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Presidential Candidate Lincoln Chaffee Proposes That US Go Metric
New submitter Applehu Akbar writes: The good news is that for the first time in years, a candidate in the next presidential cycle has proposed completing our transition to the metric system. Though unfortunately it's Lincoln Chaffee, let's all hope that this long-standing nerd issue gets into the 2016 debate because of this. Warning: Lame CNN autoplaying video.
Really, with all the important issues that should occupy a president's attention, if this is even on your radar, you're not qualified for the job.
Converting to metric is not just a fun science nerd issue no one cares about.
Really it's an economic issue, and I'm surprised it hasn't been made more of a big deal. When we follow international standards, we can better share ideas and better trade goods. If the US used metric, we'd be in a much better position to sell our goods worldwide, as we wouldn't need to re-tool or re-calculate all the time.
Great example: our US engineers are mostly trained in the English system. My wife used to work in an industry that is now heavily developing and building things overseas. The American engineers had to build everything to metric standards, since they were building in India and what not, and really had trouble with it, as they weren't properly trained to do metric calculations and the equipment they wanted to buy from American companies didn't always come in a metric size. Instead, the engineers would have to half-ass some crazy scheme (like buying parts and then cutting them -- makes sense until you realize you'd have to pay field guys to do this 10,000 times) to get it to work. The quality suffers, and since there's all these problems, I get the sense that many international companies would rather just hire Germans or whatever to do it.
This is an anecdote of one industry, sure, but if our engineers were trained in metric, and our businesses made the jump to make metric products in the first place, we'd probably be a lot more competitive in the world market. We wouldn't need to spend all this extra time and money on customization, we could just do it. I imagine all this effort has long ago exceeded the cost of buying new tools once; we should have just switched then and told businessmen to shut up about costs.
All the nuts and bolts in my car and bike are metric. The bike is made in the good old US of A. Everyone knows what a 2-liter soda is, why can't they figure out what a 2-liter bottle of milk is? We are partially converted. We use 35mm film (old people, at least) and 9mm ammo. Anyone who has been in the military has done everything in metric, it's not that difficult. It is hard to change everything. Even countries you changed decades ago still use old units. England and Ireland are full of examples of that. The most noticeable change will be road signs. It's not that hard to learn that 60 mph is 100 kph. We will have to watch out during the transition. A Canadian airliner ran out of fuel half way due to bad conversions from gallons/pounds to liter/kilograms during their changeover.
Nice try. The word "soccer" was invented by the British as an abbreviation for "association football". The Brits just stopped using it out of spite when we took it up :)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
Even going just partial metric can also lead to big problems.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie1 of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade — which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.
No big deal, right. Unless you want to actually calculate something.