Thor

Over 500 years spent trying to cut down a whole trunk of human culture.

GET READY FOR A BRAIN CHANGER!! (manifesting a @gamechangershow and D20 crossover)

This idea hit me like a ton of bricks while i was on a brief errand and then i had to come home and immediately draw it.

ALSO THAT GAME CHANGER FINALE. WILD. GOOD LORD.

Uber is a fucking shell game of a company designed to leech investor capital and output bootleg cabs.

Nvidia posted a profit in 2023 of $4.37 billion. This is like someone stealing less than a penny from me.

And they lock this kid in a prison hospital for LIFE?

~~~~Artefacts, Nick Kyme

a Bn size is the mean between An and An-1

The US doesn't "have to do things different" for the sake of doing things differently, as your words imply, nor is the sentence above about who uses what paper fully correct, either*.

The reason that the US (and Canada, most of Central America, Chile, and the Philippines) use different standard sizes* from Europe is probably pretty easy to figure out when you think about things like "there's a big fucking ocean between two of those places, but not between all of the countries in Europe."

The standard size of paper, according to the American Forest and Paper Association, comes from the days of manual paper-making, and their assertion that 44" is about the length of the average experienced vatsman's comfortable grasp. So a sheet is 1/4" that length. The US standardized its own paper according to what legacy equipment it had, and keeps those standards because even today, paper tends to not be shipped back and forth between Europe and the US unless it has to be, because paper and books are really fucking heavy, so why should either one of us change our standards? Doing so would require massive amounts of capital investment, and frankly, we like our paper sizes just fine. It's really not to our detriment at all. We don't really import a lot of paper, and in fact, we export a lot of it.

American paper sizes are also half of each previous size, it's just that our base is a rectangle, not a square, uses imperial measurements, and reaches back to measurements based on manual paper-making. Sure, we could spend billions of dollars changing our standards to meet that of countries that don't supply us with this good, creating a massive amount of industrial and consumer waste as everything from paper manufacturing mills and industrial printing presses to plastic binders and hole punches at schools all become garbage, but... why? We also use different standard sizes of snack food bags, based on how our industries developed, but there's no actual reason for those things to be standardized, so why, exactly, should they be? Because it bothers someone who doesn't use our machines and didn't know until today that it was different? That's not a real reason. That's just "haha the US sucks and is dumb and irrational."

No, it's actually super fucking rational when you remember that most European countries are smaller than US states, and we're standardized across the places where paper actually moves back and forth in massive bulk on a regular basis. You know: our own states, and Canada, and not Europe, on account of this being a huge fucking continent and paper being incredibly heavy and expensive to transport across oceans. That's why it's governed by the American National Standards Institute, which also governs or governed stuff like thread standards for nuts and bolts & exposure standards for film. The latter had the ANSI standard become the ISO standard, which is a great example of technology which was developed more recently and more specialized and thus not so deeply rooted and hard to change being much more possible to standardize.

tl;dr: all industrial standards like paper sizes have valid and long-argued reasons why they're like that, and unless you're coughing up the solution for changing something with hundreds of years of built-up infrastructure without breaking all of the industries that depend on that standard, the cash to do it, and the reason why all the old equipment that can't be converted should become garbage... fuck off, man, and leave us alone. There are real problems in the world, go solve those.

Do you really think America is so isolated that it gets to uniquely ignore the rest of the world?

Explain fucking Australia then?

Who isn't in Europe? Who is actually a continent, with no land borders unlike America. Who, much to my annoyance, has been more economically tied to the US than Europe since WWII (and its own neighbours since long before that). Who suffered a century of using American typewriters with American sized paper. Who also has their own paper industry like quite a lot of the world (though which still uses predominantly American designed and built machines) that creates massive kilometres long rolls of paper, like the America industry, that isn't limited by the length of someone's arm and is chopped down later.

Even with all those similarities we managed to switch to DIN 476 in 1974, the year before ISO 216 was created, along with a whole list of other countries that also aren't in Europe and also have massive ties to US industry (Japan 1951, Israel 1954, NZ 1963). We even have American made home and business printers that normally work with ISO paper seemlessly but get confused when we print a document made by Americans.

Also the UN switched in 1975. You know the big bureaucratic organisation that uses a lot of paper and functionally exists solely in New York. It can somehow get standardized paper while dealing with American industry.

Watercolour paper and most art papers are still sold in subdivisions of the big old arm width standard (called double elephant) in the UK, Japanese printmaking paper has the Hosho sheet and its subdivisions. I'm pretty sure newsprint still comes in its own formats etc. etc.

Check this shit out! Newspapers and Broadsheets are the opposite of universal, even in countries that use the Metric System.