Why should the US go metric?

Answer 1

because we are the only country who doesn't which makes us look pretty lame

because we are the only country who doesn't which makes us look pretty lame

This is interesting from an observer's point of view, being a Briton, for legally the only system allowed for trade in the UK is metric - strictly speaking the SI System version of it.

There are exceptions: thanks to public pressure, milk and beer may still be sold in pints & half-pints, and road distances can legally be signed & quoted only in Statute Miles and Yards. So cars in the UK have dual-calibrated speedometers with the odometer in Miles. It would cost the country & industry absolute fortunes to convert all these fully.

For lesser distances, altitudes, sea depths etc the Metre (the right spelling - it's French) is used. It's about 39", so just over a Yard.

For day-to-day shopping in the UK at least, the Centimetre is the nearest fraction of the metre that relates to human dimensions. However the only technically-recognised, ISO-Standard multiples and divisions of the Metre are the Kilometre (1000m), Millimetre (1/1000m), Micrometre (1/1000 000m) and Nanometre (1/ 1 000 000 000, or 10-to-the-minus-9m). The cubic centimetre (cc) is used in laboratories, I understand, as well as in car engine sizes.

On which, the standard unit of power is the Watt (1 Joule / Second of energy conversion), but the motor-trade has invented a truly bizarre thing called the kiloPoule (1000 French Hens?) where normal people would use the Horsepower - still animal but at least horses were used as draught animals.

It's common to use Scientific or Engineering Notation when dealing with big multiples or divisions of 10 - easier to read, and the sums are easier.

Unlike all the historical units world-wide, the French invented the Metre from a totally non-anthropogenic base, to rid themselves of a confusing morass of regional units within their own country. It is based on a calculation of the Earth's polar circumference, so it no more or less arbitrary or accurate than one based on human body proportions. I don't know why they didn't use the Nautical Mile, an angle/circumference measure, as the base, though it is rather long.

The only ISO unit of Volume is the Litre; of Mass the Kilogram, and their multiples as above. That of Time is the Second. Of angle, the Radian is "preferred", the Degree is used for everyday practicality.

The SI System then has very few primary units, and fewer that mean much in everyday human terms, but they are bureaucratically and numerically knitted together to form a cohesive whole. It's fine for science but full of very odd things like the Pascal (1 Newton / square-metre), a unit of pressure that's neat arithmetically but at 1/100,000 of atmospheric pressure is far too absurdly small for anything much except in acoustics - then you have to divide it by 1 million, to the micro-Pascal, because it's far too big!

(Look up how the human ear works and just how incredibly sensitive it is to the sound pressure in a whisper, to see why.)

They also sought to honour pioneering scientists by naming compound units after them, like the Pascal - but all that does is make dimensional analysis very much harder.

Whether you Americans adopt the SI System for everyday use, or prefer to leave it to scientists, engineers and exporters of goods, is your business...!

Answer 2

you should not. are you british or American? i am british and we have been dictated to by brussels.(THE EU) i don't know what a kilo is or a kilometer. it is pounds and miles as far as i am concerned. as soon as we get the referendum we was promised by the labour party to get out of Europe the better.

The UK began moving to the metric system long before we joined the EU, parliament first considered it in 1819, five years before the adoption of the imperial system. Claiming not to understand metric is not a statement of superiority, but rather one of ignorance.

to answer the question, if you are working in isolation you can use any unit to measure, even a dead cat. If your neighbour wants to make something the same as yours they would have to use the same dead cat. This is why countries began to standardize their units around two hundred years ago, France in the 1790s and the UK in the 1820s. These standard systems meant that everyone in the country, or empire, used the same units; before the same word was used for a different measure, to this day a U.S.A pint is much smaller than an imperial pint. Today we live in a global village, or if you prefer we have a globalized network of industries. This means that, for the same reasons countries standardized, we have to have an universally agreed global standard for measurement. This international standard is the SI, or metric, system. For personal use, any system is fine (even dead cats) but for professional, legal and business uses we need to all use the same; the same we use is metric.

Answer 3

Here are just some of the reasons:

• Most conversions involve multiplying or dividing by 10, 100 or 1000, which is just a matter of shifting the decimal point, making calculations much, much easier.
• Whenever we travel outside the US we are surrounded by measurement systems to which we are not accustomed.
• Whenever someone visits the US he/she is surrounded by measurement systems to which he/she is not accustomed.
• It is the standard for the international scientific community.
• Many millions of dollars have been wasted due to accidents resulting from people mistaking standard quantities for metric or vice versa.
• International trade, and even international personal communication, would be much less confusing.
• A great deal of our household furnishings, consumer electronics, appliances, cars, etc. are made overseas. A lot of extra work is done to Americanize many products and manuals, which increases the prices we pay.
• There are around 200 countries in the world, but there are only three that still cling to the old measurement systems: Myanmar, Liberia, and "home sweet home". That reminds me of the countries that clung to the Julian calendar until the 20th century.
• Our federal government already requires that the units used by their contractors be metric.
• Most of the Americans who grew up without any exposure to the metric system are no longer with us.

Answer 4

We should go metric because it could be easier to convert measurements and it would be easier all the way around.