Comment on Every non US market could impose their will, simply by banning imports of products that use, or reference SAE instead of metric.

southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  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.

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  • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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?

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    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.

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    • MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      That’s a lot of words to say the US probably wouldn’t like the planet to shift to, insist on, SI exclusively.

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      • southsamurai@sh.itjust.works ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        You are genuinely, truly dense

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  • AdamEatsAss@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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    • MushuChupacabra@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

      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.

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      • nave@lemmy.ca ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

        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 this might not apply to you as much but in most countries that use metric, American companies already sell products that use metric unit. This would literally change nothing.

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  • bdonvr@thelemmy.club ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    If we could get the who world to team up and do anything we’d be in a better place

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  • sxan@midwest.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    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.

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