Badsnookerplayer wrote:Americans brains are not really wired for metric units.
I will have to jump in here for just a minute to defend the homeland. I have been working 15 hour days, 7 days a week for the last few weeks so I haven't looked in on the Island much.
In comment boards across the interwebs, I read the American bashers saying we are just too stubborn or too stupid to switch to the "better" metric system. I am a Mechanical Engineer and I work most often with German manufactured machinery. I can easily work in either ISO (metric) or ANSI (American) systems for my designs. The many machine shop services I use for parts fabrication can easily accommodate any metric base designs I can throw at them. I can acquire metric raw materials from multiple warehouses if I need to though starting with a 50 x 25 mm steel bar will increase my cost about 80 percent over starting with 2" x 1" so in general, why should I pay for the metric?
The reason we do not switch to metric has nothing whatsoever to do with ordinary, everyday people you see on the street. It has to do with the infrastructure of the country and how product is manufactured and moved from place to place. I am moving paper stock through my plant right now......boxes, but boxes before they become boxes, laid out flat paperboard. When these "blanks" were designed, a part of the design was based on transportation across the highways and byways. Standard pallet size is 40" x 48" as it has been for, oh, I don't know, probably a hundred years, maybe more. I have to remove the pallets from a semi-trailer, process, and re-load on the trailer. These can fit either 26 or 30 to a load depending on orientation. I must orient at 26 to a load because I must load with a pallet jack, not driving on the trailer with a forklift. Because of this standard, the trailer itself, as all the rest of the trailers you see on the highway, is 53 feet long, just enough to fit the necessary pallets efficiently. This same sort of design interactivity applies equally to the rail and shipping industries. And of course, it also applies to every industry that manufactures and moves product, not just paper. The overwhelming majority of good product design will also include efficiency of transportation in the algorithm.
If you don't understand most or any of what the hell I just said above, that is okay, you don't really need to. The point is it has nothing to do with "stupid" Americans not being able to figure out that a meter is 39.4 inches or to leave your coat at home when it is 25 degrees C outside. It has got to do with the largest economy in the world by far which has developed efficient processes over the last century to continuously expand that economy to the point the the US Dollar remains the benchmark currency. To make that change to the metric system would be a decades long process, if it ever comes, and to date, there simply is no reason to change it. What advantage would the changeover give us, make us the largest economy in the world or something? Oh, wait a minute...
Sorry to rant, I think I am just exhausted. But I read the same ignorant comments over and over on multiple comment boards and have never responded before. Maybe I can open the eyes of at least a couple people in the world.
By the way, I perfectly agree that metric is easier, more logical, and more convenient to work in. That is not the point at all. It is very easy to snap your fingers and say, "Ok, this snooker ball which previously had a diameter of 2-1/16 inches no longer measures that but now measures 52.5 mm." But it is not so easy to say, "Ok, this whole cross-country transportation system of millions of trucks and railcars and cargo ships, that will all have to go. We will just replace this system that has worked well for a century with something better." If anyone understands anything about business, it is a very simple equation called cost versus benefit......the extraordinary cost of implementing the metric system across the economy of the USA would provide little if any tangible benefit as the current system has already developed to amazing efficiency over a very long period of time.