WARNING: Personal rant ahead, please disregard.
I don’t know anything about standards in the steel industry, but your example seems like that would be a HUGE difference. Namely, your customers would all quit buying from you [I certainly would], and you’d go broke.
There are 25.4mm in an inch. 15.875mm would be 5/8" stock, It wouldn’t fit my intended applications, and I’d be pissed.
Though I’m an American, born and raised, I’ve used the metric system preferentially since I went to grade school In Atlanta in the aforementioned 70s.
Okay, so why should individual citizens care? IMHO, our traditional system is a big part of the problem with our general knowledge of math and science. You can’t do easily science or engineering in the so-called English units, so most of us don’t use them in our daily lives and fully internalize them. We’re far more proficient in math when it comes to our money – because it’s decimalized.
What? You think you do engineering in the traditional system? Well before you express that opinion too loudly, tell me: what’s the English unit of mass (it’s not the pound)? Of force? Of power? What’s a slug? A poundal? How many BTU does it take to raise a 1 lb weight 1 foot? Not many who could correctly answer these basic questions without looking it up would argue for traditional over metric.
Without units like slugs and poundals (which are far more obscure to Americans than, kilograms, liters and meters) and dozens of conversion factors you’ve probably never learned, you can’t do science and engineering in the traditional units. So we don’t, and European or Asian high school students do. Objective tests show that most of us don’t have the innate grasp of science that high school students of most underdeveloped nations do, We’re just as smart, we just make life more difficult for ourselves by rejecting a far superior tool.
I once read a 18th century math high school textbook (early 1700s). the standard math faced by any shopkeeper or clerk -or shopper- would drive us batty. Just making change was a mental workout: every state had a different currency with different values that varied with time. A customer might pay in any combination, depending on what the store next door gave them in change, and you had to make change with some combination of the currencies you happened to have in the till.
“That’s a terrible example,” you say? Well, look to Europe again, and see how many billions of Euros a year their combined economy, on a par with the US economy, is saving by converting to a uniform decimalized unit. It was a lot more complicated than switching to metric would be for us. Our businesses have made the major underlying changes already because most of them have figured out that the rest of the world is a bigger market than the US is, and it’s getting bigger.
Basically, currencies are one of the biggest factors that hold stable free nations -and more importantly, their citizens- apart and away from opportunities.
Yes, our computer systems, down to the digital odometers on most cars, can do the conversion at the press of a button. That makes it easier to switch! Individuals are the roadblock. They don’t want to learn. We have a name for refusing to learn: deliberate ignorance. Odd, isn’t it, that most who master the new system see its advantages, while those who don’t, defend the old one?
I have somewhere around here, an essay I wrote on all the times the US has adopted the metric system nationally on some level or another, and all the times it’s cost us cruelly for not carrying out our intent. It’s harrowing. Congress has studied the matter many times, always concluding the benefits of metric were increasing, not decreasin. I’d guess the percentage of defenders who’ve read them is barely in the single digits. I know the percentage of defenders who advance valid arguments of the superiority of the the old system would be lucky to reach the single digits at all. In fact, there is only one: change takes effort.
I love my country. I hate to see it suffer to any degree for a lack of effort, a lack of willingness to put forth a minimal effort. I know that effort, I’ve made it. Those who haven’t, can’t say how hard it is. Even if it’s harder to change when you’re older, you don’t know how hard it is or isn’t until you’ve done it