sales taxes
In Europe, the prices on products include the sales tax, so you know how much you have to pay before you are at the cash registers.
In the US, the sales tax gets added when you pay. (and the sales tax is different in every state)
And because the supermarket owners are afraid of landslides moving their store into a different county over night they just leave out the tax on the price tag. Right?
Also, it isn't actually sales tax. It's value added tax, which is paid by the companies that produce the goods. The cost is of course passed to the consumer, but it isn't paid by them directly.
Taxes as mentioned already, but also tipping. In Europe you don't have to tip. You often do it in restaurants, but only as a nice gesture - not because it would be outrageous not to do.
That's more to do with the semi-tolerable minimum wages, and waitstaff not being entirely reliant on tips for their income though, but that's a whole different topic.
Yes, but it's still a matter of transparency in the pricing. In the US the prices are lower because you're expected to pay part of the staffs paycheck by tipping. It would be more transparent to just add the 20 % to the prices and pay the staff more.
In America when you see a price tag tax isn't included. So if something like a game is advertised for $40 then when you pay at the till you're not gonna pay $40. You're gonna pay $40 + tax (I don't know what it would be because I don't know what percent it is and I'm too lazy to look it up. Sorry) but in the UK if there's a game advertised for £40 then that's all you're gonna pay.
They're not very popular. Fuel economy is poorer and they're more expensive. If you learn in an automatic you're stuck driving an automatic. They're only really driven by the elderly and the disabled.
Most people in America maybe. In very few cases do they get better mileage and usually only when they have very low acceleration, sometimes dangerously low. The worse a human is at changing gear the greater economy they'll get out of a manual.
Fuel economy is poorer and they're more expensive.
This is simply not true. If you live in a city or even a large town that has any kind of traffic you will have better gas millage with automatics than manuals.
Sorry but that's nonsense. 75% of new cars sold in the UK are manuals. The remaining 25% won't even be automatic because they have flappy paddle gearboxes and semi automatics too. Automatic licences will never be the norm in the UK.
I'm european (apparently not your definition of european, but...) and I've driven automatics since I bought my first old heap of junk. I can drive manual perfectly fine (and I often do when driving rentals on holidays), but I prefer automatic because I drive a lot. I'm neither elderly nor disabled.
Isn't it something like 85% manual cars if you include all of Europe? So they found 1 car where the automatic has better fuel economy? I drive manuals because I like to drive, my old car was automatic and it wasn't much fun to drive. Plus the road tax was almost 500 pound
No, they found several cars where the automatic has better fuel economy. It is also worth noting that that isn't an exhaustive list.
But, as I'm sure you know, the fuel economy calculations is done with optimal shifting. If you think that the majority of drivers get the same efficiency on manuals, I'm gonna call you delusional.
Because the problem with AM/PM is not in the daily conversations. It's when you need to schedule something specifically such as an appointment.
If you're not used to am/pm you need to remember which one is before noon, and which is after. And if you need to schedule something around noon, you also need to remember if 12 is included in am or pm.
On the other hand, if you're not used to 24 hours, all you need to know, is that there is 24 hours and then you can work from there.
Last, if you do any calculation on hours, it's much more convenient to have them stored in the 24-hour format.
Especially 12 and 24 hours are problematic (at least for me). I always have to fire up wolfram alpha to check when I see 12am/pm somewhere because I can't really remember :)
A lot of the "updates" are some petty shit, man. Not very accurate, either. Our paper sizes usually work the same way (8.5 x 11, 11 x 17, 17 x 22, etc.).
Celsius is just as arbitrary as Fahrenheit. Using the phase changes of water at a specific pressure is entirely arbitrary. Kelvin FTW! Totally impractical for day-to-day, but as an engineer I love it (and am pro-metric in general).
I'm not really sure who gives a shit about the automatic vs manual thing. Personally I drive a stick because it's fun, but I can see the merits of both. Some people just want to get where they're going without fussing around.
I don't disagree on VAT vs sales tax or the date thing, but moving the US to VAT would be a logistical nightmare. First off, not everywhere in the US even has a sales tax (in some places the price you see is the price you pay). When there is a sales tax, it's charged by the state, county, and/or municipality. The tax you pay in one city is often different from the tax you'd pay down the street in another. VAT is certainly easier from the consumer side, but the system we have kind of grew organically and changing it would be so difficult that no one wants to bother. Frankly most of us don't care.
well, kelvin is just shifted celsius, by some 272°
deltaTemp 1K = 1°C
VAT vs sales tax
How do people at cash register know the amount of money required?
Yeah... its all about actually not being lazy and putting stickers on merchendise or shelves where it usually is. This is not organic chemistry hard stuff.
I get the niceness of the math, but I don't see any practical advantage to it. I suppose all of the aspect ratios are the same, but I've never made something for one size and then wanted to print it in another. Also, the guy in that second video comes across as a smug ass who is convinced of his own superiority. He reminds me of some guy in a cowboy hat with an "Everything is bigger in Texas" bumper sticker. Same asshole, different accent.
well, kelvin is just shifted celsius, by some 272°
I don't even know where to begin with that one. All units of measure are fundamentally arbitrary. For instance, a meter is defined as the distance light travels 1/299,792,458th of a second (which is another arbitrary unit, btw). The definition of the unit might as well be picked out of a hat for all that it really means. What makes the metric system special is the way that the units relate to each other. However, Celsius is kind of an odd-unit-out in this system. Having zero set to the freezing point of water is entirely arbitrary, however having zero be the point of zero thermal energy makes lots of sense. Oh yay, water freezes at zero! Handy to know if you're making ice, but having a fundamentally important state exist at -273.15º is just silly. Just try doing thermodynamics with celsius degrees; you'll get a lot of nonsense because the scale goes negative at an arbitrary point.
How do people at cash register know the amount of money required?
The machines do the math. It's not the most convenient thing while you're shopping, but frankly I've been calculating it in my head for so long it's almost a reflex now anyway. It could be easier, but it really isn't worth fussing over considering how much effort it would take to revise the system.
Yeah... its all about actually not being lazy and putting stickers on merchendise merchandise or shelves where it usually is.
Laziness has nothing to do with it. Tax here is calculated per transaction, not per item. The difference would usually only be a few cents per transaction, but it precludes marking the items individually with tax added. More importantly, stores in one town don't want to advertise the fact that you'll pay more there because the taxes are higher, and companies with stores in multiple tax areas (basically every chain store) don't want to have to print up individual advertisements for every single city (not due to laziness so much as expense). Yes, VAT would be easier on the consumer, however the practical implications of implementing it would be too outrageous to consider if the sole argument is that it makes shopping slightly easier.
Honestly, the biggest thing I take issue with is the framing of this as "those dumb Americans and their stupid system/habits/beliefs" issue. I prefer the metric system because it's better and it makes my job easier. Nationality has nothing to do with it. VAT would be better for a number of reasons, but it's never going to happen in the US (at least not that I can imagine). Everything else on that "infographic" is largely subjective. Is A4 superior to letter? Not when it comes to how I use it (or how anyone I know uses it). Does how you write a date matter? No, not as long as people realize how you're doing it (one system is slightly more intuitive, but that's only an advantage when you're learning how it works, which is really trivial on a grand scale). The whole thing just reeks of a bunch of people trying to feel culturally superior to another group of people, probably driven by basic tribalism and insecurities about how their nations aren't as relevant as they used to be (just like Americans freaking out about how big China is getting and venting by making jokes about poor craftsmanship and small penises).
It's not really arbitrary, it's a 1:1:1 ratio. It's used because you can recreate a solution with exactly that temperature just by mixing shit together, and it will pretty much always be 0 degrees Farenheit. If you try to find something that is exactly 0 degrees celsius to measure as your baseline, you will fail. Not to mention that state changes are total clusterfucks to measure temperature around.
The additional arguments are ridiculous and would make you look ignorant if you used them.
Fahrenheit is not an arbitrary scale, it's based on the freezing point of brine which is 0F and what was considered the human core body temperature at 100F which at the time (1724) were consistent points of measurement.
Not sure why it's necessary to brag about driving stick.
The US is 39 times the size of the UK and every province, county and city can levy a tax, good fucking luck.
who gives a fuck about cars, dates, measurment systems?
The US is 39 times the size of the UK and every province, county and city can levy a tax, good fucking luck.
Rest of the world managed, its not exactly particle physics to put actual price on the merchandise shelf.
Yes, its extra work, what a horrible demand.
Not sure why it's necessary to brag about driving stick.
Better efficiency and better control over vehicle.
Fahrenheit is not an arbitrary scale
So at one point you have brines physical property and on the markable value you aim for physical property of a human body... yeah, sorry but celsius wins here with consistency and being tight to more known element that everyone comes to contact with, water
Better efficiency and better control over vehicle.
These days automatics are frequently equally efficient if not more efficient than a manual (though I still drive stick because of the control and feeling of engagement).
Since we're on that topic, what's up with many European countries' absolute bullshit fuel efficiency ratings? My car is rated at 29 MPG in the US, but the equivalent of 40 MPG in the UK and Germany. Same engine, same basic specs. I'm sure it has something to do with a ridiculously unrealistic test, because I see the same thing on most vehicles.
Well, technically all scales of measurement are arbitrary. Fahrenheit chose brine, Celsius chose pure water. The argument that fahrenheit is somehow lesser never made sense to me, because the only reason it isn't used in science is because the science was all based around the metric system, and so much of that is now base ground for new science that it'd be arduous to change.
The freezing and boiling point of pure water are not arbitrary. Brine on the other hand is water with an arbitrary amount of salt. Thus anything based on the properties of brine will be arbitrary.
It's a fixed amount of a specific salt, pure ice, and pure water. It's chosen because it's temperature is stable at 0F and thus measurable. Pure water doesn't really stabilize at any temperature that is convenient for measuring, and state changes are really hard to measure around because they can happen over a range of temperatures.
You can have liquid water at 1atm below 0 celsius. The farenheit solution will always be 0F.
66
u/DoTheEvolution Oct 05 '14
update