John David Galt wrote on 2002-10-04 21:34 UTC: > 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.
History shows that at least for paper sizes, your view seems very realistic. I don't know of a single country that mandated the use of ISO paper sizes legally for anyone but government employees and contractors. The de-facto complete switch to A4 paper happened in most countries around 5-15 years after the respective government ordered all its government offices to switch to the new standard sizes. The practical advantages of the new format (especially with photocopiers) and the lack of any particular advantages of older formats, together with the fact that for most users the exact paper size is pretty much irrelevant (you have to look quite closely to see the difference between A4 and US Letter), led to a fairly rapid completion of the changeover, without imposing any restrictions anyone who is not payed by the government. You just need one single very large and widely respected paper user to initiate the switchover and cover some of the initial cost, and governments are the obvious candidates. Labeling of net quantities of sold goods on the other hand is a different matter, as governments have here usually a constitutional obligation to set and enforce clear and non-confusing standards in the interest of free trade. Using anything other than legally defined units and measurement techniques is just as inacceptable as using miscalibrated measurement equipment. Allowing the use of a non-decimal weight and measures system seems to me rather incompatible with a requirement for consumer price transparency. Markus -- Markus G. Kuhn, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, UK Email: mkuhn at acm.org, WWW: <http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/>
