US switching to metric system?

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

And there's why the date is usually in mm/dd/yy format: because that's the way we normally say it.

The way we normally say it is arbitrary. We might as well change that along with our date format.

That reminds me of another complaint of English; giving the descriptive details before mentioning what we are describing. The giant, grey, slow, smelly, cunning, elephant. It makes no sense because I can't begin to imagine what is being described until I know what it is, and then I have to go back and remember what the descriptors are. Spanish is superior in this regard.

[Frank Lee]

I like their upside-down question marks at the beginning.

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

Which has been the most economically successful country since the invention of the metric system? Why has just about every major country that adopted the metric system gone downhill after doing so? While those that haven't gone downhill pretty much make their money selling stuff to the non-metric country? And why do those countries adopt the language, currency, and a lot of the culture of the non-metric country?

China, obviously.
Although their meteoric growth only happened after they dropped their own system of measurement for the metric system.

It is quite something to attribute the rise of the USA to the measurement system.
I believe those two world wars that destroyed most of the infrastructure in Europe and Asia, twice over, had more to do with that.

That English is now a dominant language has 4 reasons, in my belief:
- Despite some of the quirks, it is a relatively simple language with no 'gender' bending of words, simple rules for past/present forms of verbs, most verbs only have a different form when used with he/she and even that is pretty much standard.
It is a hard language to master fully, but easy to get started with.
- War again; when Napoleon conquered most of the European mainland it gave the British a free hand at sea, allowing them to establish a global empire that lasted till after the second world war.
- Computer technology for the masses from Silicon Valley gained critical mass in the late 70's and swept the competition, making English mandatory for anyone involved in information technology.
Most countries acknowledged that and made teaching English a priority.
- Music (the Beatles!) and Hollywood.

[D.O.G.]

I don't get why you Americans think changing is so hard.
At least your currency is already "metric" (base 10).

I'm old enough that I grew up with the imperial system for currency (pounds, shillings and pence) in Australia, then changed to dollars and cents in 1966.

You pick it up quickly enough.

We adopted metric units for everything else gradually between 1970 and 1988 and while I still sometimes have to mentally convert between the two systems, there are many imperial units that are now only a vague memory (how much is a rod or perch?)

There are short term draw backs to change of course.
I'm an electrician and still remember the hassle of using different sized screw threads and conduits, working out current ratings of the "new" metric sized cables, etc, but as I said before, you do get used to it.

These days, I love the metric system.

... and just because it was mentioned earlier in this thread ...
Our dates are written day/month/year, your convention of month/day/year is confusing at first glance to me, but I'm sure it would become second nature very quickly if we changed to your convention.

[Fat Charlie]

Originally Posted by Frank Lee

Speaking (PUN!) of which, since the world is deciding on the most rational system of weights and measures, why would the world also decide on the most irrational language?

English is rational as all get out, but its weakness is that it's inconsistent. It's a b@$+ard (take that, censorware!) language built over time based on what's effective- pulling useful bits from all sorts of languages wherever useful. If it pulls something from German, it uses German rules for it. If it pulls from French, it uses French rules. It was spread by force and is too effective to get rid of because only another artificially created language could compete. And Esperanto just ain't happening.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by D.O.G.

I don't get why you Americans think changing is so hard.

It's not hard, it's undesirable. Change ought to make things better. Changing to the metric system for everyday use would make things worse, for all the reasons given above.

At least your currency is already "metric" (base 10).

Not entirely. That's why we have the quarter, nickel, and half dollar (though that's now rare in everyday use). And the most common bill is probably the $20. If it was purely decimal, we'd only have pennies and dimes, and $1, $10, and $100 bills. Having those non-decimal denominations makes life a lot easier.

Though I admit I've never quite understood why we have a quarter dollar coin, but not a $25 bill :-)

You pick it up quickly enough.

And one picks up the LSD system quickly enough, too.

Originally Posted by RedDevil

China, obviously.

Not by per capita income. In 2014, China $7,590.00, US $54,629.50. (Per GDP per capita (current US$) | Data | Table ) And of course China makes a big chunk of its income from selling stuff to the US.

It is quite something to attribute the rise of the USA to the measurement system.

I don't attribute it to the measurement system, I simply note that it obviously did not prove to be a major obstacle. And I do find it interesting that both France and Britain have declined since adopting the metric system, even if it is pure coincidence.

I believe those two world wars that destroyed most of the infrastructure in Europe and Asia, twice over, had more to do with that.

On the contrary. Destroying antiquated infrastructure created the opportunity to start again, with a newer and more efficient one. Much of which was paid for by the US, BTW :-)

[Piwoslaw]

Originally Posted by D.O.G.

Our dates are written day/month/year, your convention of month/day/year is confusing at first glance to me, but I'm sure it would become second nature very quickly if we changed to your convention.

I work for company whose HQ is in the US, but has offices all over the world. Our computer system uses the "American" date format of mm/dd/yyyy, but at the same time we are required use dd/mm/yyyy in any texts. As this has lead to many costly misunderstandings, most of the offices outside of the US have started to use the DDMMMYYYY (17DEC2015) format to avoid misunderstanding, but only in unofficial documents and emails. In fact, many people from the offices in the US have followed, but the company still refuses to change the format in the computer system (because of the expense?), so our whole workforce has to recognize and mentally convert dd/mm/yyyy to mm/dd/yyyy and back, scores of times per day.

Homework: Why would switching the computer system to dd/mm/year be too expensive to imply?

[P-hack]

wow, dd/mm/yyyy is pretty dumb too.

yyyy/mm/dd puts things in normalized order of significance, like a number, the bigger parts to the left the smaller parts to the right. we don't do mm/ss/hh or ss/mm/hh...

[freebeard]

Everybody uses a mix of number systems. In my case metric wrenches for a car that is driven in miles.

Get back to me when the Metric countries go decimal for time instead of a base 60 system.

[PaulB2]

I majored in Physics in college. Virtually all problems in Physics are done in metric. We only learned how to solve them that way (either MKS - Meter,Kilogram,Seconds or CGS - Centimeter,Gram,Seconds). The few times we were given a problem in English units, we had no clue what to do with it, other than to just convert everything to MKS or CGS, solve the problem, and then convert the result back to English units again.

The US only carries on with English units because it has been so dominant recently. When we lose our empire we will finally have to bite the bullet and go all the rest of the way into metric. It's a tremendous competitive disadvantage to keep English...

Some things are going to look funny though. There is a standard for card edge connectors that is every tenth of an inch for a contact. It will stay the same, but just be called the 2.54mm standard. That standard may already be superceded though.

One thing that annoys me about metric is the wrenches. Some countries use 10, 12, 14mm..., others use 11, 13, 15. or some combination. It's too bad the world did not standardize on bolt head sizes, one way or another, long ago. It means your tool box has to have wrench sizes for every millimeter, twice as many as should be.