, especially as a child, I had plenty of people in my life who still thought and talked in Imperial units (including my parents), just a few days ago I was watching a British show from the 1960s, books last for decades (including my mother's recipe books and my father's textbooks), etc., so for me the previous system cast a very long shadow. It may be that your parents and community embraced the new or somesuch in ways that mine didn't, or mine held on to the older stuff more? Perhaps my parents and their siblings were older, that may be a factor (they married in 1961). So, while I knew my weight in stone, I wonder if you knew yours in kilos. It is only the everyday units I know well, mind. A hundredweight is at about the limit of my familiarity, from my father talking about filling skips with rubble or whatever, units like chains I'm far less sure of. Thinking back, maybe it's also a matter of if one's taken to small local shops instead of larger chains, I often accompanied my mother to small locally owned shops rather than supermarkets, maybe those were slower to transition.

In education, our experience was similar: from what I recall, mine was just about wholly metric too and it's the main reason I'm also comfortable in metric.

However, I'd strongly suggest that some small part is not bugger all. If the thread had toned things down to be rather less categorical then I'd have more readily agreed.

[cmcmck]

I grew up with imperial but then moved to Belgium for a few years so have always been equally at home with both although I tend to think in metric.

I was amazed the other day when we were having a drink in a pub during our short break to hear an old guy refer to something costing 'ten shillings' more in one supermarket than another!

[andrewducker]

Wow!

[wildeabandon]

This doesn't match my experience. I was born in '81, and when I was a kid I bought food and learned to cook in pounds and ounces, to sew and knit in inches, and to run in miles. I can do the conversions, but I still /think/ in imperial for quite a lot of things.

[mair_in_grenderich]

gosh. I was born in '81, and we went to the shop every Saturday with our pocket money for a quarter of sweets, the milkman delivered two pints of milk every morning, we weighed ourselves in stones, and measured ourselves in feet and inches.

[cmcmck]

It's a fairly scary thing when you have an Attorney General who doesn't know the law of the land.

That or her transphobia transcends her commonsense!

[qilora]

"7. I'm actually hoping that Boris Johnson holds on until the next election, and drags the whole party down with him"

uuuggggh, i know what you mean! to see such calamity is like waiting to see Trumpelstilskin lost the vote.. it gives me such a Schadenfreude!

[coth]

It's a measure of my new paranoia that reading that thread by the weights and measures inspector makes me think:

So Boris' master plan involves reverting to imperial measures because that means he can scrap all the weights and measures 'red tape' because the metric won't be needed and the imperial will be too expensive to implement.

Of course, regulation of weights and measures has been one of the primary functions of the state for thousands of years. We really would be going back to the stone age.

[anna_wing]

As far as I am aware, the countries that are still on Imperial measure are the US, Myanmar and Liberia. Though of course many places still have traditional measures for informal or specific uses. Countries around the Indian Ocean and anywhere with a large historical Indian diaspora will still retain a lot of old Indian measures. Lakh, crore, viss, reti (only for pearls), kati, and many specialised measures for gold, including one based on the seeds of the Saga tree (Adenanthera pavonine)...

I'm still not entirely certain how far a mile is...

[andrewducker]

1,600m. Or 8/5 of a km. But if you think of it was a km and a half you won't be far off.