The point being, Civil Guy, that making it easier was considered to be a bad thing. Being an Engineer was sailing through the tricky bits that slowed down the non-E’s. At least to some.
It’s like telling doctors that interns shouldn’t be forced to stay up too many nights in a row, because there’s no real reason for it and that’s when most mistakes get made. It’s rationally true, but the change hasn’t happened yet, has it?
[QUOTE=Civil Guy]
Of course, the Brits (and others) cling to tradition as well, using ‘stones’ as the common way everyone figures personal body weight, er, mass.
[/QUOTE]
“Stone”, actually. One stone plus one stone equals two stone. Like sheep. One stone is 14 pounds.
It carries through otherwise. In the US, a hundredweight is 100 pounds. In the Imperial System, it’s 8 stone, or 112 pounds. Similarly, a US ton is 2,000 pounds while an Imperial ton is 2240 pounds.
However, the UK has been officially on the metric system for some time.
[QUOTE=Jubilant]
My town is full of monorails. Only they have two rails and are called Els.
[/QUOTE]
You do know what the “mono” part of monorails means, right?
Anywho my teacher was telling us about a futuristic article or something she had read recently (this was 1974-75) in which instead of a private car that drove on a road you would have a private monorail car that would travel on the nationwide monorail system.
The complications of such a system boggled my mind even then.
I have indeed noticed a tiny bit of metric sneaking in here and there. Milk that was once a half gallon is now a liter…but sold at the same price. Therefore you are getting less milk for equal expense…an underhanded way to actually raise prices.
[QUOTE=Billy on the River]
I have indeed noticed a tiny bit of metric sneaking in here and there. Milk that was once a half gallon is now a liter…but sold at the same price. Therefore you are getting less milk for equal expense…an underhanded way to actually raise prices.
[/QUOTE]
That makes no sense. A litre is slightly more than a quart…a US quart, that is. It’s a little less than an Imperial quart. There’s no way you could mistake a one litre container for a half gallon. A two litre carton is very similar in size to a half gallon, but is actually slightly more milk.
There you go, that’s part of the problem… his milk cartons/jugs may be enforcing metric on him with no alternative, as has been suggested – but he now has no idea of specifically what is the metric measurement he’s getting, and his first fear is that he’s getting cheated on it.
…and no State Consumer Affairs or Agriculture Department or Dairy Board would allow a litre to be sold for the price of a half-gallon… well, unless you’re comparing a litre today with a half-gallon in 1989…
<delurk> Actually, soccer (football to the rest of the world) is still officially defined in yards/feet, with metric equivalents given parenthetically (I always wanted to use that word in a sentence) in meters/cm/psi, according to FIFA’s (world governing body of soccer) LOTG (Laws of the Game).
Moreover, soccer *is *the most popular participant sport in the USA (huge youth leagues here give it many more participants than basketball, for instance). So go figure. </delurk>
PS: As an American doing business in Europe and Asia, I’ve always found that talking Kg/kph/°C avoids one being labeled as just another typical American *arsloch/baka/langer/tosser/connard/cazzo * and is a whole lot easier than learning an actual language. Besides, their English will always be better than your (or my, anyway) French/German/Japanese/Italian…and they’ll never let you forget it, either. 
PPS: <troll> All the greatest English goalkeepers are all American now (Keller/Tottenham; Friedel/Blackburn; Howard)/ManU/Everton) </troll>.
–maxrad
[QUOTE=Laughing Lagomorph]
You know, its funny. I was just thinking about the parallels between the US not adopting the metric system, and the US not liking soccer.
Growing up in the US in the 1970s we were told by our teachers that even though our parents and grandparents had never used it we WOULD be using the metric system in our everyday lives by the time we were grownups. We would have to, the rest of the world did and we wouldn’t want to be different, now would we?
And it was right about this time that I first heard about this game called soccer. It was a “new” sport (I know), one that was played all over the world, and even though our parents and grandparents had never played it, it WOULD be one of the most popular sports in America by the time we were grownups. It was in the rest of the world and we wouldn’t want to be different, now would we?
One of my teachers promised us monorails everywhere too, but that’s a different story.
[/QUOTE]
[QUOTE=Civil Guy]
Of course, the Brits (and others) cling to tradition as well, using ‘stones’ as the common way everyone figures personal body weight, er, mass.
[/QUOTE]
On this day in history UK currency went decimal.
In this spirit of progress the bookmaking fraternity decided to restructure its odds pricing system. Ancient prices such as 13/8 and 9/4 were replaced by 8/5 and 11/5 respectively. This confused the punters so much that the experiment lasted about two days before the old pricing system was reinstated. Perhaps Wolverhampton on a cold Monday in February was not the place to attempt such a revolutionary idea.
One legacy of decimal pricing yet remains. Old prices of 100/9, 100/8, 100/7 and 100/6 are now quoted as 11/1, 12/1, 14/1 and 16/1 respectively and this is how the odds are chalked up at the track. However, and not many people know this, if you like a horse at 16/1 you can walk up to a course bookmaker, hand him £6 and say “£6 on War Admiral plus the fractions” and he will lay you 100/6 instead of 16/1 which, of course, is a superior bet. If you omit “plus the fractions” you will only get the 16/1.
Not really. Its upside didn’t match the downside of a wholesale conversion. What benefit is it to me that my roads are marked in kilometers rather than miles? None. The only advantage is that it would make driving easier for people from other countries. The value to that is greater in Europe, where you have a bunch of small countries abutting. There, a common system has value and they had several to choose from. Metric won because several of the countries had already converted and they pushed the simplicity and Cold Vulcan Logic angles. The same was tried here but, for the half-joking, Archie Bunker, “Ugly American” reasons I gave, it never gained traction in the overall market. Sure, in industries that export they converted, some more enthusiastically than others, but the biggest example is the 2-liter bottle of Coke, which has been a win for the American consumer. During this holiday time, many stores have 2-liters on sale for 99 cents. Fifty years of dealing with the American marketplace tells me that the same stores would be selling a 2-quart bottle for 99 cents, not 93.7 cents.
I’ll remind you that, except for a few neutral countries and Great Britain, ALL of the EU was overrun, plus some countries that haven’t qualified for membership. And I don’t recall Australia unilaterally declaring war on Germany. It waited until treaty obligations forced Great Britain’s hand when Poland was attacked and Australia’s own obligations under the Commonwealth did the same for it. The US didn’t have those obligations, and I suspect Australia’s leaders would’ve preferred they didn’t, either, what with Japan menacing its region. Instead, when war actually came to Australia, a large part of its armed forces were in North Africa.
[QUOTE=DSYoungEsq]
You know, given that the economy in the United States is as robust an economy as can be found, generally speaking, given that we manage to muddle along as the world’s biggest superpower, generally speaking, and given that we don’t appear to be losing either status anytime soon, I wonder what the point to insisting that we are somehow silly/stupid/less enlightened for failing to convert to metric is?
Is the metric system more “rational?” Yes. Does it offer the average person advantages in their life through its use? No. Would it occasion a period of discomfort while we adjusted? Yes (think, for example, of all the recipe conversions that would be needed). Are we going to do it? No time soon.
We’ll eliminate the penny, first. 
[/QUOTE]
I think this is an important point. Changing to metric offers two main advantages to the US today: ease of conversion of units and more compatibility with the way much of the rest of the world is measuring things.
What do either of these matter to most people? What percentage of people in the population struggle on a daily basis (or even a weekly or monthly basis) with converting units? What percentage care that the engineering plans have to be converted or have two sets of dimensions? Most people just don’t have to deal with these issues regularly, and so the metric system offers no real advantage to them.
I have heard the argument made that the average consumer would benefit from lower prices as a result of standardized manufacturing and lower inventory costs on replacement parts, but I’m not convinced the effect would be enough to notice.
So while I think the metric is the way to go, I don’t see a full changeover occurring soon because if the cost/benefit ratio for the country as a whole. Rather, I think we’ll continue to see individual manufacturers change their products slowly over time, in the same way that many one and two quart items have become one and two liters.
[QUOTE=Askance]
Which if so is fairly small minded of them.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, yeah. That’ll help. :rolleyes:
You know, for a “new” country, us Americans are sure as hell stuck in our ways. Get rid of the penny and the dollar bill? Oh no…The vending machines would need to be redone! Everyone would have to learn a new system! Get rid of the English System? Never! IT would be so complicated.
Nevermind that the EU masterminded a complete change of currency in its member states without a hitch. The Brits changed from Pounds/Shillings/Pence to decimal as well. Did these civilizations collapse? Of course not. Are we really that incompetent and stuck in our ways? Are people really that useless? I think we really underestimate ourselves and under-exert ourselves here. You’d be surprised we sent a man to the moon!
[QUOTE=Merkwurdigliebe]
You know, for a “new” country, us Americans are sure as hell stuck in our ways. Get rid of the penny and the dollar bill? Oh no…The vending machines would need to be redone! Everyone would have to learn a new system! Get rid of the English System? Never! IT would be so complicated.
Nevermind that the EU masterminded a complete change of currency in its member states without a hitch. The Brits changed from Pounds/Shillings/Pence to decimal as well. Did these civilizations collapse? Of course not. Are we really that incompetent and stuck in our ways? Are people really that useless? I think we really underestimate ourselves and under-exert ourselves here. You’d be surprised we sent a man to the moon!
[/QUOTE]
I think people are willing to change when they see a need to do so, but they do need to see a need. Standardization, by itself, is not a need, as it really only impacts a few.
As has been pointed out, the “pound of coffee” is now about 11-12 ounces, which has been accepted just fine. Changing that to 350 g (or whatever the conversion will be) will not matter.
People see no reason to change to Celsius, when common sense/experience tells them that 0 degrees F is too cold, 70 is nice, and 100 is too hot (even in Vegas this week).
We do not have enough international through traffic to justify changing mph to kph or miles to km.
There is also an elegance talking about a half-pound burger vs. a quarter pounder that loses something in a decimal system. That is one of the reasons even the post-revolutionary French failed in changing time to a decimal system, even they realized that fractional hours were superior to decimal hours.
I do not think Americans (of which I am one) are lazier than others, they just need to be convinced at the grass roots level that the conversion if for the better. But the key is that it needs to come from the populace up, not industry or government down.
BTW, I think the penny will go when more and more small stores realize that handling them is a waste of time. The “Need a penny” cups are the first step in that evolution.
[QUOTE=Merkwurdigliebe]
Nevermind that the EU masterminded a complete change of currency in its member states without a hitch. The Brits changed from Pounds/Shillings/Pence to decimal as well.
[/QUOTE]
But you’ll note that the Brits did NOT make the change to the Euro. What are they, pussies?
OK, here’s a nice simple everyday-person example. Suppose you have a fish tank, with measurements 1 foot by 1.5 feet by 2 feet. How many gallons does it hold? That’s a practical question which almost nobody would be able to answer. Even if by some extreme fluke a person happens to know that there are 231 cubic inches in a gallon, you’d still need a calculator to do the arithmetic. But for the equivalent problem in metric, not only are the conversion factors easy, but so are the calculations.
The counter-argument used against metric is that most Americans don’t have a good grasp of the metric system, and it would take time and expense to train them on it. This is true. Except that most Americans also don’t have a good grasp of the American system, and it would take even more time and expense to train them on that. If we want to train Americans to the point of mathematical literacy, why not do it the easy way, rather than the hard way?
Yes, but that’s a completely different thread. 
The main long-term reasons to go to metric:
A) Anyone who doesn’t know metric is, ipso-facto, a scientific illiterate.
B) Years and years and years of elementary and junior-high “math” are wasted in trying to drive in, year after year, such facts that there are 5,280 feet in a mile (or 1720 yards), two cups in a pint of milk, but 2.32 cups in a pint of strawberries, and other bloody-pointless garbage. No wonder Johnny can’t read; there’s no time to teach him!
C) Millions of dollars are wasted and lives put at risk every day by confusion of the two systems.
[QUOTE=Outpits]
People see no reason to change to Celsius, when common sense/experience tells them that 0 degrees F is too cold, 70 is nice, and 100 is too hot (even in Vegas this week).
[/QUOTE]
Sorry, but forecasts are the one place where forecasts are better in celsius. Just better. Sorry.
The fluctuation of temperature you can actually feel does correspond to one or two degrees Celsius. None of this ‘high 70s’ nonsense. Which of the seventies is it?
Also, if things get near zero, it means frost, durrrrrrrr. Simple, is it not?
“The nice thing about standards, there are so many to choose from…”
[QUOTE=Chronos]
OK, here’s a nice simple everyday-person example. Suppose you have a fish tank, with measurements 1 foot by 1.5 feet by 2 feet. How many gallons does it hold? That’s a practical question which almost nobody would be able to answer. Even if by some extreme fluke a person happens to know that there are 231 cubic inches in a gallon, you’d still need a calculator to do the arithmetic. But for the equivalent problem in metric, not only are the conversion factors easy, but so are the calculations.
The counter-argument used against metric is that most Americans don’t have a good grasp of the metric system, and it would take time and expense to train them on it. This is true. Except that most Americans also don’t have a good grasp of the American system, and it would take even more time and expense to train them on that. If we want to train Americans to the point of mathematical literacy, why not do it the easy way, rather than the hard way?
[/QUOTE]
I think the simplest answer is that almost nobody would bother to determine that roughly 20 gallons or 80 liters of water is necessary to fill the aquarium. They would either run a hose from the sink or get a 2 gallon/8 liter pitcher and fill it until it met their aesthetics. Again, the common person (not a student in math class) would never find the need to answer this question, so the units are irrelevant.