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You forgot the metric system.
by soperj 5y ago
You forgot the metric system.
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoAnd while we are at it, drop this MM/DD date formatting nonsense!
- seizethegdgap 5y agoISO 8601 master race, checking in on 2022-02-14!
- Andrew_nenakhov 5y agoYYYY-MM-DD is the true path. It is known.
- apurtbapurt 5y agoThis is the way, that is naively sortable.
- sgjohnson 5y agoWhere it matters, the US already uses the metric system. Virtually all products are dual labeled, with good chunk being in metric sizes. The military uses metric exclusively, and so does most of the science community. But to force the people to go fully metric would take a genereration.
- CRConrad 5y ago> But to force the people to go fully metric would take a genereration. It's already taken more.
- unbalancedevh 5y ago> to go fully metric would take a genereration Longer than that, I'd say. I remember watching videos about the metric system when I was in grade school back in the 70's. ("You can measure how far from your car to a star -- with the metric system!")
- sgjohnson 5y agoI mean, not if there was an actual metrication effort. There isn’t. Nobody’s putting up any speed limit signs in kilometres per hour or using celsius for the weather forecast.
- genewitch 5y agonot just speed limit signs. Mile markers, exit numbers, distance signs. There's millions of them all over the US. It would cost unfathomably (lol) large amounts of money to do that, and for arbitrary reasons.
- not2b 5y agoYou saw it in the 70s because that's when there was an effort (later abandoned) to convert the US to metric.
- oasisbob 5y agoI'll believe the US is using metric when you can buy rice by the kilo, gas by the liter, paper in ISO sizes, and construction sheet goods in increments other than 8x4 feet. Non-metric preferred sizes are embedded everywhere.
- not2b 5y agoThe Carter administration attempted to start a full transition to metric in the late 1970s. When Reagan took power this was killed and no one attempted to revive it, because it was turned into a nationalist thing, one of those things Republicans reflexively oppose.
- sixothree 5y agoWe officially switched to metric at one point. People were using metric. Specifically, nurses were using metric. Reagan put an end to it. And here we are.
- CRConrad 5y agoHe was an arsehole in so many more ways than most people nowadays realise.
- stjohnswarts 5y agoI don't think I've ever seen a doctor or nurse use oz for medication?
- sixothree 5y agoWe still measure weight and height using dumb people measurement systems.
- sgjohnson 5y agoYeah, I was under impression that medicine is also one of the fields that exclusively use metric.
- genewitch 5y agothere's not really "smaller than an ounce" that is commonly agreed upon, so milliliters for liquids and milligrams for solids wins out by default. Same thing with manufacturing. Most places switched to being able to do metric measurements by the 80s, but for older parts it's still in "thou" and other metric sounding divisions of inches. Drug dealers on the other hand talk about eighths and teenths, though. But everyone knows that a nickel is 5 grams. Both literally and figuratively.
- CRConrad 5y ago> there's not really "smaller than an ounce" that is commonly agreed upon, so milliliters for liquids and milligrams for solids wins out by default. Milligrams? Grams are already quite a bit smaller than an ounce. A millilitre of water weighs one gram.
- virgulino 5y agoNow you are pushing it.
- olyjohn 5y agoI like some of our standards. Temperature is one of them. I like that 0 is cold as hell, and 100 is hot as hell. And I like the fact that in Fahrenheit, the degrees are finer. Don't have to set my thermostat in half-degree increments in my house.
- novok 5y agoI think preference that just comes from familiarly. In practice you don't set your temperature in half increments in places with Celsius, it's just 20, 21, etc. Most HVACs do not set temperature that accurately enough in a room anyway for 0.5C adjustments to actually be useful. If you come from a Celsius place and then move to the USA, you find it actually fairly annoying, because a bunch of useful numbers to remember is arbitrary as fuck. What is the freezing point again? 35, 37, 33? In Celsius it's 0 and very easy to remember. The freezing point is very useful, since you'll know if the rain will become snow if it's just under 0, or if ice will start forming on the road or not. Similarly what is the boiling point? 200, 205, 210, 212? vs. a nice round easy to understand 100. You can also think about how hot your water can be as a 'percentage of boiling', so 75 becomes 'hotness that is %75 the way to boiling'. Vast majority of the world also knows that -17 (OF) is cold as fuck, and there is nothing special about that specific number too! You would also know that -16 and -18 are cold as fuck. Same with 38C (100F). 40C and 39C are also hot! And there are no unique properties about 0F and 100F, unlike 0C and 100C.
- layer8 5y ago> Most HVACs do not set temperature that accurately enough in a room anyway for 0.5C adjustments to actually be useful. The radiator thermostats I use have a 0.5 °C gradation. A 1 °C gradation would be too coarse as far as I’m concerned. That doesn’t mean that I’d prefer Fahrenheit, but 1° C is actually a quite significant step subjectively for environmental temperature.
- genewitch 5y ago> Same with 38C (100F). 40C and 39C are also hot! you were doing so well until right here.
- 5y ago
- BoxOfRain 5y agoI think that would need a lot of public buy-in, here in the UK we aimed to go fully metric in the '70s and it's still a mix to this day. Most things are officially metric but you still see a lot of informal use of imperial even among young people (height, weight etc) as well as quite a few official things like signs on roads and pints of draught beer in pubs. Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as political football too I think, in the UK opposition to going fully metric sometimes manifested itself as Euroscepticism and that was back in the '00s when we didn't have nearly such aggressive culture wars.
- PaulDavisThe1st 5y ago> Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as political football too I think, it was a political football here back in the 70s when there was talk of metric adoption. i do hope that people like stewart brand (whole earth catalog, coevolution quarterly, how buildings learn etc) feel some level of shame for the role their proseltyzing against metric, in spite of the good things they also did.
- genewitch 5y agoThe US is metric for everything except casual conversation. In the same way that i see and hear people in the UK say "he weighs 18 stone" or whatever, but everyone knows what a gram and kilogram and metre is. There's some things where knowing the SI definition is irrelevant, like how many PSI a tire needs. Sure, knowing what that is in SI is useful if you're trying to figure out how much a car weighs, but if i'm at the gas station setting the pump to 35 doesn't really matter. Industry and commerce is conducted on the global standard, though. And while the average american might not know how to convert between kilometers and miles (or hogsheads or chains or ...), but knows 500km is far, 500kg is heavy, and 500l is a lot. Until the SI stuff is the largest part of labels, and people feel like paying a ton of extra taxes to replace every road sign in the entire country (there's millions!), it's never going to be a "metric" country. Just think of the logistics and cost of replacing every road sign, including "mile markers", exit number signs, distances on all US government roads (BLM, USDA, Forestry), overpass signs, speed limit signs and road paint - i don't see that happening any time soon. If the only benefit is "the rest of the world stops talking smack because we're backwater imperial measurement users", would you force everyone to pay for that?