Wait, no, please convince my countryfolk to metricate. I’m an engineer and desperately want to be able to design things in metric. It’s so much better but the average American doesn’t know a meter from a hole in their ass
But they do know litres, because the big soft drink bottles are sold in litres. They know grams if they do drugs or bake. They know prefixes like Mega, Giga and Tera if they are into computers, and they know about “kilo” if they pay an electrical bill. If they’re into military stuff, they know about “clicks”, which are actually… kilometers.
So weird phenomenon actually, because our military is fully metricated, you wind up with some of the most die hard American exceptionalist/American nationalist types fully using metric and 24 hour time. A friend was raised in a household like that where they just didn’t use US customary at home because the military doesn’t.
We’re all taught a lot of the basics in school. And yeah we have an instinctive idea of what 2L looks like. Drug users know grams, as do some bakers (a lot of baking is still done by volume here). And other than that I’d say maybe a quarter of Americans know that a meter is kinda close to a yard. Maybe 5% (may be overestimating tbh) know that a liter of water is a kilogram.
Slowly but surely though more things are being roundish numbers in metric here (like 325 mL/12.9 fluid ounces) and I think that’s a vital component of the move to metric. We are actually headed there, we’re just slower than the UK and Canada.
Yeah, that’s funny because the hoo-rah American Exceptionalist types are otherwise very conservative and dislike anything foreign, but they also adore the military, and the military has to be practical, and traditional units are so not practical.
I would guess that in time the US will adopt metric – it will happen much faster if the American Century ends and other countries become more powerful. Since almost everywhere else is mostly metric, the US won’t be able to go it alone anymore.
Normalize it. Use meters and kilograms on your own even before legislation. Convince others to use it. Push back the storm. If a handful of people in your town use it then it goes from something that nobody uses to a thing that a few people (and the rest of the world) use. Be the change you want to see.
Wait, no, please convince my countryfolk to metricate. I’m an engineer and desperately want to be able to design things in metric. It’s so much better but the average American doesn’t know a meter from a hole in their ass
But they do know litres, because the big soft drink bottles are sold in litres. They know grams if they do drugs or bake. They know prefixes like Mega, Giga and Tera if they are into computers, and they know about “kilo” if they pay an electrical bill. If they’re into military stuff, they know about “clicks”, which are actually… kilometers.
I think it’s slowly creeping in.
So weird phenomenon actually, because our military is fully metricated, you wind up with some of the most die hard American exceptionalist/American nationalist types fully using metric and 24 hour time. A friend was raised in a household like that where they just didn’t use US customary at home because the military doesn’t.
We’re all taught a lot of the basics in school. And yeah we have an instinctive idea of what 2L looks like. Drug users know grams, as do some bakers (a lot of baking is still done by volume here). And other than that I’d say maybe a quarter of Americans know that a meter is kinda close to a yard. Maybe 5% (may be overestimating tbh) know that a liter of water is a kilogram.
Slowly but surely though more things are being roundish numbers in metric here (like 325 mL/12.9 fluid ounces) and I think that’s a vital component of the move to metric. We are actually headed there, we’re just slower than the UK and Canada.
Yeah, that’s funny because the hoo-rah American Exceptionalist types are otherwise very conservative and dislike anything foreign, but they also adore the military, and the military has to be practical, and traditional units are so not practical.
I would guess that in time the US will adopt metric – it will happen much faster if the American Century ends and other countries become more powerful. Since almost everywhere else is mostly metric, the US won’t be able to go it alone anymore.
Normalize it. Use meters and kilograms on your own even before legislation. Convince others to use it. Push back the storm. If a handful of people in your town use it then it goes from something that nobody uses to a thing that a few people (and the rest of the world) use. Be the change you want to see.