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Posted on 05/15/2006 10:41:02 AM PDT by Junior
> I like American traditions and uniqueness. I love American sovereignty. I'll stick with good ol' miles, feet, gallons, ounces and pounds.
The metric system is nothing but a French scheme to charge more for less. It's pounds, quarts and inches at our house.
In all seriousness, 10 doesn't factor except into 2s and 5s, and that's useless in the real world.
We had signs like that for a decade or so in California with distances in both miles and kilometers, but like the red colored "55" on 70s and 80s speedometers, they have disappeared and been replaced with mileage only signs.
You've outed yourself on this thread. You've got a real job.
Or I took physics once.
SD
I bet he's just eccentric...
169 cm = ~ 5'6"
More like 1.85 meters tall...
FWIW, I read the other day in a Construction textbook that the reason why the US hasn't switched is because a system for integrating it into construction standards did not exist.
But, that one was being designed and was almost ready to be distributed, and that once that happend, the switch all around would happen.
I'll convert in a millisecond.
I don't like the idiotic system based on gills, hogsheads, pints, fluid ounces, avoirdupois ounces, and other nonsense.
5,280 what?
Is this a bit of American superiority that I detect here in many of these comments?
Exceptionalism, sure.
But for most people it's simply conservativism at its purest level. Which means change occurs only for good reasons.
Where we have economic or academic reasons to involve ourselves with the French system of measurement, we do so. Gladly and without regret.
But where there is no compelling reason to change, there is a compelling reason not to change. There is no reason why a dairy farmer selling milk to local consumers needs to switch to liters instead of gallons. If there is a good reason (there's more pop in a 2 liter bottle than a 2 quart one) we switch.
It's really that simple. People in our culture use the measurements we have always used, or developed for the task at hand. They're organic. Being told to use something foreign for no good reason will always meet with resistance.
SD
Conversion for construction is much more complicated than it appears.
Everything in the National Building Code used to be based on 4 inch modules -- e.g. 16" between studs, 48" X 96" plywood, etc. A "hard conversion" uses 10 cm. modules -- close but not the same. Metric plywood is slightly smaller at 1200 mm X 2400 mm (everything is measured in millimeters, to avoid any need for decimals or fractions). Thicknesses are different too.
Most house builders still use Imperial (I think). The two don't mix. If you use metric plans, you need metric materials -- soft conversions simply aren't practical. (Too many decimals.)
You can get by without a metric hammer though. :-)
I did not know that, thank you.
Am relatively new to the Construction industry.
"The English system is so weird that I'm not even sure what the main unit of mass is."
I believe it is the slug, which if memory serves, and it probably doesn't, is a mass which weighs 32.2 lbs.
Which immediately conjures up images of lead disks or garden pests, neither of which masses 32.2 lbs, last time I checked.
When they were pushing conversion to the metric system, I don't remember anyone ever coming up with a figure of what it would cost (either in pounds or dollars). /p
It would mean that every machine shop and factory would have billions of dollars tied up in machinery (lathes, milling machines, etc) that would be almost useless as soon as the conversion were complete; not to mention all of the tool boxes which, at the time, contained nothing but SAE wrenches and sockets.
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