2008-05-04-Newsweek

I just finished reading Fareed Zakaria's The Rise of the Rest and noticed the comment about joining into the international system of units (i.e. the metric system).

I'd love to see an article that explored the costs we face in continuing to use our customary units and it's effect on our society and economy.

I've read that our recurring cost is about 10% of GDP and comes in the form of lost international business, conversion expenses (doing them in the first place and fixing mistakes like the Mars probe), material waste from supplying multiple measurements for various products (and again, fixing mistakes), time wasted in schools teaching a more difficult system and various scams due to the complexity of our system.

Surely it must be more expensive to continue to use this system than to finish the job of metrication we started 30 years ago.

Thanks, Paul