[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Both dollars failed by plan. The plan that introduced them did not allow > for the phasing out of the paper dollar bill. If the paper dollar had been > phased out in 1979 when the SBA dollar was introduced, people a long time > ago would quickly adapted to it. But, the paper bills were not withdrawn > and people refused to adapt. > > Sound familiar? It is the same problem with SI adoption. No one is going > to use SI if the old system is allowed to persist.
Decades of experience in the USA show that this is not true at all. Without any laws or policies to restrict the use of imperial, we already have: - Metric tooling (bolt/nut/wrench sizes and the like) having mostly replaced inch-based sizes, mainly due to the auto industry, which finds it cheaper to produce cars for all markets in metric. I believe even the American makes have all switched. - The "fifth" of liquor has been entirely replaced by the 750 ml bottle. - Soft drinks are widely available in both metric and US measures, with the 2L and 0.5L bottles here to stay. > Take FFU away and > completely replace it with SI and in no time people will be using it as if > they were born knowing it. Our leaders in their infinite stupidity can't > seem to get it through their thick skulls that voluntary does not work. All > it does is create a long period of confusion and frustration. Think of the > costs and mistakes that occur daily in industry as companies have to deal > with two systems of measurement. There aren't that many. And I'm a firm believer in doing things voluntarily no matter what it does to people with grandiose plans for everybody. > Can you imagine the chaos if the EU did things the American way? They wouldn't have jailed that guy in Britain recently for selling meat by the pound. And it's a violation of human rights that they did. Can you imagine the chaos if the metric system had been compulsory when it was first introduced? France would not have been able to abandon the metric calendar (which lasted until Waterloo) or the metric clock (which was so confusing they abandoned it after 16 months). These are not the only metric units that didn't make sense. "Grads" of angle were useless, and I'm glad that they're no longer part of SI. Both degrees and radians are much more useful mathematically. > Their > national currencies would still be legal along with the Euro. And guess > which currencies would be used more often? The national ones, because they > are/were familiar and the Euro is new. The Europeans are smarter then the > Americans when it comes to implementing long term plans and eliminating or > reducing potential problems. On the contrary. The larger nations in the EU are having problems *now* because the stability pact that came with the Euro limits them to 3% deficits (though there's a proposal to delay enforcing this until 2004, a "band aid" solution that just casts doubt on the future stability of the Euro). Meanwhile the very different fiscal policies of the countries involved are causing trade distortions, which in the old days could have been solved by devaluing one country's currency against the others. All this will only get worse if/when the EU expands eastward. If the nations of the EU were willing to commit to following a single economic policy (with the same taxes and tax rates, the same levels of public spending, the same rules covering employment, and so forth), so that they're practically a single nation, having the Euro would make sense. But if this doesn't happen (and it's almost certain it won't), the Euro will have to be abandoned, probably within twenty years, and until that happens it will be a millstone around the necks of its users. > It is just a matter of time before our poor > planning methods catch up with us and we are left behind in the dust. The fact that we _don't_ have the kind of command economy you advocate is the reason that we're not in a depression, and Japan (which does) is. * * * But just because I reject compulsory metrication doesn't mean that I wouldn't have the government do anything to help. I can think of three simple changes the US government could make which would greatly speed up adoption of the metric system in the US. 1) All laws referring to old-style measurements of things should be metricized. For example, gasoline taxes and liquor taxes should be assessed by the litre rather than by the gallon. Laws regulating gas mileage (if we must have them) would refer to km/litre rather than miles per gallon. 2) Change all road signing and speed limits to metric. 3) Have the government do all its procurement in the metric system wherever possible. Order all paper-pushing agencies to switch to A4. Design all new tanks, fighter planes, and submarines in metric, and have them use metric parts and tooling. This also goes for anything the government sells. The government is such a large part of the economy that changing just their procurement will push enough businesses to change, that business will find it profitable to get the rest of us changed over, too.
