I think you are pissing into the wind. Has anyone ever conducted a survey of every company and business to see how much it costs them to not be metric or how much business they have lost because they weren't metric? There should be a survey of overseas companies too and determine how many won't buy American products because they are not metric.
The auto industry and Caterpillar produce in metric and I believe they are in big trouble. Why isn't being metric helping them? Jerry ________________________________ From: Paul Armstrong <[email protected]> To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, February 9, 2009 2:31:34 PM Subject: [USMA:42972] Re: Action: Economic Stimulus Package I haven't had a chance to call them yet, but here's the letter I sent to Barack Obama, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Anna Eshoo, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elaine Alquist and Paul Fong. """ The economic disaster brings us fresh opportunity to think about the things that aren't working and make fixing those things part of our economic stimulus. A great example of this is our broken customary measurement system needs to be done away with in favor of metric. Currently, we use a confusing and out dated system of measurements rather than the easy system the rest of the world uses. This is one of the factors that makes our economy less efficient than that of other countries and makes our exports less desirable (no one outside the USA wants to know about our customary measurement system). The confusing nature of this system leads to substantial losses such as the $360M Mars orbiter and the $25,000 congress wasted last year because of a conversion error when buying carbon credits. It also leads to errors in medicine (children ending up in E.R. because of conversion errors and errors involved with parents using teaspoons out of the drawer rather than a measuring spoon if given a prescription in teaspoons instead of milliliters) and extremely valuable time wasted in our classrooms as we have to teach our children a difficult set of units and then even more difficult calculations using those units (as they involve conversion from metric) rather than the much more straight forward metric version. Our children come out of school unprepared for the global economy because they're unable to effectively use the global language of measurement. It's time to fix this mess. Please require that new infrastructure built with the stimulus package is exclusively built using metric measures and that conversion to metric is one of the goals of the stimulus. """ You can send a letter to your representatives too by going to http://gometric.us/xwiki/bin/view/Blog/2009%2D02%2D09%2DLetterToCongress, filling your zip in the box and following the instructions on congress.org Paul --Go Metric http://gometric.us/
