When do you think we’ll accomplish it? Certainly not in the next four years, IMO. If we’re lucky, we might be able to do it within like 20 years.
Do you think it’s related to Boomers at all, and newer generations might be more willing to push it through? Here’s a Boomer Death Clock that says about 35% of them have passed away by now.
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Right after the UK switches to driving on the right.
We’ll follow it up by fixing the polarity on all our electrical drawings.
Bold of you to presume that we ever will:-).
I think that the areas where it’s important to switch have pretty much already switched. Science is essentially all metric.
The areas where it tends to linger are:
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Places where existing standards are in place and would be expensive to change. Like, paper size or parts used on a given class of device or something – dishwashers have a 1/4" hex key on the underside to rotate the device if it gets stuck. Recipes.
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Things where the public has a general “sense” of something in their heads from experience, like temperature outside or miles traveled.
Entrenched standards probably aren’t going to actively change purely for the purposes of metrification – like, tripods for cameras are going to continue to be 1/4 inch diameter shafts – but if a new standard comes out these days, it’s probably based on metric. I expect that there’ll be kind of a natural phasing out as existing standards naturally get replaced as some sort of new need arises.
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My guess would be never. I’ve been in construction for 20 years. Even the new kids coming in use feet inches, yards, etc. All the architects and engineers in construction also use imperial. I just don’t think it will ever happen.
I wouldn’t give imperial that much credit. I think momentum is the only reason. Workers are trained to think in imperial because the older person training them thinks in imperial. And so it continues.
I really hope sometime in my life. But this country just voted traitor trump back in and waive their flags of absolute stupidity, so I’m not gonna get my hopes up too much.
As a mechanical engineer, it is incredibly frustrating having 2 systems that I have to use daily. Even though every company I’ve worked for has been a metric company, I often cannot get the part I want in metric easily / quickly / cheaply. Full support of switching ASAP
What are you talking about?
The US federal government made the switch decades ago…
They just dumb it down for the common folks.
The Metric Board was abolished in 1982 by President Ronald Reagan, largely on the suggestion of Frank Mankiewicz and Lyn Nofziger.
One more thing to throw on his pile of sins.
So now you’re upset we switched to metric?
I’m saying it sucks that Reagan pushed back on metric by abolishing the board responsible for the Metrication of the US, dooming us to the current situation where we’re stuck in the middle
7 years after it was put in place…
And it’s been 40 years since and multiple things have happened…
Like, sure, Reagan was a bastard man, but you’re missing not just details but broad strokes if you’re blaming that for how things are now
Why would there be another push?
The units in place are perfectly functional. There’s no lack of ability to use SI/“metric” measures, particularly in fields where it matters. It would be absurdly expensive to shift everything all at once, and doing it gradually means switching to dual systems in common life first, so it would be doubly expensive.
Hell, there’s not even significant benefit to everyone using the same units of measure, and there’s significant benefits to knowing how to use both decimal and fractional systems of computation. So the only gain for the average person would be not having to hear people whine about the subject. You’d still have to learn how to do fractions because it’s a fundamental skill.
I still don’t get why people even care other than their own laziness. And that’s regardless of whether it’s an american whining about dealing with SI units they aren’t used to, or other people whining about the U.S. not jumping on board. It really isn’t something that matters, and if you’re too damn lazy to learn how to convert units you use regularly, that’s on the individual. It’s basic math, not calculus. Fuck, if someone is too lazy to learn it, we have devices that will do the work for us. It’s such a non issue. If you’re in a field like medicine or engineering, you’ll be using whatever is standard for that field in any professional interactions, and those units are likely different than what you’ll run into in someone’s home.
not really ever, nor should it. it would cost billions upon billions of dollars for every industry to switch to a metric format for, i am being literal and accurate, zero benefit.
us customary units are fine, they are defined by the SI physical standards and so are just as consistent, precise, and functional. this sort of desire also misunderstands what unit systems are actually like in practice. cgs or mks or xyz are just a surface display, every industry, metric or us customary, has dozens of units specific to the processes relevant to that industry, that are insane and annoying and unintuitive. switching to a metric format does nothing to alleviate what is actually annoying about units (which isnt actually the units but the dimensions). there are some cases where it might, but ultimtely unit conversions are so incredibly trivial that it doesnt ever matter that much. but re designing every calibrated tooling or device and drawing to use a new format? unfathomable time, effort, and introduced opportunities for error, insane costs, wastes of time. eventually in some indeterminate future enough industries will have had to redo most of their standards enouch times that they may be mostly metric anyway, but that’s probably quite a ways away. many decades, a century, hard to say. some industries still use units that are hundreds of years old.
tl;dr it’s not boomers it’s industrial momentum and isnt even useful to anyone to change.
We missed an opportunity to switch to km when all the “55 Saves Lives” speed limit signs were replaced.
We will never abandon freedom units
It won’t happen. Not in the next hundred years.
