[Improve Content] Please be a bit more international

Hi Ben,

Now as to why America has been so slow to adopt it?  Easy.  Those
with money do not want their factories having to spend all that cash
re-tooling (especially auto-makers). 

To play devils advocate, if profit is the engine that drives
management and management decisions, and given the old adage that ‘we
Americans’ are losing a fortune by not switching to metrics, wouldn’t
the statement that you made be untrue not to mention somewhat
foolish?

I think that the problem is reeducating the educators along with
government tax relief and education incentives to both industry and
individual craftsmen to help defray the fear and the cost of the
enforced change over.

Regards,
Skip

Skip Meister
@Skip_Meister
Orchid Jewelry Listserve Member
A day without sunshine is like night!

Hello Peter.

Bits of a dollar are what a blacksmith made for you from a silver
dollar, back in pre- and post-colonial American days. The dollar
started out a disc, and was worth far too much for many small
purchases a person would make. Penny candy was really something back
then.

The blacksmith took hammer and chisel to your buck and made it “two
bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar”. Sound familiar? Visualize that
silver disc being divvied in pizza-type fractions. Those are the
bits.

Our modern stock exchanges run on sixteen-based fractions of a
dollar. Traders on the floor call them “teenies”. So close and yet so
far away, eh?

I’m 35, too. Metric was discussed in my classes, too. Maybe the
Military-industrial complex had to think up the microchip to handle
all that stuff. And some of those folksingers was commies, too. Sure
didn’t hear Woody Guthrie beat up on Joe Stalin, a man with a bigger
body count than Adolf.

Dan Woodard
An American, First.

Skip, as a retire from GM,I can assure you that the auto makers have
been using metric for at least 15 years. Notice that all engines are
listed by cc or liters. Also if you look at any product on the market
you will see the the volumns are in metric. Look at whiskey bottles.
Industry has been metric for years,it’s congress and there fear of
public opinion that is holding up metric.

Dan,

Thanks for the historical insight! I wonder how many of those old
"bits" of silver dollar have survived the passage of time?

You’ve no doubt heard the expression that something is “not worth a
plugged nickel”. Somewhere in my childhood coin collection I have a
plugged nickel, from the 1800s. Gamblers used to spear nickels with
the tips of their Bowie knives, and flick them into the pot during
poker games. It was common practice to repair those coins by pouring
a bit of lead into the hole. (Nowadays most people won’t even bother
to stoop down and pick up a dropped nickel, let alone repair a
damaged one!)

Woody may not have been much of a Capitalist, but I doubt he would
have had any tolerance for the variety of Communism that Joe Stalin
practiced. Woody was more a “do your own thing” kind of guy than a
"kill 20 million people" totalitarian kind of guy. :slight_smile:

Peace and a Happy Easter!

-Pete-