Unlike the metric system, however, the new standard is not clearly any better than the old.
Americans today are just as ignorant of the metric system as they were 15 years ago except pot-smokers.
The UK first mooted plans to convert to an all-metric system in 1965.
Currently, all loose goods sold with reference to units of quantity have to be weighed and sold using the metric system.
For most of us soccer is just an odd affectation of foreigners, like minuscule cars, pink shirts on men and the metric system.
But his own views were more moderately right-wing, extending to a liking for law and order and a horror of the metric system.
Never having known the wonders of imperial measures, they would probably prefer the easier-to-learn metric system that is standard in the rest of Europe.
Some of the issues the world is facing, like IFRS, may be adopted in the US about as soon as we adopt the metric system.
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But, like the metric system, they have not caught on here.
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While many countries mandate the use of the metric system by law, the U.S. Congress has repeatedly passed laws that encourage voluntary adoption of the metric system.
The United States is one of the few countries left in the world who still have not converted to using the Metric System as a standardized system of measurement.
Lipset illustrated his point by recalling how the governments of Canada and the United States at virtually the same time announced that their nations would convert to the metric system.
Given the widespread association in the UK between the metric system and the European Union, it's tempting to view the battle simply as an expression of hostility towards political integration.
One, Mars Climate Orbiter, had a particularly humiliating crash, because the fault lay with a group of engineers who, in defiance of common sense, had continued to use imperial units of measurement in their calculations when all around had adopted the metric system.
Investigators have attributed the failed 1999 Climate Orbiter mission to human error: The flight software used metric units while the ground system that wrote the code used Imperial measures.
The new system provides a more accurate metric for investors when comparing different companies, he said.
Capital is only one metric that the regulators should be using to measure the health of our banking system.
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The goal, when the system is completed in 2015, will be to capture 1 million metric tons a year of carbon dioxide and inject it a mile underground.
The latter is a relatively new metric for advertisers in the online space, as most, until now, have relied on an ROI system based on impressions and clicks.
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