One way to push the U.S. toward metric right now

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Here's how you switch the US to metric. Make it extremely profitable for big corporations.
If ANYTHING can be successful shoved down everyone's throats, it will be thru a corporate marketing campaign. People try to deny it. but american culture is based on advertising.

Just look at what has become popular over the years.

Metric just needs a good marketing campaign and a healthy profit incentive for investors.
The socialist "make it a regulation" approach has been unsuccessful here. many americans reject whatever "policy" forces upon them.

BUT, make it all colorful and sexy, have a good way parasites and bottom feeders can make tons of cash off of metric, and everything in the US will be metric by Xmas!! !

Of course, it will be so financially successful that by the following year, they will be selling us "Metric 2.0", now with 'centons' from Battlestar Galactica.

Rince and repeat....

in a few years, measurement systems have become as diverse as linux builds and bitcoin forks.


It's all about the money.

The corporations OWN washington DC, and do not want to spend the cash on re-tooling.
The only way to make it happen here is to make it attractive to THEM. Make it profitable, not a re-tooling expense.

The reason why everything is in two languages in Canada is because English and French are both the official languages of Canada.

There are quite a few French Canadians throughout Canada, but mostly in Quebec.

It's good that people have the opportunity to see more than one language in their everyday life. It broadens their horizons.

As for the Metric System, I know it quite well, so If we implement the Metric System here in the US, I would have no objection.

I would like to discuss an oft neglected issue involved in not using metric: If we don't use metric in our everyday lives, then it would not be intuitive to us making us less likely to catch an error using metric units. I'd like to go back to the 25 lb toddler, whose weight/mass in metric is 11.3 kg. At the hospital the child was measured on a scale using pounds, which came out to 25 lb, and the nurse was supposed to enter the weight to be converted to metric in the system. However, she did it wrong and the system read "25" as 25 kg, more than double the child's actual weight/mass of 11.3 kg! When medication was prescribed for the child, it was dosed according to the child's weight, so the child received more than double the correct dose, causing an overdose!

In other countries, where people are familiar with metric and use it in their everyday lives, they likely would have taken one look at that child and known that there was no way the child was 25 kg! They would have recognized there was an error and taken steps to correct it. The problem in America, however, is that even if we know how the metric system works we aren't very familiar with it, so we don't really have a feel for the units. Because of that, to them, 25 kg was just some number they were supposed to use: they did not realize how ridiculous the weight/mass given was, because they lacked the intuition to discern it on the spot!

What is the solution? Go to metric nationwide so people start becoming familiar with metric units, so they develop an intuition for them. That way, we can prevent other such errors from happening.

Source, which also discusses other cases where the pharmacist rather than the hospital made the error. In one case, the doctor prescribed 6 mL of a liquid medication for the child, but the pharmacy misprinted it as 6 teaspoons, which comes out to 29.38 mL! So the child received 5 times the dose they were supposed to get, resulting in a massive overdose that brought the child to the emergency room!

http://www.teammetric.org/the-metric-sy ... ealthcare/

By overtaxing American children's working memory by requiring them to work in fragmented customary units and making them convert between customary and metric, our children are weak at spatial measurement. In addition, children of color and poor children have an especially hard time at this task. This is despite the heavy emphasis on spatial measurement the American education system has:

It appears one big reason the conversion attempt in the 1970s failed was because there was too much emphasis on conversion formulas between customary and metric, which over-complicates things. Instead, when we convert, we should just switch to straight up metric and use conversion formulas only when absolutely necessary. The best way to learn metric is to get a feel for metric units, to have that intuition of the approximate weight or measure of something, and you do that by using it without relying on a customary crutch:

Theres also the Mars Climate Orbiter which was lost due to a discrepancy in units being used between Lockheed Martin and NASA. It was a $125 million dollar mistake.

It doesn't matter how much better you think it is if people don't want to change, if it was too much of a disruption then Americans would simply vote to get rid of it. There has to be a benefit to regular people otherwise they're going to tell you to pound sand, they don't care if it's used in STEM. Last year Rasmussen asked the question and put it a t 21% supporting metrication, 64% opposing, 15% undecided. Trying to force a change would result in a major backlash, I think the push in the 70s is a big reason why 64% oppose is so high so to go even further with that line of thinking definitely wouldn't work. Should we have metric time and the decabet too? There's no legal way for the US to mandate the metric system either. There has to be an incentive or a tangible benefit, find the dollar amount or tell us how many jobs it would produce. If it can't provide a benefit to 95% of Americans then they won't do it.

Also not sure I buy that teaching both makes them weaker at both, that was what was thought originally with language but we now know that isn't true and the brain benefits from bilingualism. Perhaps the US should put more pressure on it's partners to adopt our system of measurement, we have the biggest economy in the world and the most influential culture so it wouldn't be too hard. I know the UK is sort of wavering a bit now that they've voted to leave the EU.