How to save billions of dollars.

[TheDragoon]

Taelas remark was not about just any metric system, but about THE metric system known as SI. Pete acknowledges this by providing a link to a SI webpage in his first sentence. After all, why would anyone expect the US to switch to systems that are no longer the international standard. Then Pete disagrees with Taelas by telling the US are already on THE metric system, but now he refers to the Metric Convention of 1875, which was 85 years before SI was created. After this, he proceeds by picking units from metric systems left and right, and showing their shortcomings as arguments against that one metric system, the SI.

Now, who is incorrectly equating "metric" with "SI"?

Ok, based upon this I see you've totally missed Pete's points. From what I have read he has sufficiently addressed all of your arguments with these basic points:

1. US units are already defined in terms of metric system units. I don't see that it matters one lick whether that uses cm, m or km (etc) since those are all units from the system.

2. SI is not THE metric system. While it is certainly A metric system (perhaps the most widely used metric system, at the moment) telling someone that CGS or other measures are not a metric system is ridiculous. They all use units from part of the system, it's really just a matter of scale and maybe some other little tweaks here and there.

3. Pete was not picking metric units to show that the SI is stupid. He was picking them as examples of why it makes sense to use other non-metric units in certain applications. He's listed quite a few examples of this, all of them quite reasonable to me.

As an aside, my personal favorite example of an application where using metric system units just isn't as nice as other units would be Football. There is no way that measuring the field in metric units (meters/centimeters/etc) would make sense. The field was defined at 100 yards long, broken up into 10 yard intervals. It certainly makes more sense to say that it's 10 yards for a first down rather than 9.144 meters for a first down.

At any rate, it seems we're continuing to beat the long-dead horse (which must have been unearthed by the rain we had up here the other day) so I'm going to leave it at this. Pete, if you ever do put together a standard measurement system rant, I'd be interested in reading it as these are always informative to me.