>>I really see no reason to go metric. The existing units are quite logical - if a yard has three feet, a gallon has four quarts, a foot has twelve inches, then a pound, of course, has 16 ounces.
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>Look, it took me years to get that all figured out. You want me to give up all that training just for the sake of uniformity? It...it ain't 'Merican!!!

You know, the socialist countries have done some really stupid things in their time, but they did them anyway because they wanted to prove something to the other side. For one, the whole free love doctrine (much later known as sexual revolution of the sixties) was a part of their social experiment from the outset - and was largely abandoned because if the West heard about it, they would launch a vast propaganda wave based on that (which actually happened, though not as a vast wave). IOW, they cared about what the world would say.

Americans, as I see them, also care, in a weird way, what the world would say. I've got the impression that the imperial measures are there because going metric is perceived as conceding to a foreign dictate, and that such a concession would raise expectations abroad... as if it would be the first snowball, and universal healthcare, Kyoto protocols, international war tribunal, traffic signs, state-sponsored vaccinations, and who knows which other horrors would avalanche. It's the "nobody's telling us what to do" attitude, which is actually admirable in a way.