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why is the US not Metric
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KL27x:

--- Quote ---I've always thought it was silly how there's an uneven number of grains in an ounce which is 437.5 grains. It should be an even number like 400 or 500.
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True. But somehow it's easy to remember that there are 7000 grains in a lb? I mean... I can't remember how many lb's are in a ton, but 7000 is such a stupid number it's hard to forget! And 16 oz in a lb is also a stupid number, so I don't care if grains don't match with oz's. I just ignore oz's exist other than for mail. Anything smaller than multiple pounds, I pretty much go to grams.

The system we use is just a skin. I still remember the internal struggle I had when I started to actually make stuff as a young adult who grew up in suburbia with a father who owned a screwdriver and a hammer, and I never seen him use either more than once. Cm or inches? Everything I learned made it seem like an easy decision to choose metric if all else were equal. But if the best value tools work better/easier/faster in imperial, then what is the difference?

It's not like I care when people express things in metric. But some guys think expressing things in imperial is arrogant. It's just the raw output of an imperial calibrated mind. If the guy thought it mattered, he would have converted it for you. When an American conveys a measurement in inches to say a mixed audience, he assumes anyone who is interested in the actual measurement can convert it if they care. In the reverse,  if I watched someone build a cabinet, I would probably be more interested in the tools and techniques and sequence of actions than the actual measurements he is spouting. If I build it, it will be made to fit my kitchen or shop, using w/e materials I have. His measurements are irrelevant. When he does this, stating all measurements in metric, no one cares. If the American or Canuck does this and states inches, you get complaints that he is being myopic, self-centered, and insensitive to the reality of the metric majority.  When in fact, he figured you were smart enough to not build the exact thing he did, to the exact dimensions he did. Because there's only a 1 in a million chance that copying exactly what he did would make any kind of sense to anyone else.
SilverSolder:

--- Quote from: Bud on November 23, 2019, 10:57:58 pm ---
--- Quote from: SilverSolder on November 23, 2019, 10:28:51 pm ---
Is it actually a problem that metric and imperial co-exist?

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It is in Canada. You go buy a 1/4 plywood for a repair, bring it home at it turns out it is not good because it is 5mm, not 6mm !  :rant:

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6mm is the closest metric size to 1/4"...   anyone selling 5mm as 1/4" need a trip to the woodshed!
Mr. Scram:

--- Quote from: SilverSolder on November 24, 2019, 04:29:29 pm ---6mm is the closest metric size to 1/4"...   anyone selling 5mm as 1/4" need a trip to the woodshed!

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Wood is peculiar anyway. They often indicate the wet size which it won't have after some drying and being in the store. The difference can be quite significant. Always measure what you buy as there's a significant chance the size isn't as listed.
KL27x:
Pretty much. Any furniture grade wood shop will joint and plane practically every hardwood they use.

Plywood is made in metric countries to metric spec, but even then it can vary a little batch to batch. So we basically just deal with the fact it's not really 3/4" plywood whenever that matters. Because our 3/4" hardwood boards are actually 3/4". 

But dowels or metal rounds/tubes? With plywood, you can just cut the slot smaller. Dowels have to fit the hole. Our drill bits being imperial, so follows the material. If the construction industry changed, this would be felt in the machining industry and in engineering/design. Then I think you wait until some years later to change the media, so's when they report it in C with gusts of wind up to kmh (with imperial subtitles), it is not rejected.




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For some reason I woke up with the idea that some people don't intuitively understand what "economy of scale" means as applied to the car industry.

Every modern manufacturer has a sophisticated inventory control. When a regional distributor orders 4 red Camrys, a Toyota employee doesn't walk through a warehouse full of Camry's, go to the imperial section, find the "red" row, and drive 4 of these over to the boat. Each car has been ordered before production even starts, and it's the distributors' job to predict and/or influence the future by keeping the order queue filled with the cars that will create the biggest profit based on the figures from all of the dealers. They are tasked with matching supply to demand, ordering the right cars, and getting them to the right place. Maybe the Camry in Rosewine Red with interior S817 and body trim R173 is killing it in the Soutwest; let's get some to our other showrooms; and the memo goes out to the local dealers that this is now in the pipeline to get their salepeople pumped up to move these cars, which they can tell their customers "Gary has sold X of these last month in Texas, and the factory can't keep up; they're very popular." Even when the factory ships these identically kitted 4 red Camrys to the regional distributor, they are not all the same. Each has a unique ID and is a unique order and is handled as such. And they might tailor many of the other options to better suit local market demand, depending where the car is headed to. A large number of factory options, of which there could be dozens, and most of which are way more "permanent" than speed and mileage indicators, are easily managed this way. If you counted all the permutations of a factory Camry, the actual different number of ways to order one could be hundreds of thousands or maybe millions. So this is the only practical way to do it, anyway.

When the regional distributor orders their 4 Camrys and ships them out to the local dealers, say 1 of those dealers doesn't manage to sell his red Camry, but a dealer over in Australia wants this exact red Camry.

What the cost of imperial is to this situation is that instead of trucking a Camry across the country, putting it on a cargo ship, sailing it over to Australia, clearing customs, and getting it over to the dealer, and dealing with any other country specific changes that have to be done, and performing a 186 point QA and safety inspection after it arrives? They have to do all that plus change a couple things for mile to km thing. And increasingly today, that would be done by plugging a widget into the ECM and pressing a button. Changing over the car might be an incredibly boring or tedious part of that job, but compare that to:

"Ted? Do me a solid and go change all the road signs in America. Come and see me when you're done. I need to speak with you before you go home."
tooki:

--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 23, 2019, 08:01:48 pm ---
--- Quote from: tooki on November 23, 2019, 02:45:10 pm ---(it’s only cheaper where economies of scale and standardization matter, and contrary to your beliefs, they don’t always matter!)
--- End quote ---

And where, in the modern world, economy of scale and standardization don't matter? I presume you understand we've been talking about formal measurements.
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Ever heard of custom builds? It doesn't matter what units it is. 

Or what about things where you need so many production lines (or whole factories) anyway that it simply doesn't matter whether they're all the same or not? (A LOT of things fall into this category.)


--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 23, 2019, 08:01:48 pm ---
--- Quote ---Not to mention the cognitive dissonance in believing that other countries are fully metric. As I and others have explained repeatedly, there is literally no place on earth that is fully metric.
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Your assertion is corroborated by USMA, the US Metric Association:

"Metric is used predominantly in the rest of the world, with the US being the only major holdout."

It's not a zero-self-awareness dumb that's saying that. It's a US-based institution.

So the US works daily to disrupt the desire of the whole world to have just one system of units, accuses the world of not being fully metric, without mentioning that the US themselves are precisely the root cause of that evil, and then claim to be metric because the inch is based on the meter.
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I have no idea what you're babbling about. And you clearly had no idea what I'm talking about. So here it is again worded differently: NO COUNTRY IN THE WORLD IS 100% METRIC. Even the "fully" metric countries use non-metric stuff here and there. I provided examples in an earlier comment. (For example, automotive tires actually use a mix of metric and inches.)

This alone is reason enough to tell metric snobs to get off their high horses, since they themselves haven't eliminated non-metric.



--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 23, 2019, 08:01:48 pm ---Gimme a break!

Who are you trying to fool?

I may be dumb. But not that dumb.

--- End quote ---
Indeed, you're actually proving to be far dumber...


You see the world as being binary, everything falling neatly into right and wrong, and that's just not reality, man...
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