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this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2026
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Anything But Metric
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Americans will use anything but metric
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Why is the measurement of a liquid in weight?
I need to know how many school buses of liquid this is to understand
It was being shipped by truck. A truckload might be 40k pounds of pabst, and be full. Or it might be 40k pounds of lead and be far from full.
The example is just for silliness, but trucks have weight limits, not volume limits. So everything shipped by truck has a weight declared at some point in the process.
At least, that's my third hand understanding. Never did any trucking
There is a volume limit, there's a maximum height, width and length for a semi trailer. A typical intermodal container is 8 feet wide, 8 foot 6 inches high and 20 or 40 feet long, which is why in some areas they're called Twenty-foot Equivalent Units or TEUs.
Cargo comes in TEUs rolling up and rolling down
A twenty foot box, boys, filled with booze, to go rolling down the river HEY!
Well, I meant more that they don't have a maximum percentage of the volume of the container allowed to be filled, but damned if that wasn't interesting anyway :)
Edit: also, damn cool to see a longest Johns link in the wild!
Like most folks I discovered The Longest Johns during that bizarre sea shanty craze during the pandemic, but I got really into them. I bought like 5 of their albums.
I totally get it.
Ever run across Steve'n'seagulls?
They don't do shanties, but I discovered both at the same time, so they're linked in my head. And, most people that like one like both eventually.
Have come across Steve'n'Seagulls, they do bluegrass covers of metal songs...something in my memory is saying they're actually Scandiwegian or something? Denmarkois?
They remind me of Hayseed Dixie. A bluegrass cover band. I'll give you two guesses who they cover.
The one I link in my head with The Longest Johns is Colm McGuinness. He's even done a video with the Longest Johns, he sang lead in a recording of Star of the County Down. He gets up to get a beer during the instrumental break, it's hilarious.
because it's so fucking aweful they can barely call them """fluid""" ounces.
How many football fields is that?
Because if it was in dollars it would be like $12.
Kilo pounds. Still better than the idiots mixing roman numerals in the industrial software at work. MP for M(ille) Pounds. And for millions? MM (which is actually 2K but don't let them know or they'll get upset).
40,000 pounds is 20 tons, a typical truckload.
Which typical truck: a single axle box truck, a tandem box truck, a tandem tractor with tandem trailer, a tandem tractor with tridem trailer, a tridem tractor with either trailer, or a Super-B? 43' trailers or 53'?
Well given the cargo is stated to be 40,000 pounds of beer, I'm strongly assuming a tandem tractor towing a 53 foot tandem axle reefer trailer. Such an "18-wheeler" is common enough to be a stereotype on American roads and such a configuration would carry a payload of almost exactly 40,000 pounds.
Because that's the reported weight of the truck in the insurance claim.