alt Hacker NewsThe super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)
Comments
I'd part with cups and teaspoons/tablespoons and the like, but you'll pry inches/feet/yards and fahrenheit from my cold, dead hands. They're both more convenient for daily use. I think I'd prefer to keep miles as well but I don't have a good reason for that one.
Fahrenheit has more precision without using decimals for the thing 99% of people are using temperature measurements for: air temp. Where I live, we generally experience 5 degrees F - 100 degrees F at different points of the year. That's 95 degrees of precision with no decimal. In C, that's -15 to 37.8, a mere 52.8 degrees. The difference between 75 (usually a beautiful day) and 85 (hot) is 23.8C to 29.4C. Everything packed into this tight range.
Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.
For science, sure, I'll use metric.
> U.S. customary (the more accurate name for what’s sometimes the called the British Imperial system)
For those wondering why there is this distinction, the British Imperial units were created by the Weights and Measures Act 1824; US customary units follow the Winchester Standard of 1588.
The US being stuck in imperial is such a meme nowadays with "freedum units" and the like. It's yet another odd thing that makes it easy for the rest of the world to laugh at the US. In these isolationist times I doubt this will change soon though, but it'd definitely help international collaboration.
An argument can be made that we should blame Pirates of the Carribean for the fact that the USA is not metric. O:-)
https://www.nist.gov/blogs/taking-measure/pirates-caribbean-...
Having converted science, manufacturing etc, what's the first (or next) true consumer facing thing that could change?
The problem is that Fahrenheit is a bit more convenient for describing the weather. Inches and feet are a bit more convenient for measuring human scale things and for being easily divisible by more numbers. And we’re used to the rest of it.
Unless someone comes along and forces it on you, for the average person, there’s not enough incentive to switch.
Seems like the U.S. uses metric for most of the important areas and just lets everyone continue to use imperial, whatever they want everywhere else.
funny related video from Loic Suberville.
Why change? Imperial was Washington's dream, after all... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk
Oh, he means that companies are adopting metric internally. If there would have been significant progress in adoption of the metric system in any public-facing field lately, Trump would have surely railed against it, same as he does against renewable energy and other subjects he perceives as "progressive"...
The metric systems's worse flaw was doubling down on base 10 instead of the plainly superior base 12.
Aren't imperial units considerably easier to calculate on the fly in construction and when squaring? They seem to come more natural for me.
"Back when I was a Catholic-school kid in northern Wisconsin, my school lessons briefly focused on the metric system. This was in the late 1970s."
Man, the progressive school (Comanche Elementary in Overland Park, Kansas!) must have had a huge impact on my life. In addition to open classrooms (I was in Unit 5, not 4th Grade), team teaching, a focus on experimental science, a circular layout to the school with a sunken (architecturally) library in the center…
Yeah, we went over the Metric System that whole year. I can still sing the "Metric Family" song from the film on metric units ("Kilo", "Milli", etc.). And to my young and impressionable mind, the U.S. was joining the rest of the "Free World" in a kind of Star-Trek-like casting aside of the old things that divided us—joining each other with a focus on progress, science, space…
President Carter came along around the same time or shortly after. And I have a photo of a family road trip to South Dakota, Montana: the sign that indicates the altitude of a particular mountain pass has both feet and meters. I Google-mapped the same location recently and of course it's no longer in meters.
I feel like in my elementary school days (the 1970's) the U.S. was on the cusp of a future of optimism—no doubt buoyed by having put astronauts on the Moon, but I was wildly on board for it.
But then some kind of shit seemingly started to poison the country. I don't feel we have ever returned to that level of national optimism. Perhaps 1976, the Bicentennial, was the end of it. (Recently watching the film "Nashville" brought me back a bit of the vibe of the times.)
I've been missing it my entire life since.