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Home Improvement Chains Accused of False Advertising Over Lumber Dimensions (consumerist.com)
per unit analyzer writes: According to Consumerist, an attorney has filed a class-action lawsuit charging Home Depot (PDF) and Menards (PDF) with deceptive advertising practices by selling "lumber products that were falsely advertised and labeled as having product dimensions that were not the actual dimensions of the products sold." Now granted, this may be news to the novice DIYer, but overall most folks who are purchasing lumber at home improvement stores know that the so-called trade sizes don't match the actual dimensions of the lumber. Do retailers need to educate naive consumers about every aspect of the items they sell? (Especially industry quirks such as this...) Furthermore, as the article notes, it's hard to see how the plaintiffs have been damaged when these building materials are compatible with the construction of the purchaser's existing buildings. i.e., An "actual" 2x4 would not fit in a wall previously built with standard 2x4s -- selling the something as advertised would actually cause the purchaser more trouble in many cases.
There is absolutely no power-of-two dependency above the block size, which is typically in the range of 2^9 to 2^`12. As I said, this makes measuring things in 2^20, 2^30 and 2^40 completely useless, especially when you try to mix two or more of those non-decimal multipliers.
Naming those silly multipliers exactly the same as previously established decimal magnitudes is just icing on the stupidity cake.
Because it hasn't always been 1.5x3.5. A 2x4 used to actually be 2 x 4. Mills get more boards out of a tree with the smaller size so of course they're going to do it. Ranting Anon Coward parent to your post is wrong, and honestly it's time someone actually brought the industry to heel with their bullshit.