On Sat, 2012-12-15 at 12:07 -0800, Rafael Skodlar wrote: <massive snip> > > Well, that would not happen without help from the USA to rebuild West > Germany after the war. At least the rate of reconstruction would be much > slower for whole EU. Remember that huge number of men were killed in the > war and had to be replaced with "imports". If US used the same kind of > regime as the Soviets, you would not see Mercedes and BMW on the streets > of EU and much less in Asia these days. It was loans and access to > American market that made western EU recover so fast. > > One thing that Americans are terribly conservative about is standards. > They will not adopt metric system, not even at the gun point. Part of > that is due to conservative unions that want to keep doing the same > thing over and over. We could turn our economy around simply with > mandatory conversion to metric system. >
OT........... We had our chance in the 50's and 60's when we build the Interstate Hwy System. We muffed it. Marking the distance in Km and selling gas by the Liter would have made a relatively painless conversion. Among other things some business got greedy (big surprise) and converted to metric units but effectively increase the price 10-20 % above the conversion thinking the public was too ignorant or stupid to notice. However, automotive and aerospace have converted basically because they are international. When I weighed into a hospital(s) the other day one was metric and the other still english. So there is an undercurrent but the general public understands the metric system about as well as they science. There is also a significant portion of the public that is so conservative they think that metric is un-american. The believe in other fantasies also. ;-) Just my tuppence. Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ LogMeIn Rescue: Anywhere, Anytime Remote support for IT. Free Trial Remotely access PCs and mobile devices and provide instant support Improve your efficiency, and focus on delivering more value-add services Discover what IT Professionals Know. Rescue delivers http://p.sf.net/sfu/logmein_12329d2d _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
