In the previous comment section, Gannon asked how come we haven’t converted to the metric system. Before I get to that, I’m going to write about the keys to the Internet.
I’d link to it if I could find it, but a few years ago I ran across an astonishingly dumb column in The Guardian that completely misunderstood the United States of America, the Internet, and most importantly human nature. You may recall a few years ago that there was a big push by other countries to try to get the US to hand over the keys to the Internet from the Department of Commerce to the United Nations. The aforementioned article in The Guardian said with a certain amount of glee that with the world united in insisting that the US give up control over the Internet that we would have (and I’ll never forget this wording) “little choice but to comply”.
That left to beg the question… “or what?” As in, we will have to comply “or what?” The UN will set up the infrastructure for its own Internet? A league of countries will go to the trouble of building an alternate Internet so that it can hand it over to the UN? They’ll invade Washington DC? If there is no “or [insert some consequence that the US could not endure]” then there is a choice. As it turned out, there was indeed a choice and the US chose to hold on to control of the Internet for the time being. Haven’t even heard mutterings about the issue since.
—
A few years ago when I went to a friend’s wedding in Canada, a discussion about the differences between the United States and Canada came up. When these conversations come up with Canadians, it is almost invariably in the form of them asking us “What is wrong with you people?!” about this issue or that. If the subject were to come up today I would probably be quizzed about our warmongering or our president or one of the many problems that they have with the current direction of our country, but given that it was pre-9/11 I was surprised by the two subjects that came up most frequently. I expected that it would be our health care system or gun-loving or something, but instead it was our tort system (a subject I will expound upon at a later time) and… the metric system.
One guy asked why we hadn’t adopted it and a couple more idealistic fellows asked why the conversion process was taking so long and when it was going to happen. My answers were “not sure”, “what conversion process?”, and “it may never happen”.
After I got back to the states, I asked started asking myself why it hadn’t and it didn’t appear that it was going to. I came up with an answer and then forgot the question and moved on to more important things like repercussions of Robin’s flirtations with Spoiler on his relationship with his then-girlfriend Arianna.
When I was in elementary school, I was dutifully informed by my teachers that the metric system was the wave of the future and that the English system they were teaching us would become obsolete. If I needed an excuse not to learn the English system, I had one. The problem is that I had to learn about inches, feet, gallons, and pounds anyway. Reality made me even if the teachers at West Oak Elementary were telling me that it would be useless knowledge.
The teaching of the metric system never entirely went away, though the examples in the math textbooks slowly started moving back to gallons and yards by the time I got to high school. I remember this because I remember thinking that the books must have been out of date, though in retrospect I’m not sure that they were.
In addition to their odd pronunciation of the word “applicable”, their odd-yet-correct pronunciation of the states Nevada and Colorado, their use of the phrase “Oh my heck/hell”, and a million other things, one of the quirks of Deseret (or more likely the corner of it where I worked) the metric system kept coming up along with the question of why we never adopted it.
Remembering the question reminded me of the answer which actually came indirectly from the Canadians which had asked the question to begin with. When they asked, I asked how the conversion in Canada went. They basically said that the government said that they were going to convert everything to the metric system because it was more logical and it was what everyone else was doing and so Canada went metric. They described it about that simplistically, though I kept trying to make it more complicated by asking “why?” like a bored second grader sitting in the back seat on a 600-mile car trip.
The thing is that everyone in the US had decided, once upon a time, that it would happen here, too. It just didn’t. And I think that part of the answer to the “why” is that Americans are extremely reluctant to being told from on high “this is what we’re going to do” even when there might be a logical reason behind it if we don’t feel like we were adequately consulted on the matter. Part of the success of persuasion is to make people think it was their idea or at least that they had a hand in the decision. It’s noteworthy that the many of the most fierce political backlashes come from Supreme Court decisions (Roe v Wade, gay marriage) rather than legislation.
Unfortunately, by its very nature conversion to the metric system is more of a top-down decision.
Beyond that, though, another big reason is the same reason that we held on to the keys to the Internet. No one was in a position to force us to do otherwise. We don’t need to move towards the universal measurement system to do trade with other countries because we don’t have a shortage of countries to trade with (at least not on that particular basis). We’re big enough and powerful enough that we can unilaterally expect other countries to work with us on the matter. In other words, we converted as much as we needed to in order to keep doing global business, but it wasn’t as much as it might have been for other countries. Americans would rather everybody else learn English rather than we learn Esperanto. We don’t know off-hand what’s wrong with them learning pounds and ounces rather than us learning metrics. And so on.
To bring these ideas together, not only do we not like being told by our government how it’s going to be, we particularly hate being told that we need to do it because other countries are doing it. It’s not an uncommon mistake, but generally speaking telling us that everybody else does it differently causes us to dig in our heels (unless, of course, someone can actually apply enough pressure to get us to reconsider).
My favorite example of this is the death penalty. As an opponent of it, I get very, very frustrated with my fellow travelers’ tendency to mention that we are one of only a handful of countries that continues to execute people. That the world does something one way and that we do it another is not, on its face, evidence that we are wrong. If other countries do things a better way, it needs to be explained why that way is better. I think that the metric-advocates placed too much of an emphasis on world community arguments rather than the ease with which one can divide and multiply by ten.
About the Author
15 Responses to The American Standard
Leave a Reply
please enter your email address on this page.
Good points. For a Westeuropean, Angloislander or Southamerican the US has very strange standards. It seems strange that the US has the death penaly, a practice associated with oppressive governments, and a punishment which can’t be reversed, We already had this decision, but high a ges of consent also feel very weird because everywhere else it’s around 14, AT MOST 16, and it usually the same as the age of criminal responsibility, not the age of civilcapcity (also called age of majority). On the other hand, the US tries 10, 11, 12, 13 year old children as Adults and sends them to jail. In general, there a way too much people in jail.
Your point about the supreme court is excellent as well. Courts should apply the law, not reinterpret it. The supreme court of the US seems to have de facto legislative powers, which is against the division of power (executive, legislative, judicial). Abortion and gay marriage seem of such trascendence that they are federal issues, not state issues. The prime function of the legislative is to express the will of the people through law. The parlament should allow unnatural marriages or the killing of children not the Supreme Court. (Gannon opposes gay marriage and abortion, being the first unnatural and familydestroying, and the second the murder of the innocent. It’s a child, not a choice.)
Finally, the country which will benefit the most in the longterm by adopting the metric system is the US itself. The metric system is much easier to use, because it is based on multiples of ten. Specially america’s low IQ minorities would benefit of it. Does the average low IQ person know how to convert 245 inches into feet? You also have to know the factorial, but in tyhe metric system it’s always 10, 100, or 1000. That the metric system hasn’t been used, also indicates that the US has lost its ability, like many democracies, to implement painful reforms which create problems in the short term but are useful in the long term. The main problem with democracy is that the politicians only think about short term, that is their 4 year period. I’m not sure if you know Chile. Pinochet transformed that country from an average latinamerican country into the crownjewel of southamerica, by implementing reforms which would have been impossible for an elected leader.
I don’t want to get into a long discussion defending the peculiarities of the US (or agreeing with you in some cases that the peculiarity is misguided), so I’ll just say that we have our reasons for doing a lot of what we do and point out that what works in a lot of other countries often don’t work here (and vice-versa).
I also want to correct something that I believe you are mistaken about. The cutoff for trying a juvenile as an adult is generally 14 or older, so we do not with regularity send try 10-13 year olds as adults. It was considered a really big deal when we went as low as 14 and I’m not sure if we’ve ever gone lower. That’s not to say our habit of trying 14 year olds as adults is necessarily a good thing, just that we don’t go further than that as far as I know.
That the metric system hasn’t been used, also indicates that the US has lost its ability, like many democracies, to implement painful reforms which create problems in the short term but are useful in the long term.
As far as the metric system goes, we’re getting along perfectly fine without it. When people can’t divide by twelve, calculators can. The fact that some people can’t divide by twelve is itself a problem, but not one that can be fixed by making measurements more mathematically simple.
It seems strange that the US has the death penaly, a practice associated with oppressive governments, and a punishment which can’t be reversed
Actually, for those who support the death penalty (Will and I disagree on this one), it’s a fairly simple thought: there are some crimes/criminals which are SO heinous that the best protection for the rest of society is their complete and total removal from it.
On the other hand, the US tries 10, 11, 12, 13 year old children as Adults and sends them to jail. In general, there a way too much people in jail.
Actually, we have two problems: #1, we have way too few people in jail, and #2, we have a jail system that doesn’t do enough to rehabilitate those who actually can be rehabilitated. We’re way too easy on a number of criminals (fodder for a future post, I think).
Your point about the supreme court is excellent as well. Courts should apply the law, not reinterpret it. The supreme court of the US seems to have de facto legislative powers, which is against the division of power (executive, legislative, judicial).
The reason for this is a very liberal interpretation of the ability of course to apply a “remedy” for violations of the law.
The metric system is much easier to use, because it is based on multiples of ten.
But the English system is much easier to “eyeball”. One “foot” is approximately the size of… well… you know. One “inch” is approximated pretty well by a section of finger.
In particular for long travel, guesstimating ETA and drive time work far easier with the mile. If you are driving between 55 and 65 miles per hour, you can “guesstimate” you are moving roughly one mile per minute. When a sign notifying you of the distance to the next gas station or rest stop pops up, you know (to a reasonable margin of error, say +/-5% or so) when you’ll reach it. Try doing that when you’re moving 96.5606 km/hour. Even if you set the km/hour speed limits to normal numbers (say, 90, 100, 110, etc) you still don’t achieve the 1:1 parity with the 60 minutes in an hour that makes the most mathematical sense for a rough guesstimate.
Does the average low IQ person know how to convert 245 inches into feet?
No, but they can probably guess with reasonable certainty that their room is 12 feet long by walking in a straight line across it, without needing a measuring tape.
That the metric system hasn’t been used, also indicates that the US has lost its ability, like many democracies, to implement painful reforms which create problems in the short term but are useful in the long term.
Actually, it’s because the metric system is relatively useful in the abstract for certain tasks, while not being reliably useful for many other things.
The main problem with democracy is that the politicians only think about short term, that is their 4 year period. I’m not sure if you know Chile. Pinochet transformed that country from an average latinamerican country into the crownjewel of southamerica, by implementing reforms which would have been impossible for an elected leader.
“At least Mussolini made the trains run on time.” – author unknown
Americans would rather everybody else learn English rather than we learn Esperanto.
Actually, nobody’s really all that hot on Esperanto. It’s mostly an exercise in “trying” (and not succeeding) to make a language that would solve (to some approximate degree) the trouble of triangular translation (or translating from one language to another by using an intermediary language). Also typified by “English as she is spoke”, or the really cheap subtitled films you get in Hong Kong where somebody obviously ran the original script through babelfish into chinese, then the chinese back through babelfish into whatever language you need.
That’s a really good point about eyeballing, Web. In some cases it doesn’t make a whole lot of different (a foot, for instance, is not particularly helpful for most people), but in other cases it can be very helpful. I did a lot of driving over the weekend and the mile-a-minute eyeballing is invaluable.
But the English system is much easier to “eyeball”. One “foot” is approximately the size of… well… you know. One “inch” is approximated pretty well by a section of finger.
If you have to measure something and don’t have a ruler or measuring tape, reach for your wallet. A dollar bill (or any other denomination, come to think of it) is close enough to six inches long to be a reasonable approximation for many purposes when precision isn’t required. I believe it’s just over 6 1/8 inches.
Also, customary mesaurements have convenient prime factorizations. A foot is 2*2*3 inches, meaning it’s evenly divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. A pound is divisible by 2, 4, and 8. An hour has 2*2*3*5 minutes, so it’s divisible by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 10. This also explains why a circle has 360 degrees: The prime factorization of 360 is 2*2*2*3*3*5, making it divisible by every number between 2 and 10 except for 7.
“That’s not to say our habit of trying 14 year olds as adults is necessarily a good thing, just that we don’t go further than that as far as I know.”
I would assume Gannon has no objection to trying 14-year-olds as adults.
In some ways, the English system is better. For example, there is no metric equivalent of a “foot,” which is a very handy measurement to have. For measuring driving, miles are better than kilometers, because they are bigger; kilometers provide needlessly small divisions of your distance.
As for air temperature, Fahrenheit beats Celsius any day. Zero is cold, 100 is hot, and in North America both temperatures can be reached. It’s a much better scale than something set to the freezing and boiling of water.
And of course, in the U.S., the use of the metric system by drug dealers has lent a definite negative cachet to the entire system. Saying you have a “kilo” of anything is enough to get you a look you don’t want.
side question: why is it that drug dealers here are the only ones who have gone metric?
I consider the larger versus smaller measurements of kilometers and miles to be a wash (except for Web’s point about mile-a-minute driving), though I agree about Fahrenheit vs Celsius. The latter isn’t sufficiently specific.
why is it that drug dealers here are the only ones who have gone metric?
Probably because it’s largely import and they’re dealing with suppliers from countries that use the metric system.
I remember teachers in school telling us the wave of the future was the metric system. I’m kind of glad it’s not. I’m too old to change.
“I would assume Gannon has no objection to trying 14-year-olds as adults.”
Yes I have objections. People under 14 are children and are not criminaly responsible. People between 14-17 should be tried under a juvenile criminal code, and go to juvenile prison, also called reformatories. People between 18-20 should also be tried as juveniles, if rehabilitation seems likely. 21 and above means full criminal responsibilty. Gannon believes juveniles aged 14 and above should face juvenil criminal justice (responsibilty), because they can distinguish between good and evil and have internalized societies basic rules {snip}
-{A note from trumwill: Let’s not let this post turn into a discussion on the appropriateness of AOC laws. I’ve been relatively flexible, but I don’t want to invite any more commentary on an off-putting subject that has already been discussed extensively, so I cut out a small portion of this comment}-
Censorship! Booooo! Intolerance!!!
The comments were clearly related to the topic and justified. Peter gets special treatment!!!!
🙂
Um, can we back up for a sec? There are really keys? To the Internet? How does that work?
Well, yes and no. There aren’t any physical keys, but the government and agencies that it works with (such as ICANN) hold the root servers and control protocols, domains, and so on.
The United Nations wanted to take it over for a variety of reasons, but that idea was not very popular with Americans (even liberal ones) for another variety of reasons. The day-to-day operations are usually handled by third parties contracted out to by the government to private (profit and non-profit) entities, though.
As one of the United States’ leading proponents of metrication, I, too, frown upon the U.S. changing over to metric “because the rest of the world has.” While the fact of global metrication should be instructive to the U.S., it should not be coercive for us. The U.S. should change to metric because metric is decimal, because metric it is already a fact that metric is a global standard, and because metric is already the legally preferred system of measurement for trade in the U.S. (1988 amendment to the Metric Conversion Act of 1975).
On the subject of one system being more readily divisible, I always shuddered to “eyeball” quarters of an inch vs. eighths of an inch on a ruler. Trying the same process with a millimeter ruler is a snap, and if all measurements of that scale are in millimeters, then the measurement can usually be quoted to the nearest integer. This is the method used in New Zealand and Australia, two countries that formerly used imperial measurement, but are today the world’s best examples of successful, and total, metrication.