7 ms·

* Imperial units are defined in terms of metric units. * The cost of changing over is astronomical * Domains where the metric system is actually better use th

* Imperial units are defined in terms of metric units. * The cost of changing over is astronomical * Domains where the metric system is actually better use the metric system * Domains where it does not don't need it. * You have a supercomputer on your wrist. Dividing by a number other than 10 is not such a challenge anymore. * A4 paper is in no way superior to letter. It's just a choice. Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement.

smallerfish 4y ago
> Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement. ISO 216 isn't specifically European. It's used in most of the world. The same is true of the metric system. The world will indeed be incrementally better when people don't have to waste time converting measurements when operating between the US and elsewhere.
- garbagecoder 4y ago
  You assert it will be incrementally better without offsetting for the externalities of the switch, which would take decades. Also the metric system is European in origin. Despite what chapter 0 of every science book implies god did not invent it.
  - Joker_vD 4y ago
    Here's the thing about the switching and the costs of it: every other country, much poorer than the modern US of A, went through it just fine. And in any case, this cost is not going to go down the longer you wait, on the contrary—unless, of course, the US industrial prowess utterly collapses so that there is not much left to upgrade.
    - garbagecoder 4y ago
      You're trying to say that because they did it and they're poorer it should be easier for us because we're richer. First of all, the cost will be in proportion to the activity of the economy and the population. Second, the proportion of people who were educated to use units of any kind was a smaller proportion of that smaller population. And in many former-non-metric countries many quantities are still often quoted in the old units. All of that and it is still the case that the primary system in the US is the metric system de jure if not de facto. De facto, the metric system is virtually universal in science domains in the US. Whether the metric system is "better" or not is not the question. There are keyboard layouts not actually designed to slow down typing, but it's just one of those things that most people don't see worth changing. Are they wrong? In that case, it's an individual valuation. I'm sure "the US economy is losing $500b because of QWERTY" would make great copy on a slow news day on reddit. But unless it costs <$500n to make the change, we aren't actually losing anything. Not everyone is a relentless optimizer. Even some of us who are also like to optimize for the entire system, including transaction costs/overhead/maintenance and not just some ab initio declaration of right like god in genesis. The US has a great solution that everyone hates because it's the US: we use metric where it's necessary and leave it alone everywhere else. We could use a lot more European know how in numerous other sectors. I would even go so far as to say it's probably correct to presume that things where the US is the outlier is a case where we are the ones doing it wrong. It's a presumption, meaning evidence can rebut it. In this case, here we can manage both. We can teach both in schools, we can use computers and calculators to divide by numbers other than 10 (which you have to do with mixed units and constants in metric calculations anyway). In fact, I wonder if there's proof that all of this extra teaching and double system overhead is worth what it costs! I bet the answer is that it is though and as long as you can experiment and find out in your domain, it sounds great to me. Different systems for the win!
  - lucumo 4y ago
    > Also the metric system is European in origin. As is quite a lot of American culture. Lots of good European ideas got improved on by America. Do one more ;-)
    - anthk 4y ago
      America would be better with just three little improvements: - Celsius temperatures near any Fahrenheit article/post/news. - The metric system. Just scale up and down by ten. You already do it with dollars. So consider it done. - ISO 6801 dates. Year, month, day. Things scale down logically. Years are composed of months; and months, of days. Also, they would be no ambiguity issues.
      - garbagecoder 4y ago
        For the amount of money you're proposing to spend to make America better we could fund universal health care and almost completely fund 2-year college for everyone. I think that would be money better spent. And despite what everyone thinks of our schools, we manage to learn both systems and divide by numbers other than 10.
  - katbyte 4y ago
    The imperial system is also European. fwiw Canada did the changeover to metric in the 70 and took about a decade and I’m rather glad we did it.
    - Moru 4y ago
      It's like technical debt. The longer you wait to fix it, the more it will cost you.
      - garbagecoder 4y ago
        You people can downvote me all you want and the fact remains that the costs to make the switch are too high to happen any time soon. The real world isn't your company where you can just mandate things. Stakeholders, such as voters, get a say. Voters probably wouldn't support this if there was a net benefit in cost, but there's not, not anymore. Of all of the things that are broken about the US, everyone here wants to fix the one thing that's not: our ambidexterity with units. Every school child learns both. We're terrible at raising kids to be bilingual, but we manage to teach them both metric and imperial units. Once you concede that the metric system is already in de jure use in the US and in de facto use in domains where it's best to use it, you lose all kinds of benefit from switches. The low hanging fruit has been picked. You're left with empty non-empirical arguments like ... ummm... it's better to use one system. It is! But we're not starting from scratch. Seriously, of all of the things I have posted on HN none has gotten more downvotes than saying that we don't need to go 100% metric in the US, I could speculate as to why, but it sure seems like this is some kind of nerd anti-normie shibboleth. It shouldn't be. Go ahead, look up the figures. Then decide if it's still worth it to you. If it is, then try and convince enough policymakers not to just support it as the US does but to change everything over. You won't win that war. There has to be some specific need for the change. 'It would be cool' or 'it soothes my OCD' or whatever aren't enough to change something this massive. Most problems it's a dodge to say "the money is better spent on X" but when you're talking about significant fractions of GDP that's just not how it is. We could do so much to improve people's lives with these sums of money. Reminder that this is all about the US government internally sticking with letter sized paper. A4 paper is still A4 when measured in inches (which can be done exactly since inches are defined in terms of meters).
  - naasking 4y ago
    > You assert it will be incrementally better without offsetting for the externalities of the switch, which would take decades The use of SI units is likely measured in centuries. You'll be fine, and you might save a few rockets, rollercoasters and planes here and there: https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/6Page53.pdf https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/6Page53.pdf
    - garbagecoder 4y ago
      That one incident is because they didn't use metric in a domain where it would benefit from it. You won't save that rocket by changing how my clothes are labelled.
      - naasking 4y ago
        Consistency across all domains is a benefit in itself.
        garbagecoder 4y ago
        Yes, but as with everyone else, you are not factoring in the empirical value of the costs and just asserting it would be better.
        naasking 4y ago
        And as already noted, since the switch can happen over 1-2 decades but the permanence of units is measured in centuries. The benefits of clarity and consistency over that timeline necessarily outweigh the downsides.
elzbardico 4y ago
I am not an American, I was raised using the metric system for almost everything, but I hate using it for manual work like carpentry and plumbing. For a long time in my country, we used the imperial system for stuff like that, and the change to metric is incredibly annoying and non-intuitive in those domains.
- rebolek 4y ago
  It seems non-intuitive exactly because you are used to imperial: "For a long time in my country, we used the imperial system for stuff like that". If you really were raised using metric not for almost everything, but for everything, it would seem intuitive and you've found the other system strange. And vice versa. That's just, in immortal words of Bjork "human behaviour".
  - garbagecoder 4y ago
    He just said he wasn't American so why would it be intuitive to him?
    - elzbardico 4y ago
      I am not an American, but until a few years ago there was not much of a push to move to metric on things like tools and plumbing. A lot of the world used imperial for such things even if they were not former british colonies.
      - garbagecoder 4y ago
        I understood what you meant. I was just saying that your case is different since it wasn't necessarily that way for you the way it is for Americans. There are many domains where imperial units have a nice human scale that makes sense, and then there are others where it is total trash and useless. I still fail to see what's so terrible about using both.
tssva 4y ago
Why are you bringing up imperial units? The US doesn't use them. The US uses US customary units.
- jimbo99912 4y ago
  Because they are based on (sorta) imperial and nobody really knows the difference all that well. So people say imperial when referring to the non metric countries that happen to speak English. At least insofar as being defined in terms of metric units, the statement you replied to was accurate for both imperial and customary.
- garbagecoder 4y ago
  Aside from being overly pedantic, which is the reason I used the term, the doubly overly pedantic reply is that we do have the Imperial system, just redefined to be different than the itself-later-redefined imperial system. Furthermore, the names of the units are from the imperial system, even if the definitions themselves are not.
  - tssva 4y ago
    Try pouring an imperial gallon into a us gallon container and then tell me I'm being overly pedantic. The names of the units are from the winchester system which is what predated both US customary units and Imperial units.
    - garbagecoder 4y ago
      I didn't say "imperial gallon" I said "imperial system" which is both historically correct and what people colloquially call it. Yes, since we adopted those units the measures have changed repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. I get it.
      - tssva 4y ago
        The US customary units were 1st established prior to the imperial system existing so it is not historically correct to say they are based upon the imperial system.
thescriptkiddie 4y ago
> The cost of changing over is astronomical as opposed to the cost of not changing over, which is much larger but paid in small increments over time so nobody is bothered enough to do anything about it
- garbagecoder 4y ago
  That's false. Most domains where it would benefit have already made the change.

smallerfish 4y ago

> Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement. ISO 216 isn't specifically European. It's used in most of the world. The same is true of the metric system. The world will indeed be incrementally better when people don't have to waste time converting measurements when operating between the US and elsewhere.

garbagecoder 4y ago
You assert it will be incrementally better without offsetting for the externalities of the switch, which would take decades. Also the metric system is European in origin. Despite what chapter 0 of every science book implies god did not invent it.
- Joker_vD 4y ago
  Here's the thing about the switching and the costs of it: every other country, much poorer than the modern US of A, went through it just fine. And in any case, this cost is not going to go down the longer you wait, on the contrary—unless, of course, the US industrial prowess utterly collapses so that there is not much left to upgrade.
  - garbagecoder 4y ago
    You're trying to say that because they did it and they're poorer it should be easier for us because we're richer. First of all, the cost will be in proportion to the activity of the economy and the population. Second, the proportion of people who were educated to use units of any kind was a smaller proportion of that smaller population. And in many former-non-metric countries many quantities are still often quoted in the old units. All of that and it is still the case that the primary system in the US is the metric system de jure if not de facto. De facto, the metric system is virtually universal in science domains in the US. Whether the metric system is "better" or not is not the question. There are keyboard layouts not actually designed to slow down typing, but it's just one of those things that most people don't see worth changing. Are they wrong? In that case, it's an individual valuation. I'm sure "the US economy is losing $500b because of QWERTY" would make great copy on a slow news day on reddit. But unless it costs <$500n to make the change, we aren't actually losing anything. Not everyone is a relentless optimizer. Even some of us who are also like to optimize for the entire system, including transaction costs/overhead/maintenance and not just some ab initio declaration of right like god in genesis. The US has a great solution that everyone hates because it's the US: we use metric where it's necessary and leave it alone everywhere else. We could use a lot more European know how in numerous other sectors. I would even go so far as to say it's probably correct to presume that things where the US is the outlier is a case where we are the ones doing it wrong. It's a presumption, meaning evidence can rebut it. In this case, here we can manage both. We can teach both in schools, we can use computers and calculators to divide by numbers other than 10 (which you have to do with mixed units and constants in metric calculations anyway). In fact, I wonder if there's proof that all of this extra teaching and double system overhead is worth what it costs! I bet the answer is that it is though and as long as you can experiment and find out in your domain, it sounds great to me. Different systems for the win!
- lucumo 4y ago
  > Also the metric system is European in origin. As is quite a lot of American culture. Lots of good European ideas got improved on by America. Do one more ;-)
  - anthk 4y ago
    America would be better with just three little improvements: - Celsius temperatures near any Fahrenheit article/post/news. - The metric system. Just scale up and down by ten. You already do it with dollars. So consider it done. - ISO 6801 dates. Year, month, day. Things scale down logically. Years are composed of months; and months, of days. Also, they would be no ambiguity issues.
    - garbagecoder 4y ago
      For the amount of money you're proposing to spend to make America better we could fund universal health care and almost completely fund 2-year college for everyone. I think that would be money better spent. And despite what everyone thinks of our schools, we manage to learn both systems and divide by numbers other than 10.
- katbyte 4y ago
  The imperial system is also European. fwiw Canada did the changeover to metric in the 70 and took about a decade and I’m rather glad we did it.
  - Moru 4y ago
    It's like technical debt. The longer you wait to fix it, the more it will cost you.
    - garbagecoder 4y ago
      You people can downvote me all you want and the fact remains that the costs to make the switch are too high to happen any time soon. The real world isn't your company where you can just mandate things. Stakeholders, such as voters, get a say. Voters probably wouldn't support this if there was a net benefit in cost, but there's not, not anymore. Of all of the things that are broken about the US, everyone here wants to fix the one thing that's not: our ambidexterity with units. Every school child learns both. We're terrible at raising kids to be bilingual, but we manage to teach them both metric and imperial units. Once you concede that the metric system is already in de jure use in the US and in de facto use in domains where it's best to use it, you lose all kinds of benefit from switches. The low hanging fruit has been picked. You're left with empty non-empirical arguments like ... ummm... it's better to use one system. It is! But we're not starting from scratch. Seriously, of all of the things I have posted on HN none has gotten more downvotes than saying that we don't need to go 100% metric in the US, I could speculate as to why, but it sure seems like this is some kind of nerd anti-normie shibboleth. It shouldn't be. Go ahead, look up the figures. Then decide if it's still worth it to you. If it is, then try and convince enough policymakers not to just support it as the US does but to change everything over. You won't win that war. There has to be some specific need for the change. 'It would be cool' or 'it soothes my OCD' or whatever aren't enough to change something this massive. Most problems it's a dodge to say "the money is better spent on X" but when you're talking about significant fractions of GDP that's just not how it is. We could do so much to improve people's lives with these sums of money. Reminder that this is all about the US government internally sticking with letter sized paper. A4 paper is still A4 when measured in inches (which can be done exactly since inches are defined in terms of meters).
- naasking 4y ago
  > You assert it will be incrementally better without offsetting for the externalities of the switch, which would take decades The use of SI units is likely measured in centuries. You'll be fine, and you might save a few rockets, rollercoasters and planes here and there: https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/6Page53.pdf https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/weekly/6Page53.pdf
  - garbagecoder 4y ago
    That one incident is because they didn't use metric in a domain where it would benefit from it. You won't save that rocket by changing how my clothes are labelled.
    - naasking 4y ago
      Consistency across all domains is a benefit in itself.
      - garbagecoder 4y ago
        Yes, but as with everyone else, you are not factoring in the empirical value of the costs and just asserting it would be better.
        naasking 4y ago
        And as already noted, since the switch can happen over 1-2 decades but the permanence of units is measured in centuries. The benefits of clarity and consistency over that timeline necessarily outweigh the downsides.

elzbardico 4y ago

I am not an American, I was raised using the metric system for almost everything, but I hate using it for manual work like carpentry and plumbing. For a long time in my country, we used the imperial system for stuff like that, and the change to metric is incredibly annoying and non-intuitive in those domains.

rebolek 4y ago
It seems non-intuitive exactly because you are used to imperial: "For a long time in my country, we used the imperial system for stuff like that". If you really were raised using metric not for almost everything, but for everything, it would seem intuitive and you've found the other system strange. And vice versa. That's just, in immortal words of Bjork "human behaviour".
- garbagecoder 4y ago
  He just said he wasn't American so why would it be intuitive to him?
  - elzbardico 4y ago
    I am not an American, but until a few years ago there was not much of a push to move to metric on things like tools and plumbing. A lot of the world used imperial for such things even if they were not former british colonies.
    - garbagecoder 4y ago
      I understood what you meant. I was just saying that your case is different since it wasn't necessarily that way for you the way it is for Americans. There are many domains where imperial units have a nice human scale that makes sense, and then there are others where it is total trash and useless. I still fail to see what's so terrible about using both.

tssva 4y ago

Why are you bringing up imperial units? The US doesn't use them. The US uses US customary units.

jimbo99912 4y ago
Because they are based on (sorta) imperial and nobody really knows the difference all that well. So people say imperial when referring to the non metric countries that happen to speak English. At least insofar as being defined in terms of metric units, the statement you replied to was accurate for both imperial and customary.
garbagecoder 4y ago
Aside from being overly pedantic, which is the reason I used the term, the doubly overly pedantic reply is that we do have the Imperial system, just redefined to be different than the itself-later-redefined imperial system. Furthermore, the names of the units are from the imperial system, even if the definitions themselves are not.
- tssva 4y ago
  Try pouring an imperial gallon into a us gallon container and then tell me I'm being overly pedantic. The names of the units are from the winchester system which is what predated both US customary units and Imperial units.
  - garbagecoder 4y ago
    I didn't say "imperial gallon" I said "imperial system" which is both historically correct and what people colloquially call it. Yes, since we adopted those units the measures have changed repeatedly on both sides of the Atlantic. I get it.
    - tssva 4y ago
      The US customary units were 1st established prior to the imperial system existing so it is not historically correct to say they are based upon the imperial system.

thescriptkiddie 4y ago

> The cost of changing over is astronomical as opposed to the cost of not changing over, which is much larger but paid in small increments over time so nobody is bothered enough to do anything about it

garbagecoder 4y ago
That's false. Most domains where it would benefit have already made the change.