America hasn't even pulled back and we still can't stop Ukraine from getting invaded. Besides, preventing Ukraine from getting invaded isn't worth a whole lot of money as an American. We can not and should not try to be the world's police.
That's not what the Budapest Memorandum said, this was the actual promise:
>Seek immediate Security Council action to provide assistance to Belarus, Kazakhstan and Ukraine if they "should become a victim of an act of aggression or an object of a threat of aggression in which nuclear weapons are used".
Such action was indeed sought at the UNSC on March 15, 2014, in spite of the fact that there was no threat of nuclear aggression. We actually exceeded our obligations under the memorandum.
>Seems a bit shitty to take their nukes
They weren't their nukes, they were Russian nukes, and IIRC Ukraine had no way to actually use them as nukes, even if they wanted to.
This Utilitarian cynicism is all too common, and unworthy of a great people. Rule-lawyering our way out of helping others seems petty and mean.
This has never been true.
>Rule-lawyering our way out of helping others seems petty and mean.
Kinda like how we told Russia we wouldn't be expanding NATO eastward and after did that and pointed it out the response is akin to "neener neener did you get it in writing?"
Given how politically polarised the US is it'd end up as political football too I think, in the UK opposition to going fully metric sometimes manifested itself as Euroscepticism and that was back in the '00s when we didn't have nearly such aggressive culture wars.
There's some things where knowing the SI definition is irrelevant, like how many PSI a tire needs. Sure, knowing what that is in SI is useful if you're trying to figure out how much a car weighs, but if i'm at the gas station setting the pump to 35 doesn't really matter.
Industry and commerce is conducted on the global standard, though. And while the average american might not know how to convert between kilometers and miles (or hogsheads or chains or ...), but knows 500km is far, 500kg is heavy, and 500l is a lot.
Until the SI stuff is the largest part of labels, and people feel like paying a ton of extra taxes to replace every road sign in the entire country (there's millions!), it's never going to be a "metric" country. Just think of the logistics and cost of replacing every road sign, including "mile markers", exit number signs, distances on all US government roads (BLM, USDA, Forestry), overpass signs, speed limit signs and road paint - i don't see that happening any time soon. If the only benefit is "the rest of the world stops talking smack because we're backwater imperial measurement users", would you force everyone to pay for that?
This is pretty much why British roads still use miles and yards, the cost to the taxpayer of switching over would be horrendous. We do have dual measurements on heights and widths though, feet/inches and metres because many HGV drivers from the Continent aren't familiar with feet and there was concerns about them driving into bridges and so on.
it was a political football here back in the 70s when there was talk of metric adoption.
i do hope that people like stewart brand (whole earth catalog, coevolution quarterly, how buildings learn etc) feel some level of shame for the role their proseltyzing against metric, in spite of the good things they also did.
Same thing with manufacturing. Most places switched to being able to do metric measurements by the 80s, but for older parts it's still in "thou" and other metric sounding divisions of inches.
Drug dealers on the other hand talk about eighths and teenths, though. But everyone knows that a nickel is 5 grams. Both literally and figuratively.
Milligrams? Grams are already quite a bit smaller than an ounce. A millilitre of water weighs one gram.
Occasionally microgram is used, just as i have to occasionally measure things down to ~20 microns. I'd never use inches, there, and i'd never say "a kernel of corn weighs 1/250th of an ounce". This whole thread kinda caught me off guard. Normally i am making fun of the metric system, but something rubbed me the wrong way up-thread.
If you come from a Celsius place and then move to the USA, you find it actually fairly annoying, because a bunch of useful numbers to remember is arbitrary as fuck. What is the freezing point again? 35, 37, 33? In Celsius it's 0 and very easy to remember. The freezing point is very useful, since you'll know if the rain will become snow if it's just under 0, or if ice will start forming on the road or not. Similarly what is the boiling point? 200, 205, 210, 212? vs. a nice round easy to understand 100. You can also think about how hot your water can be as a 'percentage of boiling', so 75 becomes 'hotness that is %75 the way to boiling'.
Vast majority of the world also knows that -17 (OF) is cold as fuck, and there is nothing special about that specific number too! You would also know that -16 and -18 are cold as fuck. Same with 38C (100F). 40C and 39C are also hot! And there are no unique properties about 0F and 100F, unlike 0C and 100C.
The radiator thermostats I use have a 0.5 °C gradation. A 1 °C gradation would be too coarse as far as I’m concerned. That doesn’t mean that I’d prefer Fahrenheit, but 1° C is actually a quite significant step subjectively for environmental temperature.
you were doing so well until right here.
Having said that I've never actually used cables or fathoms in practice, only metres or feet for depth and nautical miles for distance.
But to force the people to go fully metric would take a genereration.
Longer than that, I'd say. I remember watching videos about the metric system when I was in grade school back in the 70's. ("You can measure how far from your car to a star -- with the metric system!")
Non-metric preferred sizes are embedded everywhere.
It's already taken more.
I'm sure this will happen around the same time a wealth tax is implemented, universal healthcare is adopted, the US stops invading countries, and we stop subsidizing suburbs. (i.e. never)