I believe an effective integration needs to be done quickly and be made
mandatory. The longer you draw it out the more costly for everyone it becomes.
It needs be forced but it can be implemented through a well thought out plan
that involves every citizen. Citizens need to be educated quite frankly that
the change is for the betterment of the nation.
Only the units of the SI should be legally supported. The old units would have
no legal status after the conversion is completed.
Of course there will always be those that will fight it. They have a right to
freedom of speech so there is no way they can be prevented from continuing to
use old units in speech. However, effective ways can be developed to prevent
those who oppose from incurring damage on the economy or on those who have made
an effort to change.
Those who refuse to change and suffer economic hardship as a result should not
be compensated.
I don't think we need 10 years to make the change as in the past. Five years
is plenty of time. Changes in such areas as gasoline pump, weather reporting,
retail scales can all be changed easily due to their digital nature. Those
that have unit selectivity software can set there equipment to metric mode
almost cost free and in a few seconds of time.
Many industries are already metric to some degree. None that I have
encountered can claim not having some exposure to metric units. This is
different compared to the '70s when the difficulty of conversion was greater
and more "manual".
So, how do we get the ball rolling? What needs to be done to jump start the
metric conversion? Do we need a government direct edict?
Simon
From: Stephen Davis
Sent: Friday, 2009-08-14 14:09
To: U.S. Metric Association
Subject: [USMA:45626] OK Simon.....try this.
Do you think that for effective integration of SI into American society, it
would have to forced through and made mandatory to only use SI units?
Or do you think freedom of choice and polite persuation would be more effective
in getting the benefits of SI across? Something that seems to be the consensus
of quite a few on this board?
Personally, I think a properly organised mandatory implementation of SI both in
the US and Britain is the only effective way doing it, much like the way
decimal currency was introduced in the UK way back in 1971.
----- Original Message -----
From: [email protected]
To: U.S. Metric Association
Sent: Friday, August 14, 2009 6:46 PM
Subject: [USMA:45625] Re: Maths (or should that be "math?")
Amen!
I beginning to wonder what kind of forum this is. When a topic involving the
metric system is brought up the responses are almost zero. Talk about
something other then the metric system or something loosely connected and then
everybody joins in.
I hate to complain since I'm so new here but I came here to discuss the
metric system and so far its not happening at the level I would like to see.
Simon
From: Aaron Harper
Sent: Friday, 2009-08-14 12:20
To: U.S. Metric Association
Subject: [USMA:45624] Re: Maths (or should that be "math?")
The question of whether decimals or fractions are better has nothing to do
with the purpose of this forum: "Metrication."
