What problems does this cause for the United States not adopting the metric system?

They lost one of their mars probes because of that.
Billions of dollars turned into scrap metal.

Our automobile speed limits are way below 100, I like it in Canada when I can drive 100. :-)

We, Americans, have to be able to multiply and divide by 12, 8, and 16 in our heads. It’s stupid. People who go into the sciences have to deal with converting all of the time, especially when dealing with the average guy. When traveling almost anywhere else in the world, if someone is not familiar with metric, they would need to literally convert the measurements to know what someone I’d talking about. I don’t need to convert a centimeter, I just know how big it is, centimeter, inch, foot, it’s just another measure for me, I don’t think of a centimeter as just less then half an inch, but I think most Americans do.

Large sunk costs in English-unit parts and tools. But wait, I hear you say “the British themselves converted”. Well, they did. But they never did fully embrace the concept of “replacable parts”. ;) Ask any mechanic familiar with the output of British industries! (see bodge)

The biggest problem I run into on a daily basis is in cooking.

I’m American. I have no fucking idea what 300 grams of butter looks like.

@Seek_Kolinahr buy a Salter brand digital kitchen scale. They are fantastic, I think mine was $25 with the 20% off I always get at Bed Bath and Beyond. You can zero out a plate if you need to way something on a plate, and it converts grams to ounces. I use it to count calories.

Also, my margarine, I don’t have butter in the house right now, but I just checked and on my stick of margarine it says right on it how many grams for one stick, so I could get pretty close to the right amount for a recipe without the scale. Maybe butter says it also?

@ragingloli do you learn our measurement system in school? Is it just a chapter of work in a science class?

@Seek Kolinahr my butter comes in 500g and is divided up in 5 sections. I find that helpful. I also use a scale in the kitchen. I like that can throw everything in one bowl and ‘zero’ my scale in between ingredients.

I like metrics because it helps me to work out volumes easily. I make soap, so I need to work out how much so many liters of oil (plus other stuff) are in volume so I know what size container to dump it into. Metrics makes that so easy, as long as I take into account the average specific gravity of the ingredients.

It isolates us from the rest of the world (except for that other powerhouse, Liberia) and causes extra work every time we need to do a conversion.
I wish we’d just man up and do it already.

@JLeslie
We do not learn the imperial system at all.

America is converting to the metric system… an inch at a time.

@ragingloli I would not have guessed that. I wonder if it was the same for my husband growing up in Mexico? I never asked him.

I travel extensively. We make equipment, half of which is sold overseas yet my company continues to use the English system so I am constantly converting form one measurement to another.

I remember, back in the 70’s I think, when we were supposed to switch over. They even had dual speed signs on the highway. Then the conservatives took over and all of that plus CAFE standards, alternative energy research and many other things that would have brought us into the real world stopped. Even England uses the metric system. Only the U.S. and a couple third world countries persist in the English system.
Even the U.S. Army uses the metric system. They teach it in schools, it’s not hard. I have even heard that some fundamentalists think the metric system is the devil’s measurement system.

You can’t fight stupidity and America has the market cornered.

If our country switches, I’m ready now.

I find that I don’t know what a certain number of grams looks like. This effects (affects? I can not keep that straight_) me at my externship as I’m baking with someone who does everything in metric. When I’m trying to figure out how large a pan or bowl to use, I almost always overestimate. What has helped me is to remember that a ½ liter is about 500 grams. I know what a ½ liter water bottle looks like, so that has helped me think through pan or bowl size.

For those outside the US, here’s a funny fact – product weights & volumes in the US are all listed both ways.

So a can of tomatoes is 14.5 ounces & 411g, a vial of lip balm is ¼ ounce & 7.5g, a bottle of Tabasco is 5 fluid ounces & 148ml, etc.

Water & soda is sold in liter and 2-liter bottles, but I can’t think of anything else in the grocery store where people ask for the metric size.

@jaytkay @tedibear I think the primary problem is that Americans think that they will continually have to convert from metric. In fact it is easy to get ued to the metric system and you don’t care what it is in the English system.

If it helps, a 500 gram steak is almost as big as a ½ pound stake so there will be very little change required to get used to the metric system. The only real problem is converting measurements in old cookbooks. For that there is a simple (free) program called convert.exe that will calculate the changes for you.

We could save billions in spare parrts alone if everything was metric.

@Ron_C In fact it is easy to get ued to the metric system and you don’t care what it is in the English system.

Agreed. That’s why it is funny to see Americans ask for a liter of water or 2-liter soda after buying ten gallons of gasoline.

@jaytkay Yes. The more you know the less you respect the Amreican education system.

@Ron_C Exactly. People get stresed out about converting everything instead of realizing once you are in the metric system you no longer need to convert. Drives me crazy that we let the idiots wo don’t realize this make the decision.

How is it that the conservatives stopped the process of us converting to metric? I never knew that. I figured it was just the majority of America is pretty stupid at math, and just doesn’t get that base 10 is simpler.

@tedibear It makes sense that it would take a while to get used to measurements in another system, but if you are brought up in the system it would be as natural to us as the system we use now. If we just man up, as someone else put it, within 10 years we would be over it I think, adjusted. Many things are already in both metric and the English system anyway.

@ragingloli My husband is pretty sure he did not learn the English system in school in Mexico either. He isn’t sure because he did two years of high school in America, and then afterwards went to American school in Mexico. I do know that he can estimate an inch, foot, and yard pretty well (he played american football) but things like measurements in square feet are hard for him, difficult for him to picture, he thinks more in square meters. Also, pint, quart, even cup he doesn’t know right off of the top of his head, and he still does not now how many ounces in a cup or how many ounce in a pound, he always has to ask me, it does not stick with him.

Having said that, I bought some salad dressing the other day at J. Alexender, a chain restaurant here. I asked how much it costs, and she said $5 a pint. It is not sold in a jar, they dram it out into a to-go type of cup with a lid, like what you would have for soup. When they brought it to me, I told them it does not look like a pint, but the container was an odd shape, so I was not completely sure of myself, they reassured me it was. When I got home I measured it, and it was 12 ounces (should be 16). The waitress who helped me, and the manager who reasured me, were both as American as you can get. They can’t even measure or estimate in our own system. Oy.

@JLeslie I can’t remember exactly without research, it was more than 30 years ago. I thing we were supposed to switch into metric in the mid-70’s. Carter was president but Nixon took over and some businesses and christian groups made a real fuss. “It will cost business too much”, “it’s the devil’s system” said others. I think congress just dropped the deadline because it would cause too much trouble. We were just pulling out of Vietnam and the conservatives were too busy covering up for Nixon and getting ready for a real radical presidential candidate. The democrats just weren’t paying attention, as usual.

The bill wasn’t killed, it just fizzled out.

@Ron_C When I was young I remember being told in school we would eventually be switching over, that is why we had to suffer through learning how to convert measures. I was a math oriented person so I didn’t mind, it was just more math to me, but many people complained. I was born in ‘68. Are children in America still taught metric in primary or secondary school?

@JLeslie We still learn Metric in science classes. In Home Ec, though, it’s still Imperial.

I’m horrible in maths – dyscalculic, actually – but I love to cook. Since most cooking measurements in the US are done by measure, as opposed to weight, I’ve become comfortable with “eyeballing it”.

When a recipe says “a cup of flour”, I know what that looks like in my bowl. When a recipe says “500 grams of flour”, I’m lost.

A tablespoon of butter is the same as a tablespoon of salt. 50 grams of salt probably looks a lot different than 50 grams of butter.

That’s where I lose it. How the heck am I supposed to remember the relative weight of every single ingredient in my cupboard? And resorting to a scale for every step is a pain in the butt, I say.

@Seek_Kolinahr good points.

@JLeslie I was in high school in 1961 and we were taught the metric system as part of the standard curriculum. It was assumed, at that time that we would switch over. That never happened though in the 80’s my kids learned the metric system also. I use it and the 24 hour clock on a regular basis. It is so simple and logical I can’t understand why we never made the transition except for purely political reasons

@Seek_Kolinahr Interestingly, I was just thinking about this more, we used to use weight for things like cake. A pound cake was a pound of flour, a pound of sugar, 4 eggs, etc. Then we went to cup measures, and that is where the term cupcake came from, but then we morphed it into meaning little cakes. So, it seems people found it more practical to use measuring cups and spoons, rather than weight back then.

I am not very familiar with recipes in metric. It seems it does not have to be by weight? A quarter cup of liquid is something like 50 mls (I’m gessing there) can’t you use that type of measure in metric, just like we do, rather than weight?

@JLeslie I suppose that would work for liquid measurements, but every dry measurement I’ve ever seen (in, say, my Irish cookbook) uses grams. Whenever I start a new recipe, I have to Google every ingredient to figure out how many grams of ________ are in a cup.

@Ron_C I just never thought of it as political, but I am not arguing with you, I think it is entirely possible. I think the 24 hour clock is better also.

@Seek_Kolinahr You have to buy one of those kitchen scales, you will love it.

Scales. Bah humbug. What is this, Chemistry class? I dropped Chemistry after nearly blowing up the lab.

@Seek_Kolinahr I’m not much of a cook but switching over might require your to convert your favorite recipes. This link might help:
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Cookbook:Units_of_measurement

My wife is a nurse so she recognizes metric units like cc, and ml as a matter of course because she’s been doing it for 40 years. When she cooks, she never really measures exactly what the recipe instructs. I suspect most cooks add ingredients in amounts that “feel right” to them. For instance what is the volume of a pinch of salt? I suspect it depends on the size of your fingers.

By the way, I opted out of chemistry in favor of physics because I was afraid that I would have to memorize the periodic table. I can figure things out in math but was never much good with memorization.

@Ron_C Cooking is more to taste, as you say people adjust recipes. But, baking typically needs more of an exact measure, there is more chemistry in it.

@JLeslie that’s why when my wife says it’s my turn to cook, I ask where she would like to eat.

@Ron_C at our school, we couldn’t start physics unless we had our first year of chemistry and in our first year, we had to memorise the periodic table. No way around it.

@Seek_Kolinahr I remember when I first moved abroad and I felt exactly like you do. It really took some adjusting. But I figured metric was going to be easier than driving on the other side of the road, so I just went with it, and in the end, managed both. BUT, from time to time, I still drive on the right side (when I’m in Europe and in the US) and I still measure in Imperial. I’m bi-driveus and bi-quantatative… hahahaha

I lived through the transition from imperial to metric in Australia. It took a while to get used to, but was definitely worth the effort. I think the only thing stopping the US from changing was that they didn’t think of it…............

There are NO advantages to imperial, so maybe the scientific community should lobby the government to change over.

@Harold Didn’t think of it? As we stated above, we were beginning to transition in the states, in the 70’s, and then it was basically stopped, we never followed through.

@JLeslie – yes, why did the US stop it, even when it was in transition? Because they didn’t think of it. The metric system was a European invention. I will bet that if it was invented in the US, it would be used right now, and would have been for years.

@Harold now I understand what you were getting at.

@cazzie the irony is that I spent 20 years evading chemistry, now my job requires that I understand it for trouble-shooting and process control purposes. I am now a part-time chemist and find it very interesting especially with reactions in metallurgy. I still haven’t memorized the periodic table, skated out of that one.

I’ve become a lay-chemist after years of doing accounting. It’s all still numbers, percentages and formulas, I guess. Working in metric helps a lot and remembering the difference between grams and ml when looking at packaging is important for what I do as well. I do everything by weight so oils packaged by the ml or litre bothers me because I want a kilo of it, not a litre! Many of the recipes and formulations I see online are still in imperial and I have to change them over and THAT is a pain, especially because things can be expressed simply in percentages, in most cases, and that would satisfy everyone, regardless of the size of batch or what unit of measure you choose.

@Ron_C Yous wrote “I can’t remember exactly without research, it was more than 30 years ago. I thing we were supposed to switch into metric in the mid-70’s. Carter was president but Nixon took over and some businesses and christian groups made a real fuss. “It will cost business too much”, “it’s the devil’s system” said others. I think congress just dropped the deadline because it would cause too much trouble. We were just pulling out of Vietnam and the conservatives were too busy covering up for Nixon and getting ready for a real radical presidential candidate. The democrats just weren’t paying attention, as usual.”
Umm… I was around back then and as I recall Nixon was elected in 1968 and Carter in 1976, with Ford in-between taking up Nixon’s slack.
I also remember getting ready to convert to the metric system, and as I remember it, people were worried about it being too confusing and difficult to change, also the cost factor, changing everything over.
Those reasons seem lame to me and they did at the time. I think it was mostly laziness and apathy.
The problems that resulted are mostly our own, we hurt ourselves by not converting back there in the 70’s.