> https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/metric-conversion-act-of-197...
> https://usma.org/laws-and-bills/executive-order-12770
The US government hasn't been great in converting US industry to metric. But ... it's a bit disingenuous to say we didn't even try.
At least if I have that right. A single Reagan's mass is from: https://www.celebheights.com/s/Ronald-Reagan-1750.html
Or, if you prefer, our sun as about 25 ronna-Reagans.
By mass, the sun is 71% Hydrogen and 27.1% Helium, the last 1.9% or so being heavier elements (much of that being oxygen.
I’m no expert, but I suspect a mass of 25 ronna-Reagans would not make a very good star. I imagine it might collapse into a dense Oxygen and Carbon rich sphere, and in that environment various chemical reactions might turn it into some other kind of material.
But maybe I’m way off.
Say what you will about his impact in office - but I genuinely believe Carters' loss to Reagan is one of the defining moments of the country.
Landslide loss in electoral votes - modest loss of popular vote. In my opinion - largely because Carter angered his own party by taking relatively sane and nuanced stances on complex issues, with a very forward looking attitude. (TLDR - he was undermining the American Military-Indutrial complex, which is great for the American people, but bad for business)
Regardless of his impact in politics - Carter is one of the few presidents I find it very hard to not respect, even if for nothing but his efforts after his presidency.
Reagan deserves to rot in hell. What a trash pit of a man. He did basically entire the opposite of Carter - Cut non-military spending, increased military spending, undermined the EPA, led directly to the S&L crisis with cuts to regulation on finance, tried to enforce an anti-abortion federal law, tried to overturn desegregation laws, started the war on drugs, on and on and on.
The man should go down as literally one of the worst things to ever happen to the US (so far - the same group is angling to get back into power today in the republican party).
Or, for short, the Freedom Inch!
Even though we don't use metric directly in most cases in the US, the US customary units have long been rebased to be defined by metric units.
Inches and pounds are just centimeters and newtons walking around in a whacky outfit.
I think the point is that the US customary units are typically used in a very different way, with fractions being way more important than in metric. See the image in this [1] article that talks about drill sizes for DIY use, for instance. You guys go like "oh no the 5/16:ths hole is too small, I'll step up to 19/64ths that should do it". Over here in metric-world we go more like "oh no the 7.9 mm drill was too small, I'll step up to 8 mm".
Again, the fact that it's easy to convert the 5/16:ths to 7.9375 mm is not the point, the point is how the decimal/metric units are used in practice.
The US yard is exactly 0.9144m such a short decimal expansion is highly unlikely when selecting two random units of measurements. It is short because we defined the modern yard in terms of meters, selecting a short decimal expansion that was still "close enough" to the old definition to allow tooling to remain the same.
The units of the metric system are defined by physical properties that appear to be constant throughout the universe.
The units of the US customary system are defined as some exact number of equivalent metric units.
Still, I'm probably the 1% of 1% of Americans who uses Celsius in daily life, except where I cannot (my car won't let me do hybrid miles and Celsius, ugh).
As a practical matter, we use metric for many things in the US. The fact that we do not force everyone to change their customary units to metric really seems to irk some folks, but mostly outside the US.
For pints (only really used for beer and milk), we still use an imperial pint but it's officially specified in millilitres (568ml) and this will always be printed on packaging.
I think we'll soon be left with the only remaining imperial bits being speed, long distances, and pints of beer - none of which seem likely to go away any time soon
> U.S. customary units have been defined in terms of metric units since the 19th century, and the SI has been the "preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce" since 1975 according to United States law.[1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...
“The SI has been adopted as the official system of weights and measures by all nations in the world except for Myanmar, Liberia, and the United States.”