I Don't Think Sports Illustrated is Buying the Girther Report

[localroger]

55. As a currently working scale technician

...I actually install, maintain, calibrate, and develop automated systems around weighing equipment. I work with the people who work with those scales in nearly every industry, from operators who can barely read to the engineers and managers who employ them. In my experience, both of your observations here are wrong. I have often heard the usage "x weighs more than y" as a shorthand for bulk material "x is denser than bulk material y." This has often come up, for example, in specifying the dimensions of hoppers for bulkweighers which must accommodate the right amount of the bulk material they are weighing. And I have never heard an engineer refer to mass in a practical context, because schemes to directly measure mass are complicated and hard to implement, while scales which measure weight are cheap and simple and acceleration due to gravity makes the relationship between the two pretty reliable.