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I have lived with both systems and can honestly say one is not better than the other. There just isn't enough benefit in one system to justify a change.
Yes, it would!!!! Metric is much easier and 100000000% better!!
Oh come on. If you like the metric system so much you are certainly free to use it to your heart's content. Why does it bother you so much that our distances are measured in miles and not kilometers, or that our temperatures are in Fahrenheit and not Celsius? It's not that hard to go from Farhenheit to Celsius in your mind, or miles to kilometers, or pounds to kilos, etc. You can write all your recipes using the metric system, you can even buy metric measuring cups and metric kitchen scales.
I'm a world traveler and am half French--the country that invented the metric system. But good grief, there is absolutely zero need for the US to adopt the metric system for our daily routine.
i support the metric system, it does make more sense, particularly when visualizng area and volume and such. meters. liters. milli, centi. it just makes more sense to me. the imperial system is ok, i do have fun converting miles to kilometers. especially for marathons. 42k phew. but i have no problem with the system we use here in the US. prefer metric, probably cuz i feel taller in centimeters...
Was it pointless to convert to the Gregorian Calendar? (Today is May 24, 2008, almost two months after the start of the New Year. It would be June 6 everywhere else.)
Quote:
Originally Posted by censusdata
With computers making conversions very easy, it wouldn't make sense to switch now
Was it pointless to changeover to decimalized currency? I hope you had fun filing your tax returns in pounds, shillings, and pence. It's not that complicated at all (or is it)? Just buy that financial calculator instead of the general decimal calculator or the tax software will do it for you.
Quote:
Originally Posted by JMT
Oh come on. If you like the metric system so much you are certainly free to use it to your heart's content. Why does it bother you so much that our distances are measured in miles and not kilometers, or that our temperatures are in Fahrenheit and not Celsius? It's not that hard to go from Farhenheit to Celsius in your mind, or miles to kilometers, or pounds to kilos, etc. You can write all your recipes using the metric system, you can even buy metric measuring cups and metric kitchen scales.
I'm a world traveler and am half French--the country that invented the metric system. But good grief, there is absolutely zero need for the US to adopt the metric system for our daily routine.
Actually I'm not free to use it to my hearts content. Everything by default comes in Colonial. I can't get temperatures in Celsius except when I'm watching ABC 13. The scales are switchable and the measuring cups have a lot of lines just to accommodate Colonial. If this was English vs. Spanish, there would be a brawl by now.
The fact that we use miles is a safety issue. People from Mexico City and other parts of Mexico and Canada (Calgary comes to mind) are moving to Houston and their cars are in km/h only. I almost rear-ended one car from Mexico City after leaving the Galleria because he was going slow. The signs only show the Colonial speed limit and the laws are based on Colonial measures. The only metric speed limit signs in Houston are at the airports and the Medical Center/Museum District and they are black/white signs and not rounded numbers. I doubt that one can accurately measure 64 km/h in an analog speedometer. (It boggles the mind why they in isolated districts. How does one drive a foreign car get from the airport to the Museum District without guessing the speed limit in km/h?) Why are we ruled by the King's foot? I thought this was a republic(..or so I thought!)?
Since we all know Imperial already, I'm sure people will vote that way, since humans are fairly adverse to change.
Rationally though, it would make a million times more sense to use metric. The system just MAKES SENSE. It's all rational. In the imperial system they kinda did things backwards. They measured things out first, and then labeled the distances in a very random way. Here's a mile, and it happens to be 5,280 feet. Metric system said a Kilometer is going to be 1,000 meters, then measured it out.
There are a lot of money involved in a switch such as this, and right now, I feel that there are more pressing issues to attend to.
While Metric might be 'better' in a standardized or scientific sense, the Imperial system is much more 'descriptive'. They are not mutually exclusive.
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