I define middle class to those who are worried about where their retirement fund is, if any. My observation is that the middle class is becoming less and less able to save for their retirement thus having to work pass the retirement age. It is also the majority of the US population that has been forgotten. It is also the group that generates most business for credit card banking industry. It is the one that works hardest and recieves the least. Middle class is definately becoming poorer in this country because the banking industry makes most money off the middle class getting richer. What credit card industry does to its customers equals almost a rubbery that is legally allowed. Anyone who can step in and say it's time for a regulation gets my vote.

Do you know that every time you make purchases with your Visa, Master Card, they charge fee averaging 2.5% and Amex and Discover are even higher. This also drives the prices of goods higher than it needs to be if we used cash.

Do you knkow that credit card companies went electronic so that they can save money on labor but they increased fees instead of lowering.

We pay for a convenience no doubt. But can we really afford it?

Mi pensis ke oni jam enkondukis la metran sistemon en Usono, sed ke neniu fakte scias pri tio. Estas strangege, ke Usono dauxras esti la sola lando uzi malnovan mezursistemon. Tio evidentigas al mi malhelpan kreskantan naciismon en Usono, la sama pensmaniero kiu kondukis al la milito en Irako kaj al la defio de la internacia komunumo.

Mi neniam auxdis tiun historion pri ELNA, interese! Sed mi ne pensas ke oni povas atribui la malgrandecon de Esperanto nur al tiaj okazintajxoj. Mi pensas ke la monda lingva hierarhxio havas multe pli grandajn politikajn kaj kulturajn devenojn.

To the angry one

1"=2.5cm What's the big deal ?
1m=about 1 step. Would you rather measure distances with steps or by touching the tiptoe of a foot with the heel of the other ?
I'm French and I don't mind saying my table is 70cm high. But it seems Anglo-Saxons do. So use the decimeter. 1 decimeter = 10cm; that's about 1/3 of a foot.
1 fl. oz. is about 3 centiliters. What's the big deal again ?
Gallons may be more practical for fuel but it the US go metric, you can be sure gas station will quickly switch to gallons, because $0.75 per liter looks cheaper than $3 per gallon.
When she cooks, my mother uses tablespoons and teaspoons for small liquid quantities but she measures big liquid quantities per centiliter of fraction of a liter and solid ingredients per grams (with a special measuring cup). And my brother in law once told me "Your mum cooks really well".
It's a rare event when it's -40 in France. What about North America ?
For tire pressure, we use the bar. 1 bar = 100,000 pascals. That's about 1kg/cm². Or 15 psi.
1 hectare = 10,000 m². That's about 2.5 acres.
If a room in your house is 27 ft (7.6m) long and 16 1/2 ft (5m) large and you wanna put a carpet that is 27" (67cm) large and $0.65/yd (or $0.71/m), the metric system will make YOUR life easier.
the only disadvantage I see for the metric system is that it's just 200 years old. It was invented when every country in the world (even France) has its own measurement system. So people had to get used to new weights and measures.

I liked the author's rant about the elusive definition of "middle class."

I think if someone paid close attention to John Edwards' "Two Americas" rhetoric, you'd realize that a lot of sleight of hand is going on between which America is "poor" and which one is "rich" when most of us fit either description at least once in a while.

The metric system is not being adopted here mainly because the units are not as useful. The nifty multiples of ten and well organized naming conventions have nothing to do with everyday use, as nobody converts one metric unit to another on a daily basis.

Think about it - in everyday conversation, nothing is as small as a centimeter, or as big as multiple meters. But inches and feet describe the lengths of just about everything. Better length units.

Pounds and kilograms? A wash.

Liters and quarts are a wash, but fluid ounces are more practicable than millileters (aka cubic centimeters) and gallons are more practical than liters when it comes to fuel. Nobody would dare use dekaliters or whatever the term for 10 liters is. Cups are also useful in cooking, as milliliters, deciliters, or liters would not be.

Fahrenheit and Celcius? Fahrenheit increments are a little more convenient, but basically it's a wash. The fact that zero Celcius means water freezes is minute indeed, 100 = water boils even more so. One nice trivia point, of the four temperature scales engineers use (C, F, Rankine, Kelvin) you don't need to specify units when a temperature is -40 degrees.

food calories vs. kilojoules, a wash.

pounds per square inch vs. kilopascals, metric loses again. Most Europeans can't tell you what the weight of 1,000 Newtons feels like, much less what pressure that weight distributed over a square meter of area would feel like. Americans have an innate sense of what a pound feels like, and how large a square inch is (see above) and get the benefit of a logical name for pressure - explicitly describing the force and the area over which it is spread rather than taking some obscure guy's name and mulitplying "his" unit by 1,000. The metric increments are stupid too.

I don't know how Europeans measure their tiny yards (yards not being more of an upper-class thing across the pond) but I doubt they have a unit as handy as the acre. No American beyond hardcore nerds can relate acres to any unit of length, but you know what they are, and knowing how to relate a typical yard size in any neighborhood to one of some unit is possible only with a good unit system.

Britain has been slow to adapt metric, as they still have miles in their highway signs, and some of the other units in use today as well.

I used all these units and many more in engineering school. While for thermodynamics students the metric system makes life easier, that's the end of it.

Just because France does something different from America doesn't make the American way wrong.

Merry Christmas.

No president in our lifetime will ever support the metric system. Why waste time and money trying to educate the uneducatable to the way the metric system works when it is much simpler to close the factories down and send the jobs to a foreign country? Once there the jobs will be done in metric and the products one made in non-metric in the US are increasing made in metric everywhere else.

The metric system should only be used in those countries that are progressive and moving ahead of the US and in those countries that are developing and gaining what America is losing.

The adoption of the metric system in the US would restore America's industrial base and offer again to the American middle class the jobs, pay and benefits lost when jobs went overseas to metric countries. The metric system would make it possible for Americans to earn the money they need to buy the nice things in life they want, but instead all must be purchased with credit that can never be repaid.

By keeping the metric system out, America is helping people in developing metric countries obtain the living standard they are losing.

While many industries have moved to metric, either because they ran the numbers themselves and found they'd be more productive not having to deal with painful conversions such as inches to yards or working out whether 1 pint 6 fluid ounces is more or less than 2 and a half cups or because they simply can't compete in a world that went metric 30+ years ago, it's still extremely expensive for us to continue to use two systems of measurement.

Occasionally, I hear people say "But won't it cost too much?". Take a look at what it costs us today and you'll find we'd make back the cost of conversion in about a year. Every time a space probe misses it's target, business is lost because other countries don't want to receive goods in our unique system of customary measures, work has to be re-done because someone made a mistake doing a conversion or even every time someone has to make a conversion (it takes time and is error prone), our economy suffers.

Let's stop holding onto a system that has passed it's useful life and finish the metrication job we started when we signed onto the treaty of the meter.

While many industries have moved to metric, either because they ran the numbers themselves and found they'd be more productive not having to deal with painful conversions such as inches to yards or working out whether 1 pint 6 fluid ounces is more or less than 2 and a half cups or because they simply can't compete in a world that went metric 30+ years ago, it's still extremely expensive for us to continue to use two systems of measurement.

Occasionally, I hear people say "But won't it cost too much?". Take a look at what it costs us today and you'll find we'd make back the cost of conversion in about a year. Every time a space probe misses it's target, business is lost because other countries don't want to receive goods in our unique system of customary measures, work has to be re-done because someone made a mistake doing a conversion or even, every time someone has to make a conversion (it takes time and is error prone), our economy suffers.

Let's stop holding onto a system that has passed it's useful life and finish the metrication job we started when we signed onto the treaty of the meter.

1. The United States has been on the metric standard, now officially the SI (Système Internationale), since the 1880s: The foot, the pound, the gallon, etc. are all defined by law in terms of SI units.

2. The concept of "average" can cause major problems, as for the school pricipal who told the parents that half of their children were below average.

La komentoj pri la metra sistemo estas nepre pensigaj. Ĉu usonanoj ĝenerale ne povas vidi kiel izoliĝemaj ni pli kaj pli fariĝas? Ne nur kiam temas pri mezur-sistemoj, tamen ankaŭ kiam ni konsideras aferojn kiel tera ekologio, mond-politiko, kaj simile.

Ĉu vere Usono unuis pri la oficiala subteno de la metra sistemo? Nekredeble...
Certe, la ĉina fariĝos lerninda kaj poste eĉ lernenda lingvo en multaj anguloj de nia mondo. La historiaj leĝoj tias: la potenco centro ŝanĝas sian lokon ĉiuj kelkaj jarcentoj...

Usono estis la unua lando, kiu oficiale* subtenis la metran sistemon, kaj eble ĝi estos la lasta, kiu oficiale postulos ĝin. Dume ni ĝuas niajn pajntojn kaj funtojn ĉirkaŭ la tutan mondon kaj atendas la tagon, kiam ni devos lerni la ĉinan en la lernejoj, kiel la panamianoj. ;-)

*Actually I'm not sure if it was official (legislative) support, or just personal approbation on the part of Thomas Jefferson.

Haruo = Leland

Middle Class is extremely hard to define as well because of the wide disparity in cost of living.

A person making $75k might be right in the middle of the pack living in the Northern VA area, but could easily be in the top percent some rural parts of the state.

Spite tiun erareton, ke "est" devas esti "esti", plaĉis al mi tia neatendita favora mencio de Esperanto ĉi tie! Dankon, Andres.

There is a misprint in the Esperanto text: I read "ne povas est tro zorgema". It should have been "ne povas esti tro zorgema". Definitely, one can't be too careful!

I don't think we need a U.S. President to support the metric system. The Metric system has slowly crept into our lives over the years through the medical field, carbonated drinks, (as previously mentioned) and the auto industry. As we continue to trade with our metric neighbors, I think our industries will incrementally adapt to their measurements or fail to compete with those who do.

I can't see a US presidential candidate supporting either the metric system or Esperanto.

In the 1950s there was a campaign by some mccarthyites who appear to have taken over the Esperanto Association of North America, caused a split in the US Esperanto movement, and targeted leading figures of the Universal Esperanto Association. Perhaps they've resurfaced as Neocons, because there seems to be similar undermining of Esperanto going on right now in various places in the world.

Esperanto doesn't seem to fit in with the American Dream of a New World Order. Probably the metric system doesn't either.

It was probably the 'Esperanto idea' that got the language banned by various dictators in the past: the idea that no one ethnic group should control another.

The metric system and Esperanto will just have to wait till the end of the Neocon Wars. Then the world will be ready.

Not only do I agree with Andres Martinez on the metric system problem, I applaud his ability to write Esperanto. It's a form of international optimism and culture that I've enjoyed for over 50 years, and that is alive and well, notably on the Internet.