They could just cop on and use the meter.
But changing the definition of the unit whilst keeping it the same is a very pragmatic solution if they want to converge on the 'normal' foot. Software displays stuff with the right units, values which are old are probably close enough to be correct if just used directly, and anything large enough for the transformation to need to be applied will be hopefully rare enough that it can be calculated and applied with ease.
You’ve now raised the possibility that someone who starts being educated in the field a few years down the line, and never used the old foot at all, will look at old data with SFT measurements and assume they are IFT and introduce all sorts of errors in their analyses and calculations.
You’ve gone from 2 distinctly named standards with a 3x difference in value, which meansa mental sanity check should be sufficient to identify errors in most cases, to introducing a 3rd that is named very much like 1 of those and is close enough in value that a mental sanity check will not get you anywhere in most cases.
Once they get left behind maybe a politician will finally propose to "modernize" the whole thing but feh... the US will drag this crap for centuries like we still have a completely special keyboard layout in France for reasons no one seem to remember lol
They are old legacy that is clearly suboptimal, but no one wants to change it because it still works and the transition would be costly
A bit like the imperial system
It doesn’t. It is infinitely more deadlocked and slow-moving, mostly by design. Switching to metric wouldn’t be a matter of “a politician” proposing it and 50%+1 of the parliament agreeing. It would be a massive, years-long all-consuming struggle.
I've actually seen an old ex-NASA engineer claim that.
He was not joking.
I root for the chinese communist to be there first then lol
. . . The discrepancy between calculated and measured position, resulting in the discrepancy between desired and actual orbit insertion altitude, had been noticed earlier by at least two navigators, whose concerns were dismissed because they "did not follow the rules about filling out [the] form to document their concerns".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...
Typical government bureaucracy.
It was not the Morton Thiokol engineers who made the decision to go ahead with the ill-fated launch. It was NASA. The engineers, meeting in Utah, communicated two messages from their meeting to their local managers. First, they produced the a formal, abstract result: "With the data available to them, and with NASA knowing as well as they that the design was flawed and that temperature might be a causal factor, the engineers argued that the Challenger ought not to fly so far out of the field database, the firmest evidence available." --Robison, et. al.
https://www.asktog.com/books/challengerExerpt.html
This fourth-level bullet concluding the slide says that, by the way, the debris that struck the Columbia is estimated to be 1920/3 = 640 times larger than data used in the tests of the model! Thus a better headline would be "Review of Test Data Indicates Irrelevance of Two Models." There is an interesting dynamic to this slide: the headline is an exercise in misdirection, which the text then awkwardly and slowly eviscerates.
https://www.inf.ed.ac.uk/teaching/courses/pi/2016_2017/phil/...
I had a friend (in Europe) who worked as a mechanic on Apache helicopters in Afghanistan; all of that is in imperial too. He worked as a contractor so had to provide his own tools, but those are all in imperial and essentially useless outside of the US. So he now has an expensive high-quality useless toolset.
Switching manufacturing from imperial to metric is the real challenge. Nuts, bolt, things that have to fit exactly: it's all very banal, but there's a lot of it and switching it all over isn't easy or cheap.