rekrunner wrote:
Wow! Millions of dollars? Really? You said millions, right? Wow, millions of dollars. Whew. Let me catch my breath. Millions. Phew. That sure is a lot of money. It's no wonder Americans don't change. Well spoken! I was sitting on the fence, but your articulated and well-defended arguments have me swayed.
But, I digress. What a good question. Why spend millions of dollars changing things? What discernable benefit could there possibly be, standardizing with the rest of the modern world, and attempting to minimize confusion? After all, it really ain't broke, is it.
I write software for measuring manufactured goods and see blueprints for all kinds of things as a result. You have no idea what the cost of changing would be if you think losing a $400 million dollar satellite even figures in this argument. Hell, I love the metric system, but the cost of this change is many, many orders of magnitude larger than a satellite.
Here's one small example: tell me the cost of retrofitting all the interstates with metric markers, speed limit signs and car odometers. Every single sign giving a distance in miles would have to be replaced in a fairly short time period. It would probably be cheaper to just send a Tom Tom to every registered car in the entire country. 250 million cars[1]*$100/tomtom=$25 billion.
[1]
http://www.bts.gov/publications/national_transportation_statistics/html/table_01_11.html.
Speaking of arbitrary measurement schemes, what do European clocks look like?