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| why is the US not Metric |
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| KL27x:
^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? :-+ |
| SilverSolder:
^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. |
| vk6zgo:
--- Quote from: KL27x on December 18, 2019, 05:59:19 pm --- --- Quote ---And you seem to deadset upon turning it into an "Australia Bashing" thread. --- End quote --- 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? --- Quote ---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. --- End quote --- This is not what cultural cringe even means. --- End quote --- 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'. --- Quote --- 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. --- End quote --- 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. --- Quote ---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. --- End quote --- Hollywood was never a huge offender, Americans having been on the wrong end of similar attitudes. --- Quote ---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. --- End quote --- It is a false analogy, as units of measurement were never a huge component of our culture. --- Quote ---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. --- End quote --- 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. --- Quote ---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. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; 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. --- End quote --- 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. --- Quote --- --- Quote ---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! --- End quote --- 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? --- End quote --- 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! --- Quote --- 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. --- End quote --- 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". --- Quote ---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. --- End quote --- 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. |
| gbaddeley:
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. |
| KL27x:
^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. ;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;;; vk6zgo --- Quote ---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. --- End quote --- 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? --- Quote ---It is a false analogy, as units of measurement were never a huge component of our culture. --- End quote --- 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 --- Quote ---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. --- End quote --- 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. --- Quote ---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". --- End quote --- 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. |
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