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It's time for the US to use the metric system

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Re: It's time for the US to use the metric system

#151

Post by rakoo »

Someone wrote: post #127
talideon wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I dislike having to own wrenches in both standard and metric units I think you mean "I dislike having US customary and standard metric units". When it comes down to it, everybody else in the world managed to buckle down and just switch to standard metric units and ISO/DIN paper sizes. There is nothing special about the US that makes it any more of an imposition for them to switch over. Many of the issues you've out…

What is special about the US is that it has a huge population that uses a single set of units of measurement. Europe had zillions of them ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass) , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ell ) units, often multiple ones per country. In some sense, the metric system was a blessing, as it was foreign to all countries. Countries would never have switched to, say, the German standard of measurem…

> Europe had zillions of them

The world had zillions of them, and yet the world (minus some strong-headed minds) switched to it. Centuries ago.

What is special about the US is that there is still some commercial value in converting from standard metric units to this specific US system.

Re: It's time for the US to use the metric system

#152

Post by trothamel »

cs02rm0 wrote: post #57
trothamel wrote: post #37

The strange thing about articles like this is that they seem to assume that converting between units is something that happens all the time, such that doing so is a huge drain on the economy and engineering time. I don't know if my experience is the common one - but with a few exceptions (inches/feet, oz/pounds) such conversions seem kind of rare. Instead, you pick an appropriately sized unit to begin with, and stick…

Probably a host of stuff from one less NASA orbiter crashing, down to not having the sticker on millions of car B pillars printed with imperial and metric tyre pressures. There are lots of downsides, it's interesting you give a construction example; in the UK we have houses built from imperial bricks. Metric bricks aren't the same size, but a conveniently round number in millimetres. A house I'm buying was built in i…

Again, it's interesting that all of those are issues caused by metrication, the switch to metric units, rather than issue caused by customary or imperial units themselves.

> The costs of maintaining different systems aren't large but accumulate indefinitely, the cost to switch is finite.

That only makes sense if there's no discount rate, nothing else that could be done with the money we'd spend to switch. I suspect there are a lot of things that could be done that would yield higher rewards.

Re: It's time for the US to use the metric system

#153

Post by Kroem3r »

sjwright wrote: post #80
sophacles wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow you must not have read my comment at all. I explicitly said we should convert, but that there are some considerations that need to be made. I even said that now is a better time than ever. Perhaps I'm not being zealous enough with my "hey lets be careful about this as we do it" type statement?

America is like the fat kid who's the last to jump into the swimming pool; everyone else is shouting the water is fine, it's warm, it's fun, but you're sitting there worried about the consequences of being wet. As if you were the first person to ever get wet. You don't need to be careful. Just look at everyone else who jumped in without injury and jump yourself.

Yep. Nope. You've outed yourself in an unfortunate way. Everyone wants to do business in the US and everyone is prepared to jump through the hoops to do that business. US regulation accomplishes a bunch of things, including adding friction to non-US companies doing business in the US.

Re: It's time for the US to use the metric system

#154

Post by mlnhd »

astrodust wrote: post #144
smackfu wrote: post #121

It's funny how Celsius gets grouped in with the metric system, even though it really has no benefits over Fahrenheit. http://www.ericpinder.com/html/celsius.html

It has benefits, like it works perfectly with Metric, where Fahrenheit is based on arbitrary numbers that have nothing to do with anything else. A 1x1x1 cm cube of water at 20°C weighs 1 gram and has a volume of 1mL. Temperature, weight, and volume are interlinked this way.

Celsius is based on arbitrary state change temperatures of an arbitrary chemical, just like Fahrenheit.

Re: It's time for the US to use the metric system

#155

Post by smackfu »

mistakoala wrote: post #3

I wonder if a successful TTIP agreement would be the catalyst for this? It's inexplicable that the EU/ EEA would allow for non-metric goods to freely flow into the market.

What's a non-metric good? Isn't it the labelling that makes something metric or not?

Re: It's time for the US to use the metric system

#156

Post by rakoo »

astrodust wrote: post #141
smackfu wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would make a lot more sense if we used a system where 0 was the coldest it normally got, and 100 was the highest it normally got. Way more integer data points, and a lot less use of negative numbers.

Kelvin starts at 0°. There's a maximum temperature but it's really stupidly hot, where the particles are accelerated to nearly light speed because of thermal energy. The temperature of the sun would be 0.00000000000000002° in your crazy system.

> Kelvin starts at 0°.

No, Kelvin starts at 0K [0] :)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kelvin

Re: It's time for the US to use the metric system

#157

Post by smackfu »

mlnhd wrote: post #154
astrodust wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It has benefits, like it works perfectly with Metric, where Fahrenheit is based on arbitrary numbers that have nothing to do with anything else. A 1x1x1 cm cube of water at 20°C weighs 1 gram and has a volume of 1mL. Temperature, weight, and volume are interlinked this way.

Celsius is based on arbitrary state change temperatures of an arbitrary chemical, just like Fahrenheit.

And only at an arbitrary pressure that happens to be based on the sea level of an arbitrary planet at an arbitrary point in time.

Re: It's time for the US to use the metric system

#158

Post by bane »

soneca wrote: post #97
bane wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, the U.S. really should have switched during the late 19thor very early 20th century before the benefits of the industrial revolution gave us so much stuff that needs to be converted. Even if we converted tomorrow, we'd still be dragging around imperial measures for decades, maybe a century. I can't see cooking or property measurements making the transition within my grandchildren's lifetimes. In most co…

There is an interesting case of old unities remaining in use for centuries in Brazil: "arroba" This is wikipedia in portuguese for arroba through Google Translator (good enough to understand, just consider "arrogance" = Arroba): https://translate.google.com.br/translate?sl=pt&tl=en&js=y&p... Basically is a mass unit (in Brazil and Portugal), originated at the imperial system (with an arabic name ar-arub meaning "the…

Yeah, you find all sorts of odd measuring systems in specific fields, we still use "hands" when measuring horses for example.

Re: It's time for the US to use the metric system

#159

Post by marcosdumay »

sophacles wrote: post #53

Some thoughts on a conversion that I don't generally see brought up: * From an economic standpoint, the US is a big enough market that it is profitable to make things in weird US units, you have 350M people to sell to, most of whom are pretty well off by world standards. It makes sense to make a line catering to them. If businesses can start making a true or good economic argument it will happen more. * Tooling that…

From an economic standpoint, the rest of the world is a big enough market so that it's worth supporting too. And everybody gains when markets join.

About tooling, yeah that's bad. But everybody has 2 sets of tools all over the world, because both US and rest of the world are big markets. A transition won't change a thing, the only thing that changes is that a few decades from now, everybody will stop needing one of those sets.

Paper is also already a nightmare. All equipment supports both ISO and US standard, and is more expensive because of that.

Constuction aparell is always weird. Your 36" doors are certainly not exactly 36" wide, as metric 90cm doors are not exactly 90cm wide. At least here (at Brazil, thus metric) there are several different sets of sizes to choose from, because some people want bigger doors and windows, other people want smaller ones.

I think you overestimate the costs at the US, and underestimate the benefits.

Re: It's time for the US to use the metric system

#160

Post by marcosdumay »

gcb0 wrote: post #102
sophacles wrote: post #53

Some thoughts on a conversion that I don't generally see brought up: * From an economic standpoint, the US is a big enough market that it is profitable to make things in weird US units, you have 350M people to sell to, most of whom are pretty well off by world standards. It makes sense to make a line catering to them. If businesses can start making a true or good economic argument it will happen more. * Tooling that…

Where i came from farm land is still measured in acre and hectare, even though everything is metric.

Hectare == hectameter == 10,000 m^2 (while we are at it, could we standardaze the world in comma and dot usage?)

It is metric, is just uses an older name.

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