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Comment by lawnchair_larry | Hacker News Reader

"So choose to live your life in metric if you want, and thank you for signing on."

That captures about all you need to know regarding the whitehouse petition feature. I'm not sure why it exists at this point.

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Putting your name on a list with a mouse click is a fairly empty contribution to our democracy; why would you expect anything other than a fairly empty response?

There are other ways to make things happen, but truth be the important things almost always involve a lot of energy, time, and money.

Democracy is ruling by the people. And the government has to give the people easy way to express itself. We shouldn't have to "mobilize" and "invest ourselves" heavily to change something in this new connected world. Electronic voting is one great thing, Petition through internet is another great thing if it really had an impact.

If you're suggesting we put the metric system up for a vote, I think I know how that would go.

It's supposed to be, but instead its representative democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representative_democracy

But doesn't that also capture the essence of what the US is all about?

I agree, I found this to be a very American response. Its not typical for the US government to mandate large changes like this and force people to do things a certain way. Its just part of the culture.

> force people to do things a certain way.

Aren't they forcing people not to use the metric system in the US?

That is what the US is about, and the citizens have spoken through this petition that we want it changed.

Responding to petitions by telling the petitioners to petition harder is kind of pointless.

In all fairness... 50,000 citizens is like 0.016% of the US population[1]. When most elections talk about a 2-3% margin of error, this is so small it is meaningless. I imagine more than 50,000 votes get lost in the mail.

[1] http://www.census.gov/popclock/

> I'm not sure why it exists at this point.

I suppose you've got a better way to get the Obama administration to state their position on any issue you can wrangle 100k signatures for. It's not direct democracy exactly. It's a good system for allocating administrative time to speak to issues that are not politically expedient or important.

It's President Obama, not Emperor Obama. The petition feature works fine for petitions whose authors have not overlooked this.

I understand that your reply is intended to be snide, but I don't understand your underlying point. As someone who is occasionally also snide, I can't fault that part, but can you make it obvious enough so that I know what you're trying to say?

Maybe I'm missing some subtlety here but it seemed obvious to me that he was pointing out that the President cannot in fact convert the country to mandatory metric.

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