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Comment by perilunar | Hacker News Reader

Of course it's easier to stick with what you have in the short term. Change is difficult. You do it for the long term gain. If you had done it 50 years ago like the rest of the English-speaking world you wouldn't be in this mess.

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Half of our houses were built 50 years ago. Even if we had a 'tough but fair' autocrat simply declaring we're moving all newly-installed everything to metric standards, we're going to have to have both kinds of pipes on the truck for 50 more years. That's 2x the inventory to manage for every trade that works on any kind of construction or servicing of equipment.

We can still do a better job teaching metric to kids, without needing to tear down every building to replace all the 2-by-4s with "50x100s." But yeah, that means dealing with the fact we don't have everything following the standards and our pipe threads, screws, etc. will always be different to yours.

> Half of our houses were built 50 years ago

That’s true of everywhere in the world at the time they made the switch (give or take a decade). Why is that a problem unique to America?

Didn't France go metric a few centuries ago? Anyway, I suspect there are at least 10 times as many buildings, and 10000 times as many machines deployed, in 2026 America than the number you'd get by adding every European country's stats at the year they really seriously standardized metric.

You can make a better case that we were fools to not stay the course in the 1970s than a case that we should try it today. Even the 70s seem more like the very tail end of a window. 1776 would have been a great time to do it!

A lot of the commonwealth countries switch ~1970 (UK, Australia, Canada at least).

Why does the absolute number matter? Every trades truck/stockpile will need to stock double for some time, not some absolute value increase.

To some extent yes, but I just think it would be a greater hit to the overall GDP with more mechanised things in existence. Maybe I'm wrong, I just think that in the farther back you go, the greater the share of the economy that wouldn't be dramatically impacted by a metric changeover. Like, farming was somewhat a greater share of the GDP then than now, and a lot of goods are weighed and sold in bulk, not really all that hard. A farm would need to replace irrigation pipe and retrofit their scales, but not demolish and build new farms. A car factory, on the other hand... it would take a while for all those machines to naturally be replaced.

What's the long term gain? It's just a unit of measure, ultimately arbitrary. Standards bring efficiency, and we already have a standard.

Exactly: the entire world has a standard, and the US is doing its own weird thing.

The long-term gain is being able to sell your stuff to the rest of the world, and being able to import stuff from the rest of the world without paying a Weird Format Tax.

Would you rather manufacture stuff for 8 billion people, or for 340 million?

You could also argue that North America should convert to 50hz 220VAC for electric services, so that one line of products could be sold to the entire world. But the switching costs would be huge and manufacturers generally have no problem making the few changes that are needed to make products for export, or when possible designing their products to accept either standard.

Cutting metric or imperial threads in a pipe fitting is a programming code change in a CNC machine, and maybe using a different cutting tool. Easily done for an order that's going to be exported.

So I don't think manufacturing is a big concern, and not the reason we've stayed with old standards in many cases.

Maybe avoid to crash half a billion $ probe on Mars surface?

k what's your quote on replacing every screw and bolt in America (and of course tapping new metric threads for those screws and bolts to go into). Also replace every pipe in every house.

There would need to be like a minimum 50-year transition where everything will be worse (keep both of everything in stock because both old and new need maintenance) and we'll probably have more confusion and mistakes over what units were being used during that half-century.

I love metric. I think it's awesome. But I'm not sure what anyone expects anymore. We attempted the same half-assed conversion Canada did in the 1970s when Jimmy Carter was President and people were pretty sane. We did only a little bit worse than they did[1] though. It boggles the mind to imagine a US populace as determinedly political and polarized as they are now adopting even a slightly inconvenient lifestyle change just because the government said so. Therefore, "you guys should just adopt metric" seems less than productive.

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Metric/comments/hmyt6a/how_to_measu...

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