----- Original Message -----
Sent: Sunday, 2004-08-29 16:58
Subject: [USMA:30930] RE: Olympics,
California, and SI
I think you
are right.
Some think
that the unfettered free market will bring this about over
time.
Those
people are dead wrong. It hasn't happened yet and never will
happen.
Some
members of the free market, including some on this list, are doing an
admirable job. But many are not, and will not. The free market
does not exist in a vacuum. Some corporations have great power and can
manipulate the political process to their ends. Some politicians kowtow
to them.
The big corporations who are metric have no interest in
pressuring the government to convert the nation. They are metric and
that is all that is important to them. They don't need to worry about
the costs of dual inventories nor about paying premiums for metric.
Because simply they don't. They tell their suppliers what they are willing to
pay. And when it is a few million dollar
order, the suppliers will jump through hoops to for these big
corporations.
Many of
these suppliers are caught in the middle. They have to have the dual
inventories and absorb the costs or pass them on to other users, like the
small companies. I'm sure many would like to just go one way or the
other, but can't. So they are caught between a rock and a hard
place. The real losers are us the consumers, as we pay for all the
dual inventories, second set of tools, etc.
Some
listen only to the whiners because only the whiners are making themselves
heard - the "no" is a thousand times louder than the
"yes".
Isn't there
a saying that goes something like: Be careful what you wish for, you just may
get it. The whiners may get their wish, but at a cost. One way or
another they pay a big price. Whether it be higher prices, costly
errors, even jobs exported to metric countries.
It will
take the government, exercising its Constitutional power to "fix the standard
of weights and measures", to bring metrication about in the US. Given
the political polarization in this country, we'll be lucky if my
grandchildren, when they get to middle age (and no I don't even have
grandchildren; I just got the last kid out of high school), see "km" on the
freeway distance signs.
It will
take a national economic catastrophe to force the change and one is coming
sooner then you think; within your lifetime. In the near future
the US will not be able to just print paper dollars to pay what it owes, it
will have to pay with hard currency, raw materials or manufactured
goods. Goods that will only be accepted when made to metric
specifications using metric parts. The US will have to become a nation
that can function in metric, not just convert back and forth between one
system and the other. Many will not be able to do it and they will
perish. The handwriting is on the wall.
Carleton
