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why is the US not Metric

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bsfeechannel:

--- Quote from: SilverSolder on December 08, 2019, 05:49:31 am ---Seems the senile old goats hark back to the days of EU v1.0 (...the Roman Empire, which ruled Britain, and imposed their pounds and ounces on the senile old goats' ancestors).
--- End quote ---

Holy crap! Blueskull is right. The West is decadent!

What is amusing about the imperial lovers is that they want their units back because they want to cook their food using their grandmother's recipes or because they want to measure distances as the ancient Romans did. The ancient Romans traveled on foot from place to place, so it was only natural that they counted their paces, usually by the thousands ( Latin milia, hence mile), taking the military marching stride as a standard. Today we don't even ride horses, much less stride between places. So miles don't have any meaning for us, but we are still counting how many paces it takes from Des Moines to Rancho Cucamonga (31,700 to be precise).

They keep saying that the metric system is always tyrannically imposed on the citizens, but they forget to mention that the UK adhered voluntarily to the metric system in 1965, before they joined the EU, and that this act itself was also voluntary.

Their motivation is not only retrograde. It's also frivolous. This clearly indicates that the imperial system is not trustworthy.

Pathetic. To say the least.


--- Quote from: vk6zgo on December 08, 2019, 12:44:38 pm ---At least as far as the usage for capacitors, SI seems to have been more reactive than proactive!
--- End quote ---

The SI was created in 1960. This explains why we don't have those prefixes standardized by them before.


--- Quote from: tooki on December 08, 2019, 10:00:26 am ---If "...because we don't care" is what you gleaned, then you are the moron.
--- End quote ---

" I expect the US to stand pat.  We're holding all the high cards and don't really need to concern ourselves with the other players."

"We're not going to convert - ever.  If we wanted to do it we would have done it 50 years ago and we didn't."

"Post back after you have made 6 lunar landings with 12 astronauts walking on the surface.  But before you reach those goals, please remember, your opinion is worthless.  Your country has accomplished nothing!"

rstofer 08/12/2019

I love this guy.


--- Quote from: KL27x on December 08, 2019, 01:59:25 pm ---If you think this "makes the country look like a land of morons," that would be your opinion, bsfeechannel.
--- End quote ---

I DON'T think the US is a land of morons. But some people are working very hard to try to make me change my opinion.

KL27x:

--- Quote ---because they want to cook their food using their grandmother's recipes or because they want to measure distances as the ancient Romans did.
--- End quote ---
As for measuring distances, it's not because the Romans used inches. It's because Americans have used inches. Today, they used inches. Yesterday, too. The day before that, as well. Three days ago, uh huh. I'm pretty sure all the way back to... ever.

Kinda like those crazy Swedes. Driving their right-handed cars on the left-hand side of the road. Basically since the beginning of driving. Then switching and having the exact same accident rate, before and after. The main difference, you might say, is maybe our democracy works a little bit better in this regard? Or maybe it has a lot to do with the age we live in, including the connectivity of the internet, where we can calmly rationalize what changing a few numbers around actually does for us all.

As for the recipes, what do you do with your grandmother's recipes? Convert them to metric so you can upload them to Thingyverse.com/Cupcakes?  ;D

vk6zgo:

--- Quote from: KL27x on December 08, 2019, 05:05:12 pm ---^This isn't about the intelligence of a country's population.
There is a gap in technology in certain areas. But as v6kgzo has noted

--- End quote ---
This an interesting example of an intelligent individual managing to stuff up a simple combination of letters & numbers, several times.
My "nickname" VK6ZGO looks easy for me & others  to remember, as it is also my ham radio callsign.
People, without being stupid, without such context clues, can easily "half read" things & "get the bull by the horns".
--- Quote ---
 in the example of the car industry, this is largely due to history, size of economy, and government priorities in spending and subsidization.
--- End quote ---
In the present atmosphere of "free trade", subsidisation lacks "ideological purity".
It is interesting to note that its greatest opponents are amongst those who made fortunes in their own countries due to their previous subsidies.

--- Quote ---
 This should be expected. It would be a waste of resources for every nation on the planet to spend 100 billion a year on building the next generation of airplanes and rockets. There are still people without AC and the internet. :)

--- End quote ---

Cubdriver:

--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on December 07, 2019, 11:15:11 pm ---
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on December 07, 2019, 04:22:45 pm ---Ahah, well, this would be a pretty old definition, and completely irrelevant nowadays, but even so - back in the day, what it meant is basically someone who was REALLY in charge of an engine, in a train or boat for instance, in which engines required constant maintenance and care, and a fair bit of knowledge for doing so. A car driver is definitely NOT in charge of an engine in that sense anyway. :-DD
Not any more that you're in charge of the CPU when you're using a computer.

--- End quote ---

My reply was meant as joke because someone said pages ago that the road signs in the US couldn't be metric because, when you're driving a car, you're not practicing engineering.

--- End quote ---

Methinks one of us needs to work on our reading comprehension, because that is NOT what was said.  He did not say that road signs COULDN'T be metric, he said that it doesn't matter what system they are in just as long as it is consistent.

Here's the quote from the earlier post:

--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 19, 2019, 03:40:30 am ---
--- Quote from: forrestc on November 15, 2019, 11:50:57 pm ---It doesn't matter what the number system is, as long as everything matches.   The distance could be miles, or kilometers, or furlongs or kilosmoots, it wouldn't matter.   I'm not doing engineering with those figures.
--- End quote ---

--- End quote ---

He added that the units on the signs do not matter because the drivers are not doing engineering with them, and he is absolutely correct - the signs are informational - how far is the next town or exit, what is the speed limit, how high is the bridge, etc.

YOU then replied:

--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on November 19, 2019, 03:40:30 am ---So you drive a motorized vehicle along a road and you think you're not doing engineering.
--- End quote ---

YOU are the one who first suggested that driving was engineering!


--- Quote from: bsfeechannel on December 07, 2019, 11:15:11 pm ---Of course a driver's license doesn't qualify you to design engines, or structures, or circuits, whatever, but you're in control of a engineering product. In the modern world, the common citizen is in constant contact with engineering, surrounded by it, dependent on it.

Engineering became so part of everything we do that it is only natural that the system of units used in engineering be also part of the everyday life of the common citizen.
--- End quote ---

Being in control of, surrounded by and/or dependent upon an engineered product != engineering.  Yes, it is a part of almost everything in the modern world.  Properly implemented, the engineering by and large is transparent to the average user.  It doesn't matter if the road was built in inches and feet or meters, as long as it is fit for purpose a driver can use it without any need whatsoever to know what units are on the drawings filed at city hall.  I can use a cell phone with no understanding or knowledge of the encoding scheme used or the wavelength it operates at.  Are there enough bars on the display to make a call?  Yes?  Sweet, good to go.  Dial the number and talk.  I think that the common citizen has far less need for understanding the significance of units than you seem to believe - most carry in blissfully unaware of what goes on behind the scenes, and the world works just fine.

-Pat

boffin:

--- Quote from: rstofer on December 08, 2019, 03:51:23 pm ---...
It's like that NHS thing.  The standard of care in the UK is to get an appointment in 12 weeks.  In 12 weeks I could be dead!  I can get an appointment with my HMO for the same day if the triage suggests things are serious.  I can go to one  facility for everything except overnight stays.  MRI, ECG, Lab, GP, Specialists are all in the same facility.  For the more serious stuff, I can go to any hospital emergency room and the cost is covered by my HMO.  Sure, it costs more than a buck ninety eight per month but it's worth it.  All socialized medicine accomplishes is to drag everybody down to the same level of misery.  Same as socialized anything else!

--- End quote ---

Spoken like someone who's drinking the USA Kool-aid.  Have you ever considered that the reason you see reports that (incorrectly) report UK, Canada, France health care as all 12-week waits is that they're sponsored by the very insurance/health-care business who's livelihood would be affected if there were real change.

If you have a serious issue, and you go into a hospital in the UK, in Canada, in France or almost any other 1st world country, you'll get treatment right away.   As for 'any hospital emergency room', I'll bet you (and plenty of your American friends) have "out of network" issues, that just don't exist elsewhere in the 1st world.

This is why the UK, Canada, France etc; all have measurably better life expectancy, and lower infant mortality rates than the USA.  (The USA lags even 2nd world countries like Costa Rica and Cuba in some numbers).

Last week my father-in-law was in town for a minor surgery. It was diagnosed as required (but not life threatening) a few weeks prior by his local GP in a very small town, and the surgery, plus the flight down to the big city, was all covered by our Canadian [according to you -- inferior] health care system.


The American "We're #1, we're better than you, we don't have to change anything" mentality, without examining the facts and looking at the rest of the world; is exactly why the USA lags the world in adoption of a single standard for measurement; and it's summed up in a single world

Arrogance

Aaron Sorkin summed it up nicely in the 1st five minutes of the show "the Newsroom"
https://youtu.be/wTjMqda19wk?t=94

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