> Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement.
ISO 216 isn't specifically European. It's used in most of the world. The same is true of the metric system.
The world will indeed be incrementally better when people don't have to waste time converting measurements when operating between the US and elsewhere.
Here's the thing about the switching and the costs of it: every other country, much poorer than the modern US of A, went through it just fine. And in any case, this cost is not going to go down the longer you wait, on the contrary—unless, of course, the US industrial prowess utterly collapses so that there is not much left to upgrade.
You're trying to say that because they did it and they're poorer it should be easier for us because we're richer. First of all, the cost will be in proportion to the activity of the economy and the population. Second, the proportion of people who were educated to use units of any kind was a smaller proportion of that smaller population. And in many former-non-metric countries many quantities are still often quoted in the old units.
All of that and it is still the case that the primary system in the US is the metric system de jure if not de facto. De facto, the metric system is virtually universal in science domains in the US.
Whether the metric system is "better" or not is not the question. There are keyboard layouts not actually designed to slow down typing, but it's just one of those things that most people don't see worth changing. Are they wrong? In that case, it's an individual valuation. I'm sure "the US economy is losing $500b because of QWERTY" would make great copy on a slow news day on reddit. But unless it costs <$500n to make the change, we aren't actually losing anything.
Not everyone is a relentless optimizer. Even some of us who are also like to optimize for the entire system, including transaction costs/overhead/maintenance and not just some ab initio declaration of right like god in genesis.
The US has a great solution that everyone hates because it's the US: we use metric where it's necessary and leave it alone everywhere else. We could use a lot more European know how in numerous other sectors. I would even go so far as to say it's probably correct to presume that things where the US is the outlier is a case where we are the ones doing it wrong.
It's a presumption, meaning evidence can rebut it. In this case, here we can manage both. We can teach both in schools, we can use computers and calculators to divide by numbers other than 10 (which you have to do with mixed units and constants in metric calculations anyway). In fact, I wonder if there's proof that all of this extra teaching and double system overhead is worth what it costs! I bet the answer is that it is though and as long as you can experiment and find out in your domain, it sounds great to me. Different systems for the win!
You people can downvote me all you want and the fact remains that the costs to make the switch are too high to happen any time soon. The real world isn't your company where you can just mandate things. Stakeholders, such as voters, get a say. Voters probably wouldn't support this if there was a net benefit in cost, but there's not, not anymore.
Of all of the things that are broken about the US, everyone here wants to fix the one thing that's not: our ambidexterity with units. Every school child learns both. We're terrible at raising kids to be bilingual, but we manage to teach them both metric and imperial units.
Once you concede that the metric system is already in de jure use in the US and in de facto use in domains where it's best to use it, you lose all kinds of benefit from switches. The low hanging fruit has been picked. You're left with empty non-empirical arguments like ... ummm... it's better to use one system. It is! But we're not starting from scratch.
Seriously, of all of the things I have posted on HN none has gotten more downvotes than saying that we don't need to go 100% metric in the US, I could speculate as to why, but it sure seems like this is some kind of nerd anti-normie shibboleth. It shouldn't be.
Go ahead, look up the figures. Then decide if it's still worth it to you. If it is, then try and convince enough policymakers not to just support it as the US does but to change everything over. You won't win that war. There has to be some specific need for the change.
'It would be cool' or 'it soothes my OCD' or whatever aren't enough to change something this massive.
Most problems it's a dodge to say "the money is better spent on X" but when you're talking about significant fractions of GDP that's just not how it is. We could do so much to improve people's lives with these sums of money.
Reminder that this is all about the US government internally sticking with letter sized paper. A4 paper is still A4 when measured in inches (which can be done exactly since inches are defined in terms of meters).
That one incident is because they didn't use metric in a domain where it would benefit from it. You won't save that rocket by changing how my clothes are labelled.
And as already noted, since the switch can happen over 1-2 decades but the permanence of units is measured in centuries. The benefits of clarity and consistency over that timeline necessarily outweigh the downsides.
America would be better with just three little improvements:
- Celsius temperatures near any Fahrenheit article/post/news.
- The metric system. Just scale up and down by ten. You already do it with dollars. So consider it done.
- ISO 6801 dates. Year, month, day. Things scale down logically. Years are composed of months; and months, of days. Also, they would be no ambiguity issues.
For the amount of money you're proposing to spend to make America better we could fund universal health care and almost completely fund 2-year college for everyone. I think that would be money better spent.
And despite what everyone thinks of our schools, we manage to learn both systems and divide by numbers other than 10.
ISO 216 isn't specifically European. It's used in most of the world. The same is true of the metric system.
The world will indeed be incrementally better when people don't have to waste time converting measurements when operating between the US and elsewhere.