Why hasnt the US changed to the metric system?

Forrestchild...wrote:

Sports choice is a preference choice, but soccer is by far more interesting than bunch of armored f****** touching their asses. But let's leave it - I'll watch soccer with the rest of the planet's 5,7 billion people, and you watch your football.

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Now come on, if people were not bias toward either soccer or football due to their culture, you know full well football would be favored!? It's objectively the more interesting game.

quote]wacka wacka wacka wrote:

Préférez être la chienne de la Grande-Bretagne ?[/quote]

Mais oui !!

american arrogance wrote:

Also, why dont we go back to running the 220, 440 and 880? Everyone knows our system is far superior than the rest of the world.

"our system"

thats great - its a relic inheirited from the UK, hence the name, "Imperial measurements"

Mertic measurements are more accurate

3.12456m you can keep going, and multiply this by 2.234m to get an accurate measurement of total area quickly.

3.23563 feet?.....yards? How do you multiply 3'10" by 2'6"????

Imperial measurements are analog, and unsuited to digital information

How does your computer ACTUALLY calculate time? 23:23:14.2222?

FWIW, I like the metric system. I also like the Mac OS. But I think people find the present systems tolerable to the pain of converting to something else.

Out.

Off the Grid wrote:

Mertic measurements are more accurate

You cannot possibly be this stupid.

Imperial measurements are analog, and unsuited to digital information

Wow. I guess you really can.

How does your computer ACTUALLY calculate time? 23:23:14.2222?

This is my favorite.

'splain Lucy...how are imperial measurements more accurate?

computer's measure time XXXX.xxxxx as a function of UTC (depending on the OS, and other architectures)

they do not count hours/minutes (contrary to popular belief, the Babylonians did NOT invent computing)

System time is converted into calendar time for users.

>>"If I recall correctly some bright programmer mixed up foot-pounds with newtons."

If that's the case, it wouldn't be a problem with unit systems, but a problem of mixing up units of energy (ft-lb) with units of force (N).

Amero Never wrote:

Because our country is much bigger than any Euro country and we don't have to to do commerce with our neighbors.

Canada is our biggest trading partner. Mexico is #3.

Just saying.

LetsThink wrote:

Forrestchild...wrote:

Sports choice is a preference choice, but soccer is by far more interesting than bunch of armored f****** touching their asses. But let's leave it - I'll watch soccer with the rest of the planet's 5,7 billion people, and you watch your football.

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Now come on, if people were not bias toward either soccer or football due to their culture, you know full well football would be favored!? It's objectively the more interesting game.

Well, but it isn't. Part of the reason is also, that nobody outside of the US is impressed by 40 yard best time with ball under your arm. Say, it would be 100m print, then it would start to be interesting :)

Just joking. As I stated, the sports choice is a matter of preference, otherwise there would be no running geeks, right?

I was just responding to the dumb poster kilgore, who is always quick with assumptions, but knows very little about the world.

Reedin Ritein Figurin wrote:

People in the U.S. can't ever read, write, and do arithmetic. The U.S. is one of the dumbest countries in the world. How do you expect people in the U.S. to handle two systems.

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We are lazy. We are getting fatter.

But, for now, (for now) we are the leader in the world in education.

However, CNN reported just the other day that is the immigration flow of latinos continues at the same rate, and given that overall the latino people are considered to be at the lower end of races that put education as a priority, that this country will, someday, become a slower, dumber, fatter country than most others.

Off the Grid wrote:

'splain Lucy...how are imperial measurements more accurate?

computer's measure time XXXX.xxxxx as a function of UTC (depending on the OS, and other architectures)

they do not count hours/minutes (contrary to popular belief, the Babylonians did NOT invent computing)

System time is converted into calendar time for users.

They're not "more" accurate, genius. They're not less either. Accuracy has absolutely nothing to do with the units being used. Any measurement is only as accurate as the measurer. Units are completely irrelevant to this accuracy.

And time for a computer is generally recorded as seconds since a given start time. This has absolutely nothing to do with imperial measurements. Nothing.

Why hasn't the rest of the world converted to the Imperial system? (is a better question)

The USA will eventually change to the metric system. What it will take is a very bad recession/depression and then the government will do it as a project that they can sink billions into and get the employment up (temporarily) and spark the economy. They will claim it will save us billion in the future and we are doing in the name of efficiency and being good trading partners with the rest of the world. I am mildly surpised it didn't come up during the current recession.

the metric system is uncostitutional

Off the Grid wrote:

'splain Lucy...how are imperial measurements more accurate?

What does it mean for one system of measurement to be more accurate than another? It seems to me that accuracy is dependent upon the tool used to make the measurement, not on the units in which the measurement is recorded. "One inch" is no more or less accurate a measurement than "2.54cm."

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Amero Never wrote:

Because our country is much bigger than any Euro country and we don't have to to do commerce with our neighbors.

Canada is our biggest trading partner. Mexico is #3.

Just saying.

Agreed. But what I was saying was that we're big and can operate over a vast area without anything besides the imperial system, and that our neighbors won't stop trading with us because of it. The US is fine with imperial maesurements for veryday life. This whole discussion brings back memories of guilt trips our teachers used to try to lay on us (Japanese are going to dominate the US economy, change to metric or else, etc.).

Time - hrs/mins are a Babylonian method. Computers count in seconds, msecs, etc depending on the OS.

BIOS starts at boot time

UNIX starts @ 1/1/1970.....genius

accuracy - how many sq m is 2.338477m x 4.233888m?

How many sq ft is 5'10" x 3' 2"?????? How much more accurate than 1/8th can I get...how many significant digits are commonly displayed in imperial measurement?

And how many inches across is a protozoa....an atom?.....a proton.....quark?.....2.3374 x 10 ^-22.....*inches*?

Don’t be so quick to rag on the metric system. We could fix our obesity problem instantly. A 350 pound person would only weigh 159kg. Presto!!!

DontFeedTheTroll wrote:

formidable doer of the nasty wrote:

And you think it ain't broke? It's arcane and pointless and it's gotta be at least partially responsible for American school children lagging far behind others in math skills.

It should improve math skills because it's harder to add up distances or weights using imperial measurements.

Yeah, it would be great if we moved metric, but the cost would be immense (even the UK isn't entirely metric and they started the change in 1965. They actually got a special exception from the EU that permits certain measurements to be made in imperial units) and the benefits, really, would be pretty slight.

Remarkably, USAians are perfectly comfortable with metric measurements for alcohol and soft drinks. It's only everywhere else that we start freaking out.

But don't forget all of our race distances and our tracks are measured in metric.