Brexit, aka, the UK Becomes a Clown Car of the Highest Order

This pisses me off especially as a Canadian living in Japan and using what are probably recipes of American origin. No wonder my pancake batter always ends up too runny or too thick.

Actually, that is probably down to the flour used (different kinds develop gluten at different rates), and how you measured it. Did you scoop and level the top with a knife? Scoop and shake the top level? Scoop and tamp it down, then scoop some more? Was the flour really compacted, or freshly sifted? Each of these can produce wildly differing results. When baking, weighing is always the best (and weighing in metric is far easier).

Thanks for the tip. I’ll be sure to weigh the flour next time.

Whilst I’m all for metric, as I use it all the time here, teaspoons and cups are very practical measurements! At some point the UK settled on metric spoons and cups (Also, 5ml = teaspoon, 15ml = tablespoon, cup = 250ml). So anything using a recipe uses that, and you get those little measuring spoons and cups in the same units.

I suspect this might be a US thing, as you guys have weird cup sizes that don’t map to metric, and possibly don’t map to your “English” units. So your teaspoons don’t align to a nice metric size, and are probably 3/8th of a barleycorn or something.

33.333cm? No, it’s 1/3m and 1/8m ;)

Which at least is easy to work out, if you need to specify it in smaller units, as they’re all related!

I can never remember if it’s 12, 14, 8 pounds in a stone, or 12, 4, 8 oz in a whatever-is-bigger-than-an-oz, or 12, 4, 9, 3, 6 feet in a inch in a yard in a mile in a something else. (Also, there’s nothing between a yard and a mile. You jut have to count out about 2517 of them)

I have no grasp of how those units stack. Most of this is a lack of familiarity, I was born and raised in the UK after “the switch”, so only human-weight, beer-and-milk-sizes and car-speeds are done in imperial, everything else is metric. Well, unless I interact with an old person. But it’s also because you have to know the different units of weight and measure, rather than simply knowing how to divide by 10 and fiddling with the first letter. You can also convert between them. 1g water = 1ml = 1cm^3 is actually surprisingly handy.

But in general I see this kind of “problem” raised often about metric. “An inch is 2.54cm and 1/6th is 1.5875. That’s stupid!!! METRIC SUCKS”. Quartering yards or fifth-ing inches is just as difficult as thirding metres. Unless you go for base-60 (like time), you’ll always find some factors easier to work with than others.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Kitchen-Craft-Colourworks-Measuring-Spoon/dp/B003SZU66W

Whenever I stumble upon an American recipe, I’m confused by the use of volume in a lot of them. (That’s after figuring out that its American, and therefore 1 cup/pint/oz means something different to my 1 cup/point/oz. Also: wtf is a Quarts). Like you say: It’s almost always best when weighed. Volume is good for fluids or fluid-like substances (e.g. rice).

And Fahrenheit is an abomination that needs to go away. Give it up already. Even elderly UK people have mostly given up Fahrenheit.

My GF and I argue enough about the difference between 20C and 23C when setting thermostats. I can’t imagine what would happen if we had 1.8* as many units in between there.

US food website Serious Eats – which has seen the light and offers both cup and weight measures in its recipes – once asked 10 people to measure a cup of plain flour into a bowl. Depending on the scooping method, how it was packed and whether they tipped every last bit out, that cup of flour weighed anything between 113g and 170g. (Apparently, according to websites devoted to the science of weighing flour, the official weight of 1 cup of plain flour is 120g and the correct technique is to spoon it into the cup, then level off with a knife). This is a huge disparity; someone might make a cake with 40 per cent too much flour in it. I’m thinking that’d be a pretty dry cake.

Then there is wet vs. dry measure.

And there are people who are convinced that cup measurements are better?

We use celsius in American weather reporting, it’s just automatically converted to fareinheit

I cannot imagine that to be the case (speaking as someone who grew up imperial and finally got a kitchen scale just a couple of years ago). Cups are fine for stews, or cooking where you can add more of the ingredients later. For any kind of baking, cups and tablespoons (and especially “heaping” tablespoons") can fuck right off.

David Cameron is now resigning from Parliament entirely.

About four years too late.

B-day set for March 2017.

Hard brexit and economic suicide it is. The primary drivers are xenophobia, nationalism and racism.

Fear of darkies is far more important than fear of poverty. This is now government policy.

Oh and fuck the 48% it seems…

The pound has sunk to a 30 year low (again) based on the announcement of the date.

Yet the FTSE 100 is doing well, which I find really hard to understand. Anyone out there with an explanation?

British manufacturing and exporting companies no doubt have as much of their accounts in euros and dollars as possible. The falling pound makes their exports more attractive, while for the moment at least they don’t yet have to raise their wages because the inflationary pressure will lag especially in this prostrate economy. Presumably British retailers aren’t quite as happy because they will have to pay more for their goods.

That makes sense, thank you.

Even simpler than that - the FTSE 100 is principally MNCs with very little business in the U.K. itself. It’s a pretty 1:1 relationship between GBPUSD and the FTSE100. The wider index, FTSE250, which is more domestically focussed, has had a torrid time.

Dunt nails it. To our shame.