#…(also a defense contractor) forgot to switch an deleceleration value (I’m like 80% sure) from like mph/s to m/s^2

[tangled-pixel-harpsichord]

Those specific ingredients are measured by weight because you BUY THEM BY WEIGHT. Either prepackaged or at the deli counter, you will figure out how much you want by weight, and the price is given in dollars per pound. They’re telling you how much to BUY.

No one in this thread is saying baking or cooking by volume is better or the only way it’s ever done in the US, and yes, there are more people baking by mass in the US than ever before, because anyone who knows anything knows mass is more accurate. We’re saying that using volume is more COMMON in the US and are examining the reasons. I, a USAmerican with a background in medicine and science, would LOVE if the whole country switched to metric and measuring by mass tomorrow, but the former would take an act of Congress or something else official, and approximately half the people in our government (currently a bit more than that) are dedicated to the idea that changing anything even remotely “American” is an evil communist plot to convince their children that Jesus kneels for the national anthem or whatever the fuck.

Like, yelling about some cookbooks you found isn’t changing the fact that most people in this country don’t have scales in their kitchens. Hell, the industrial kitchen I worked in for a few summers didn’t even have one. I do, mostly because I use it for my French press, but I only have it bc my brother gave it to me, and HE only got it because he was experimenting with wine and beer making, two disciplines that demand the kind of accuracy only measuring by mass can provide. I agree that mass is a better way to do recipes, but on average, people usually measure by volume and it’s probably gonna take a bit for that to change.

So the thing with the US's awful units is like

So, my mom worked at NASA for some time before I was born and I asked her about the American use of US customary units when I heard about the Mars Climate Orbiter's crash.

And what she told me — which was surely a simplification somehow, I was a child at the time — was that periodically, someone would push for this within NASA, and then they would do a study to explore the possibility of forcing them and all the various contractors to use metric, and they would come up with a number which was the cost of doing that and replacing all the non-metric tooling, and then they would shelve the proposal.

So, my point is: before that I thought of the unit thing as like an American culture thing. Like Americans are set in their ways and conservative and arrogant, or whatever. After that, I thought of the unit thing as a state capacity thing. Americans simply can't do a lot of stuff, and when they can't, they puff themselves up defensively, like what they're forced to do is the best way to do things anyways.