Russellings

Miscellaneous musings from the perspective of a lefty (both senses) atheist with a warped sense of humor.

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Location: Madison, WI, United States

I am a geek, but I do have some redeeming social skills. I love other people's dogs, cats, and kids. Snow sucks, but I'm willing to put up with it just to live in Madison.

Saturday, February 01, 2014

Marching Moronically on Metrics

Dear Time editors:

How ironic that I finish reading your article bemoaning America's reliance on 40-year-old magstripe technology for its credit cards, then flip the page to see people advocating that we retreat even further into the past by abandoning metric measurements on food packaging "because most Americans don't deal with grams on a daily basis". That's sadly all too true. 95% of the world (AKA the people who used to be our customers) has gone metric, but the US is the last holdout for ACHU (the Accidental Collection of Heterogeneous Units), and here some geniuses are saying we should dig ourselves even deeper into our backwards, isolationist hole in the ground. Evidently using their preferred technnology, the teaspoon.

No, the correct solution is the one that should have been advocated for the credit-card industry as well — the same solution that worked wonders for digital television — a strict government mandate and timetable for finally catching us up to the 21st Century, where we'll all be spending the rest of our lives.

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If God had wanted us to use the metric system, he would have given us 10 fingers.

— Ashleigh Brilliant