For better or worse, commerce is international in scope. There's no denying that fact of modern life. It's what raises our standard of living. We can eat fresh fruit all year long, we run quite a bit of relatively inexpensive foreign hydrocarbon through our foreign-made engines, we have access to a wide array of inexpensive outsourced clothing options. Add your own observations here, too.
It’s interesting to note that this is the only first-world country that won’t adopt wholesale the metric system as its standard. We’re the ones wearing brown shoes at a black-tie affair.
The metric system really isn’t that difficult to grasp, especially if you reside in a country that uses it exclusively. In that situation, you can forget about converting values back and forth. If all you have available is liters, there’s no point in thinking in terms of gallons. After all, when you were starting out, you saw something that someone called a “gallon.” You got a sense of what constitutes a “gallon.” Well, it works that way with the metric system. You just get used to it.
I realize there’s no way to convert the diehards out there into believers in the metric system. To help ease them out of their brown shoes, Josh Madison offers soemthing called “Convert for Windows.” This is a free download that can convert most any dimension into its equivalent, not only the metric system. Take my word for it, it’s a truly useful piece of software. If it’s of any consequence, I use the software regularly and have never been disappointed in it.
For the real diehards out there, those who can’t grasp the functioning of the decimal system, I offer a page from Nova Roma’s website. You’l never by stymied by dates again.