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Comment by jakkos | Hacker News Reader

I'm from the UK and I genuinely believed the A0 system was a global standard, how could you not use it when it's so beautiful!

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Why wouldn't people use it? Simple: it was created by a German, not an American, so the US is unable to use it. The US can only adopt standards that were invented in America, with rare exception.

Anytime you see the US doing something different from the rest of the world, investigate to see who first invented and popularized it: it almost certainly came from outside the US. Whereas if there's some global standard that even the US uses, it probably got started in the US.

Which makes perfect sense. In many cases the US was probably already using their own standards/conventions when some, typically European-driven, standardization effort came along. And the US never saw a reason to go through the effort and cost to broadly switch. Aligning with Europe just isn’t a high priority.

As is widely remarked the US does use metric where it makes sense to do so. It’s just mostly not consumer-facing.

The US uses metric in some places, such as the automotive industry, but it took decades to do. For a while, in the 90s, American cars were a nasty mixture of SAE and metric fasteners, so you had to have two sets of wrenches to work on them. Meanwhile, not aligning with Europe (or anyplace else in the world) meant that American-made products were a hard sell since they were too hard to service.

And useful from a design perspective.

Need to make a bigger version? It scales so easily.

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