US switching to metric system?

[RedDevil]

Originally Posted by jamesqf

On the contrary. Destroying antiquated infrastructure created the opportunity to start again, with a newer and more efficient one. )

I am glad you finally saw the light! Let the one country that still uses that antiquated system finally make the switch to a newer, more efficient one!

On a serious note.
When I was born 19 years after the war my parents rented a small room.
We lived in a small room.
Both my parents worked and could afford to rent a small home, but it simply wasn't available.
Only in the 70s was the housing situation restored to normal.

A bridge, even an antiquated one, gets you on the other side.
A railroad, even an old one, gets you to your job or whatever.
A factory, no matter when it was built, can provide that job.
A bicyclenot molten to panzer steel gets the kids to school.
Not having all that does not provide a great chance to start afresh. Rather, it prevents and frustrates making that start at all.

But nothing compares to the human suffering.
My mothers teeth need a lot of care, because they were damaged as a result of the famine in the last year of the war.
My grandfather survived because my grandmother kept him hidden for over 3 years, telling the Germans who routinely came to search the house they had already taken him to Germany and that she never heard of him since.
The Germans sought the house anyway but never found him.

I don't blame you for your ignorance. You probably never gave much thought about what life looks like during or shortly after an all consuming war.
You simply did not know.
But please never sing the praise of that kind of carnage again.

[freebeard]

We don't need war because now we have recycling. But still the streets of Manhattan follow old Indian and deer trails.

A picture I will never forget was of a Vietnamese metalworker pouring melted aluminum (prolly helicopter parts) out of a ladle made from an American GI 'steel pot' helmet.

[Xist]

Rooster!

[freebeard]

Even the root word is five letters to two.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by PaulB2

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.

I complain about this all the time with auto parts. Why does there need to be 10,000 differently sized brake pads and calipers? Why can't there be, say, 20 different standard calipers and pads that will suit a variety of vehicle sizes instead of inventing a new, slightly incompatible part for each redesigned model? Heaven forbid a Ford part being interchangeable with a Chevy car.

I'm sure glad phone manufacturers settled on USB as a standard instead of the proprietary junk they had before. Apple is still screwing this up, but they don't seem to be hurting for their insolence.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by Piwoslaw

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

Err... Because you're stuck with Windoze? And even there, it should be a simple matter of changing the print format, because (as said earlier) the computer does not store dates in that form.

Now if you had Linux, it'd be a simple matter of setting the LC_TIME environment variable to your local value, probably pl.UTF-8.

[jamesqf]

Originally Posted by RedDevil

ILet the one country that still uses that antiquated system finally make the switch to a newer, more efficient one!

Well, when you consider that the metric system is over two centuries old (and, as has been pointed out, has numerous inefficiencies in everyday use), let us wait for a newer, more efficient one to come along :-)

But please never sing the praise of that kind of carnage again.

Now when was I singing praises? I simply stated well-known facts of economics: the European (and Japanese) economic resurgence after WWII was in large part due to the more modern replacement infrastructure. It may not be kind, gentle, or good, but life is often like that.

[freebeard]

Seriously, International date, time and keyboard layouts was settled art by 1984. Automatic conversion now extends to written text.

Computers spend a lot of their time wrangling bits into a form humans can comprehend.

[redpoint5]

Some metric units are absurd too; Celsius for instance. Negative temperature is nonsensical (there is no such thing as cold), therefore, I prefer Kelvin.

The US should adopt SI units, not metric.

[P-hack]

below freezing is hardly nonsensical, nor is boiling, I will assume you are kidding (I want a temperature system designed to have a 100 degree spread between the freezing and boiling point of water, but make everyone, in everyday life, surrounded by water and weather, and stoves, remember to use an offset of 273.15... because that isn't even more arbitrary than celsius)