3 thoughts on “Death by 1000 Cuts Chapters 10 & 11”

  1. Not sure that people think metric is not masculine – I think it is just an excuse for cognitive laziness. It takes mental effort to change to units one did not grow up with. People, as a general rule, tend to be lazy when they can.

    In my formative years, I learned the quaint legacy imperial units – to this day, if I am trying to work on something, inches try to creep into my brain. When I worked with older equipment, I was always dealing with conversions – slows things down. An encoder that dosen’t have a factor of 254 built into the rotation count can be maddening to work around.

    Most programmers love the first text-editor they used – there are huge blog battles between emacs and vm – both do the job – for every advantage to one there is something the other does better. The problem is learning both. If you learn both – there is always the impulse to use a keystroke from the other system. Learning both is really a bad idea – it will slow you down. But the first one has a huge advantage in the users brain. (I don’t have a dog in this hunt – I mostly run kate).

    So the change is not going to be finished until the last generation using the imperial nonsense dies off. Even then – if people still read books – they will come across these units – as I’ve bumped into cubits a few times..

    The Cleveland Twist Drill co – and several other similar – supposedly US companies – no longer list the country of manufacture – the reality – things like drill bits are made overseas in so-call metric countries.. In the past, I bought metric drill sets that were actually a mix of the closest letter, number or fractional size – made in a ‘metric country’. Today it is better – metric is winning – slowly but surely.

    Now if the world could only change to a better garden hose connector while we are at it..

    • Karl,

      As long as the US still has control over much of the world, USC will go on for generation to generation. However, there is a war brewing and the US will not be able to stop the war from coming to US soil. A devastating destruction of the entire county will be and fully effective in killing off USC.

  2. It seems if you talk to any young person today about their college or career choice it falls into some type of financial arena, be it accounting, marketing, economics, etc. Engineering and sciences are loathed by young Americans. The few that started out in an engineering profession quickly switched majors to a financial field. Those few Americans who venture into an engineering profession and don’t switch are highly outnumbered by Asians, predominately Chinese and Indians.

    Among these people the feminisation of disciplines of high intelligence doesn’t exist. Engineering and sciences are considered utopian careers for all and the means by which their countries will by-pass the US. These Asians I’m told study in the US instead of their own country for now because teachers are in short supply as most graduates prefer to go into industry and R & D.

    I’m convinced this “war” between the US and China is because the US elites have finally come to realise that China and India will by-pass the US in the next decade. If the US tries to stop China and India’s advance, there will be a very destructive world war that along with Russia, Turkey, Iran and others aiding China will utterly destroy the US. Americans then won’t have to worry about whether USC is better than metric in practical culture.

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