And we wonder why the country is in trouble. We seem to reward those that make huge mistakes and punish those that do what is sensible and right.
Jerry ________________________________ From: Remek Kocz <[email protected]> To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]> Cc: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]> Sent: Friday, March 20, 2009 10:39:44 PM Subject: [USMA:44031] RE: postage in grams I suspect that even if 99% of all the postal scales were electronic, with easy firmware upgradeablility, one of the major reasons thrown out against switching to metric would be that "someone out there still has an analog scale, and it would be unreasonable to make them go out and get a digital one." Remek On Fri, Mar 20, 2009 at 8:48 PM, Jeremiah MacGregor <[email protected]> wrote: If it is a modern office, it will have an electronic one that can have postage added by either an online connection or dial-up. The one we have at work is digital and we access the post office via a dial-up connection from our fax line. I'm sure most have such a scale and if the day ever came where the postal service went metric such scales would be upgradable with a downloadable firmware upgrade. Jerry ________________________________ From: Bill Potts <[email protected]> To: U.S. Metric Association <[email protected]> Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009 2:40:34 PM Subject: [USMA:44003] RE: postage in grams One problem is that many people have the postal scales they bought at their local post office, which weigh in pounds and ounces (to one decimal place) and don't apparently have a means to change them to grams. It's probably not a major problem. However, because of that, the USPS Web site would, for at least a year or two, have to provide the the amount in pounds and ounces parenthetically wherever it shows rate information. Many conversions are, for similar reasons, not easy. The relief comes some time after the conversion. It's worth doing, though -- and others (e.g., Canada) have proved it can be done effectively. Bill ________________________________ Bill Potts WFP Consulting Roseville, CA http://metric1.org[SI Navigator] ________________________________ From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Al Lawrence Sent: Thursday, March 19, 2009 11:28 To: U.S. Metric Association Subject: [USMA:44002] RE: postage in grams Getting the post office to go metric will be difficult because of all the usual problems with public resistance, but to start with, it seems like they could do all international mail in grams and kilos. International mail has different rate structures anyway, and since it's international mail metric would not seem out of place to most people. Alan Lawrence ________________________________ Hotmail® is up to 70% faster. Now good news travels really fast. Find out more.
