Brexit discussion thread XIV (Please read OP before posting)

silverharp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117903953#Comment_117903953

it was 1/10th of a pound but 24p

It's just what you're used to. I've been using metric for my height and weight for a decade now and can't picture stone at all.

Oafley Jones

As to metric…

https://twitter.com/pippamusgrave1/status/1438559713604608003?s=21

On M&S: well the Patrick St store’s food section has been pitiful throughout this. Whole rows of refrigerator units turned off and an overall a massive decrease in the variety of stock. The paucity of stock is just embarrassing and I keep on wondering how long it’ll keep going.

Sam Russell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117904138#Comment_117904138

I think you mean 24 d, or two shillings - not 24 p. The p came in as a 'new pence' which is now 'p'. The old system was pounds, shillings and pence - or L S D. So pence abbreviated to D.

Sorry to be a pedant.

silverharp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117904281#Comment_117904281

In Tesco the abonombation of Sottish water being sold in Dublin seems to be a thing of the past and if pushed there is probably less dairy like Sour Cream or their own brand yogurt if not made in Ireland. deffo curious to pop into an M&S now

10000maniacs

It just occurred to me about Brexit.

We were all complaining that the low skilled workers in the UK voted for Brexit and didn't know what they were voting for.

Well,

1: They can now pick and choose their jobs from the highest bidder.

2: They can demand higher wages and better conditions.

3: They are infinitely more respected than they were.

Worked out quite well for them. They knew what they were doing. LOL.

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117905056#Comment_117905056

None of those things are true though. Companies are going short staffed rather than upping the wages.

Only an hour ago I saw the biggest queue I have ever seen for the food bank at Charing Cross and they were mostly not homeless people but young people in the crowd

10000maniacs

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117905236#Comment_117905236

With a million vacancies, its an employees market out there. If you are a farm worker, fruit picker, meat processor, lorry driver, supermarket worker, the list is endless, you are in a vastly improved position than before Brexit started to hit.

silverharp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117904325#Comment_117904325

 you dont get to be a pedant when you write this "(£0.10p)" 😎

pixelburp

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117905292#Comment_117905292

There are a lot of assumptions going on there, not least that the roles are nearby, pay a living wage (there's a good reason the cockle pickers were shipped in fadó) or those seeking are able and skilled enough to do them. HGV driving requires specialist licensing (even if there is an attempt to soften them), it's not as simple as just dropping a CV at the local haulage company.

Primarily though, the UK has lost out on swathes of low skill, low pay labour imported from foreign shores. Locals won't necessarily be a good fit.

Nody

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117905292#Comment_117905292

But the problem is UK workers never bothered with those jobs in the first place which is what's caused the current issues...

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117905292#Comment_117905292

But wages have not gone up. Inflation has though as has cost of living and council services which are way more important in the UK than Ireland are still being cut which for UK residents is like having a wage cut

Sam Russell

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117905301#Comment_117905301

Well, then I was not being pedantic to correct 1/10th of a pound as 24p - it is 24d. 24p is nearer a quarter of a pound and not a tenth.

1/10th of a pound was two shillings, or 24 d. The nomenclature has changed much since decimalisation and it is confusing to use 'pence' as 'old pence' (d) and 'new pence' (np or p) have vastly different values and can be confused, just as you did in your reply. It would be confusing to use other than £0.10p for a florin.

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117904075#Comment_117904075

This!. The reason people think in imperial for some measurements and metric in others, is because imperial is such a massive pain in the ass to convert to metric, so we just categorise certain things as being imperial because we understand what they mean, while for the vast majority of everything else, we will use metric/decimal systems

When a baby is born, the mother texts out that it's an 8lb baby, because that's easy for their family to compare with other babies that have been also measured in lbs

Does anyone really want to divide lbs by 2.2 to convert to Kg? or remember this conversion for LBs, and then how many lbs are in a stone, and how many ounces are in a LB. it's a massive PITA

Metric makes sense, the name of the thing tells you how many grams or bits of grams are in the thing, and the same for distance and volume

A litre is a thousand mililitres. How much is a fluid ounce? I have no idea.

It takes generations to move from thinking in one unit to another, and Brexit is just trying to go backwards in time to a bygone era

reslfj

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117905292#Comment_117905292

I was in a large firm.  We had something called 'Resource Deployment Mangers' (RDM).

It usually took a very long time for them to understand that special skills couldn't be replaced with differently skilled persons having the same or a similar job title.

It depends very much on where the availability of jobs and the unemployed are located. Likewise the skill match of job <-> unemployed is vital.

It is often not economically possible for a family to move for for anything than a permanent and well paying job. The spouse might lose a permanent job and kids should not change school too often. Family members may need attention and this alone can prevent many to moving away. And much, much more.

This is not to say that more flexibility shouldn't be requested of unemployed, but such flexibility is equally needed from employers and e.g. from public adult vocational education. 

In short: You can't meaningfully just compare the gross figures of vacant jobs and number of unemployed. Solutions will require a much deeper analyse. 

Lars  😀

looksee

I grew up with imperial and only in the last 20 years or so got used to using metric. I use a glorious combination of both. I was looking for a quote for 25 metres of 2 x 4 timber in 16ft lengths yesterday, both of us knew exactly what we were talking about. My height and weight are in imperial, but measurements for things like room sizes are metric. Metric does make a lot more sense but old habits - and significant amounts of our vocabulary - does anyone go to the pub for a few litres? - die hard.

I would think that the vast majority of Brits have the same relationship with metric/imperial as the Irish and its just the Brexiteers scraping the barrel for something to shout about.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117906435#Comment_117906435

Because the claims by Brexiteers / Leave voters that there were too many migrant workers were barefaced lies. There is not a shred of evidence that UK immigration was ever "out of control" or that too many workers were arriving every year....it was just ill informed commentary from a legion of xenophobes and bigots.

blackcard

1000 litres of water equals 1 cubic meters equals one thousand kg or 1 tonne shows how the metric system makes sense. If you had to order concrete for an of area of 6'8"* 3'3""*, 1'3", I wouldn't have a clue how many cubic yards that is even if I had a calculator. But if you said 2.05m*1.0 m*0.375m, any fool could work it out

Slideways

I live in aus so have all but abandoned any links to the imperial system. Funnily enough lots here still refer to their height in feet and inches but will also know it in metric. The other anomaly is when we are fitting big components to a machine with a crane, people will often say it needs to move an inch to the left.

Its amazing that there is a vast swathe of people here who know nothing of whats going on with brexit. The similarities in political back scratching and utter incompetence do seem on the same path however

Sam Russell

The language of everyday lags by a very long time everyday practice.

How many say 'I must run and spend a penny' when they will not be spending anything but just visiting the washroom/bathroom/toilet - the actual destination depending on which continent they live on.

The UK media (like the BBC) refer to large sizes in multiples football pitches, or double decker buses, or other absurd measures. Horse racing still (in the UK and Ireland) still refers to miles and furlongs as race distances. Crude oil is measured in 'barrels' - if only we knew how many litres that was.

Milk in Ireland is sold retail in Litres but in the UK it is sold in pints and quarts, but butter in Ireland must be sold in pounds.

Interestingly, the French relate to a person being tall as being '2 metres' while in imperial it would be a 'six footer'. Six foot is not so big anymore, two metres is about 6 foot 8 inches - the height claimed by the TV presenter (and now author) Richard Osman and ex FBI Director James Comey. Now that is tall.

There was an April Fool joke a good few years ago about how the EU was going to decimalise time. 100 seconds in a minute, 100 minutes in an hour and 10 hours in a day, 10 days a week and so on. It was all worked out and was very funny - particularly those that believed it. Our time is based on an Etruscan system that used numbers to the base 60. Now how old is that?

Akrasia

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117907061#Comment_117907061

Dave Allen had a brilliant bit about teaching a kid how to read an analogue clock

but decimalising time would be a brilliant idea. Computers already have a hybrid system called Epoch or Unix time, which is the number of seconds since 1st of Jan 1970 GMT that can be sub divided into milliseconds or micro seconds in a way that would be head wrecking if we stuck with base 60

of course then we wouldn’t be able to use analogue clocks anymore as base 10 doesn’t work with circles, and even Unix time gets into trouble with the laws or relativity and would need to be recalibrated against an atomic clock based in London every so often

weights and measures are hard

storker

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117906185#Comment_117906185

On a much smaller scale, the UK (and the US, to be fair) persisted with descriptive chess notation for years after the non-English-speaking world had been using the simpler and less ambiguous algebraic notation. Descriptive notation is more long-winded e,g. B-QB4 (Bishop to Queen's Bishop Four), with every square on the board having two names, one from White's point of view, one from Black's. Algebraic notation references the squares like a street map; i.e. there is only one square called a1 (bottom left) and one called h8 (top right). B-QB4 in algebraic reads as Bc4 if a White move, Bc5 if Black.

Thankfully, the algebraic system has won out - reprints of previously-published chess books have been converted from descriptive to algebraic, in the US and even in the UK. Now this affects hardly anyone at all, granted, but my point is that I think simplicity and lack of ambiguity will win out over archaic, complicated, illogical systems, even in the UK and at worst, Boris & Co's posturing about it this week will only delay this, not stop it.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117907163#Comment_117907163

There seems to be a belief among Brexiteers that metric and decimalisation was 'forced' on the UK by the EEC. But several experts have pointed out the entire world was moving in this direction anyway and that Britain would have gone metric without ever joining the union.

RobMc59

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117907805#Comment_117907805

Decimalisation was in 1971,two years before the UK joined the common market.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117908951#Comment_117908951

It seems Britain was heading towards decimal and metric from the late 1960s onward. Claims that it was 'forced' on the UK by the EEC (or the prospect of joining it) are baloney. Imperial and Lsd had had its day and was starting to slowly go out of fashion.

Sam Russell

I think the coinage going decimal was driven by the prospect of joining the EEC. There was also a move towards metrication as a move to make Britain more 'modern'.

The motor industry started going metric around the early seventies, along with most engineering. Plumbing went metric, along with electric cable.

Currently fuel is metric, but speed limits and distances are imperial. W&M is all metric. Milk is sold retail in imperial.

It is a mess.

RobMc59

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117909403#Comment_117909403

I agreed totally with your earlier post but think you`re being a little unfair saying it`s a mess in the above post.You mentioned earlier Irish people also use some imperial W&M which is how it is here.The only major difference I notice whilst driving in Ireland is the speed limits and signs in KM

breezy1985

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117909224#Comment_117909224

The EU have probably helped save imperial by giving it the space to grow as a political issue

Sam Russell

The mess refers to the half hearted approach to metrication.

Metrication should not be a political issue or give scope for xenophobes to make it a nationalist stick to beat out an imperial sound on a drum that should be long silent.

In speech it is easy to use a confusion of standards, but that is just talk. W&M standards are too serious a matter to be a source of slogans. Where it matters, SI units are used.

As a curious aside -car wheels are measured in inches - a 17 inch diameter 7 J rim is 7 inches wide. The tyre that fits that would be 210 mm wide with a profile of 55%. TV screens ae measured on the diagonal in inches.

Strazdas

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/117909403#Comment_117909403

The reason MPH on signs and pints were retained is because the EU had no problems with it (therefore rendering this weeks posturing from the Brexit govt about restoring Imperial as quite ludicrous).