Americans, what's so great about the Imperial System?

bartholen_v1legacy

A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
Jan 24, 2009
3,056
0
0
Kalezian said:
Because I would rather say I was 6'4" or 76 inches instead of saying I'm 193.04 centimeters tall.

That just makes me sound tall as fuck.....
Not to the rest of the world it doesn't.

I think most people can agree that the Imperial system is worse, and much less logical. However, it is so deeply rooted in every aspect of America that it'd be next to impossible to convert to metric. That, or it would cost trillions of dollars, require an immense restructuring of countless systems and take decades to fully grow into the system.
 

ungothicdove

New member
Nov 30, 2007
132
0
0
I'm down for switching. Except for distances. I'm driving a hundred miles dammit, not 160 km. And maybe height too because saying I'm 5'8" sounds better than 1.7018 meters.
 

MCerberus

New member
Jun 26, 2013
1,168
0
0
SecretNegative said:
MCerberus said:
SecretNegative said:
MCerberus said:
There's actually a fairly strong thread of Xenophobia going through this. There's this assumption that some foreign power is trying to force us to change and TAKE OUR FREEDOM. This combined with the fact it's easier to do nothing means it doesn't get changed.
Really? From what I've seen pretty much everyone has been saying "Metric is obviously better, but everyone uses Imperial since that's what they're used to". Doesn't strike me as xenophobic, it strikes me honestly as pretty rational.
This is both historic context, and add on to that the US cannot sign a treaty with another nation this day and age without people going to the media claiming its some sort of Illuminati plot to take our freedom. America is not a rational place.
That's...totally not what I was asking. I was asking where the xenophobia in this thread was.
I never claimed that the thread was xenophobic, but I can see where you can get that impression. I used an ambiguous "this", but it was not my intention to refer to the thread.

And I should know better, considering how much java I use.
 

Atmos Duality

New member
Mar 3, 2010
8,473
0
0
Apart from a couple of handy conversions, there's not much that's all that great.
As a meteorologist, the only place I ever use Fahrenheit is for surface forecasting; literally everything else is in Celsius or Kelvin. (mostly Celsius, though it's not like it's hard to convert between the two since they have the same degree ratio)
 

Tayh

New member
Apr 6, 2009
775
0
0
Kalezian said:
Because I would rather say I was 6'4" or 76 inches instead of saying I'm 193.04 centimeters tall.

That just makes me sound tall as fuck.....
If that's going to be your argument, please find just ONE person who would ever say that.
Everyone else would just say one-point-ninety-three.
 

loc978

New member
Sep 18, 2010
4,900
0
0
I'd be on board with switching if we had a balanced national budget... but we've been undertaxing and overspending for over a decade now. We've got some proverbial arrows to remove from our proverbial guts before we take care of this proverbial sliver in our proverbial toe.

Even my 60-year-old father can do distance/speed conversions in his head now. We're ready, as a nation, to continue the conversion... if we had the money to do so.
 

senordesol

New member
Oct 12, 2009
1,302
0
0
Heronblade said:
Comocat said:
senordesol said:
I don't think there's anything inherently 'great' about the Imperial system; it's just what we were raised on and, thus, how we're used to measuring things. It's a pretty easy system to translate physically, too.

I know I can easily lift a pound, not a thousand pounds though.

But I can easily lift a gram and a kilogram; so what's the point?
I agree, it's just a system of measurements. Any organization where measurements matter probably already uses SI conventions and then who really cares if we measure a road trip in miles or km?
Everyone who has to translate between the two systems cares, which includes pretty much everyone who makes the products the rest of you use and depend on. It is a pain in the freaking ass for us, and ends up presenting a potential safety hazard if we proceed with less than our usual care.

Case in point, a recent 125 million dollar orbiter failed simply and solely because Lockheed Martin standardized components in imperial rather than SI units. NASA should have caught the issue prior to launch, but mishaps like this are a hazard every time a company is forced to work with both systems.

Also, senordesol, kilogram is the standard starting unit for most day to day use. Its about 2.2 pounds. Try using that for your standard of comparison rather than a gram.

Of course, it technically is a unit for mass, not weight, comparing it to the English equivalent of slugs would be more accurate, but almost nobody, even Americans, seem to know what the hell a slug is anyways, and going the other way, people don't seem to like using newtons for weight.
Hey, that's your problem, buddy ;) and the only Newtons I care about are those of the 'fig' variety.

In all seriousness, I'd consider changing a measurement system on a national scale almost akin to trying to change a language. I just as I think in English, I think in Imperial. At this point, if we converted to metric, I'd be constantly having to convert measurements into the units I had been raised to understand. When one says "Oh it's about four kilometers that way" I'd instantly think: "Shit. Okay well a kilometer is a little less than a mile, so...what about three and a half miles? Three and a quarter?"
 

Xpwn3ntial

Avid Reader
Dec 22, 2008
8,023
0
0
Do you want to shut down the highways and distribution centers of America, crippling in-state, interstate, and international trade for between a week and a few months?
No?
Didn't think so.

Also, is this starting yet another trend of thinly veiled "AMERICA SUCKS" threads? Because if there's one more before December I'm reporting it.
 

Vegosiux

New member
May 18, 2011
4,381
0
0
MinionJoe said:
MinionJoe said:
So answer me this: Using the metric system, how many minutes are in an hour?
Since no one seems to know the answer, I'll provide it:

There are 60 minutes in an hour, regardless of your other units of measurement.

So until the metric system adopts decimal time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_time), it's not all as simple as "dividing by 10".

The real question is: Why hasn't the metric majority converted to decimal time yet?
Funny thing is, when calculating for time in metric, you're not going to use minutes or hours. You're going to use seconds, and orders of magnitudes. That's when you're doing calculations in some scientific field, I mean.
 

LetalisK

New member
May 5, 2010
2,769
0
0
What's great about it? Not a damn thing. It's an incredibly awkward system of measurement that I sadly don't see us shaking off because we're so used to it.
 

BlumiereBleck

New member
Dec 11, 2008
5,402
0
0
Convenience. That's why. Also saying "I ran a mile." rolls off the tongue a lot easier than "I ran a kilometer." It would also cost a great deal of money to convert, you'd also have to educate the entire nation on using it. And the U.S. has the third highest population in the world. That's a whole lot of hours and dollars spent on it.
 

loc978

New member
Sep 18, 2010
4,900
0
0
Xpwn3ntial said:
Do you want to shut down the highways and distribution centers of America, crippling in-state, interstate, and international trade for between a week and a few months?
No?
Didn't think so.

Also, is this starting yet another trend of thinly veiled "AMERICA SUCKS" threads? Because if there's one more before December I'm reporting it.
Conversion is a lot more gradual than that. We can change policy and officially adopt km/h speed limits overnight, but we can't replace all of the signs in a few months. No, I'm pretty sure we'd just add km/h limits to the signs over the course of a few years, then switch.

...and you've got to admit, we do a lot of things pretty ass-backwards here. I wouldn't go so far as to say the US might as well be a third-world nation... but we've got some stupid, stubborn policies. Like our 72,000+page tax code.
 

Callate

New member
Dec 5, 2008
5,118
0
0
Fahrenheit gives a greater range of temperatures within areas which are common human experience: climate and cooking. One can reasonably say that the temperature on a given day will be in "the sixties" or "the eighties" in Fahrenheit and be both reasonably accurate and give someone a fair idea of what to expect, whereas if one could expect the temperature to vary between thirty and forty degrees Celsius during a long afternoon (86 - 104F), climatologists would have reason for alarm. Celsius (or Kelvin, for that matter) is fine for when you're measuring the temperature of a blast furnace or the tolerance of atmospheric re-entry tile; for day to day usage, I don't really feel the benefit of a 0-100 scale based on the boiling point of water is all that useful.

As for the rest of it, sure; the ten-based system does make more sense. I could get used to a pound is almost half a kilogram, a liter is almost the same thing as a quart, and a kilometer is about .6 miles. I know the local petroleum companies would have a field day hiking up prices during the confusion if we switched to liters, though.
 

Skeleon

New member
Nov 2, 2007
5,410
0
0
As a non USAsian: Probably just what people are used to.
The Imperial System is quite nonsensical in terms of actual unit conversions, but if you grew up with it, switching later on is difficult. And it works well enough for the medium scale that we live our day-to-day lives in.
It only starts sucking utterly when you reach very small or very large numbers, which is why scientists in the USA also use SI-units, of course.

EDIT:
Callate said:
Fahrenheit gives a greater range of temperatures within areas which are common human experience: climate and cooking. One can reasonably say that the temperature on a given day will be in "the sixties" or "the eighties" in Fahrenheit and be both reasonably accurate and give someone a fair idea of what to expect, whereas if one could expect the temperature to vary between thirty and forty degrees Celsius during a long afternoon (86 - 104F), climatologists would have reason for alarm.
That seems completely arbitrary and is probably just based on what you're used to (Fahrenheit). When somebody says the temperatures are going to be in "the thirties", that makes a ton of sense to somebody who is used the Celsius. They'd know to expect a hot summer afternoon.

Celsius (or Kelvin, for that matter) is fine for when you're measuring the temperature of a blast furnace or the tolerance of atmospheric re-entry tile; for day to day usage, I don't really feel the benefit of a 0-100 scale based on the boiling point of water is all that useful.
Quite weird. Don't you boil water in day-to-day life? Don't you freeze ice cubes?
 

Kiriona

New member
Apr 8, 2010
251
0
0
Well, while I can't give the end all answer, I can tell what I remember about learning the two systems in grade school. Most of us learned the imperial system first and very early on, so it stuck better. Then when we were introduced to the metric system (years later in middle school, mind you) most of us just looked at it like 'wtf is this...' After spending about a week on it, the class moved on to other things.