Jim, Let me tell you what those market forces are doing to small European languages. These are slowly being crushed to death. Denmark has an offical policy of becoming a dual language country: Danish and English. Both languages will not live together in peace, they will compete. One is small, the other is strong and carries a lot of prestige, not one is superior and the other inferior. You can figure out which is which. Market forces will probably kill the smaller one in the long run if English and the native language are not taught properly.. The Netherlands does not have such official policy, but the same thing is happening here. Our own native language is slowly being crushed by English. If that issue in Denmark and The Netherlands is really left to the market, their native languages are doomed. Marketeers and business interests are doing their utmost to Anglicize and Americanize our country. I can hardly tell you how I despise them! I would like to spit in their bootlicker's face. Many shopping streets in our cities look like English streets. Has any of the list members ever seen barbers' shops with the sign "Hair Design" in his or her own country? I think that "Hair Design" is absolute nonsense in English. Another business sells baths. The Dutch word for bath is 'bad'. The owner has "Bad Design" on his shop window! If only he really knew English.... So I think that everybody should learn English in order to achieve a situation where it and the native language can exist side by side and I think that ifp should be taught here in a short but sharp encounter, for instance, solving physics and construction problems in metric and in ifp. No conversion. I would like to see how they would react if they saw some of these crazy BTU/W etc. air conditioning tables from ARI and had to solve problems based on the tables, immediately followed by SI problems. That would make everybody know what trash non-metric is and would stop them taking metric for granted, tolerating the inch here and taking part in a 10 mile run there. Then people would know that there is no 984 ft high Eiffel Tower in Paris when they talk to English speaking people. And that the museum that Leo was talking about recently is 1800 m distant. Period. Or say it is a 72 000 inches walk if some people have the gall to ask us in our own country to use 'another' i.e. ifp unit. Fighting fire with fire. I accept English as a second language, I even love that language (as opposed to ifp, of course), but yet I do not want to see the destruction of my own language. Going back on topic, market forces have repeatedly been used in attempts to corrupt and subvert metric countries. The computer industry is a glaring example and is still at it! I have to stay where I am. I do not trust the market. It supports strong interests against weaker ones. Market forces may well destroy cultural and language diversity in the near future. If the metric system did not have the internatonal backing it now enjoys, it would be killed off by ifp, because the latter is used by the most powerful and influential nation on earth. This thing about the market doing everything good or not is probably a difference between European and American philosophies, so we will have to agree to disagree. Han ----- Original Message ----- From: "Jim Elwell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, June 08, 2001 8:39 PM Subject: [USMA:13590] RE: Market forces Han Maenen writes: I distrust market forces. They do not necessarily boost the good things. They made inferior standards like VHS Video and the MSDOS PC the global ones. I think you are confusing "technically good" with "good." VHS had one advantage over BETA at first: longer record time. While BETA had a better picture, clearly customers preferred the longer record time. VHS was the *better* solution, when the differences were weighted by customer preferences... <snip>
