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It blows our hivemind that the United States doesnโ€™t use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).

Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of Americaโ€™s little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:

The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram

[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]

ISO 216 A series papers formats

AO

A1

A3

A5

A7

A6

Et.

A4

Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. Weโ€™re not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.

Source: Financial Times

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46 points

People behind ISO 216 thought of everyting

how to make a good standard:

step 1: copy from DIN

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_216#History

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4 points

Well, Germans are pretty anal about standards (thankfully) and they do them right, so why not copy them?

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3 points

The world would be a better place if we copied good things more often.

Imagine all of Europe copied Dutch transportation-, German prostitution- and Portugese drug-policies

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2 points

so why not copy them?

oh, I totally agree with you.

In fact standards are made to be copied. Thatโ€™s like the entire point of them.

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