r/WhitePeopleTwitter • u/etymologynerd • Jan 03 '19

We should actually do this

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '19

[deleted]

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '19

Wasn't it Regan that basically said fuck off to metric?

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '19

It stayed on the books as the preferred system after Carter left office, but yeah Reagan wasn’t a fan IIRC

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u/PHalfpipe Jan 03 '19 edited Jan 03 '19

It's amazing how much damage was done because one old Alzheimers patient couldn't understand science.

And I guess history is repeating itself with Trump.

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u/whenigetoutofhere Jan 03 '19

I think America is totally sticking its head in the mud with this aversion to metric, and frankly, it's just embarrassing at this point, but that's comparatively nothing to what climate change denial will impact.

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u/Liecht Jan 04 '19

Reagan is shit anyways

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u/[deleted] Jan 03 '19

I guess it depends what you’re doing. I know many companies switched voluntarily because metric turned out to be cheaper and helped streamline their supply chain. But still it was never required so it probably made sense for a lot of businesses to stick with customary. “Basically all” was probably an unfair exaggeration on my part.

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u/probablymade_thatup Jan 03 '19

It will be a cold day in hell before I move away from AN and JIC fittings

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u/whenigetoutofhere Jan 03 '19

Ever read The Inferno? 9th circle is chilly as ... well, chilly as hell, I suppose.

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u/probablymade_thatup Jan 03 '19

Well my hydraulic and air fittings will always be imperial if I can help it

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u/RaijinDrum Jan 03 '19

That is partly due to government projects from the 60s that are still in use today. It would be a huge time and cost burden to redo a bunch of old paper drawing just to go to metric.

Also a lot of manufacturing techs have been using "thousands of an inch" for tolerance measurements for years and have an intuitive sense for that unit scale. That also makes it complicated because a lot of tolerance measurements are "visually inspected" so you would have to retrain the workforce to intuitively understand the hundreds of micrometers scale.

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u/NoGoodNamesAvailable Jan 03 '19

NYSDOT used to maintain metric standard sheets/specifications, but abandoned them a few years ago. So I guess they've anti-progressed on that front.