181–190 of 547 posts
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Oh, the problem with the Euro was that they raised prices everywhere where they introduced the new currency. What was previously 0.8€ becase 1€, 28€ to 30€ and so on. Economic power also moved from individual countries to the ECB in Brussels. If the US started using SI (Systeme International), it's not like you would be subject to a metric-controlling organisation in Paris. :)
The ECB is in Frankfurt, Germany.
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I disagree. A meter is a reasonable approximation of most adults's step length, but a foot is not.
Everyone who works on my farm has a foot that is approximately 30cms, so it works great. If we all had 15cm feet, then we'd say you need to step off 60 feet in the aforementioned example. It is not strictly bound by the imperial system, it just so happens that the imperial system maps fairly well to what is practical in the field without any tools, so it is what we reference. I see no benefit to introducing the metri…
If instead of putting your feet in front of each othr you actually take a step you should get closer to 1m.
(most people I met measure distances with 1m = 1step when playing european football, for example and you have to be at X meters from the ball por something)
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To be honest, although I know the obvious benefits of metric, I still prefer imperial simply because of its messiness. I realize the system is archaic, etc., but I still like that connection, as attenuated as it may be, to our ancient past. Use metric for all scientific purposes, etc., but keep that connection to the natural world. I suppose I like it in the same way I prefer natural languages to some artificial lang…
Sentiment is not a good justification in the science/engineering world.
Like a previous commenter said, all my science labs in high school and college used metric. I imagine legitimate research and engineering labs in America are also using metric.
Regionalized units have the same damaging effect to manufacturing as closed software ecosystems has to software development. The only reason most US citizens do not feel the pain of this fragmentation is that they do not have to buy anything that is not adapted to the US market. Again, this is because the US is the biggest market on the planet and thus it is profitable for big companies to adapt their products to US…
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Sorry, but how is that picture evidence that the US system sucks? I don't disagree that we have a poor system, but "everyone else is doing it" has never been a justification to do anything!
Every time one of the red countries does business with the grey countries, there's conversion deadweight.
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I only live in Metric-using country and I have no slightest idea how tall is five foot, whereas 155cm instantly comes to my mind as, ah, at around my eye level. It's all about familiarity.
Sure, but that's 3 digits versus 1; if the requirement is to express common, human sized-objects with rough accuracy in as few words as possible, it works just fine. Really, it's all semantics (as you say), but there are specific cases where one might be a better fit than the other. It's the inconsistencies in imperial that are truly horrible, not the arbitrary standard unit...
I moved from Belgium to the US last year, and one of the things that surprised me was that metric measures actually see a fair amount of use in the States. It makes a convoluted system even more weird, but it's also just plain fascinating. 2L bottles of coke and 9mm bullets, miles except when people suddenly switch to kilometers, 50 meter pools and 5K jogging runs but a 120 yard football field, 2 oz shaving cream but…
I'm an American that grew up during the time they "tried" to go metric and none of this surprises me. Volumes are tricky for me, but I have no problem going from imperial to metric. Most other countries see the US and are like, "why aren't you using metric?" and we're like, "what's in it for us?" We learned metric in school and it's great, for exact measurements. Sometimes you just want to use what you have and not t…
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To be fair, non-metric units are also use worldwide in some specific fields. In aeronautics, height is in feet. In a boat, distance are nautic miles (not even the same miles as Americans on the road). Quick quiz: what's the diagonal size of your laptop screen in centimeters? Your mobile phone? So it doesn't matter if you use completely unrelated metrics for different things. When you want to buy a laptop you know how…
You understand, though, that the reason laptop screens are measured this way is because of America's continued use of the imperial system.
related question to people from the US: did you actually learn the metric system in primary school? did you learn it besides the imperial units? I believe as Tloewald pointed out that the adoption really depends on whether people are learning it and not what politicians declare to be the standard.