Dear All,
I hope you don't find this depressing, but this article, http://blog.erlingsson.com/?p=2073
might give you some material for arguing for the more rapid
accepatance of the metric system in the USA. Here is a sample:
What shocked me was the discordance. At the same time as the U.S. had
a GDP per capita that was one third higher than any other country,
they seemed to be at least one third less efficient at what they were
doing. Most things in the stores were imported from China, and the
U.S. didn’t produce much that the rest of the world wanted to buy.
Their insistence on using their own measurement system instead of the
metric system pretty much disqualified their products from any
application in which they have to be interfaced to anything else, or
to be repaired abroad – a disadvantage that pretty much affects all
manufactured goods. The Chinese have solved this by making a unique
U.S. version for export using the U.S. measurement system instead of
the metric one, but here in the U.S. it is so hard and costly to find
metric raw materials for producing metric products for export, that it
becomes totally impossible to produce items for export at competitive
prices (keep in mind that the costs here already are the highest, even
without this handicap).
Already in 2002 I thus predicted that the U.S. economy would collapse,
for lack of competitiveness. Unfortunately, rather than realizing the
situation and changing with the times, the Americans have been told by
their leaders and media that the U.S. is the best country in the
world. The impression they have got is that they are the best, and
that they have something to teach the rest of the world rather than
learn from it. And so the downfall has become inevitable.
Cheers,
Pat Naughtin
Author of the ebook, Metrication Leaders Guide, that you can obtain
from http://metricationmatters.com/MetricationLeadersGuideInfo.html
PO Box 305 Belmont 3216,
Geelong, Australia
Phone: 61 3 5241 2008
Metric system consultant, writer, and speaker, Pat Naughtin, has
helped thousands of people and hundreds of companies upgrade to the
modern metric system smoothly, quickly, and so economically that they
now save thousands each year when buying, processing, or selling for
their businesses. Pat provides services and resources for many
different trades, crafts, and professions for commercial, industrial
and government metrication leaders in Asia, Europe, and in the USA.
Pat's clients include the Australian Government, Google, NASA, NIST,
and the metric associations of Canada, the UK, and the USA. See http://www.metricationmatters.com
for more metrication information, contact Pat at pat.naugh...@metricationmatters.com
or to get the free 'Metrication matters' newsletter go to: http://www.metricationmatters.com/newsletter
to subscribe.
