dromia wrote:Also decimal costs more, I remember when the decimal coinage came in how excited I was as a young un, cos young uns lack wisdom and think all new things are exciting but have no experience to know that all new things should be treated with a high level of suspicion, however my enthusiasm was greatly diminished when it came in as my ginger crisps and comics all ended up costing more.
That was a consequence of two factors:
- Making the smallest (sensible) price increment 2.4 x the size it had been before. We had the ridiculous (for a decimal system) of a ½p coin for a bit, but basically we reduced the granularity by a large amount, meaning any price changes were more significant. If we had (like Australia, New Zealand and South Africa did) had a "New Pound" at half the value of the old, divided into 100, this effect would have been much less. And we could have kept the tanner - it would have been a perfectly rational 5p coin, and the half-crown which would have been worth 25p. We might even have called it a quarter.
- The natural inclination of businesses to seek, take and exploit ways to increase their profitability.
In the late eighties I was making a good living as a kite maker, the main stuctural members were made from ramin dowel which came in 6' and 8' lengths and all my sail templates were made to fit these lengths or fractions there off, when my supplier went metric I was assured that there would be no changes as 1.6m was the same as 6' and 2.4' was the same as 8ft, more metric lies
One has to be careful accusing people of lying when in fact they are just wrong.
Whoever told you that was wrong. 6' is 1828.8mm, nowhere near 1600. 8' is 2438.4mm, closer to 2400, but, of course, not exact.
However, this is a consequence of
change, not an intrinsic fault in the metric system.
as they arenot the same they are just shy of the imperial lengths so all my template for 100s of kite designs were now redundant, the stalling of production to update the templates was enough to make me close down that business. Such conversions might work for companies like Nissan but for the two person band of my kite business it was the death knell.
A French kite maker would have had exactly the same problem had France changed from using metres to feet and inches. Does that mean that the Imperial system was wrong, or based on lies?
It seems to me that what you object to is change. Change is inevitable, and to be welcomed, or we would all still be living in caves, eating raw meat from animals we had chased on foot and killed with pointed sticks. Organisms and societies which cannot adapt to changes die.
Metric gives number blindness and errors
Is there evidence for that, and a known mechanism involved?
whereas Imperial give memorable numbers, I have never got the hang of working accurately in metric and have still to convert metric to Imperial to know what it means,
Ignoring any particular unit names, what you are describing, generically, is that you can accurately cut something to, say, a length of 8¹/
32 somethings, but not to 204 something-elses.
still convert £.p to L.s.d to now what value the price of something is.
Since any Lsd prices you remember are forever locked into 1971 values, I wonder what use that is. So petrol is now £5/18/3 per gallon. And...?
Metric was just another EU scam to allow europe to replace our own indigenous industries for almost total dependency of supply on europe which has lead us all down hill to the total mess the world is in now.
That is one opinion.
The following are facts:
- Metrication began in Europe 198 years before the formation of the EU.
- Decimalisation of currency began in Europe 289 years before the formation of the EU.
- People started seeing the international trade advantages of decimalisation and metrication 152 years before the formation of the EU.
- Metrication and decimalisation in the UK were first called for by a Parliamentary Select Committees 131 years before the formation of the EU.
- It became legal to use metric units in contracts and dealings 129 years, and in all trade 96 years, before the formation of the EU.
- The UK joined the Metre Convention, which created an international (not just European) bureau of weights and measures 110 years before the formation of the EU.
- 104 years before the formation of the EU it was a British firm that was chosen to cast the international prototype metre and kilogram.
- We came very close (progress halted by a general election) to making metrication compulsory 89 years before the formation of the EU.
- It was us who drove the creation of the CGS system of units.
- We began an official programme of metrication 28 years before the formation of the EU, 5 years before we began negotiations to join the EEC, and 7 years before we joined it.
- We decided to decimalise our currency 27 years before the formation of the EU, 4 years before we began negotiations to join the EEC, and 6 years before we joined it.
- Today the metric system officially predominates in most countries, and only 2 still have non-decimal currencies.
Imperial good!
Metric bad!
IMO "
The old ways of doing things and never changing are good, and new inventions and systems and easier ways of doing business with customers around the world are bad" would be a more realistic interpretation of your position.
Brexit good!
Just as with your view that something which began nearly 200 years before the formation of the EU was an "EU scam", that is one opinion.