Comment by garbagecoder
3 years ago
* Imperial units are defined in terms of metric units.
* The cost of changing over is astronomical
* Domains where the metric system is actually better use the metric system
* Domains where it does not don't need it.
* You have a supercomputer on your wrist. Dividing by a number other than 10 is not such a challenge anymore.
* A4 paper is in no way superior to letter. It's just a choice.
Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement.
> Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement.
ISO 216 isn't specifically European. It's used in most of the world. The same is true of the metric system.
The world will indeed be incrementally better when people don't have to waste time converting measurements when operating between the US and elsewhere.
You assert it will be incrementally better without offsetting for the externalities of the switch, which would take decades.
Also the metric system is European in origin. Despite what chapter 0 of every science book implies god did not invent it.
Here's the thing about the switching and the costs of it: every other country, much poorer than the modern US of A, went through it just fine. And in any case, this cost is not going to go down the longer you wait, on the contrary—unless, of course, the US industrial prowess utterly collapses so that there is not much left to upgrade.
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The imperial system is also European. fwiw Canada did the changeover to metric in the 70 and took about a decade and I’m rather glad we did it.
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> You assert it will be incrementally better without offsetting for the externalities of the switch, which would take decades
The use of SI units is likely measured in centuries. You'll be fine, and you might save a few rockets, rollercoasters and planes here and there:
https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/6Page53.pdf
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> Also the metric system is European in origin.
As is quite a lot of American culture. Lots of good European ideas got improved on by America. Do one more ;-)
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I am not an American, I was raised using the metric system for almost everything, but I hate using it for manual work like carpentry and plumbing. For a long time in my country, we used the imperial system for stuff like that, and the change to metric is incredibly annoying and non-intuitive in those domains.
It seems non-intuitive exactly because you are used to imperial: "For a long time in my country, we used the imperial system for stuff like that". If you really were raised using metric not for almost everything, but for everything, it would seem intuitive and you've found the other system strange. And vice versa. That's just, in immortal words of Bjork "human behaviour".
He just said he wasn't American so why would it be intuitive to him?
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> The cost of changing over is astronomical
as opposed to the cost of not changing over, which is much larger but paid in small increments over time so nobody is bothered enough to do anything about it
That's false. Most domains where it would benefit have already made the change.
Why are you bringing up imperial units? The US doesn't use them. The US uses US customary units.
Aside from being overly pedantic, which is the reason I used the term, the doubly overly pedantic reply is that we do have the Imperial system, just redefined to be different than the itself-later-redefined imperial system.
Furthermore, the names of the units are from the imperial system, even if the definitions themselves are not.
Try pouring an imperial gallon into a us gallon container and then tell me I'm being overly pedantic.
The names of the units are from the winchester system which is what predated both US customary units and Imperial units.
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Because they are based on (sorta) imperial and nobody really knows the difference all that well. So people say imperial when referring to the non metric countries that happen to speak English.
At least insofar as being defined in terms of metric units, the statement you replied to was accurate for both imperial and customary.