… I wouldn’t expect them to offer 25′ for $2 
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To expand on what you and a lot of others here have said, my take on HF is that it’s fine if you’re a mechanical whiz. Those with real know how can analyze, adapt, adjust, and modify their tools to be useful, like the product off the shelf is just a rough draft. The rest of us need to be really careful.
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Thought this was going to be another case of the Chinese inches.
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Lathe. I should buy a lathe.
And make that dreidel.
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Who uses a tape measure in any sort of professional capacity?
Actually, that’s not true. I use the 50m ones. For that sort of scale they’re useful
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Normally speaking I wouldn’t laugh at someone tricking someone else to cause pain themselves, but Feynmann would be an exception!
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Not where I’m from. They’re just called “Meter” here. Not even “Meterstab”
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That doesn’t narrow it down enough:
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Well, you’ve narrowed it down to two bands of territory in Southern Germany. But I have never been shy about announcing that I’m from Franconia.
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That’s one of those imaginary places from “The Princess Bride,” right? 
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That explains a lot.
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I used to belong to a great website called NeighborGoods, where people would list all the tools they were willing to share with neighbors. Then you could easily connect to borrow them from each other.
People listed everything from power tools to kayaks. It was awesome.
Unfortunately it shut down after a year or two, and has not been replaced. I guess one could try to use NextDoor or Facebook, but I don’t participate in those. I do still have a neighbor with all the tools in the world, and will occasionally physically walk over to him to ask for a loan of something. (Very 20th c. of me, I know.)
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it’s also useful to connect a microphone on one side and a heat exchanger on the other. Give the microphone to your average poltiician and watch all their hot air heat an entire neighborhood!
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Oh wow, that takes me back to my beer drinking days. I could open a beer bottle with anything, mostly a Bic lighter.
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To avoid injury, just keep your fingertips away from the segment ends as you level them into place.
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That would be inconceivable. /rimshot
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FWIW, my current cheap tape measure of choice is from the US chain “Dollar Tree”.
It has both Metric and Inch scales. I find this feature very useful, and not very common in inexpensive tape measures in the US.
“Tool Bench Metal Tape Measures, 25-ft.” is $1.25 if your store has it (items carried seem to vary greatly between locations) and one can order it online for store delivery if one has use for a quantity.
My philosophy on cheap tools is that tool vs no-tool is often a great convenience that is worth the ticket, and tool-vs-improvised tool is frequently a substantial improvement in safety.
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I read a biography of Fermi for a class in college. When Fermi was in university, he was a member of the “I hate my neighbor club,” which specialized in such pranks as tossing small bits of solid sodium into the urinal where someone was peeing and fastening locks into the buttonholes of men’s fine coats.
I bought a post hole digging bar from them, because it was half the price of anything else I could find, and because it’s hard to screw up a 6-7 foot bar made of iron with a vaguely blade-shaped end.
And it was perfectly fine, except that the first one didn’t show up. So they had to ship a second one. And then a month later the first one arrived.
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