Author Topic: why is the US not Metric  (Read 170698 times)

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Offline KL27x

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #900 on: December 18, 2019, 09:56:44 pm »
^Believe me. I am not denigrating other countries. America is in may ways the worst of the lot. And to fuck with ancient history. I'm talking about today. I just happen to be born here.

Did you even read the first half of my post? But that is for another thread. This is purportedly a safe place to argue over metric. You might also accidentally learn something other than "metric is so good! Americans must be arrogant."

Might I have subcounsciously influenced v6kgzo's choice of vocabulary, today, in the London flat thread?   :-+
« Last Edit: December 18, 2019, 10:47:33 pm by KL27x »
 

Offline SilverSolder

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #901 on: December 19, 2019, 04:25:32 pm »
^I wasn't particularly picking on America, just saying that how we think about things is evolving.  Fast.  This is true across the world, in all nations.  And I don't particularly think America is the worst - we are all Homo Sapiens muddling through, trying to avoid at least the dumbest mistakes, and not always succeeding.

 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #902 on: December 20, 2019, 09:06:21 am »
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And you seem to deadset upon turning it into an "Australia Bashing" thread.
Well, the America bashing seems to be gone, now.  :-DD
You seem deadset to make my words into what you want to hear. In what way am I bashing Australia?  :-// I'm trying to understand the context. I am curious what 1960's Australia was like. Australia IS unique among english speaking countries in its success of metrication. If trying to learn about Australian history is "bashing" to you, perhaps cultural cringe is still present in Australia?

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There always have been "Artificial Poms", " Artificial Yanks", " Eurosnobs", etc.
Unfortunately, they have an influence upon the Media, out of all proportion to their actual numbers.

This is not what cultural cringe even means.
We invented the term, so may know a bit more about what it means.
Basically, it is the habit, mainly amongst those groups I mentioned of dismissing anything done in Australia, as inherently inferior to that done in the overseas countries of their choice.

Thus, a Eurosnob will not watch Australian's "A" league soccer games, preferring to watch European teams online or pay TV in the middle of the night.
Whilst doing so, they may sip a drop of French wine---- never Australian, American, or South African.
"Australian? Really my dear, how could you?

An "Artificial Pom" regards anything Australian is inferior to that produced "In The Old Country".
Australian art, music & literature is regarded by them, as "crap".
In Sports, they will watch the "English Premier League", & cheer for the England team in Cricket.

"Artificial Yanks" consider anything made, or done in the USA, as superior to anything done elsewhere, & in sport, wouldn't watch Australia's " National Basketball League", as it is so inferior to the NBA.
Of course,to them, US made cars are much better than anything ever made in this country.
They are also usually great fans of the US gun laws.

None of them would deign to watch the AFL!

Unfortunately, they have big mouths & manage to convince a fairly signicant section of the public that "we suck'.
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beg you to read the wikipedia about "cultural cringe" all the way beginning to end. But this time assume that I am an ethic immigrant citizen of America. Assume I am of a race that is belittled and stereotyped by American media, daily. Assume that if I go to a 5 star restaurant in my own city with a group of only my own color, that we will stand there watching white America getting seated ahead of us for 40 minutes, even though we have a reservation. And that should we make the mistake of bearing the humiliation rather than leaving with some dignity, the servers will utilize their 5 star training to charge us $300 a head for the pleasure of enduring further not-so-subtle barbs and denigration.
Sorry, "wiki" has stretched the meaning out of all proportion to its original usage.
"Cultural cringe" is annoying, but what you are talking about is "common or garden" racism.
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Cultural cringe is not limited to media. That said, American media has been bad to just about every other country other than britain. I don't know how much you see of it, but Crocodile Dundee and Steve Irwin ain't half bad, compared to how we portray many other people. I think by today, Australia has been granted "full citizenship" by this point. I mean being rich and white and having a cool accent, I don't think Australia can be victimized by American Hollywood that long. Perhaps in the 60's it was different, though.
Hollywood was never a huge offender, Americans having been on the wrong end of similar attitudes.
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I might have more curiosity and connection to this idea of "cultural cringe" than you. Let's say as this ethnic immigrant that being exposed to American culture and schools and media caused me to be embarrassed and to undervalue my own heritage and culture. And maybe that is also the fault of my parents, who made effort to NOT expose me to their culture and even their language; in belief this will help me to "get ahead." (When in fact this only further limits my value and opportunies).

I see analogy in Australia totally erasing its old ways of measurement.
It is a false analogy, as units of measurement were never a huge component of our culture.
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So maybe you will see I am not bashing Australia when I am curious about this phenomenon in Australia in the 60s. Australia/New Zealand are the only post-metricated countries where even the old people pretty much completely switched to metric in every way of daily life.
Remember, this was 45 years ago, & today's "old people" were in early middle age then.
Even people who were old then didn't find it a big drama, though.
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I have a lot more feelings on this about cultural cringe and America and my ideas of slavery as it has always existed in advanced societies since centuries before Christ. And how it continues today; it's just way more sophisticated and sinister. But that is getting off topic.

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I think kilometerage is a thing because of car rentals that charge by the kilometer. Or taxis/uber. If they use the word mileage somewhere on the contract, then it might cause confusion (real or people just being cheapass, by saying they wrote "milage," so I will pay for by the miles, not the kilometers). But it's a real word in Italian and in Spanish, too.
 
If kilometerage was going to become a common term in Australia, I would think it may have achieved some traction over all these years.
It has achieved exactly zero.
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If I wanted to, & was persuasive enough, I could organise a group of people to march down the road yelling " Inch!, Inch!, Inch!, Foot!,Foot!, Foot!, Yard!, Yard!, Yard!, Mile!, Mile!, Mile!, Furlong! Rod! Pole!, Perch!, & as long as we were well behaved, didn't hinder traffic, or get into unseemly physical confrontations with the public or police, we could go home & sleep soundly in our beds, knowing the Metrication Death squads are not coming for us!

This is nothing to do with language, daily life, culture, sporting history/records. Cultural cringe is about destroying historical buildings, denigration of your own art and achievements, eagerness to disconnect with your own history. This is curious to me. I think metrication was more complex than Australians being smarter than UK, Canada, America. Because by IQ and education level, is not that different.

And here is the strawman that gets raised, over and over. You already told us that even in your schooling in Australia, 60 years ago, you learned inches, feet, and miles, only. But here are those rods, perches, poles, and furlongs that you bring up when it is convenient. Why not have a serious discussion? What are you afraid of?

Because your idea of a "serious discussion" is for you to throw in a bunch of "red herrings" whenever your previous argument is getting a bit "frayed at the edges".
OK, I'll withdraw the rods, poles, perches & furlongs --- the comment still stands!
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Also, during Australia's metrication, it WAS illegal to sell a tape measure with inches on it. It was made illegal to print oz's in addition to metric on food packaging. If you were doing this, I suppose the Bureau of Metrication would confiscate and destroy these things, then levy a fine. If you think this would go over in America, you don't know America. The politician to even mention this is going to kill his career.

There was no "Bureau of Metrication"(sounds delightfully Totalitarian).
The authority involved was the Metrication Board, which had no powers to do such things.
The responsible bodies were the various State ones which normally controlled things like stopping manufacturers from trying to sneak in "15.5 oz pounds", & suchlike skulduggery.
Old stock tape measures were pretty much run out of stock (after all, it's not as if people hadn't been warned that Metric measures were coming.)
Food packaging is not normally stocked in huge quantity in advance, so the changeover was not hard enough to make that a big problem.

Any prosecutions were pretty much "naughty, naughty, don't do it again", followed by "a slap on the wrist".
Hardly anything that people would "go to the barricades about".

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In my curiosity/investigation, I discovered some other things I was not aware. During the penal-colonization of Australia, at one point Britain had 222 capital crimes. Most of which were for property crimes. We think that Saudi Arabia is crazy for cutting off your hands for stealing. At one point, stealing a rabbit was a capital crime in Britain.  In fact, any theft greater than 5 shillings was a capital offence. Symptom of a sick and dying empire? Source of cheap labor? So at least during this period of penal-colonization, one might imagine that many of the criminals did something far less odious to earn their sentence. Early on, many of them were worked and lashed to death in Australia, and laws were eventually made to limit the number of convicts to 70 per "owner" and to limit the number of lashings allowed per day.

Prior to 1775, when the locals became "a bit too restive", Britain transported convicts to America, under the same conditions.
https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2015/05/britain-sent-thousands-of-its-convicts-to-america-not-just-australia/

They then cast about, looking for somewhere else, & decided upon Australia.
 

Offline gbaddeley

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #903 on: December 20, 2019, 01:21:35 pm »
After 50 years there are still some vestiges of imperial measures in Australia. Most tape measures have metric and imperial. Nuts / bolts are available in both metric and imperial ( whitworth mainly, but also sae fine thread ). However, the building industry is fully metric. Car tyres (tires) have their tread width in metric, but the hub diameter is in inches. Go figure. In some states race horses go clockwise and in other states anticlockwise. Rugby (on a field similar to American football) uses metre lines, not yards.
Glenn
 

Offline KL27x

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #904 on: December 20, 2019, 06:23:53 pm »
^Apparently even in France many of their tape measures, today, have inches on them.

On a common tape measure, here, the small cm numbers often go only 1-10 and then wrap back to 1. Because 1 cm is only so big, and you can't make them bigger just to get bigger font on there. So when you use the cm side to measure something several decimeters long, you have to find the nearest 10's mark to find where you are. The inch side is way bigger and bolder, and the inches are continuous. The foot marks will be on there, but for many uses we ignore feet. There are no yard marks on our tape measures, at all. Maybe this is the stonecutters doing? Or maybe here, we don't care that much about measuring in cm's.

Perhaps there are countries where tape measures commonly only have cm on them. If this is your country, this is an FYI. In case you thought our tape measures changed to feet and yards and the inches started all over. Just cuz they exist doesn't mean we have to use them. Anymore than 19.284 meters would be measured as 1 dekameter, 9 meters, 2 decimeters, 8 centimeters, and 4 millimeters in Australia. 

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vk6zgo
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If kilometerage was going to become a common term in Australia, I would think it may have achieved some traction over all these years.
It has achieved exactly zero.
This was a bit of a strawman of my own. I already stated this is for car rental contracts and the like. Unless you read car contracts aloud daily, this will never be part of your daily life, no. OTOH, in France, this might be used in daily life the way we use "mileage." Because in French is sounds fine?

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It is a false analogy, as units of measurement were never a huge component of our culture.
If you say it and other Australians say it, then it is so. But do you find it curious that French Canada is mostly metric-only? But english-speaking Canada still largely uses imperial in daily life to this day? At least this is what internet research suggests. Admittedly, I haven't been to Canada in many years. The only other English speaking country to be so nearly metric after metrication is perhaps South Africa. And English is only their 4th most common official language. They also did the change a bit authoritarian-like, forbidding the use of many "four letter words" like pint and inch and mile. And they also had just finished changing to decimal currency.
http://www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/short-history-metrication-movement-south-africa
If our government Board of Metric came up with these posters, we would think it's cute our government believes it has such authority over us. And if it were attempted to be enforced, we would tell our inching government exactly where to stick the yard, and to mind its own pinting business.

You also fucked up all your previous sporting records that were rounded to the nearest foot or yard. They can be converted to metric, but they will lose in the translation due to rounding errors. :) Also by changing race course lengths, the times can no longer be compared apples to apples, at all.

I haven't been in Canada in a couple decades. My personal experience with watching Youtube:
AvE, Matthias Wandel are two of the only Canadians I "know." They both use inches to describe and communicate distances. Quite unapologetically, I would say. Neil from Pask Makes is Australian, and he usually states things in metric and imperial conversion. But he will also sometimes use just imperial. "3/4" plywood," for instance. It's probably just easier to say. There are tons more examples. John Heisz is another Candian that could care less about centimeters. I have never seen english speaking canadian use metric, casually. I think Ireland also accepts metric more than Britain. And there are obvious reasons why this might be the case. (Ireland uses the red circle signs, too, but they put the units under the number; go figure, Ireland of all countries has some common sense).

Matthias was one of my inspirations and teachers in learning to build (complex machines with moving parts and requiring high accuracy) with my own hands. As previously stated, I tried both sides of the tape measure before I settled on inches, and I am sure he and others influenced this decision. Now, I didn't take shop classes. I took science classes. I had learned only metric in school. So you could say I learned inches from a Canadian.  >:D

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Old stock tape measures were pretty much run out of stock (after all, it's not as if people hadn't been warned that Metric measures were coming.)
Food packaging is not normally stocked in huge quantity in advance, so the changeover was not hard enough to make that a big problem.
Well in America, stores would still be ordering and stocking and selling customary tools and measures. Heck, they would use metrication as advertisement. "Get your inches here before they're all gone!" There's very little chance our government would successfully ban a silkscreen. In your country, maybe you thought "Inches will be gone, we won't be able to use them." In America we think "things will still exist and need to be measured and cut. As long as my tools are accurate in inches, I don't care if the government doesn't recognize the system. I can still use them. Who's going to stop me? The thought police?"

You are going to ban a silkscreen on a tape measure? Like "no, Inches. Mr. Metric has the patent on tape measures. You're in violation." You're going to go around measuring things, and if they round to the nearest 1/32th of an inch better than the nearest half mm, you will send out the inspectors to see what tools they are using?

In Australia, entire businesses switched in sync. Entire districts of butchers, for instance, switched at the same time. For the reason that a holdout who still cut their steak in inches and weighed in lbs would gain unfair advantage in attracting customers. In America, we just let our people pursue as much profit as they can and let nature take its course. Inches seem to be in demand in most english speaking countries.

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Any prosecutions were pretty much "naughty, naughty, don't do it again", followed by "a slap on the wrist".
Hardly anything that people would "go to the barricades about".
That would not deter Americans. If they made more money, they would continue to do it. If they gain market share and more business/profit, they will take that along with the slap on the wrist. They will brag about it. They will stop when it no longer makes them more money. For this to occur, the Bureau of Metrication will need to have some teeth. Like the ability to revoke business licenses and to levy fines. Or to disrupt a business for hours or days at a time.

Either Australians accepted a more authoritative government in the 60's and 70's. Or Australians actually wanted to ditch inches more than most other English speaking people. I think it's the latter. Australia is a bit of a special snowflake in this aspect. You should be proud of that and not care what we do. Unless you are waiting us to change in order to validate your own choices.

But... metric is the entire world. Yes, the entire globe uses metric, including US. But do we speak the same? I suppose you have the common language with then entire world in Australia. As soon as you learn a hundred more languages. You are accustomed to using metric casually, conversationally, already, so that is a huge advantage.

The only people who seem to care that inches still exist and are predominantly used by the english speaking world, other than Australia, is english speaking Europe and Asia. They learned English as a second language. Thousands of words. But they object to 4 of them. Inches, yards, feet, and miles.

We have homegrown metrication fans. They are a small but noisy minority. This is just one of many useless causes that people learn in liberal schools which the underlying common goal of is government funding and increased power of the federal government. Over 200 years of this dance, we have learned to not lightly give our federal government responsibilities and powers that it does not need to have.
« Last Edit: December 21, 2019, 08:16:39 am by KL27x »
 

Offline Tepe

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #905 on: December 20, 2019, 10:05:57 pm »
Perhaps there are countries where tape measures commonly only have cm on them.
Of course there are :)



More commonly they also have mm on them.
 

Offline KL27x

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #906 on: December 20, 2019, 10:21:26 pm »
^Yeah, I know they exist. I wonder if any countries exist where you cannot buy combination tape measures (with those disgusting inches!) at the local hardware store. In case people have not seen inches, I wanted to make it clear they don't roll over at 12.
 

Online Zero999

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #907 on: December 21, 2019, 09:53:34 am »
Some of the rulers at school only had cm and mm on them and that was over 20 years ago, so it wouldn't surprise me if there a quite a few people under 40 who are unfamiliar with inches.
 

Offline vk6zgo

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #908 on: December 21, 2019, 10:41:15 am »
^Apparently even in France many of their tape measures, today, have inches on them.

On a common tape measure, here, the small cm numbers often go only 1-10 and then wrap back to 1. Because 1 cm is only so big, and you can't make them bigger just to get bigger font on there. So when you use the cm side to measure something several decimeters long, you have to find the nearest 10's mark to find where you are. The inch side is way bigger and bolder, and the inches are continuous. The foot marks will be on there, but for many uses we ignore feet. There are no yard marks on our tape measures, at all. Maybe this is the stonecutters doing? Or maybe here, we don't care that much about measuring in cm's.

Perhaps there are countries where tape measures commonly only have cm on them. If this is your country, this is an FYI. In case you thought our tape measures changed to feet and yards and the inches started all over. Just cuz they exist doesn't mean we have to use them. Anymore than 19.284 meters would be measured as 1 dekameter, 9 meters, 2 decimeters, 8 centimeters, and 4 millimeters in Australia. 

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vk6zgo
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If kilometerage was going to become a common term in Australia, I would think it may have achieved some traction over all these years.
It has achieved exactly zero.
This was a bit of a strawman of my own. I already stated this is for car rental contracts and the like. Unless you read car contracts aloud daily, this will never be part of your daily life, no. OTOH, in France, this might be used in daily life the way we use "mileage." Because in French is sounds fine?

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It is a false analogy, as units of measurement were never a huge component of our culture.

If you say it and other Australians say it, then it is so. But do you find it curious that French Canada is mostly metric-only? But english-speaking Canada still largely uses imperial in daily life to this day? At least this is what internet research suggests. Admittedly, I haven't been to Canada in many years. The only other English speaking country to be so nearly metric after metrication is perhaps South Africa. And English is only their 4th most common official language. They also did the change a bit authoritarian-like, forbidding the use of many "four letter words" like pint and inch and mile.
http://www.theheritageportal.co.za/article/short-history-metrication-movement-south-africa


If our government Board of Metric came up with these posters,{/quote}

 we would think it's cute our government believes it has such authority over us. And if it were attempted to be enforced, we would tell our inching government exactly where to stick the yard, and to mind its own pinting business.
The text of the link didn't say a thing about the accompanying picture, so perhaps you are reading things into it which suit your understanding of the situation.
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You also fucked up all your previous sporting records that were rounded to the nearest foot or yard. They can be converted to metric, but they will lose in the translation due to rounding errors. :) Also by changing race course lengths, the times can no longer be compared apples to apples, at all.

Australia, the USA, the UK, Canada, & a lot of other Imperial & ex Imperial countries have been involved in world sports for many years, like the Olympic Games, where the distances, weights etc are all Metric, so there is a large archive showing the performance of athletes from those countries at Metric distances, weights, etc.

Looking back, those people who were dominant in Mile races were also dominant at 1500m.(the mile is, "near as dammit" 1609 metres).

The same situation held for other distances where the Imperial & Metric distances were close.
The 440yd race comes out at a couple of metres longer than 400m
The 100yd race is just over 8m shorter than the 100m.
.
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I haven't been in Canada in a couple decades. My personal experience with watching Youtube:
AvE, Matthias Wandel are two of the only Canadians I "know." They both use inches to describe and communicate distances. Quite unapologetically, I would say. Neil from Pask Makes is Australian, and he usually states things in metric and imperial conversion. But he will also sometimes use just imperial. "3/4" plywood," for instance. It's probably just easier to say. There are tons more examples. John Heisz is another Candian that could care less about centimeters. I have never seen english speaking canadian use metric, casually. I think Ireland also accepts metric more than Britain. And there are obvious reasons why this might be the case. (Ireland uses the red circle signs, too, but they put the units under the number; go figure, Ireland of all countries has some common sense).

Matthias was one of my inspirations and teachers in learning to build (complex machines with moving parts and requiring high accuracy) with my own hands. As previously stated, I tried both sides of the tape measure before I settled on inches, and I am sure he and others influenced this decision. Now, I didn't take shop classes. I took science classes. I had learned only metric in school. So you could say I learned inches from a Canadian.  >:D

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Old stock tape measures were pretty much run out of stock (after all, it's not as if people hadn't been warned that Metric measures were coming.)
Food packaging is not normally stocked in huge quantity in advance, so the changeover was not hard enough to make that a big problem.

Well in America, stores would still be ordering and stocking and selling customary tools and measures. Heck, they would use metrication as advertisement. "Get your inches here before they're all gone!" There's very little chance our government would successfully ban a silkscreen. In your country, maybe you thought "Inches will be gone, we won't be able to use them." In America we think "things will still exist and need to be measured and cut. As long as my tools are accurate in inches, I don't care if the government doesn't recognize the system. I can still use them. Who's going to stop me? The thought police?"
Nobody was banned from using tools they already had, & it was acknowledged that there would be a lot of stuff still around for years, if not decades.
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You are going to ban a silkscreen on a tape measure? Like "no, Inches. Mr. Metric has the patent on tape measures. You're in violation." You're going to go around measuring things, and if they round to the nearest 1/32th of an inch better than the nearest half mm, you will send out the inspectors to see what tools they are using?

In Australia, entire businesses switched in sync. Entire districts of butchers, for instance, switched at the same time. For the reason that a holdout who still cut their steak in inches and weighed in lbs would gain unfair advantage in attracting customers.
How?
When people shop at the butcher, they just want to buy some meat, take it home, cook it & eat it.
They don't give a stuff how you measured it.
I assume you meant to put a "?" following your comment above.
Otherwise, it reads as an assertion.
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In America, we just let our people pursue as much profit as they can and let nature take its course.
Yeah!------Tell that to anyone who wants to install self serve fuel pumps in New Jersey or Oregon.

Or anyone who wants to sell alcohol in competition with the State Liquor Stores in Alabama, Idaho, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Utah and Virginia.

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Inches seem to be in demand in most english speaking countries.

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Any prosecutions were pretty much "naughty, naughty, don't do it again", followed by "a slap on the wrist".
Hardly anything that people would "go to the barricades about".

That would not deter Americans. If they made more money, they would continue to do it. If they gain market share and more business/profit, they will take that along with the slap on the wrist. They will brag about it. They will stop when it no longer makes them more money.

Unless they have idiots for customers, they wouldn't make more money.
The small amount made by catering to idiots would be swamped by the loss of customers who considered it a stupid stance to take.
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 For this to occur, the Bureau of Metrication will need to have some teeth. Like the ability to revoke business licenses and to levy fines. Or to disrupt a business for hours or days at a time.

Yes, I can just imagine how the USA would do it.
Set up a Department of Metric Security, with armed agents with powers of arrest.
Perhaps offenders  could be sent to Guantanamo Bay! ;D
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Either Australians accepted a more authoritative government in the 60's and 70's. Or Australians actually wanted to ditch inches more than most other English speaking people. I think it's the latter. Australia is a bit of a special snowflake in this aspect. You should be proud of that and not care what we do.
 Unless you are waiting us to change in order to validate your own choices.
No, do what you like.
What annoys us is when you make up silly reasons why Australia Metricated, missing the obvious one----- that it was a good idea.
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But... metric is the entire world. Yes, the entire globe uses metric, including US. But do we speak the same? I suppose you have the common language with then entire world in Australia. As soon as you learn a hundred more languages.

The whole idea of Metric, as well as Imperial, is that the units can be read & understood by anyone familiar with the system, no matter what language they speak.
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You are accustomed to using metric casually, conversationally, already, so that is a huge advantage.

The only people who seem to care that inches still exist and are predominantly used by the english speaking world, other than Australia, is english speaking Europe and Asia. They learned English as a second language. Thousands of words. But they object to 4 of them. Inches, yards, feet, and miles.
Nobody "objects" to the words.
We are just bemused by the fact that you continue to cling to the last vestiges of the system they are part of, whilst, over tens of postings, you have gone from "It's too expensive", to "We are already metricated where it matters", to "Australians gave away their heritage", to implications of totalitarianism in the Metrication process", finally, something vaguely to do with internationalism.
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We have homegrown metrication fans. They are a small but noisy minority. This is just one of many useless causes that people learn in liberal schools which the underlying common goal of is government funding and increased power of the federal government.

Finally we have "It's the Libruhls!"

I'm giving up, this is doing my head in!
 

Offline Tepe

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #909 on: December 21, 2019, 12:12:17 pm »
^Yeah, I know they exist. I wonder if any countries exist where you cannot buy combination tape measures (with those disgusting inches!) at the local hardware store. In case people have not seen inches, I wanted to make it clear they don't roll over at 12.
I haven't seen any combination tape measures. Folding 2 m sticks with metric on one side and inches on the other can be found here, but they are uncommon. Curiously, even the ones labeled in cm only  are called "tommestok" around here, meaning "inchstick"... ;-)
 
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Offline tooki

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #910 on: December 21, 2019, 03:18:02 pm »
^Yeah, I know they exist. I wonder if any countries exist where you cannot buy combination tape measures (with those disgusting inches!) at the local hardware store. In case people have not seen inches, I wanted to make it clear they don't roll over at 12.
I have never seen a combination one in a hardware store anywhere outside of the Americas (as of now, meaning Europe and Thailand). Whether measuring tapes, foldable yardsticks, office rulers, or analog calipers, micrometers, etc, it’s metric-only by default. For sure, here in Switzerland you have to look far and wide to find non-metric measures (other than in electronic gadgets, which are usually switchable). If you need something in inches here, you will not find it in retail, but rather through the large industrial suppliers. (For example, I recently ordered some combination metric/inch vernier calipers from Mitutoyo, which makes nearly all its products — even digital! — metric-only. So I had to order them from Switzerland’s biggest tool vendor, since other places only carried the metric-only versions.)

Frankly, I doubt your claim that combination tape measures are readily available (as in, retail) in France. What’s your source for that belief? (Your wording makes me think it’s just something you heard through the grapevine.)
 
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Offline KL27x

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #911 on: December 21, 2019, 07:39:47 pm »
The text of the link didn't say a thing about the accompanying picture, so perhaps you are reading things into it which suit your understanding of the situation.
Ok, pot.

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What annoys us is when you make up silly reasons why Australia Metricated, missing the obvious one----- that it was a good idea.
Got it. Metric is good! Why not use it? Ok. Why not use more than one system if you want?

Quote
The whole idea of Metric, as well as Imperial, is that the units can be read & understood by anyone familiar with the system, no matter what language they speak.
My point is that people speak different languages. So the fact that "anyone" can understand a meter doesn't help you very much to communicate with someone in French or Russian. OTOH, if I could use 2.54 and a calculator to speak russian, that would be pretty awesome. Still easier for you to speak with us than with Russia. Just think of the rest of the native english speaking world as foreign to you, speaking a "completely different" language which you just need a calculator to understand. Conversely, Americans can use metric just fine when the want to communicate in English with English speaking Asia/europe/russia and/or Australians, the Irish, and South Africans. We are totally ok that our perception of the world is framed differently and in some cases requires conversion to be accurate as needed. We don't mind. It works for over a century, already. We invested quite a lot in making the meter standard and in the process also making inches and lbs standard across the world. Abeit, fl oz and gallons not so. That is unfortunate but of little consequence in daily life for anyone.

Quote
Nobody "objects" to the words (inches, feet, yards, miles)
We are just bemused by the fact that you continue to cling to the last vestiges of the system they are part of, whilst, over tens of postings, you have gone from "It's too expensive", to "We are already metricated where it matters", to "Australians gave away their heritage", to implications of totalitarianism in the Metrication process", finally, something vaguely to do with internationalism.

It IS expensive. And America IS already metricated where it matters. Australian government determined that having two systems was the worst possible outcome. To an American, this is patently wrong. Considering the value of metric in chemistry and physics and electronics, and the body of knowledge that has been built around metric, the worst outcome would be to have only imperial. This is why we were keen to gain access to metric and completely change chemistry and physics to metric. Well before much of the rest of the former commonwealth. Having both is fine with us, because we have been doing it ever since the scientific community adopted metric and later SI (which we had a big hand in). We consider imperial as part of our language and culture and we appreciate it, and there are in fact real advantages to using in certain contexts.

As it turns out, it isn't cancer. There is no problem having both. Australia cut its left testicle off for nothing. That was the correct one to remove, if you had to keep just one. America doesn't need to follow suite, and it probably never will in our lifetimes. Unless it's your goal to be a construction worker or civil engineer in America, there is no reason you can't use metric to your hearts content. Some Americans do.
« Last Edit: December 21, 2019, 10:08:32 pm by KL27x »
 

Online ebastler

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #912 on: December 21, 2019, 08:01:28 pm »
America doesn't need to follow suite, and it probably never will in our lifetimes.

That probability depends on your age.  :P
 

Offline KL27x

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #913 on: December 21, 2019, 08:12:34 pm »
Unless anyone today will live 300 years, I stand by that. IF America (as we know it) continues to exist in 300 years, I would bet it still has mile signs. Barring events that cause a change in our government resulting in unbalance or authoritarian regime or such.
« Last Edit: December 21, 2019, 08:18:01 pm by KL27x »
 

Offline GeorgeOfTheJungle

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #914 on: December 21, 2019, 08:41:01 pm »
IF America (as we know it) continues to exist in 300 years, I would bet it still has mile signs.

I doubt that because gubbermints love to spend. If there's an opportunity there it's only a matter of time.
The further a society drifts from truth, the more it will hate those who speak it.
 

Offline KL27x

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #915 on: December 21, 2019, 08:53:16 pm »
^Exactly. That's the fight Americans so far are still winning against an overgrown federal government. If I were to bet, I think United States of America as we know it quite likely only exists for maybe 100 more years. Cuz.... things change.

When our government has the power to unilaterially do things like South Africa, it is already over. It's way easier to give a government power than to take it back. In Australia changing to metric-only was perhaps popular will. But in America it is not. Think of america as 100,000 special interest groups all in it for themselves. American politics doesn't agree on anything even if it's sensible, until there's personal incentive.

I'm sure there are parties very interested in metrication, cuz they want to profit from it. Not because it's "good for the country." W/e that means. Peeps think that changing road signs and tape measures does something magical and they no longer get Whitworth screws in their consumer goods. We'll have the country with the same problems as before, only some asshole and his nephews will be enriched at the expense of the rest.

Every state: Yeah, we love metric. We want to change to metric.
Federal Board of Metrication: ok, do it. Starting with AZ.
AZ: OK. Great.
... ?
We're ready
....?
....OK, you can turn on the money hose.
Fed: We aren't going to pay for this.
AZ: Ok. Ne'er mind. We still love metric and are completely dedicated to it, but our signs work ok for now. We thought we were going to get something out of it. Turns out it actually costs a lot, and there's not enough local support for us to skim off the top and do this as inefficiently as we wanted to on your dime.

The AZ experiment "It's here, it started!" obviously did not trigger the donations from private enterprise or individuals or USMA that they hoped. No blood to squeeze out of the stone. Now we see the real amount of interest. Almost none.

In my era we learned this in school. We learned how "pork barrel" politics works. We learned how self-interest runs things. And we learned about the inherent fragility of the balance of powers. It's a miracle America has gone this long and is still in as decent shape as it is. American people and American culture is a big part of it. You can't maintain individual rights/freedoms unless you fight for them. This is part of our culture and psyche. We know this can all evaporate in less than a generation, and the path to this destruction will probably be littered with good intentions. Some things are more important than inches vs centimeters. We would rather use a calculator once in a moon than to allow our government to mandate something so immaterial to anything of any importance, let alone at a great cost and against popular will.

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added as an edit, because it doesn't deserve a bump.

see 28:40. This Australian states that the new road signs were put up in advance and covered with sacks. These were then removed on "M day."  He makes the suggestion that the cost was covered by the savings obtained thru allowing the old signs to stay up for a period of 18 to 24 months longer than normal, which sounds like a fairy tale to me.

Earlier in the video, he claims that changing to metric in construction ultimately saved ~10% of the cost of home construction by using the opportunity to change the building code to use 25% fewer studs. By moving the stud spacing from every 18" (~450mm) to every 600mm. No citations/references. Just this 10% number people like to throw around. Note they also spec'ed a stronger wood. For various reasons, this would not necessarily be the case in the US, even if you believe these fairy tale numbers. Liability and legal repercussions might be different in the US, and also the size of the market is much larger. This "stronger spec'd wood" might rise to 3x or 10x the price if the US started building all their homes with it, if it was even sustainable at this rate, at all. While the price of sustainable, fast-growing pine and douglas fir would take a plunge due to a humongous drop in demand. The tail can sometimes do things that the dog can't.

Regarding the 10% savings, he also describes in his experience in the construction industry, a company did an experiment building one house in metric and one in imperial. According to him, the waste leftover from the imperial home filled two 5-ton(ne?) trucks. And the metric house, only a wheelbarrow. I would assume that any real differences would be due to the starting sizes/shapes of construction materials used, and that this comparison was done after all building supplies were sourced to fit the new metric method. There are statistics and there are exaggerations and there are bald face lies. Take your pick, here. I am sure this "scientific double blind controlled, not-anectdotal experiment" was performed to demonstrate a particular outcome. Et voila! Australian government made a great decision. Fact! (That after changing an entire system from sourcing to construction to optimize any one single home design, that building a different one with the same workers and materials will be less efficient.) You can actually tell he knows his dishonesty by his body language. And he never specified... was this an imperial wheelbarrow or metric, and what was the volume? More importantly what was the size of these houses and where is the waste being generated? There are a million games you can play, here. Meredith Perry should look this guy up.

The best way to maximize efficiency is to have a competitive construction industry. Period. We don't pay people for their productivity, directly. We pay by the hour. Of course when you do a spring cleaning, the mice will be better behaved when the cat is forced to pay attention and oversee things, especially when they're calculating your efficiency. The cats also like to give themselves credit. All the way up to the government. This guy gets paid to make these talks, because this is the guy spreading the message they want their people to hear. Period. "We did it, and look; it's awesome!" The end where he says "metrication is inevitable" is like bsfeechannel's fantasy. Complete bullshit.

Also, BTW, Tepe's tape measure shows what I was talking about. It looks like they mark only every 10th cm on this tape? There's plenty space to mark every inch serially up to any distance you would measure with an imperial tape measure. Without crowding the numbers into each other or squinting. This is no doubt something that was considered ever since man started making rulers and tape measures. Recall that the Romans had both digits and inches on their rulers. And the smaller digits died, for some combination of reasons, while the larger inch thrived. Today, most of the world has gone to super smaller digits called cm. Which metric is great for chemistry and physics, but it was not evolved through millennia of hands-on fabrication work alongside centuries of communication between workers in the ever-changing English language.
« Last Edit: December 24, 2019, 12:33:58 am by KL27x »
 

Offline cs.dk

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #916 on: December 23, 2019, 10:01:36 am »
I have never seen a combination one in a hardware store anywhere outside of the Americas (as of now, meaning Europe and Thailand). Whether measuring tapes, foldable yardsticks, office rulers, or analog calipers, micrometers, etc, it’s metric-only by default.

I've never seen an analog caliper being metric only.  I have 5 different in my workshop, all with inches on the top.
Like this one;
895150-0

Tape measures with dual scales are also readily available here in Denmark.
https://www.hoffmann-group.com/DK/da/hodk/M%C3%A5lev%C3%A6rkt%C3%B8j/Linealer%2C-vaterpas/B%C3%A5ndm%C3%A5l-mm--tommeafl%C3%A6sning/p/462014

I can not really understand tires though. Their width is in millimeters, and the diameter is in inches. How weird is that?
The only full metric tire I know of, was fitted to Citroën CX.
« Last Edit: December 23, 2019, 10:04:03 am by cs.dk »
 

Offline Tepe

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #917 on: December 23, 2019, 12:22:49 pm »
I have never seen a combination one in a hardware store anywhere outside of the Americas (as of now, meaning Europe and Thailand). Whether measuring tapes, foldable yardsticks, office rulers, or analog calipers, micrometers, etc, it’s metric-only by default.

I've never seen an analog caliper being metric only.  I have 5 different in my workshop, all with inches on the top.
Like this one;
(Attachment Link)

Tape measures with dual scales are also readily available here in Denmark.
https://www.hoffmann-group.com/DK/da/hodk/M%C3%A5lev%C3%A6rkt%C3%B8j/Linealer%2C-vaterpas/B%C3%A5ndm%C3%A5l-mm--tommeafl%C3%A6sning/p/462014
Readily available from a shop that does not sell to private persons is readily available in a fairly narrow sense.
 

Offline cs.dk

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #918 on: December 23, 2019, 01:10:40 pm »
Readily available from a shop that does not sell to private persons is readily available in a fairly narrow sense.

Well, it was just first result from google as an example. I've seen plenty of them in my life.. https://smedebutikken.dk/maalebaand-3-mtr-mm-tommer

I wouldn't be surprised if Jem&Fix, Silvan, Bauhaus, or similar have them on the shelves.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #919 on: December 23, 2019, 04:04:19 pm »
I have never seen a combination one in a hardware store anywhere outside of the Americas (as of now, meaning Europe and Thailand). Whether measuring tapes, foldable yardsticks, office rulers, or analog calipers, micrometers, etc, it’s metric-only by default.

I've never seen an analog caliper being metric only.  I have 5 different in my workshop, all with inches on the top.
Like this one;
(Attachment Link)

Tape measures with dual scales are also readily available here in Denmark.
https://www.hoffmann-group.com/DK/da/hodk/M%C3%A5lev%C3%A6rkt%C3%B8j/Linealer%2C-vaterpas/B%C3%A5ndm%C3%A5l-mm--tommeafl%C3%A6sning/p/462014
I was surprised, when shopping for calipers in the past year, that tons of Mitutoyo models are metric-only — even among the digital ones!!

Here’s their catalog page of standard vernier calipers. 60% of them are metric-only:

https://www.mitutoyo.co.jp/eng/useful/catalog-2018/html5m.html#page=235

If you flip through the calipers selection, overall about half of them are metric-only, most of the rest are both, and a small number (mostly dial) are inch-only.


As for the yardstick: tue claim was that you could walk into any hardware store in Europe (i.e. not a specialist industrial tool vendor) and get dual-scale models. I think that’s untrue.

 

Offline cs.dk

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #920 on: December 23, 2019, 04:23:56 pm »
As for the yardstick: tue claim was that you could walk into any hardware store in Europe (i.e. not a specialist industrial tool vendor) and get dual-scale models. I think that’s untrue.

It may depend on the importer for that specific country.. I've personally never seen a metric-only Mitotoyo caliper, analog or digital.
 

Offline bsfeechannel

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #921 on: December 23, 2019, 04:45:42 pm »
Well, guys, we are at that time of year when we try to forget our arguments and our differences and look on the positive side of life. This is when we reach out our hands to our fellow creatures and celebrate.

Since the metric system is the epitome of that universal concordance, I can't help but wish everyone a Metric Christmas.

Let's sing it together:

We wish you a Metric Christmas,
We wish you a Metric Christmas,
We wish you a Metric Christmas,
And a Happy New Year.
 

Offline Tepe

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #922 on: December 23, 2019, 04:46:03 pm »
I wouldn't be surprised if Jem&Fix, Silvan, Bauhaus, or similar have them on the shelves.
I would :)

Biltema, however, does have dual labeled "tommestokke".
 

Offline KL27x

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #923 on: December 23, 2019, 09:15:06 pm »
It is easy enough to buy a metric-only tape measure in the US, online. But you won't have a lot of options, if any, in a regular hardware store.

Most of my tape measures are combination. But one is imperial, only. It has the same 2^-1 graduations on both sides of the tape. It might be fun to have a tape with tenths or 20ths of inches on one side rather than 16th's.

If you do any precision work in SAE, at least in my experience, you tend to think of it in decimal to thous. I.e. 1/8th steps are 0.125", .250", .375". .500", .625", .750", .875", 1.000"
Each 16th is 62.5 thous. Each 32nd is 31.25 thous, or about 30. But we have digital calipers; if you need this kind of precision, you are not using a tape measure, anyway. There's something "good" about using thousands/ths (000-999's), like metric users have found. And the inch just is the right size for this in common machining and manufacturing. Hundredths of mm would be the closest scale, but you only get 100 of them and they are more than double the resolution (so you only cover 1/25th of the range before adding decimal points (or commas that are in the wrong place); also this resolution is beyond inexpensive calipers, so the accuracy tolerance adds additional baggage.) Using thousandths of cm has its own problems; it seems like no one does that. Size of the unit absolutely matters to the context of what you are doing, IMO.

Look at it like this. If you handed an EE a caliper mechanism with no markings, just the electronics, and no measuring system existed, yet, and you ask him to make the thing show digits on it down to w/e resolution if has, he would have come up with something close to the order of thousandths of an inch. If you asked people to put useful markings on a measuring stick or tape to build things like homes and boats and boxes and baskets, well... that's how the inch evolved. The statute mile is a little weird. But, hey, the Romans built the best roads of their times, and it has worked out so far. They do what they are supposed to.

At the top end of precision CNC, the situation is reversed. Today's best software in the realm of high precision machining goes down to the nearest thousandth of a mm. Not that the machines can make things to this precision. But it does make for potentially smoother (talking about surface finish at this point) curves and radii when the max resolution is used.

;;;;;

A lot of the time in low tolerance production work, it is not efficient to use general measuring equipment, at all. You will make some kind of custom measuring thing, like a go/no-go gauge, to verify you are meeting the mark to the tolerances required, and to sort parts that are good, need further work*, or have to be binned.

* This might mean running the parts through the exact same process, again; or maybe having to stop and tweak the settings to run a batch of oversized or otherwise out-of-spec parts when you have enough of them.
« Last Edit: December 24, 2019, 02:27:52 am by KL27x »
 

Offline CatalinaWOW

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Re: why is the US not Metric
« Reply #924 on: December 23, 2019, 10:48:52 pm »
On a recent road trip I came across another little tidbit on the cost of metrification in the US.  On one recently worked interstate highway all of the speed limit signs had been replaced with electronic signs which can be remotely changed to reflect current traffic conditions and the like.

Since this is in Arizona, the state that already owns the only segment of interstate marked in metric this seems like an easy opportunity to cheaply convert to metric in the future, right?  Not so fast chucko.  The signs only support two digit numbers.  So can only support a metric speed much lower than the current limits.  Conversion will require adding a half digit to each of these signs (or would have required that additional expense this time around).  Not an insurmountable barrier, but just another case where the conversion isn't free and one case where traditional units are actually better matched to the use case than metric.  Few if any places anywhere in the world have allowed highway speeds in the three digit class using traditional units, but they are quite common using metric units.  At least metric doesn't require a full third digit in very many, if any, cases.
 


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