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Comment by krschultz | Hacker News Reader

Most of the comments in this thread are talking about the units for personal height, weight, local road signs or for the weather forecast. Those are by far the least important things to be worried about. All of those things are local and there is no carrying cost for them. There would be a cost to change all those signs and forecasts - for no real gain.

However, dimensions of physical goods are a constant recurring cost to the economy. Anything that crosses the borders for trade (all resources mined/farmed, everything manufactured) has to be dealt with in both sets of units. There is massive redundancy in fasteners, components, scales, paperwork, etc. It requires companies to keep two sets of tools (and not just wrenches, also drills, taps, dies, cutters, etc).

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I agree the examples are irrelevant. A better example (from my experience) would be the oil/gas/chemical industry where you have millions of miles, oops kilometers, of pipes, uncountable valves, fittings, sensors, vessels, etc. What's the counterpart to a 6", sch 60 pipe? You definitely do not just convert to metric!

My favorite nonsensical (not-quite-non-dimensional unit)? Heat rate: MMBtu per MWh

Another nonsensical conversion? MMCF to MMBtu or, worse, 10^3m^3 to MMBtu.

Good point. In Canada, we still use imperial measures for body height and body weight, and many older folks still talk in miles and fahrenheit.

But everyone adjusted to metric for less personal weights and measures, and other abstract measures.

Pretty good compromise, I think.

Another Canadian here (Maritimer). With temperature I find many people talk about the weather in Celsius but the temperature of their homes/thermostats in Fahrenheit. Swimming pools also measured in Fahrenheit.

Gym weights, except in Olympic lifting competition, everyone talks lbs.

While in the UK I noticed everyone measures weight in stone (1 stone = 14 lbs).

Yes. The gym weights I found in the UK where in kg, though.

I used to think in stone. But I don't need to know my weight very often and when I do it's usually for ski bindings at european resorts - so now I find myself thinking in kilograms.

The only non-metric unit that I think in now is miles - and there are obvious safety/legal problems in switching our speed limit road signs to kilometers.

No, everybody will be going just a tad slow for a while.

Good consternoon affable. No, I thought this speedo was in KPH.

hehe, you owe me a new keyboard :) tx

The gain would be psychological. If people use metric units in day-to-day things, the rest will fall out naturally.

THe 'sets of tools' argument is kind of spurious. I already have a box full of wrenches; I'd need some more in the box. Nobody argues 'lets get rid of 5/32 bolts, so I can get rid of that wrench'.

Its the mental effort to rationalize them that is the real cost. Lets see, slightly larger than 1/4 - is it 7mm? or 8? or 9/32?

When I had the tires on my buell motorcycle changed the guy here in germany only had metric wrenches. He had to "fix" one to get the wheel of.

I was talking about the factory floor. Even if we switched to metric tomorrow, you would still need wrenches to work on things made before the switch.

But cutting tools are consumable. You need new drills, taps, dies, and cutters all the time. Manufacturers have to stock twice as many because of metric and imperial. Those are big ticket expenses.

Quite right. I just finished a civil engineering degree and found that despite the vast amounts of published academic research and literature from the US, the use of imperial units rendered a very large proportion virtually unusable. Its an inherently empirical subject and continual conversion was both incredibly tedious and introduced a likely source of error (you get "an eye" for metric units so you can quickly tell if you are obviously an order out from where you should be).

I agree that it is all about cost, however this is far more "local" to many US citizens than they might imagine. For example, most of the coke bottles outside of the US come in half litres, while in the US they come in 20 fluid ounces (this is certainly true for many other products, too.) Hence, companies that make coke filling machines must accommodate the imperial system on top of the metric system, as well. Given that the metric system company can easily grab most of the market share, it should eventually be able to get larger economies of scale. In the end, it could very well be that machinery to supply imperial unit sized products becomes more expensive, a cost that will most certainly be relegated to the consumer.

That would probably work if the US economy wasn't so big. In reality, it isn't until you get to niche products that it will be possible (and ay have happened); anything as mainstream as a Coke bottle will be fine in imperial.

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