American reacts to 'Is The Metric System Actually Better?'
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 26 ก.ย. 2024
- Thank you for watching me, a humble American, react to Is The Metric System Actually Better?
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A litre of water, 1000 ml, wil fill a 10x10x10 cm cube and weigh 1 kilo. It will freeze at 0 degrees and boil at 100 degrees. The energy needed to heat that litre of water 1 degree is 1 kilocalorie. It's an elegant system. Of course it's superior but the problem is with the switch.
There’s beauty in its simplicity and consistency. And yes: frozen up to 0°, then fluid up to 100°, then gas. Perfect 😘
Also a cm is 1/100 of a metre and a metre was defined as a distance of 1/10,000,000 from the equator to the North Pole, which says the distance from equator to the North Pole is 10 million metres, defined by the French in 1793.
Calorie is not metric. Joules are.
@@udavster I don't know. I know the system switched to joule, but I don't know whether that excludes calorie from metric because I don't know the exact definition of metric.
it will boil at sea level at 100 degree. Up high in Himalaya its more like 97-98 degree
Metric system seems pretty common in US schools,... I mean 9mm are very, very popular, I believe.
😂
dude lol
Now this is what I call:
Shots fired.
You killed it bruh
Lol
As an ex engineer I can use both but Metric is just soooooooo much easier. It just makes sense.
The shifty powers of 2 rock! Gallon
Well, humans have 10 fingers, and we do math based on 10s, so yes, it's only easy because it's natural (and better).
Sir you are not an Ex Engineer, you are an engineer as far as you live!! is a way of thinking !!
@dimitrios lianos I did my apprenticeship in sheet metal work. You can now do 95% of that trade with the push of a button. Got out of industry years ago when the credit crunch let to 2 redundancies in 6 months. Don't miss it.
you are not an engeeener.. you pretend to be, by used ANY non SI mesurements...
My wife left me because, she said, I was too European. I saw it coming from 1,6 kilometers away.
You mean 1,609344 kilometers away.
(2.54 * 12 * 3 * 1760 / 100000 = 1,609344 kilometers = exactly 1 statute mile)
@@wimahlers I am guessing you are single too :)
@@bartermens8219
Yes ... and I actually am European ;-)
@@wimahlers Me too, but never married. I just copied the joke from someone :) I was just joking around, I didn't mean anything by it.
@@bartermens8219
I know. It is funny. My response was just teasing sarcasm, amplifying the ridiculous imperial (or US customary units) system.
“In metric, one milliliter of water occupies one cubic centimeter, weighs one gram, and requires one calorie1 of energy to heat up by one degree centigrade-which is 1 percent of the difference between its freezing point and its boiling point. An amount of hydrogen weighing the same amount has exactly one mole of atoms in it. Whereas in the American system, the answer to ‘How much energy does it take to boil a room-temperature gallon of water?’ is ‘Go fuck yourself,’ because you can’t directly relate any of those quantities.” Wild Thing by Josh Bazell.
We in South Africa went metric in 1970. It was more exciting to have the speed limit at 120 than 70😂
made my day, thank you!
Huh, km/h is not metric! The metric velocity unit is m/s. 😂
@@dmitrykazakov2829 nah, that's base SI units 😂
@@dmitrykazakov2829 . Km/h is metric, just not in base SI units.
@@rebecca4680 Non-base SI units of duration are such as ms, ns, i.e. second multiplied by some power of ten. Hour is not a SI unit.
A couple of days ago, I saw a video where a number of acres was mentioned. I had no idea, how much of area this was, so I looked it up:
1 acre = 1 chain X 1 furlong.
I kept looking: 1 chain = 22 yards, 1 furlong = 10 chains = 220 yards = 660 feet.
So 1 acre = 4,848 square yards = 43,560 square feet which is roughly 4,047m² and 640 acres = 1 square mile.
The corresponding for agricultural space in metric would be the hectare. 1ha = 100m X 100m = 10,000m². 100ha = 1km²
Ask me again, which system is better.
1 acre = 4840 sq. yards (22 x 220), not 4848 sq. yards ... and I understand the frustration, many times we make errors in converting between different imperial units.
@@nathanoyeght The "8" was a typo. Thank you for noticing! So, at least 1 person read what I wrote.
I just tried to calculate the force of pressure of 3 gallons of water in a 3 square foot barrel. In PSI (pounds per inch)
@@mina_en_suiza Also, if you notice ... hectare is a compound word - hect(o) + are.
1 hectare = 100 ares.
1 are = 100 sq. meter.
Hectare is so commonly used, than people overlook that 'are' is the root word, and follows metric nomenclature.
@@nathanoyeght I knew, but didn't mention it because nobody really uses the are (except in crossword puzzles: "measurement unit for areas with two letters". In German it's "Ar", also "Hektar" ).
there are two kinds of countries... Those that use the metric system and those who lost a war to Vietnamese farmers
Didn't the frensch also lost against these Vietnam farmers 🙂
@@DSP16569 yea but france sucks
@@DSP16569 Yep, they caught a dose of "Dien Bien Flu". . . . . . . . . . . . . .
@@DSP16569 By an American betrayal in Dien Dien Phu. Frenchs was promised a nassive air shelling if the gathered the Viets....(What they ve done).
@@DSP16569 "didn't" and "lost", you must be French and English is your second language. Right?
For a country that rebelled against a monarch it is weird they want to keep measuring stuff in that monarch's feet.
Too dumb, lazy or stubborn to adjust. The American way.
Ikr, they should have embraced it with open arms.
I was just about to text same thing. Hate Britain soo much but keep their measure. But made their own gallon measure( 3.9 litres compared to 4.5 litres. Even as a kid in 70s I thought it weird
They didnt rebel against a monarch.
You dont understand, because youre ignorant of the facts.
the British colonists that rebelled didnt rebel because they hated a monarch.
@@deanblaze-h5e
they didn't hate Britain. The vast majority were British. George Washington fought for the British military.
They didnt make their own gallon, they simply chose which British gallon to use. They varied depending upon what you measured.
Why as a kid in the 70s didn't you find the answer out for yourself?
That man banging his head against the wall is me, as a Continental European, when I understood that my British colleagues could not divide by 10.
Weird they should definitely be able to since the only thing they way still use the imperial system widescale is for measuring distance and speed on roads. And schools definitely just use metric whenever it comes to physics or maths.
metric is taught in the UK in every school - we use imperial for some everyday things like milk, beer, and (perhaps the most annoyingly) roads but we generally get the best of both because a pint of beer is the correct amount of beer - i don't think your colleagues not being able to divide by 10 is so much to do with the fact that they're British (you never know though), anyone who can't divide by 10 probably has a learning disability so you should go easy on them lol
@@landmimes (as you wrote you use the Imperial for liquid measures) how much is 5 fl. oz + 5 fl. oz in gill? Well... according to the the Imperial system the answer to that question is BOTH 2 gill AND 2.5 gill (or 2 gill and 2 fl. oz). It depends if you're in one (UK) or another (USA) country 😜
As a European I always wondered how you measure something precisely in the imperial system....I mean, in metric you have millimeters, but an inch is 2.54 cm. So a millimeter is like what....0.03 inches??? How do you use a measuring tape with the imperial system on it when you want to measure millimeters? And what about rulers at school in geometry? It must be crazy....
Imperial rulers usually go down to a 16th of an inch, so pretty close to a millimeter. IN the end both systems are arbitrary because they were both made up by someone who said "yep, this is how I'll measure a meter" or kilogram or whatever. Then science has had to go back and find some constant that aligns with that measurement.
The "genius" of the metric system is everything works in tens and most people can do that maths, so long as everything COMES in tens. The issue is when you have 36 spans of 15.36 meters and you need to do the maths. Now everything isn't in tens, so you use a calculator. Funny enough we can program calculators to count in anything we want, tens are just easier...
I hope you’re not building rockets with that inches to centimetres conversion factor. You might want to edit it 😊 Cheers.
@@Bellas1717 Lol, no I'm not. I didn't remember correctly the conversion of inch to cm. So correction - one inch is 2.54 cm. IF I ever were to build a rocket, I would do so in the metric system only. ;-)
Well how do Americans measure small things like the grooves on a screw? The use thou, which are thousandths of an inch.
In the UK in the 60s, I was using a centre grinder to grind to a tolerance of plus or minus half a thousandth of an inch.
As a French, I’m proud one of our contribution to the world was the metric system. One of the few good things to come out of the Revolution
The french contribution to the metric system could have been huge, but they couldn't decide for words for the numbers 70-99
You guys have a decent histroy of how to deal with the rich/powerful too, don't forget that.
I'm French too and I know one of the reasons why metrics appeared... There were hundreds of measurement systems in the little French kingdom before our revolution - we could not manage with such a mess :D
Now can you please stop assigning gender to everyday objects?
@@MegaGandalf12This is the French language. Also in German (not the same :D ), Russian, Italian, etc. etc.
You have a mess of a quest, kid, so sad for you.
As a Canadian growing up under the metric system. But learning carpentry, from people that use imperial, i use a mixture of both. Like for example, i am 193cm tall, or 1.93m, or in imperial I am 6'4" for an easy conversion 1" is 2.54cm, 1kg is 2.2lb (rounded) things like that. Ive recently switched back over to 100% metric. It's just easier for me.
I was a union carpenter foreman at that time - it brings back memories with the first set of metric prints I ever built from. I had a gang of about 20 men and after the first couple of days I had enough with the costly mistakes, wasted time, and wasted lumber. That night I bought 20 metric only tapes and as the men came in the next morning asked for their old tapes as I was "gifting" them with a brand new one. Tool box meeting - laid down the law, end of mistakes. There was a lot of bitching but they were all Steady-Eddys' and didn't want to quit or get laid off. They eventually got used to it and eventually like it.
Canada is everything but metric in the trades. Good luck finding any metric nuts and bolts in hardware stores. It's such a pita.
To be fair, unless you're in Quebec or an immigrant to Canada, you'll have generally used feet/inches and pounds when referring to your own bodily measurements , so we're not quite as 'metric' as some people seem to think we are. While the majority of the other use cases tend to be metric, we're still actually a mixed system in a number of ways.
P.S. Forgot about Canadian (gridiron) football, which is a sport very closely related to the American version (both deriving from rugby), and both use yards for distance (though a Canadian field is 150 yards long [110 yards plus 2 end zones of 20 yards each] x 65 yards wide, thus midfield is the 55 yard line).
@@CanuckGod I am absolutely in favour metric (UK, and been in favour since 1972). But I am happy to refer to my weight in stones and lbs, simply because I know from experience what they equate to in general terms. The same with mph, because in general terms, I am familiar with my speed when I see it happening.
But if I want to calculate the precise length of something from the angle it makes with a vertical surface, using Imperial is absolutely insane. With metric, it is easy.
This is the issue. The people who are comfortable with Imperial usually don't need to have to do any maths with it. They just know approximations (or rote additions if buying groceries). Like a pound of carrots or potatoes at the grocery store. In that sense, units don't matter too much.
But when you're dealing cross border with the world, or trying to do very accurate calculations, they matter a lot. Especially when US Imperial is different to UK Imperial in some cases.
@@CanuckGod We also tend to measure distance in time rather than kilometers. A modern phenomena.
The same situation is with traffic signs. The USA has mostly signs with words whereas most of the world uses standardized signs also with specific shapes.
YES imagine China used traffic signs the American way and there was a single American visiting China, it would be a desaster, but in the US it’s fine because.
So true!
An interesting fact : European signs are this way because they were designed to be understandable by illiterate people (it was the 1930's after all)
Even today most signs are just pictograms. So you only need to learn a few words in the language of the country to understand the eventual written addition.
And even then most additions are very simple, giving weights or distances.
In the 1970s Germany changed from a „Halt“ to the „Stop“ sign.
@@maxbarko8717 Those changes were mostly to make it easier to drive around Europe. It's also the reason why we have this one yellow/white sign, a compromise with out neighbors.
I love that we all conveniently forget that it was Germans working for both the US & USSR space races
what else to expect? They had the first rocket program...
@@ft6637 indeed, but surprisingly few people below 30 are aware of it
It’s a strange and dangerous place we’re living in
@@JamesThomas-zl9er You mean over 30? The older generations were given nationalistic propaganda.
Nasa works in metric
base2 (binary) is natural for computers, base10 (decimal/metric) is natural for human brains, and Imperial is ... a mess
As far as we know the human brain has no bias towards a particular base. The preference for base 10 is societal/cultural and something that children have to acquire. This particular choice of base was probably influenced by having 10 fingers. But there have also been many cultures and there still are those that use a different base.
@@YellowBunny yup some culture had 12 as base if I remember correctly ancient Egyptians used 12,
amd probably that's why we have 24h and 60 minutes, 360 degrees
@@einkar4219 360 is a very neat number - can be divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 10, 12, etc :) there's also a system where a circle has 400 degrees, which can be divided by 2, 4, 8, 16 (or 2 to the power of 1, 2, 3, 4^^)
@@YellowBunny Celts made 20 their base. Remnants of this can be seen today in french numerals and galician-portuguese traditional measures.
@@YellowBunny True, in a binary system it would be best to use units that are double or half the amount of another unit, but since we already use a decimal system to count it just makes sense to use metric units.
I am pretty sure I heard some South African comedian say "Imperial system is so inefficient that even American drug dealers switched to metric."
What is quite funny is that many English words for measurements are actually... French. For instance, the British system is called: _avoirdupois_ , which literally means _good of weight_ (des avoirs de poids, en français moderne). A _pint_ is French, even though in modern French (pinte) it now means 1/2 litter. The same for _ounce_ , which is also French (once), _barrel_ which evolved from the French word _baril_ . We can add _gallon_ to the list as well and _cup_ of course. So when Americans complain that the metric system is _French_ , well their system is actually based on old French as well... Ironic no? YOU CANNOT ESCAPE US...
even worse, they use the outdated French system, the Americans can be said to be more "French" than the French. Tabernac!
40% of english words come from the french, and another 20% also have french roots but more ancient and obscure.
@@math9172 Yes of course, you are right. The Norman invasion was no small picnic and the damage to the English language is still very visible even today. French people usually think of English as an easy language, but the main reason is basically that it is pretty easy to come up with words in English. You take a French word, you modify its pronunciation to suit English ears and voilà, you are basically never out of words. Actually, it is also true for English speakers. Beware of faux-amis still...
d "easy" is because of the proximity with french. I agree it does help, but in my opinion the very simplistic grammar and rather freeform syntax is what truely makes english a rather simple language.
The only real difficulty of english is its thoroughly inconsistant pronounciation, which is a consequence of the many influences of the english language (french, german, latin).
@@math9172 English is actually a pretty complicated language. The tense system is the most complicated of all European languages and is quite confusing for most foreigners. I have been speaking English in a professional context for 30 years. I even lived in England for a year. I still have some issues to understand the distinction between preterit and present perfect. One of my colleague was working on a project that was financed by the American side of our company. He said in.a meeting: "We worked on this project for two months" and the project was stopped. It took several days to explain the confusion out. I'm actually a computational linguist by trade and I have implemented grammars for many languages such as French, Italian, English or Japanese (see Xerox Incremental Parser for papers on these grammars). English has a very strict word order compared to most European languages, which is due to its lack of gender and case. Furthermore, English is a highly lexicalised language. The grammar of English was four times larger than the one of French or of Spanish to account to all its specificities. It is very easy to speak broken English, but it is also quite easy to speak broken Spanish.
Oh, this ended up becoming really complicated really fast! Almost like the first time I tried to bake a cake the American way... 🥴😂
I totally messed up my Mongolian beef tonight because everything was in pounds and ounces and I just tried to wing it rather than googling the conversion. It was a disaster and the kids ended up having ham and cheese toasted 😂
"A cup? What kind of cup!?" 😅
@@sandyakabatteriehuhn D cup??
@@b.v.nielsen8714 it‘s you, Brigitte?
That's how the portions come out far too big.
Fun fact: The "tonne" being a barrel originally is a german thing too. "Tonne" is a german word for barrel / drum. Commonly still used in compound words like "regentonne" = "rainwater barrel"
A Danish Tønde=Tonne, is a messurement for area. So 1 tønde land = 14.000 kvadratalen = 0,55 hektar = 8 skæpper = 32 fjerdingkar = 96 album = 5.523,14 m² (1835: 5.516,10 m²).
Glad we went metric to.
Similar in Sweden, a barrel is a "tunna". In Swedish "regentonne" is called "regntunna".
"Tunnland" (which would be like "barrelland") is a measurement for area, which was basically how big area you could sow with one barrel of grain.
In Portuguese it happens as well. We have a word for "barrel", which is "tonel", and "tonelada" literally comes from "tonel". However that's actually a more archaic and ancient word - nowadays "barril" is used more.
Which is even more interesting is that "barril" is actually a Celtic word of origin, coming from "barr" (a piece of metal), which was then imported to Western Romance and also English. "Tonel" comes from Ancient French "tonel" (nowadays "tonneaux"), which is a Germanic cognate.
The British still use "tun" and "tundish" , barrel and funnel.
In french we used "Tonneaux" for ship displacement before the general use of Short(metric) and Long(imperial) tons. As you might have guess "Tonneau" means Barrel. That at one time a standard "Tonneau" (of wine of course) was equivalent to 1000 liters is any one guess :). I mean it was most likely a multiple of a set number of bootles :))!
If you're able to figure out USD 1,- from a handful of coins, you know the metric system. 'Nuff said.
True, we should have adopted the decimal system of weights and measures that came with our decimal money, the Jefferson decimal system. Coinage Weights and Measures Plan of 1790, look it over.
Impressive they havent done the same with coins.
"56 cents in 1 dollar" or something completely impossible.
@Frosty an even more impressive thing would be: 1$=56cents but 2$=87.849cents )))
Not to mention gigabytes, kilobytes and so on....
@@Mr1SaS ROFL
I didn't realise Americans understood sarcasm. You have exceeded my expectations.
I guess you do not watch much American TV
I attended a teacher’s college in 1975 in Australia. The country had just converted to the metric system . Our currency changed back in 1966. We were being taught the metric system at the same time as learning how to teach it to school children, because we hadn’t learned it ourselves in school
The most important reason why metric is the only scale worth using is that each unit of measure correleates to every other without any need for conversions. There is no need to try to solve different fractions when everything can be expressed in base 10 with far more precision.
It's really weird that America uses more Imperial metrics than Britain does now. Britain is mostly metric (excluding a few weird remnants like miles and yards) even weight is mostly done in KG now instead of Stones and Lbs (the last time I needed to use St and Lbs I was very young in primary school my doctor always does it in KGs)
Remember you're speaking of a country that needs to be told that coffee is hot and you don't put your dog in a microwave to dry it... So yeah they have to write things down
apart from miles , yards and chainage used on the UK railway , hands and furlongs in horse racing , carpenters / cabinet makers use feet and inches , knots in shipping , farmers use acres , pints in brewing / pubs , stones and pounds in weighing each other .....
@@moonshineboy A large part of which is why Britain made the insane decision known as Brexit.
Every friend of mine uses stone for weight, however, my grandson is weighed in kgs at the hospital.
The USA has never used Imperial. It uses US Customary Measures, which are basically the measures used before the British Empire redefined their weights and measures in 1824 and called it the Imperial System. Gallons and tons are quite different in the two systems.
In the UK we use both lol. But the metric is definitely used more nowadays tbh. I was born in 2003 and I only use feet and inches for height and miles for distance. But I also use cm for height too as do most people I know and i never learnt to convert between the two, I was taught the difference when I was very young but not drilled. There really is a difference between generations because for example I’ll use kg and cms while my mum would use stone and inches and we both have no idea what we’re talking about 😂
I’ve noticed more and more guys weigh themselves in KG (including me). At least in my experience, women love Stone Age measurements still.
I've heard of inches, feet, miles, ounce (even though i am confused between the 2 types) and stuff but stones are killing me. That just seems so funny as a measurement. I live in continental Europe.
@@bencze465 it’s yet another national embarrassment!
Haha I'm German and my dad is English. I have no clue of stones etc. So when his Wii asked me what my hight is I decided on a small number. Well.. the balance board did my weight so my mii ended up being a huge tiny blob and it kept saying how well I'm doing the exercises and I couldn't stop laughing
Living in NI currently and the stone thing is so damn confusing 😅
To switch to metric, America will probably have to do what Canada has been doing. We started off with imperial. When my dad was going to school, schools were teaching both metric and imperial, and now he’s the only member of my family who knows the conversion between °C and °F off the top of his head. When I was going to school, I was only taught metric. Yet as many Canadians do, I still use the systems relatively interchangeably. I almost exclusively measure my own body in imperial, using feet, pounds, and inches. However, I think of distance, elevation, temperature, and speed in metric, along with any more sophisticated measurements, and seeing imperial units in a university physics class actually makes me uncomfortable. I have been making an effort to slowly transfer my brain over to using metric entirely. Using entirely metric makes conversions between different metric units easy. Want to convert km/h to m/s? The use for learning algebra in high school finally makes sense! Cancel out hours with the equivalent value in seconds, and cancel out kilometres with the equivalent value in metres.
10km/h x (1000m)/(1km) = 10000m/h
10000m/h x (1h)/(3600s) = 2.778m/s
Or in short terms, 1m/s = 3.6km/h
This is admittedly one conversion I think I will always need a calculator for, but at least it’s relatively easy to memorize what number you need to multiply or divide one value by to get the other.
The weirdest thing I’ve seen so far in physics is that some constants such as the ideal gas constant or universal gas constant have values expressed in two different sets of units. I don’t even remember the units themselves off the top of my head, but it can either have a value of 8.314 or 0.08206, and you have to be careful about which one you use depending on what you’re trying to calculate. Most values related to gases in physics are calculated using the 8.314 value. However, some calculations involving gases in chemistry are done using the 0.08206 value.
I recently switched to the 24 hour clock so now I'm fully metric. I have never been outside the US but I have friends in Canada. Metric may not be helpful when I talk to people in person but I do a lot of tech stuff so it's helpful for what I do. Game dev software measures distance in metres & so does Subnautica. It would be a pain in the ass doing tech stuff with imperial units.
Your son just wanted to complain about the fact, that he has to learn about both systems and has to do a lot of "conversion stuff" in about 10 years at school... But if that's the only complaint he has, you're doing a geat job as parents....👍 On the other hand, if he becomes an engineer, he will bang his head against every firm structure, he has constructed an therefore had to convert between imperial and metric....😖
Liberia was founded by former black slaves from the U.S. and the Caribbean- it’s not a coincidence that the flag is so similar.
When it comes to lenght measurments, its just SO MUCH more convenient and EASIER to use barleycorns, ells, shackles, ropes, cables, furlongs, hands, sticks, nails, inches, fingers, poppyseeds, cubits, skeins, leagues, shaftments, fathoms, picas, spindles, yards, rods, poles, perches, links, spans, miles, roman miles, nautical miles, twips, points, Gunter's chains, paces, foots and spans.
Its just so intuitive and easy to use compared to MM, CM, M and KM
(sarcasm)
Poppyseeds?
That's a weight unit, isn't it? Not a length unit.
Unless I'm mistaken.
Football Fields ?
I am a Civil Engineer in Greece and I have seen the superiority of
the Metric System in practice.
The good thing is that in all Technical Universities is US teaching
both systems but the most important is, the futures Engineers can
see clearly the advantages of the Metric System.
So, maybe in 30 or 40 years most of people in US maybe will use
the Metric System.
Yeah. I'm using metric. But lets see, in USA, a foot is how many inches, a dozen? Silly. And 4 dozens is what, 38? Crazy math! 52??? Crazy muricans.
The metric system has been used in STEM since forever but the average American still uses imperial units 🤷♂️
@@_blank-_ strange. That is not an argument, that a foot in length is about as big as my own foot. Then what is next? A mile is how long? Do i hear it? As long as what? As nothing! And you still talk about doing 90 mph on a highway haha. And why in the world you would say a dozen??? And 3 dozens is 42 pieces, heh, that is really silly. Counter intuitive as f.
I'm Australian and obtained my Commercial Pilots Licence in 1984 - at that time we were constantly converting Gallons to Litres, ensuring check whether the initial figure was Imperial gallons or U.S. Gallons (all aircraft documentation for U.S. built aircraft was in U.S. measurements) and pounds to kilograms etc. To this day, as far as I am aware, vertical separation is measured in Feet whilst lateral separation is measured in Metres. Also, as air density affects engine performance and density changes with temperature we used a calculation basis of 1.98 degrees drop in temperature per 1,000 feet of increase in elevation. All good fun. (oh, and we didn't have I-pads or the Interweb back then to make it simpler/easier/quicker - 90% of us just memorised the conversion factors).
I work in Aeronautics and we have to deal with both units because of these guys.
You only have to deal with metric, because the Imperial units are based on PSI metric units anyway
American currency is metric so the concept can't be difficult for them. They had a genuine gripe previous to our change over to decimal but the basics of metric can't be too alien, surely.
They use a lots of credit/debit card, the do not know even ho to count to 10
Understanding isn't the problem. We learn both in school anyways, since decades ago. Nowadays you can just put "32 cm in in" in search engines and get an answer (without even looking at the search results, even on the big non-google ones).
Apparently in Germany (according to a video) they take the kitchen stuff when they move. If you're the only one not doing it, sucks for you. Same for measurements.
If a certain application is using one type of measurements, and you want to be weird and use something less compatible, you just made it more difficult and you're the odd one out.
Other ways Americans use metric, some of which they know, others they don't:
1) When drugs are seized, they're routinely measured in kilograms.
2) Soda is often sold in 2 liter bottles (the big ones).
3) Medicine dosage via syringe is given in CCs... a 'cubic centimeter'.
Look at any website for a USA grocery store and it shows the composition of the food on sale. The composition (fat, carbohydrate, sugar, etc.) is shown in grams and sometimes the percentage (of the metric weight) but the package size is ounces! That really is screwed up.
The meter was originally defined by the French as a fraction of the Earth's roundtrip at the equator and the kilogram as a piece of metal they kept in a vacuum. But then scientists have reconverted all units to fractions of universal constants that aliens could be able to figure out even if they've never seen Earth nor got a copy of the metal piece.
"My car can tell me how far I can go"
I am pretty sure your car gives you a rough estimate, does not have to take into account the total weight of the vehicle and changing air density (on which both the ground speed and the fuel consumption depend), and the worst that can happen if that estimate is wrong, you have to stop halfway through a highway and take a long walk to and from the nearest gas station.
Planes... Kind of don't have that option.
Could it be done? Probably. But as my grandfather once said, "The more complicated the system, the more elements it has, and the bigger the chance of something breaking".
You are correct that it is rough estimate, but that rough estimate is really precise. For starters, it just takes your fuel input and knows how much is in tank, averages it over 15minutes and presumes that you have same tempo. it iterates around that number every 1minute cycle. It is damn precise and self correcting system.
Fun fact, in Sweden we have something called a "Scandinavian mile", which is basically just an old term used for the measurement of 10 kilometers, it's still used today though so don't be confused if a Norwegian, Swede or Finnish person gives you direction, they're still talking about metric measurements.
there's still nautical mile, and knot in sailing which is weird to me as they seem to be the only weird units that so many countries use... at least the only somewhat 'mainstream' ones i heard about
so sic scandinavian miles would be 60 km?
@@bencze465 and the nautical mile is (or better was originally) defined as 1/60th of a degree of latitude, later then defined to be exactly 1852 meters
We call it "en dansk mil" because you know, the rest of you used to belong to us ;) 😅
@@sirhenryvonvandings Yeah, 6 Scandinavian miles are 60 kilometres.
The Air Canada plane that ran out of fuel did have a fuel computer onboard. It was broken that day and a miscommunication meant the maintenance crew also switched off the backup so the ground crew had to manually calculate the fuel requirements. They were supposed to pick up a replacement part for the computer at their destination.
Electronic Engineer here. Historical pin spacing on electronic components is 1/10th of an inch. SMD passives are specified in mm. So we must use both systems unfortunately.
Cad software for electronics (cae) do support working with both and switching system on the fly. The need to shift system while designing is so frequent that the software I use dedicated the ALT key to temporary using the other system for numerical inputs, grid snaps and everything.
Sometimes you have a screw terminal you can't tell even with caliper if it's 5.00mm pitch or 5.08mm pitch (2/10th of an inch). Both kind are vastly used in the industry. It can insert in the wrong pitched receptacles but not the best fit, but you can't really tell from insertion force what it is: wrong pitch or correct pitch and tight fit.
It drives you crazy.
An M14 screw fits into a 5/8", but 5/8" is 15.875 mm, which is closer to 16mm. But the metric and imperial also have different standard spacings, with the metric being 1mm and imperial, well... larger. So to mix the 2, you have to think about how long will the screwing be to have a tight fix. If you need just a few turns, an M16 can be used in a 5/8", but if you need to go deeper, a rarer M15 is needed, or a common M14. If you need a very deep screwing, then you need to import the exact match. It's so frustrating to work with anything that has been touched by US manufacturing.
I think a great, easy place to start the switch to metric would be with groceries etc. Make it mandatory for manufacturers to label weight and volume in metric units on their products.
Of course first by having both units, then maybe metric in a bigger font and then slowly getting rid of the imperial units.
All packages food in supermarkets in US have labels with both metric and imperial measurements. The metric units on products is required by law.
People would riot.
It's funny because it was Europeans that invented the imperial system, but then redefined while murica the land of the free keeps using the IMPERIAL units. You know, the units of the empire they fought to gain independence from.
every single person in the world understands counting 1 to 10 no matter what language is spoken, this is what makes Metric the obvious choice.
i see someone doesn't know some languages dont have base 10.
Freaking French has something to do with base 20 and they were the pioneers on this thing
even the folk that create the standard units of measure for the Imperial system base it off of metric PSI units of measure, so..
@@echinas0908 nobody likes the french so yeah
What is there not to understand. You have 100 cents to 1 dollar and you could have $1K (1000 Dollars or 1 Kilodollar). You have 1000 millimeter or 100 centimeter to 1 meter and 1000 meter to 1 kilometer. Freezing point of water is 0 centigrade and boiling point of water is 100 centigrade (Celsius). 1 cubic meter contain 1000 liter of water, and so 1 liter of water is the same as 1000 grams, or 1 kilogram, 1000 kilos, equals 1 kiloton. You have all your calculations in one system. If you can count 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 and 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 and 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000, you will understand the metric. I am 1,80 m high (1 meter and 80 centimeter). My wight is 87,3 Kg (87 Kilograms and 300 grams) and I am sipping to a 33 cl (centi liters) small Coke. There are schilling 12 degrades outside but comfortable inside on the other side of 20 - here in Germany. I do not understand why US choose to stand outside this universal and simple measurement system that the whole world is using.
I grew up in the UK being familiar with and using both systems, which one I use today depends on how precise I need to be. If necessary, I can convert in my head. 1 mile = 1.61 kilometres.1 inch = 25.4 mm. Fahrenheit to Celsius, subtract 32 and multiply by 5/9
1 mile = 1,609344 kilometre. Be precise :P
I remember the day we switched to metric here in Australia, I was very young and struggling with getting my head around the imperial system, the teacher walked in the classroom and said forget everything I taught you we have changed the system and I thought to myself thank god lol.
Metric system is just that simple and consistent
The whole idea of the Base Units is that you can hand over the recipe how to built the measurement tool instead of handing over an actual tool to compare to. The second for instance was originally defined as the 86400th part of a solar day. But more precise measurements have shown that not all days (as the time passing between two noons) have the same length. Thus, another natural clock was searched for, and finally, Science settled on a specific hyperfine change in the electron orbits around a Caesium-137 atom. Similar for the meter: originally, it was defined as the 10,000,000th of the distance between the Northpole and the Equator, and a stick was made of that length. Later, it was found out that the stick was 2 millimeter off and too short. Now the meter is defined via the speed of light in a vacuum - a fundamental natural constant. Mass was always a problem, as Gravity is comparatively weak, and you need a probe the size of the Earth to pull on a kilogram of mass with measurable force (literally. Earth and a kilogram of mass pull on each other with a force of 9.81 Newton.) Thus, we know the size of Newton's Constant only for about 4 to 5 digits, very imprecise compared for instance to the strength of the Electromagnetic Force, which we know down to 18 digits at least. Hence, for about 200 years, Science had to do with a lump of metal, which was defined to have 1 kg of mass. (And then, it was noticed, that the lump slowly and steadily loses mass, but the copies sent out to the different nations don't.)
I confess to a certain sadistic attitude/pleasure when dealing with "superior" Americans at business conferences over the years when the subject of gasoline and prices came up, especially when in Canada. Once I got going explaining metric to US measures to Imperial(UK) measures and then converting currencies and distances at the same time, their eyes would be glazed over. Oddly, they tended to stay away from me after that leaving the more sensible Americans to chat with and they tended to be quite lovely folks.
The airplane story mentioned at 5:42 is nicknamed the Gimli Glider. I recommend looking it up; there are a number of videos on TH-cam on it. The story is a bit more nuanced than what is mentioned in the video (understandably), but the differences between imperial and metric definitely played a big part in it.
One funny conversion thing I noticed when I (once again) heard someone say they always grow couple centimeters when they goto NHL. Referring to Finnish players who make it to the NHL. And in their stats they indeed gain a centimeter or two. And I once calculated and realised that the NHL converts their official metric system measurements into imperial for their official NHL stats, but when NHL stat page(as an example) shows their length in metric it is converted from the rounded (up) conversion to imperial. So they don't use the original measurements they convert the original metric into imperial -> round it up to feets and inches -> then convert it back to metric -> thus they "gain" a centimeter after going to the NHL.
To anyone saying "it's so much better because 1000 meters is a kilometer," etc, repeat after me: powers of 10 prefixes are not per se different units.
There are reasons SI units are better than US Customary units. None of those reasons have to do with the specific arbitrary values chosen at the time of their inception (and yes, they were arbitrary), nor a shorthand for order of magnitude that could be (and is) applied to any sort of measurement system. The main advantage is that their current definitions can be experimentally derived in a laboratory That's why US Customary units are already legally defined in terms of SI units.
Best part of this video was JACE'S appearance!!!
Fun fact: Germany used to have "meilen / miles" as units ... and BEFORE UNIFICATION IN 1871 ... there were loads of different miles that were sometimes significantly different. We realised this ... and for this reason INVENTED THE NORM!
You mean the DIN norm that was then blatantly copied into the international ISO norm. Not the metric system itself, which was practically invented by the french.
It's said that the English conception that Napoleon was a short guy is based on that the English and French used a different definition of the inch
In Sweden we still use "mil", but because the original was so arbitrary we just defined it as 10 kilometers. 😁
6:30 That happened shortly after the conversion of air canada to the metric system, therefore the pilots were not experienced in the conversion (and they did not have computers to help with the calculation). Also, the meassuring system within the plane was broken and the pilots decided to fly anyways. Otherwise they would have landed normally after noticing that they were low on fuel early on. So, there was much more involved than an antiquated system of measurement.
If big things fail spectacularly a lot of small things didn't work before and a lot of people made decisions which in summ lead to the result.
That's on Air Canada for not following procedure and for the pilots for making a very irresponsible decision. It's a set rule within aviation that if a main computer fault is present the plane does NOT fly. Only minor computer faults like a confirmed incorrect message being stuck on screen for example is okay to fly with if checked. But if the computer isn't getting the fuel readout from the tanks and the FMC/MCDU didn't flag up an issue with the FLTPLN length and TRIP FUEL amount then that plane was not airworthy.
yeah, the Gimli Glider incident (Air Canada flight 143)
@@lewismackay9533The A320 in the video was illustration material. The incident happened in 1983, so not an A320 but a 767-200.
Check the wikipedia article of the "Gimli Glider", the technical problem was a sensor, not the computer.
The FMC only worked with entered data as the sensor was inop.
What is even worse, is the measurement used to describe the thickness of wires. In the metric system we just use it like this "this wire is 1mm in diameter", which is easily measurable with a caliper gauge. Not so in America: The (nearly) same wire according to AWG will be described as "how often the wire is pulled through thinning holes, in this case 18. I said nearly same wire, because an 18G (AWG) wire reflects to a wire with a cross section of 1mm², which has a diameter of 1.024 mm
RE the Air Canada crash and your question: “these guys just happened to be there?”
It’s a wild story. Where they landed was an old Air Base near Gimli. Since the base was abandoned, the runway was used for Drag Racing, and there were people and cars literally on the runway who had to scramble when they realized it was trying to land.
Look up “Gimli Glider”for more information
The co pilot was a former royal canadian Air force pilot who landed at Gimli Air Force base back in his military career who remembered where it was located
And yes it was a converted drag track at the time
The captain was an expirenced glider pilot who knew how to land an aircraft with no power in fact he used a known glider landing tactic known as a side slip to slow the plane enough to land...
A crazy coiendence that saved everyone on board.... everybody got crazy lucky that day
When I was in my teens out country switched from our old currency to the Euro. It took a while to get used to it, but it is nowhere near as a pain as some people in the US make it out to be to switch to metric. I'm into knives, and most of the media coverage is in inches and ounces... I've gotten used to that too. It really only takes a few years to make a full switch.
Few years is a lot of time though
@@VoidCosmonaut It's really not as bad as it sounds. And I'm usually a person that's averse to change.
I lowkey believe the reason the average education level of the US is so low is because of Imperial system. It really kills the joy of learning when freezing temperature is 32° not 0°.
And boiling water is 212°F instead of 100°C...
Yep, you got us. Everyone in America is stupid because our temperatures have different numbers.
This is like asking a scientist if $1 is more useful than $100 if found on a street.
Well, the origin of the meter and kg are still the chunk of steel, and the scratches on the iron bar in Paris, but are now expressed in physical constants that in principle you could determine anywhere.
Loved the cute baby interruption lol
Also, here in NZ, while we use the metric system, and have done my whole life, it's still commonplace for people to talk about humans height in feet and inches.
Yeah, it's often fun when creators leave in the little human touches.
That was one seriously tall baby though.
Aye nice to see another kiwi in the comments! And yeah most people know their height in both metric and imperial, for example Im 180cm or 5ft 11in
Brilliant. Yeah I remember doing decimal calculations in 1973
It’s much easier 🇦🇺
I'm sure that someone else said this but, weight is a force and mass measures inertia
Weight is the result of a force applied to a mass.
When I arrived in California from France for the first time, that was in August, I was 18, and watched the weather report on TV for the first time there, I thought the end of the world had come, or at least, my world: 95° in Sacramento, 98° in Los Angeles, and (only) 88° in San Francisco ... What's happening here?, I should be roasting by now!!!! What's wrong? I had just totally forgotten that you guys used Fahrenheits, silly me. I think I will stick to my good old metric Celsius :), it's more reassuring 🙂
543 : The "Gimli Glider" was a fascinating near catastrophe averted by the fact that a) The aircraft's Captain was an experienced glider pilot, and b) the First Officer was a former Royal Canadian AirForce pilot who knew of a decommissioned airfield in the vicinity when they ran out of fuel. The airfield had been converted into a dragstrip and so yes, there were people nearby when the aircraft made an emergency landing; all the car enthusiasts and their families. In fact two young boys were frightened off the airfield/dragstrip when the aircraft came down. Yes, there _should_ have been a computer to warn the flight crew of the fuel shortage, but it was out of service at the time - just one of those things. There have been some docu-drama recreations of the event that are worth watching.
Gets even more confusing when you realise that the US Customary System also differs from the traditional Imperial System in a few ways.
For example, a US Gallon (3785ml) is about 20% smaller than an Imperial Gallon (4546ml)
Bananas (imperial system) are fine if you deal with technologiy on the level of the amish. At a higher level you trip yourself with bananas.
I remember as a kid switching from imperial to metric. It wasn't hard and was seamless. Strangely though, we still ask how many pounds a baby is when it's born.
Ok but where are you from?
16:00 imagine earth as a country, and current countries as one person in the country - only 3 of 195 people understand imperial system of measurements
The USA uses US Customary Measures, not Imperial.
Due to their histories, I suspect Liberia also uses US Customary Measures, but Myanmar would actually use Imperial.
This is why Liberia's flag looks familiar:
"In 1816, a group of white Americans founded the American Colonization Society (ACS) to deal with the “problem” of the growing number of free blacks in the United States by resettling them in Africa. The resulting state of Liberia would become the second (after Haiti) black republic in the world at that time."
So basically they wanted to send the freed slaves back to Africa.
Celsius is more intuitive than Fahrenheit, as well: 0 - water freezing point, 100 - water boiling point.
We use both in the UK. Miles on the roads, height in feet and inches.
Petrol by litre but miles per gallon 🤔
Mish mash to say the least, road works 200 yards ahead etc, do young drivers even know the imperial system anymore, probably to some point l guess?
You still have cousin marrying family as the head of the state. That's why.
@@glennlingard7851 I mean, yard = meter for me.
Not exactly but for daily life mostly good enough.
@@Londronable Yes, I use them interchangeably for general use.
First person reacting to this topic that acknowledges the difference between systems and personal use of units. Love it! Americans were using metric since before all of this - the trading superpower that US became would not be possible using imperial system. Units and conversions happen all the time inside even a single system. What makes US unique is the denial required to think that everyone else is converting from your units and not your own country converting from everyone else's. This has been a lie since 19th century and only got more evident since. It was one of the smartest political ideas that turned US into a superpower, yet the most Nationalistic members often degrade it in favor of denial.
I think we can make this whole "Foot" idea even better.
Why use square feet when a foot also has an surface area. And why use cubic feet when feet have volume?
So we keep feet for length, we use feet for area, and use feet for volume.
I'm a US citizen born and raised and I'm an industrial designer, I use both the metric system and the imperial system, but never together, though I could I know how to convert between the two, but it just makes more sense to stick to one for a project. If someone says they want something designed within a certain number of inches or feet I use the imperial system, if someone wants something designed within a certain number of centimeters or meters I use the metric system. But as far as cooking goes, I'm imperial all the way.
imperial=outdated and gey
Don't you use US Customary Measures?
When you're cooking, remember that the Imperial pint is 1¼ US pints if you're following a UK recipe.
@@hypsyzygy506yes, I cook using US measurements, thanks for the info, I didn't know there was a difference between US pints and UK pints.
Italian, one of my boggest problem playing d&d is having to deal with the imperial system 😂
I love your videos 😊👍 I am from Europe/Switzerland and it's funny to watch what americans think about us. so many things i did not notice because i thought we are so similiar. But i also have to say i didn't see what our diffrences are. and yes, the metric system ist far more practical and better. 1 m is 10 dm. 10 dm are 100 cm. 100 cm are 1000 mm. And we have tricks to make it easy to use for everyday. we do not say someone is 1.75 m tall. We just say 175 (one seventy-five) and everyone knows it is in centimeters. or for the body weight we just say 75 kilos (everyone knows it is not kilometers) and not 75 kilogramms or 75'000 gramms.
The circumference of the earth is approx. 42,000 km. We describe the circumference of the earth as a circle with a total of 360°. Each degree is divided into 60 arcminutes. One arcminute consists of 60 arcseconds. One arcsecond corresponds to one nautical mile. A nautical mile consists of 2000 yards. One yard consists of three feet. One foot is 12 inches. So there is a direct relationship between the inch and the circumference of the earth and this is only of interest to sailors.
Both Imperial and US Customary Measures are _defined_ in metric units.
The metric system was one of the greatest archievments of mankind.
As a Canadian, I'm 129lbs, 5'7".
I've never weighed things in metric, but I use metric in everything else.
Although sometimes I use feet because it's easy to measure with feet.
Things like Fahrenheit and miles confuse me.
Theoretically, US runs on metric system, but society uses imperial
The US is just fiercely loyal to its imperial legacy.
Thank you - you were a good sport when it came to your 'chosen' method of measure. Yes it was pretty tongue in cheek but when you analyze the origin of the Imperial System - it is pretty funny. Whilst I adore Mythbusters, it always annoyed me when they used different measures, coz I always thought they would be more enlightened, and would have used Metric - for accuracy. But they were Americans, appealing to a mostly American audience - so there's that! Cheers mate from Australia.
G'day Ryan,
When Americans whinge about Metric being too hard I like to ask them "🤔so how do you count your money?"
It was awesome that he also mentioned that Imperial Measure is actually based on Metric too, none of the Freedum Unit Whingers I have conversed with have know this or that Imperial like the English Lanuage is not a USA Invention🤦♂.
When other people whine about the Imperial system, I ask, so how do you count your time?
The Act that gave us our decimal money also had decimal weights and measures as well, written by Thomas Jefferson himself. True Freedom Units!
Jefferson's foot is pretty close to 1 light-nanosecond, meaning a quantum version of the Jefferson decimal system could just define the speed of light to be 1 billion Jefferson feet per second, then build the system up from there.
The USA has never used Imperial measures anyway.
@@hypsyzygy506 So the Day America was change from UK to it's Own Government the new Government threw out all Measures being used & implemented a whole new system ???
For example- bottled water in usa 16.9 oz is 0.5 liter in metric.
33.8 oz bottle is 1 liter.
1 liter of cold water has mass of 1 kilogram .
Water freezes below zero degrees celsius and boils at 100 deg celsius.
Espcially funny because the metric system is used more often than you might think:
- Engine Displacement (Liters)
- Bullet Sizes (Millimeters)
- Lenses (Millimeter)
- Food (Grams, not ounces) 🙂
There are probably a lot more. So, US people, don't be scared, you're almost there :D
Money as well.
Never fear ,Ryan I'm English and still prefer and use the imperial system. Mind you, I'm 70yrs old. 🤣 🤣
I'm a little under 30 years your junior, and have a preference for Imperial when I am estimating and visualising.
Bought up in an education system that taught both, and constantly drummed conversion between the various systems into our young minds. Every project I undertake is measured in metric, and I find measuring and working in Imperial units tiring and stressful. I simply cannot, however, look at something and estimate what it measures in metric. I weigh things in grams and kilogrammes, but I cannot make sense of my body weight unless it is in stone and pounds (mind you, I cannot make sense of the US method of body weight in pounds, and have to divide it up into stones). On the other hand, I cannot make sense of ingredients in a recipe unless they are in grams.
I cannot gauge how long a journey is, in my mind, unless it is in miles. Interestingly, however, I would welcome changing the road network too metric. As long as I can continue to order my milk and bread in pints, I'll be happy...
@Damion Lee pretty much think as you do, in regard to body weight and miles. Pints too.
Am on your side lone reader 🙂
@@lonereader2993, enlighten me. 😊 If you put one pound of gold and one pound of cotton on a balance scale, what would it show…? 🤔
@@solna7214 equality. A pound is a pound.
New Zealand converted to metric in 1973, when I was working as a land surveyor. Land measurement never used feet here though, it used chains and links(1 chain is 66 feet, 100 links in a chain). Metric dramatically simplified our world and I'm sure reduced mistakes. But, having said that, I do still love the 'character' of the imperial system on which my education was based. I have a great memory for numbers so Imperial made me feel cleverer than other kids at school. Imperial has its own measure for just about every activity. For example, horse racing is in furlongs, a furlong being 220 yards, or 1/8 mile. Water depth is fathoms (6 feet). I did once own a 1996 Chevy car, and I was surprised to find the fasteners were metric. So yes, Metric is the world standard and it's time the US moved over, but lets remember the character filled Imperial system....for a while anyway.
Another extraordinary French invention of the revolution.
used and invented in France since 1790.
Speaking as an Englishman of a certain age who grew up with both systems:
Horses for courses - I would suggest that for any meaningful measurement or calculation the metric system is far superior. However, the imperial system tends to make more day-to-day sense and has greater flexibility in partitioning of whole amounts.
I use metric for nearly everything. But will use imperial when considering human-scale measurements, or for divvying up.
Given both systems are fully functional, the most important thing is not to mix them up. (NASA!) Also a lack of familiarity is a common source of errors - stick with what you know best, but be sure you understand both systems.
Metric is easier as it's all based on factors of 10, and the various units are also linked, like 1 litre of water weighs 1 kg. I'm an electronics and radio engineer and in those fields everything is metric - Hz, kHz, MHz etc, wavelengths are in metres (can you imagine Radio One being 'The happy sound on 270 yards!'? But most of us in the UK still estimate people's heights in feet and inches, still drive miles and we buy a 55-inch TV. Most of my generation still use both in everyday life.
"it rained today, the rain amounted to 10mm".
You immediately know that it's 10 liters pwr m², or 10kg.
How many pounds is 1 inch of rain per sq.ft.? You can surely calculate it, but why bother when there's the metric system.
I vividly recall the time when Canada officially adopted the metric system over the Imperial system. It took minimal effort as the whole system is based on multiples of 10. For example, a hectare is 100 metres x 100 metres or 10,000 square metres whereas an acre is 43,560 square feet (208.71032 feet squared. ) or 4840 sq. yards, or 160 sq. rods. There is also a relationship between units : 1 millilitre of water occupies 1 cubic centimetre and weighs 1 gram. Re. the Air Canada plane (the Gimli Glider) that ran out of fuel due to a conversion error - check out this You Tube :
th-cam.com/video/9wnja3h70DM/w-d-xo.html
As an engineer i can explain - please switch to metric assap.! Pound per square inch for pressure - unbelievable and stupid. Thats an example. Same with temperature. Most difficult- the imperial units are not 10th or 100/100/1000 fold of units. 12" =1 foot. Shocking to handle it. With Dollar and pound USand UK did it in the past. Both values should be shown in parallel for approx. 20y. Than everbody got it. It needs a will to change. I guess this is the issue.
3:19 "That a miracle that thing didn't blow up" it blow up
The reason Liberia's flag looks like a lite version of the USA flag, is because it was founded as a US colony intended to be a refuge for former USA slaves who were offered by the US government to migrate back to Africa, their ancestral homeland. There were boats of people going over, trying to have a crack at a brand spanking new country, made by black people, in Africa. They later declared independence, but it did in fact start out as a colony of the United States.
The metric system is better than the USA's old British-based system, since just about everyone else in the world uses it. The problem is that the USA is not only one federal government. You would have to get 50 state governments go along with a total switch to metric, and private industry also to endorse the change, something very difficult to do.