Australia has had metrics for years. This is a complaint of a farmer after introductions.
“It is nearly twice as far into town”
“It takes four times more fuel”
“My property is only half as big”
“A kilo of anything only gives me half as much as a pound”
And so on…
I think the US general public, at the time of the first attempts at introduction, suspected that selling gas in smaller units would give the producers a chance to jack up the the price. Probable. We still list gas gallons at $X.XX and 9/10ths of a cent, in the hopes the consumer won’t be scared by that extra cent, and go across the street.
What’s amazing is how close we were came to going metric. In 1977 attending the University of Minnesota and Jimmy Carter as president, we were working with the Metric Headquarters in Waukegan, IL to lobby the congress to go full metric. I had come back from living in Canada who had come on line and we were the only hold out in the world.
The amazing thing is that we are mostly already metric. There is no ‘pint of blood’ any more, it’s measured in liters. A bottle of whiskey is 750 Ml, no longer a fifth. If your working on any car, leave your SAE wrenches at home. One of the holdouts though, is the Construction industry, where there is still a 4x8 sheet of plywood, 16p nails, etc. Imagine living in a base 10 world where all you have to do is move a decimal point. Yay!
Quite often the metric measurement is just a translation of the original imperial measure. We buy sheets of most things as 2440x1220, which is the mm equivalent of 8’x4’. 6’ is 1830mm and so on. These sizes aren’t actually correct but they are so close they worked with the change over and have become the norm.
I never had a problem with rising gas prices, I always get for €25 
I don’t understand 25 euros… but as another aside…it will take years to “pay off” the solar panels but with an electric car, rising utility rates and rising gas prices are not so daunting.
If I had to buy a new car, I would go for fully electric, but it still wouldn’t be perhaps the most economical decision. Finns drive a lot as we live far apart, but the price difference between an electric car and an old-fashioned one still buys gas for something like 5 years of average Finnish driving, and electricity isn’t free either.
My point is that the gas and utility prices keep rising whereas my loan payments–granted we have to pay interest-- for the solar panels don’t change. And a further point it’s hopefully a positive move for our carbon footprint. Someone just told me that half a car’s carbon footprint is in manufacture so don’t go junking your perfectly good gas powered car…And currently only the few can make such choices.
The prices haven’t been good for electric cars and there’s little movement by the manufacturers and politicians to really do anything in that direction.
Agreed. I really wanted an electric car, but the entry to that technology is still at least 50-60% higher than the traditional combustion alternative. I just couldn’t do it.
Don’t feel bad, we Canadians still have problems with the metric system, especially our young people! I asked my teen daughter years ago how long was a decimeter … she did not know. 1 decimeter is equal to 10 cm or about 4". We Canadians have become experts at imperial/metric conversions in our heads. Metric was forced on us, we didn’t want it. Imperial was easy, an inch, that’s your thumb, foot, duh about a foot, yard, about a stride. Anyone could imagine these things. A meter, what the hell is a meter!
In our parts, a meter is considered to be about a stride long. A basic scout assignment is to calculate the actual length of your stride by counting the strides it takes you to walk a known distance.
That’s fun! I just learned that 1 meter is about 1.09 yards.
How boring would it be if we had a single unit of measure used throughout the whole world…
“A meter, what the hell is a meter!”
I guess you did not detect the sarcasm in that statement.
Of course, I know how long a meter is, they have been pounding metric into our brains for many many years.
Love your videos! boring I guess, but think how cool it would be if everyone spoke the same language. Besides only a small few countries still use imperial, and costly mistakes could be avoided if we all used the same measurement system (Canadians still prefer imperial). Remember the Nasa Mars probe that crashed because someone made a mistake converting between imperial/metric. Millions of dollars down the drain.
Of course I did. I just wanted to point out that in the popular imagination, the yard and the meter are the same - both measure one stride!
The Romans thought that you should measure in paces, not strides.
A ‘mile’ is a thousand paces.
A pace is 2’6" x 2 - i.e. they come in ‘pairs [5’]
So a Roman ‘mile’ is about 1000 x 5’ - 5000’
which is about 1666… yards - so it’s not far off a current mile ? and that’s despite centuries of messing on in its exactitude.
One MAJOR difference is that a gram is a measure of MASS and a pound is a measure of FORCE. All the other measurements (length, volume, temperature, currency) are just different names for the same thing.
When I took physics, we always converted to metric, worked the problem, then converted back into imperial. Otherwise, we had to deal with the ludicrous G/Gc constant to make the units work out.
Makes no real difference at sea level on Earth, can make a big difference elsewhere in the universe.
metre is a yard 
not too much of a mental mind flip
don’t forget that the metre was defined basing on a much larger scale than a stride : our planet itself.
it is a fraction of the length of a meridian.
It used to be. Currently all SI units are defined with the help of constants found in nature. If I got it right, mass was the latest addition and the iridium kilogram models became museum pieces.