i gonna assume that guy was kidding with his point about the zoo. but i think it is a good point, i have heard enough dire predictions that they dont scare me any more. in high school we were told all sorts of crap about how landfills were full, everything was polluted, we were ****ed and we had ruined the earth. if we didnt recycle, we would all die within 6 months. looking back i think basically everything they said was a lie. now i actually think it is better to not recycle, landfills are virtually impossible to run out of, we havent screwed the earth. the people barking doomsday scenarios at us, they didnt really care about reality as much as they did feeling good about themselves for indoctrinating kids with crap.
I always liked the one about the fact that we were gonna be SCREWED in the world economy if we didn't go metric. I heard that one in the 10th grade at good ol' RHS. That was 35 years ago. We're STILL kickin' @ss EVEN WITHOUT th' freakin' metric system. :lol:
Wake up and smell the coffee, amigo. America is steadily going metric. Scientists made the switch decades ago. Engineers still use both systems. You go to the liquor store and order a fifth of bourbon, but it has actually been a 750ml bottle since the late 1970s. We may call them pints and half-pints, but they are in fact 500ml and 250ml bottles. A lot of your packaging is in metric units. Soft drinks sold in litres, not quarts. All the nuts and bolts in my American-made Ford Explorer are metric and there are kilometers-per-hour marked on my speedometer. Kilometer scales are included in government maps, the newest series of USGS quads are entirely metric with elevations in meters, not feet. Many of your magazines are no longer 8.5 x 11 or 9 x 12 inches, but rather International "A" size. Nutrition labels on your food are in metric units, grams not ounces. The US military has been metric for decades. Ammunition has been metric since the 1950's. All of their map units are in meters and kilometers. They have to be, they work all over the world and can't be confused by the metric system. They have to know it and use it. Most of the products you buy at Walmart are made in China and most have metric dimensions. Computer technology is thoroughly metric. International corporations, even those based in the US use the metric system for obvious reasons. English measurements may very well die a lengthy death, but the metric changeover started a long time ago in America and is well-along the way.
Bullchit. Show me one source who said that if we didn't recycle, we would be dead in six months. Just one. Your naivete on this topic is astonishing. The concept of enviromentalism is not all about doomsday predictions. How perfectly ridiculous! And check around . . . there are many, many counties in this country that are running out of space for landfills, including the one you live in! Is there plenty of open space in this country? Sure. But there is little that is geologically suitable for a landfill site and even less that is politically acceptable for one. You can only haul garbage so far before it becomes a huge economic liability. Shipping it to Wyoming or South America just won't work. We have only 5,500 dumps today compared with 18,500 in 1979. And the number drops every year.
6 months? i meant two months! (i was exaggerating for humor and emphasis.) oh no! sounds like we better change now or it could be one month!
I still think of my height in feet and inches. My weight is still recorded in pounds. I still buy gallons of milk and my eggs are sold in packs of 12 rather than 10. We measure for recipes in cups, tablespoons and teaspoons. Our speed limit signs are still in MPH. Mapquest displays distances between places in miles first, not kilometers. The english system will never die! By the way the only computing technology that is "thoroughly metric" is the die sizes of microprocessors, and that is because since such a measurement became worthwhile to speak about they have always been smaller than an inch square. Hard disk drives are 3.5" or 2.5". Floppies were 5-1/4" or 3.5". Storage capacities are thought of in base 2 units, which are neither metric nor English in origin. A megabyte is 1024 * 1024 = 2^20 = 1,048,576 bytes.
Hey red - how many kilos do you weigh?? I see those kilometer per hour signs up EVERYWHERE out here.... I don't know about you, but 37.777 C just doesn't sound as hot as 100 F. A fifth will ALWAYS be a fifth, never 757.082 milliliters. The 100 yard dash ALWAYS made more sense to me, just like the mile relay. And the business that I work in STILL uses Iron Pipe Size (IPS) dimensions, which are NOT metric... And one LAST thing - why aren't our clocks metric????? PS as long as a football field remains 100 yards instead of 91.44 meters, then I'll be happy.
In all fairness, can anyone explain why they like the English system better than the metric system, other than they're too dumb or lazy to learn the basics? As for environmentalism, I'm certainly no Greenpeace member, but I find it stunning if anyone can disregard maintenance of our environment.
This is similar to a point one of my physics professors made against the jargon that we would eventually convert to metric. He said that so many standards, such as screw threads/inch, pitch, etc. had been expressed in US units for so many years that it's futile to think entire industries would suddenly change everything. Alabama DOT went metric for about a year. They had all their highway mile markers and everything in metric units. Turns out it wasn't such a hot idea. And the mere fact that LA DOTD state highway plans are in metric units tells you what an awful idea it is, and that it is bound to eventually fail.
