Australia, Canada, the UK and India have all gone from the Imperial system to the SI system of measurement. The US can do it too. Besides, most large companies (including the entire automotive industry) are already metricated in the United States. The only parts of their operations that are imperial are those that are customer-facing.
... the US customary units are defined by the metric system equivolents. If you were to go ask the NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) what an 'inch' was, they'd reply "We define the inch as 25.4 millimetres." It occurs this way, because the metric system is more precise.
Howdy,
I was thinking, wouldn't it be better if the USA finally adopted the International System of Units?
Because...
So, what do you think?
There was a push to do it in the 1970s, and we really should have sucked it up then and done it. It'd be long done and over with by now.
I think we're roughly the same age and I remember the same thing. Though I disagree and think we should have pushed it through.
If The People don't want it, it shouldn't be pushed on them. Free country, and all that.
You mean like income tax?
I do and I'm what YOU would call a liberal.
I have to disagree with that completely. Our "new" kitchen is 10 years old and I expect it to last another 15 years at least considering we bought good quality appliances. The average car is 10 years old, which means half of them are older than that. Tractors of all kinds are kept on and off the road for decades. Houses last decades if not over a century, though there have already been changes in that area from pre-WWII houses. Buildings last even longer, especially sky scrappers.
While I would be fine with seeing metric (I'm old enough to have learned both in school) it won't be nearly as easy as you might think. The cost would not be inconsequential even if you spaced it out over several decades because there will be compatibility problems and re-designing that will need to be done. You can't just replace a 1" bolt with a 26mm bolt, it might not fit into the design correctly - assuming 26mm would even be a "standard" bolt (metrics tend to be odd numbers only after 10mm). 2x4 studs and 4x8' sheets fit correctly but 50x100mm and 4x8' sheets won't fit quite right - both need to be changed at once. There are millions of the same kind of examples out there. I'd like to see it but this is why is wasn't done 40 years ago and we've got the same problems now as we did then. The only difference is there would be some good come from it because there's more world trade than ever, now, so some industries would see some savings from it.
I'm not surprised, but I actually know what a chain is, too ...
Even in modern surveying we still call a 100' steel tape (aka engineers tape) a "chain", even though it's not 66' long. Honestly, I can't imagine anyone surveying with an old-fashioned 66' chain (100 links) - though you DO need to know the conversions into feet. 1 link = 0.66 ft. --- surveyors don't use inches.
No, the costs would not be inconsequential, but it would have cost less in 1973 than it would in 2013, and it would cost less in 2013 than it will in 2053.
The metric system isn't more precise but when the US went to the metric standard, US units were defined in those terms.
I understand and agree but I'm not going to sugar-coat the process, either. People need to know what it is we'll be getting into by doing this and there will be a lot of mistakes while the old equipment - us humans - get used to it. I've seen more than one construction job screwed up when using meters instead of feet simply because the mistakes the construction guys would normally catch weren't being caught. That can't be the only industry where that kind of thing will happen.
