In message , Alan Minyard
writes
On Fri, 31 Oct 2003 17:49:35 GMT, lid (Goran Larsson) wrote:
There is no relation between these two statements. No one, not even
you, have a clue to what the US GDP would have been today if the US
had gone through with the decision to go metric.

What I am saying is that, if the countries that use the metric (misnomer)
system were so superior, they would be the leading economies, they
are not. If the US had "gone metric" there would have been significant
economic damage for a long period of time.

Why? It's hardly catastrophic. British industry had far worse problems
than "changing units", for an example.

Having been trained in both, it really is a lot easier to do serious
work in SI than to try to work out whether a reference to "pounds" means
pounds, poundals or slugs...

On the other hand, we still buy beer in pints (even if it's officially
..568 litre measures) and measure distance in miles.


One of the more interesting summer work placements I had was rigging up
a gas-turbine engine to run on a novel fuel. One challenge was simply
trying to cope with the multiple screw threads used for the holes
already drilled and tapped: some US, some Whitworth, some ISO.

If the US wants its measurement system to prosper, you need to make it a
_lot_ easier to find the relevant taps, dies and fasteners. Muttering
that the rest of the world ought to do it your way is useless: make your
standard easy to use or see how young engineers drill and tap new holes
for threads they _can_ get easily.

At one time gasoline stations sold fuel by the liter and speed limits
were posted in KPH. The citizens of the US did not like, and refused
to tolerate, such usages.

At what point does this stop being a noble defence of fine units, and
start being King Canute ordering the rising tide to retreat?



--
When you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite.
W S Churchill

Paul J. Adam MainBoxatjrwlynch[dot]demon{dot}co(.)uk