A/B/C paper series formats are based on metrics system and therefore, morally evil and unfit for the US consumption.
This has the great advantage of allowing documents to be easily up and down-scaled on a photocopier - i.e. an A3 document can be printed at 50% scale on an A4 sheet.
I wonder if anyone ever tried to do something similar with imperial units (AKA English units to the US Americans) - i.e. create sheets of papers with side-length of sqrt(2) : 1, and the largest being 1 square yard or similar.
This specifically is what allows easy up-/downscaling for an A* size.
An A1 sheet can fit 4x A3 posters, 8x A4 pages or 16x A5 flyer/booklet pages without any wastage, so all you need is a single A1 printer.
ANSI A == 8.5 x 11 inches (letter)
ANSI B == 11 x 17 inches
ANSI C == 17 x 22 inches
ANSI D == 22 x 34 inches
ANSI E == 34 x 44 inches
There are additional sizes frequently used in the US too: business card, legal, half letter, and specialized sizes for architecture.
17/11 = 34/22 = 1.55
These have the property that they alternate aspect ratios every size, so you have to go up two sizes (4x area) to get back to the original aspect ratio.
The first one, 9 x 12, happens to also be “ARCH A” but I haven’t seen a fancy name for the others.
I've never heard an American complain that Coca Cola is sold by the liter. There's no moral component to Americans not wanting to switch to metric. It's simply a matter of the switch and retooling being more hassle than continuing to use American customary units. Frankly, the difference seems to bother Europeans a lot more than it bothers Americans.
Probably because European consume a lot of content from the US which makes little sense to them
Nobody. Cares.
At the end of the day, the one you’re used to is the one that makes more sense. There is no system that is objectively better “in all situations.”
Most people that strongly argue that one is better than the other are usually just saying “it’s better cuz I’m used to it”
Again, nobody, anywhere that I'm aware of, is sitting around insisting for imperial units as a matter of principle. We just don't care. We use and learn metric where we use it (all the sciences, chemistry, physics, etc in American schools are taught in metric). And we use imperial where we use it, mostly in daily life. And it's perfectly fine.
For example, I personally prefer grams (more because of weight, but still preferred to ounces) to cups (volume) in recipes because it removes density as a variable (a packed cup of flour vs a loose cup of flour)
"Everyone" in what scope? For an international team of engineers and scientists, the answer is obviously metric. But if "everybody" in the relevant context is other tradesmen in America, then "everybody" agrees on the American customary units. It doesn't matter to the latter what the former pick.
But C/F makes absolutely no difference in understanding the weather. Or cooking temperatures. Apart from measuring body temperature and possibly controlled lab environments, there is no situation in life where you need to break temperatures into 1/10 units or benchmark the weather on the boiling/freezing temperatures of water at sea level (I'm talking about the population at large, not meteorologists).
Miles/KM make absolutely no difference in understanding the distance you need to drive somewhere. The fact that a KM is 1000m does nothing to help you understand that the neighboring city is 40 miles (or 64km, or 64,000m) away.
Inches/MM make no difference when I'm doing woodworking. Although, again, no doubt doing the math is easier in mm than adding/removing fractions for inches.
My point is that, one can agree with the simplicity and standardization of the metric system (and I love its consistency) and also argue that it makes no difference in daily life.
There is, it's just that Americans are happy to overlook it here and there for completely arbitrary reasons.
Show me the evidence. Where are these Americans sincerely claiming that metric is immoral?
* The cost of changing over is astronomical
* Domains where the metric system is actually better use the metric system
* Domains where it does not don't need it.
* You have a supercomputer on your wrist. Dividing by a number other than 10 is not such a challenge anymore.
* A4 paper is in no way superior to letter. It's just a choice.
Replacing American exceptionalism with European exceptionalism (usually because of someone's trip when they were in college) is not necessarily always an improvement.
ISO 216 isn't specifically European. It's used in most of the world. The same is true of the metric system.
The world will indeed be incrementally better when people don't have to waste time converting measurements when operating between the US and elsewhere.
Also the metric system is European in origin. Despite what chapter 0 of every science book implies god did not invent it.
All of that and it is still the case that the primary system in the US is the metric system de jure if not de facto. De facto, the metric system is virtually universal in science domains in the US.
Whether the metric system is "better" or not is not the question. There are keyboard layouts not actually designed to slow down typing, but it's just one of those things that most people don't see worth changing. Are they wrong? In that case, it's an individual valuation. I'm sure "the US economy is losing $500b because of QWERTY" would make great copy on a slow news day on reddit. But unless it costs <$500n to make the change, we aren't actually losing anything.
Not everyone is a relentless optimizer. Even some of us who are also like to optimize for the entire system, including transaction costs/overhead/maintenance and not just some ab initio declaration of right like god in genesis.
The US has a great solution that everyone hates because it's the US: we use metric where it's necessary and leave it alone everywhere else. We could use a lot more European know how in numerous other sectors. I would even go so far as to say it's probably correct to presume that things where the US is the outlier is a case where we are the ones doing it wrong.
It's a presumption, meaning evidence can rebut it. In this case, here we can manage both. We can teach both in schools, we can use computers and calculators to divide by numbers other than 10 (which you have to do with mixed units and constants in metric calculations anyway). In fact, I wonder if there's proof that all of this extra teaching and double system overhead is worth what it costs! I bet the answer is that it is though and as long as you can experiment and find out in your domain, it sounds great to me. Different systems for the win!
As is quite a lot of American culture. Lots of good European ideas got improved on by America. Do one more ;-)
- Celsius temperatures near any Fahrenheit article/post/news.
- The metric system. Just scale up and down by ten. You already do it with dollars. So consider it done.
- ISO 6801 dates. Year, month, day. Things scale down logically. Years are composed of months; and months, of days. Also, they would be no ambiguity issues.
Of all of the things that are broken about the US, everyone here wants to fix the one thing that's not: our ambidexterity with units. Every school child learns both. We're terrible at raising kids to be bilingual, but we manage to teach them both metric and imperial units.
Once you concede that the metric system is already in de jure use in the US and in de facto use in domains where it's best to use it, you lose all kinds of benefit from switches. The low hanging fruit has been picked. You're left with empty non-empirical arguments like ... ummm... it's better to use one system. It is! But we're not starting from scratch.
Seriously, of all of the things I have posted on HN none has gotten more downvotes than saying that we don't need to go 100% metric in the US, I could speculate as to why, but it sure seems like this is some kind of nerd anti-normie shibboleth. It shouldn't be.
Go ahead, look up the figures. Then decide if it's still worth it to you. If it is, then try and convince enough policymakers not to just support it as the US does but to change everything over. You won't win that war. There has to be some specific need for the change.
'It would be cool' or 'it soothes my OCD' or whatever aren't enough to change something this massive.
Most problems it's a dodge to say "the money is better spent on X" but when you're talking about significant fractions of GDP that's just not how it is. We could do so much to improve people's lives with these sums of money.
Reminder that this is all about the US government internally sticking with letter sized paper. A4 paper is still A4 when measured in inches (which can be done exactly since inches are defined in terms of meters).
The use of SI units is likely measured in centuries. You'll be fine, and you might save a few rockets, rollercoasters and planes here and there:
There are many domains where imperial units have a nice human scale that makes sense, and then there are others where it is total trash and useless. I still fail to see what's so terrible about using both.
At least insofar as being defined in terms of metric units, the statement you replied to was accurate for both imperial and customary.
Furthermore, the names of the units are from the imperial system, even if the definitions themselves are not.
The names of the units are from the winchester system which is what predated both US customary units and Imperial units.
as opposed to the cost of not changing over, which is much larger but paid in small increments over time so nobody is bothered enough to do anything about it