The US has no issue with the metric system, and most engineering and scientific people switched decades ago. The military is mostly all metric too. The general public of the US is a harder nut to crack, asking a population of stubborn freedom lovers to change something they’ve known their whole life is damn near impossible.
I switch my stuff to metric all the time, and the usual response isn’t “oh that’s interesting”, it’s nearly always, “the fuck is wrong with you, why would you want that weird shit?!”. If the government suddenly made all weather reports metric, the T-Shirt sellers would all become millionaires overnight from selling anti-metric slogans.
So, what I’m hearing is to get some dropship tshirt designs, and get AI to publish a load of articles about how Dems are pushing metric…
Damn, why do I have morals?
Haven’t watched the video, but as someone who works in industry in the US I think the consumer side of a metric switch is the lowest barrier to entry. A much bigger hurdle is the fact that almost all of our raw industrial inputs are built on the imperial system. Need to buy raw plate or bar stock to have something built? It’s sized in imperial. And if you want to source metric you’re either going to have to pay more for it or look outside the US. And after that raw stock is purchased and you send it to a machine shop that machine shop is almost certainly using exclusively imperial tooling and measurement equipment. You can do the fake metric thing that some companies do where you dual dimension all of your drawings, but those companies will usually still design to imperial so their parts can be fabricated in the US.
I’m absolutely not opposed to a switch to metric. I still perform most of my calculations in metric and then convert to imperial just for ease and because that’s how I was taught in school. But it’s certainly much more difficult than just deciding one day that we’re all going to switch.
This is the most valuable comment. I use metric everyday, but I can't magically change that my house was built in imperial.
I try to use metric as often as possible. I measure everything in millimeters in grams. I still haven't switched over to Celsius completely yet but I'd like to.
It would be an easy switch for me outside of speed and temperature.
I think farenheight makes the most sense when it comes to describing a comfortable temperature. Baking , computers, and what-not, celsius makes more sense.
Speed, well, that’d take me a long time to get used to.
Measuring for home projects and the like wouldn’t be difficult as I had already made that switch at my last job.
Eh American temperatures just sound confusing.
I’ll see headlines like “Record breaking weather over 104 degrees “ and think holy shit people must be dying, and it’s just like only bloody 40 degrees.
I just think of it like this. 0 is fucking cold, 100 is fucking hot. It’s the easiest for me to describe comfort levels according to temperature.
72 is room temperature, so anything above, it’s time to start taking clothes off. Anything below it’s time to start putting more on.
32 is around about where water freezes so if it gets close to that, time to make sure pipes are wrapped and plants are inside. Only really have to worry about that one time a year though.
Celsius:
0 is freezing
10 is not
20 is pleasing
30 is hotIn metric you just look at the first digit:
0x is cold
1x is light jacket
2x is shorts weather
3x is hot
one time a year though.
One time… Like late November to early March.
I only have to worry about the change once a year as far as major things go. Which is what I was alluding to.
Comfort levels? I usually wear a hoodie with 1-2 layers down to 32, then my coat for everything below that with layers added the colder it gets.
I live in Michigan so the transition seasons are a crap-shoot on what you’ll need to wear that day anyways so I have to keep clothes in my car either way temperature is measured.
American living in Canada here. It took me a couple of months at most to get used to both. I still couldn’t give you an accurate conversion between metric and imperial, but my brain understands the metric units now. It’s just a matter of using the units in everyday life.
Speed and distance were probably the easiest ones for me. You set your car’s dash to use km/h instead of mph. Then you just follow the road laws like normal. If it says the speed limit is 100 km/h, you just don’t let the number on the dash go much above that. Or you just drive the same speed everyone else does like you do on American roads anyway.
Temperature was a bit more confusing, but you pretty quickly learn that you’ll be happy if you set the thermostat to 18-24 and that if the temperature outside hits 30, it’s going to be a hot day. That kind of precision is more than enough for your mind.
I genuinely used to think I’d have a hard time switching to metric for most things. In my mind, I’d always have to be converting things back to imperial in my head. But that just isn’t the way it works. You quickly just start to relate the units to the real world and you understand it pretty quick.
The speed thing would be difficult for me as I’m into car culture so with that I’m far too used to MP/H.
Speed limits and driving would be easy as I have a VW with nice clear gauging for both speeds and my info center I think can be switched over anyways.
Horsepower/torque numbers are also what the fuck. That might be a British thing though. What is the most common measurement for that outside the US?
The temp thing I still don’t think I could ever change. Not like I would do it in a way that would affect people.
I already use celcius as much I can outside of temp.HP is kiloWatt and lb/ft is Newtonmeter
kW=(0.105NmRPM)/1000 HP=(LbFt*RPM)/5252
There would be mass confusion if the US went metric.
Seemed to work fine everywhere else.
In the US it’d be attacked as un-American and as part of the “culture wars” the US right wing seem to imagine. The government would be attacked for taking away “freedom units”.
Electoral reform with proportional representation would be better priority so government can reflect the majority, and not the noisy fringes.
I saw a clip from probably Fox where someone made that point. He wanted to be able to use his grandma’s recipes for whatever and also noted that the metric system was creacted by revolutionaries, the implication obvious being the pride that North America has never had a single revolution, which is why you’ll see pictures of the king in every classroom and the union jack being flown everywhere in the colonies.
Whoosh
