The British person, one of the Metric Martyrs, was not jailed, he got a conditional discharge. It was not about selling goods by the pound (he is still entitled to do that, as long a he also prices in metric) but because he did not use metric at all and he used very old scales and weights which had not been re-verified. No Metric Martyr has been jailed. Only when they do not pay a fine, people are jailed. On the other hand, a few years ago a real Metric Martyr was fined 3000 pounds for using metric glasses in his pub. The silence was deafening.
The American way has definite flaws as it promotes cheating and endless confusion. I know that some states in the USA have a so-called 'commercial acre' which is substantially smaller than the statute one. It is in Rowlett's Dictionary of measuring units. http://www.unc.edu/~rowlett/units/index.html under C. Commercial Acre. So if you buy, let's say 1000 acres in certain states, you may be cheated through the nose and there is nothing you can do as this 'acre' is accepted as a legal unit of measurement in these states. I am glad that we adopted the euro the 'undemocratic' way we did. It curtails the period of confusion significantly. This is the same way as Britain and Ireland changed to decimal currency in 1971. Metrication, however was done the 'democratic' way, so it may take 100 years or more to achieve completion, and in the mean time confusion and cheating run wild. And SI has replaced old metric (m.kgf.s) also by the 'democratic' way in the old metric states of the EU. The crazy consequence: frequently I have to see the irrationality and gross stupidity that in ads about cars torque is expressed in Nm (correct) but power in the so-called 'metric' horsepower (utterly wrong). They accept one SI unit and reject the other! And why? It is beyond me. Traders have vested interests in blocking change, so they sabotage it as much as possible. Marketers have kept the stupid horsepower alive and kicking. In France, in the nineteenth century, traders almost killed metric and after decades of misery, the only way was to impose metric on trade by law in 1837. Private persons have never been prosecuted for using illegal units of measurement. If we did not have our ' undemocratic' Weights and Measures Acts, American companies or even some of our own (in order to create confusion) could impose ifp on their European customers at will. Some of our own DID try, like the German company Ragold/Kanold in the late eighties. They sold sweets in packages that ONLY showed avdp or avdp in large, metric in small print. I reported them to the Weights and Measures people, and lo and behold, after some months R/K had stopped this lunacy. When Britain was still firmly Imperial, any contravention of the Weights and Measures act was dealt with severely; there was never 'freedom to measure' in Britain. It exists in the USA, but there it has led to abuses like the Commercial Acre. Han ----- Original Message ----- From: "John David Galt" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "U.S. Metric Association" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Friday, 2002-10-04 23:34 Subject: [USMA:22450] Mandatory conversion? (was $1 coins) > [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. > > <snip> > > 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. > >
