Oh my god please do this. Kill the Imperial measurement system. This is such a golden opportunity.
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2025
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I'm a digital age, all of that is converted automatically. Bottom right corner, units option. Even when you find suspicious values like 25.4mm (1.000"), there's so much esoteric sizing out there that it's not a smoking gun. We use 10mm hex sockets on 3/8" square drive ratchets and put 235mm wide tires on 18" diameter wheels across the world.
The other way too. Nobody has made a SAE bearing since like the 1950s. You will see bearings that are a somewhat odd size in metric, but they picked nearest measure to the SAE value asked for and then rounded to metric to not be as odd.
In the digital age, you still have to talk with humans. What did my coworker tell me again? The wheels need to be torqued to 150 Nm or ftlb or lbft? Shoot. He's busy helping other customers now... uhh... I'll just wing it.
US engineers would thank you - we only work in metric units anyway.
No, they couldn't.
Metric is used in every country, and sae is not exclusive to a small number.
You might end up with some pressures applied, but it wouldn't be some kind of hammer to swing.
This is you not grasping what it might be like to have the entire world refusing to engage the US in imperial units, in any capacity, right down to shunning products that display both units. Wtf is a mile per gallon? Can't import that. Oh, you can toggle between that and metric? Can't import that, as imperial units are not permitted. No dual units display allowed.
That's just automotive, without much thought.
There would be many other consumer and commercial grade product lines, where the world could make American companies squirm to export products cost effectively, if all of their shit requires freedom units in the manufacturing or labeling, to retain their domestic market.
Dude, I can go to any hardware store and get metric shit all day long. Some of it US made.
You have a really skewed idea of how little the units involved matter. They literally teach conversions in elementary school for one thing.
But, for another, what makes you think a multinational conglomerate car company can't just paint new numbers and letters on a dial?
If you want to make "the US" squirm, you can't just pick some random shit like that to refuse to export. It's stupid. You gotta just refuse to play entirely. Which is damn near impossible because a lot of the companies that are actually exporting things to the US are way too big to give a fuck, often have US based branches that they would also be hobbling, and would tank their local work forces entirely.
Like, pretend that toyota decides "fuck sae", and only sends new parts with metric units on them. What happens? Nobody in the US is going to give a fuck at all. Toyota dealers will, and toyota plants will, but not anyone else.
You know who will care? Whatever factory worker in some other country that's mass manufacturing those parts, and now has even worse pay.
To matter, Toyota would have to just outright not ship anything, and hope that the loss in sales isn't more than the manufacturing savings. Then, instead of the actual workers having less pay, they're out of work in a capitalist hellscape where multinational conglomerates and the oligarchs that own them play tiddlywinks with people's lives. But, hey, at least those workers showed the US that they can't be bossed around.
I get it, I do. You're all pissed off and are grabbing for things to regain a sense of stability and maybe improvement.
But you're talking about burning someone's mail while they're burning your house.
Jfc, dude, I get that this is showerthoughts, but damn. Put some actual thought into it if you're going to veer into serious shit. This is stoned teenagers sitting around at a park level of idea.
Like, do you not realize that damn near every brand you think is a company is just one piece of a bigger company that's a part of an international network?
That's just automotive. Every branch of every publicly traded company is like that. Not a single person that's in control of any of them gives two shiny fucks about you or me. They don't give a fuck about japan, or the US, or brazil, or Liberia, they only care about themselves. Trying to pretend that refusing to ship one kind of part painted one way is going to disrupt any of that is absurdist.
And I can guarantee you that the leader of your country, whichever one that is, doesn't give a single shiny fuck about you either, or the US. At best, they might care about not screwing you extra hard as long as it doesn't interfere with their power and money.
You want to change something? Rise up. Get together with like minded people and take the fuck over.
Tear down the oligarchy and maybe it'll spread far enough to encourage others to do the same. But dicking around with pieces and parts? That's a joke dude, a joke. It wouldn't even inconvenience anyone that makes decisions until everyone rises the fuck up, and that ain't happening.
Toyota has always been metric only in the US. Once in a while a "shade tree" mechanic will fit a SAE bolt/nut to hold something in, but the cars didn't come from Japan with anything SAE, and when they built factories in the US they didn't design anything for SAE.
No auto manufacture in the world designs a new part with SAE parts, and they haven't since 1980 or before. There are still a lot of things like alternators that haven't got the case changed since they were designed in the 1960s that have SAE parts, but anything newer is all metric. Once in a while they put a oil plug in with a SAE bolt head, but the threads likely metric.
Every mechanic who doesn't specialize in antiques uses their metric tools more than the SAE. Those who work on US cars still have the SAE tools, but they don't get much use.
Well, that's all true, but my Toyota has mph on the dial, not kph, and that's what I was riffing on more than the hardware specs.
Tbh, the only car I've ever had in my fifty years that wasn't all metric, parts wise, was my 76 cutlass. Even the shitty escort station wagon that was an 83 was metric on enticing everything I ever had to touch on it, except the oil drain plug, iirc. Wanna say it was a 3/4 inch head.
Also, fwiw, I blocked the guy so I didn't end up being a dick to him rather than criticizing his idea, so I'm not sure if this will show up until I unblock once I'm sure he's not going to be silly at me again. So, if this comment pops up in a few days, that's why; I'm not gravedigging older comments lol
That's a lot of words to say the US probably wouldn't like the planet to shift to, insist on, SI exclusively.
You are genuinely, truly dense
How many grams per cubic centimeter?
If we could get the whole world to team up and do anything we'd be in a better place
I think you're confused about how the USA works. We use metric and sae tools all the time. Any imported machinery uses metric. Machine shops will have two sets of tools to work in both. We learn metric in high school science class.
The USA uses USCS because that's what we've always used. There is a wealth of data in USCS already, we already have the tools for it, and we all have a base understanding of it. We could never just "switch to metric." No one is replacing working machinery because it's in the wrong units.
I think you're confused about what I'm getting at. This would be more of a "You know what? Since you're unilaterally crashing the global economy and betraying all of your allies, and the gloves are off, we're sick of your shit." Point of view.
As in keep your "that's what we've always used" to yourselves, and forget attempting to export anything that conforms to something other than metric. As in, adding cost to production to appease the strict anti-SAE, anti Imperial everything market. Sorry, can't import that; Fahrenheit has been referenced.
Everything. Every commodity, ingredient, finished good. If it has anything other than SI attached to it, the rest of the world shuns it.
The purpose would be to make it very irritating for American companies to bend to the rest of the world's standard, simply because you're being complete Dickheads on the global stage.
The purpose would be to make it very irritating for American companies to bend to the rest of the world's standard,
OP, I think you’re Canadian, so it might be a bit of an exception but in most countries that use metric, American companies already sell products that only use metric unit. This would literally change nothing.
You understand nothing.
I'm talking about trade using the ISO standard exclusively, and being punitive to any entity from the US that merely uses SAE guidelines in their production and QA.
If any reference to non SI weights and measures can be found in the production process, there's an embargo against it.
But go on, explain to me the concept of relabeling stuff, as though I'm unfamiliar with the concept.
That would be ridiculously difficult to enforce. Also, most manufacturing, American or not, is already done in metric. It would be trivial for companies to swap units. There are many, many better ways to tariff American goods.
I think that companies tend to print country-specific labels anyway, don't they? I know larger Mexican company products can often be found in two sections is some stores: in the "Juice" section, with an English label, and in the "Foreign" section, with a Spanish label. Same product, just different labels. I've seen American company products in Germany, and - again - large companies have country-specific packaging. Sometimes it's pretty drastic differences; not just languages, but entire style and color schemes.
It's usually EU products where I see them trying to cram, e.g., the ingredients list in 5 different languages on the same package. I don't know why Frito-Lay wouldn't just only print metric units on their French-labelled bag of Doritos. It wouldn't have any impact on their domestic labeling.
I don't know why frito-lay doesn't print metric only labels in the us for that matter.
For anyone else wondering WTF SAE is:
Tools and fasteners with sizes measured in inches are sometimes called "SAE bolts" or "SAE wrenches" to differentiate them from their metric counterparts. The Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) originally developed fasteners standards using U.S. units for the U.S. auto industry; the organization now uses metric units.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units#Other_names_for_U.S._customary_units
EU doesn't get products with imperial units anyways as no one knows what it means. Sometimes you get both units if it's an extremely cheap Chinese item, but that's about it.
Good shower thought and an interesting angle on boycotting the US. You just to use it as an excuse to cut out their products and call them dumb for still using such an arcane system all at the same time.
You could also ban everything that has language X on it, if your goal is to standardize while being a dick.
You'd have to demonstrate that all other countries not only just use metric, but also only sell products that already only have metric on the packaging. I don't doubt dual labeling is heavily a US thing, but I doubt it's only US. Simply to keep packaging making universal. Now that could be altered if such a ban was put in place, and maybe most non-US places wouldn't care too much...but we need a sampling of what's already out there to even say if it's a thing that can be used.