The resistance on the consumer side (which is fairly small, especially because few people realize it is coming) has mostly to do with having to remember yet another passcode, and some confusion about debit cards and whether that means if someone steals your card and code, are they now going to be able to take all your money in one transaction.

The bigger resistance is on the business side, which had a lot to do with regulations, which have now been dealt with, and the cost to small businesses to update their equipment.


About Metric...

You may be confusing precision with accuracy. Accuracy is how close to the actual value you come. Precision is about units - for instance 1 decimal place versus 2. The concern is that most metric measurements require lots of decimal places to get to the same level of precision as the imperial system.

But there are actually a couple of more important reasons. For one, imperial is actually a little bit easier when you understand it. You are dividing base 12, which means division is easier than base 10 (you can divide 12 by more denominators and get whole numbers than you can 10). Plus, you don't actually HAVE to do the math, you just write a fraction! Another factor is that it is more real world based. Metric may have very precise bases for its measurement units, but they don't relate anywhere near as well as imperial does for the base unit. An inch is about the distance from the end of a thumb to the first knuckle. A foot is about a foot. Temperature is realistically based around what is the coldest most people encountered long ago and 100 was about as hot. Who the heck experiences when water boils? And we often gt temperatures well below when water freezes, so why have to go negative?

That in the end is why the US has been able to stick with it - being more consumer/public driven, the government has not had the power to force change even when it didn't improve things.

re metric i US (in this thread? huh?) - national population, state population, state power
didnt change a long time ago, metric started relatively shortly after US independence

I don't see how this is any different than a mag stripe debit card, except that chips are more secure from interception and less prone to failure from use than the mag stripes.

I don't know how your card and pin can both be stolen at the same time, anyway, unless you're one of those foolish, foolish people who writes the pin on the back of the card. If you're that stupid, you don't deserve to have a debit card.

The cost of equipment updates is substantial, especially to small businesses who might get the cheapest reader available and use it until it falls to dust. I don't blame smaller businesses one bit for being resistant to change, though I hope that cheap, mobile-device-based chip and pin readers are available, like those available for mag stripe cards (i.e. Square and other such devices). The changover might have to be slow, but hopefully it's inevitable.

Imperial is Base 12? Based on what? The fact that there are 12 inches in a foot? Because that's the ONLY 12-based division in the entire Imperial system. Everything else is based on dividing things in half and half and half again, which is less precise than decimals.

Rulers are typically marked in 1/2", 1/4", 1/8", 1/16", 1/32", and sometimes 1/64" increments. Building trades seldom go lower than 1/8". Automotive and appliance measurements seldom go below 1/32. Machinists tend to use decimal inches rather than fractions, i.e. 1.004" instead of 1-1/256".

Anything fraction-based is confusing as hell compared to the simplicity of decimals. Trying to add 12'-2 7/64" plus 19 5/8" is a lot harder than adding 3711.169mm plus 498.475mm. Decimals, whether inches or mm, can be added easily without conversion. Fractions require conversion to the lowest common denominator, and when you mix yards, feet, and inches together, you cave to convert yet again to get everything into the same units before you can even begin to deal with the fractions or decimals.

As to "relateability", what is more relatable than counting to ten? Base-ten math is our go-to precisely because it's the most relatable base, since humans default number of fingers and toes is ten.

Neither thumb length nor foot length are anywhere close to being a "relatable" common frame of reference. Trying to say that an inch is the length of your thumb is dumb, because all thumbs are unique, and vary wildly among individuals of different genders, age groups, racial groups, and body types. And have you been in a shoe store lately? How long is a foot? Anywhere from 7" to 14", and that's just the adult feet.

Besides, that argument is a non-starter. When people think about inches, feet, yards, or miles, they never think about thumbs and brazos, they think about the inch-foot rulers and yardsticks we grew up with. THOSE are the real-world objects they relate to measurements, and that mental relationship can be established among schoolchildren just as easily with a CM ruler and a meter stick as they have been with rulers and yardsticks.

Are you kidding? So 0F is as cold as it gets and 100F is as hot as it gets, like anywhere that people live? You do realize that even in ancient times, before the Imperial system was created, people knew that it got colder up north and hotter down south, right? Even for an American, that's a ridiculously parochial attitude; everybody knows it gets well below zero in the upper midwest and well above 100 in the desert southwest. Is 0F relatable to someone who lives in Miami? Is 100F relatable to someone who lives in the Upper Peninsula? How realistic is any of that?

And by the way - we've ALL experienced boiling water. Temperature is not just for measuring the air, it's also for measuring, well, EVERYTHING. I don't care where you grew up or where you live, every human being on earth has at some point in their lives encountered boiling water.

Frankly, is Imperial is so much better and/or easier than metric, why has it been abandoned by THE ENTIRE WORLD except for three stubborn hold-out nations (at least one of which is in the process of officially switching over now)?

In the end, the US looks like a bunch of April Fools for not having switched to metric five or six decades ago.

In the US the gov't is more geared towards protecting large corporations and making sure they're all comfortable and cosy rather than imposing upon them. Consumers come a very distant second compared to the corporate world.

The EU is different: people come before corporations.

But at the end of the day it should be in Visa/MC's interest to actually push this forward themselves on a voluntary basis. Sure it will be a great cost to move from magnetic stripe to chip-only, going from a disappearing card to portable payment terminals, but if they don't do this then Apple or Google will eventually step in with a new system that will take over. And when it does so in the US, just watch it spread like wildfire across the globe and put current card issuers in the back seat...

The US is switching to chip though. The point is that since we're only doing chip and not PIN there's no justification to do pay at the table using portable card readers like in other countries. And my current experience with using chip cards in US restaurants seems to be bearing this out thus far.

We are not doing PIN, just chip and sig? I missed that part.

There's a 700+ page thread discussing it:

http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/credi...signature.html

In short, there's only one issuer offering "true" chip and PIN (and not simply cards that have a backup PIN for kiosks) that people can apply for right now. If you're fortunate to have Diner's Club, your card is chip and PIN as well. A few others briefly had it but switched to chip and signature.

Also, I was thinking some more about how common pay at the table via mobile app could end up being. Even though apps like OpenTable could add support for Apple Pay and Google Wallet, one app is likely not going to become dominant. I'm not sure people would be willing to have three or four different restaurant pay apps installed on their phones just to avoid having their cards taken away from them.

I dunno. Given our obsession with smartphones, and our cavalier attitude toward personal security and privacy, I wouldn't be surprised to see people accumulate a bunch of payment apps on their phones and keep them logged in all the time with no password or security feature activated on the phone.

Given our notorious resistance to change, which is overcome only by our love of uber-convenience, I do expect to see a proliferation of self-service table pay devices like the Ziosk used at Chilis. The current model uses mag stripe cards, but I'm sure that new models that accommodate chip and sig, or even chip and pin, are on the horizon.

Personally, I don't see why there any CC company would go with chip and sig in the US instead of chip and pin. It just doesn't make any sense to invent a new standard. Hell, most US-issued credit cards already have a pin, for use in making cash withdrawls at ATMs!

That's different than what we are moving too, though. By October, merchants need to be accepting chip and pin cards or they become liable for any fraudulent activity. http://www.qsrmagazine.com/exclusives/are-you-ready-emv

Personally I think we are really in a lurch on this, as they haven't quite figured out how to roll out the new cards, but they are coming.

indeed.

They just have to accept chip, not necessarily chip and PIN. That's why Square's new chip reader is acceptable for the purposes of that liability shift. Foreign cards still work, they just won't be given the opportunity to enter a PIN and will have to sign instead.

It also depends on the restaurant too. Major chains and restaurants in tourist/border areas would probably do the tablet or portable reader thing or at the very least switch to pay at front, but something like that is a lot less justifiable for somewhere that caters to locals. Visa/MC would probably need to ban taking cards away to come close to fully getting rid of it in the US market.

I don't know if "happy" is quite the word I'd use. Tolerate might be better!

Though a lot of the older generation seem to despise the small amount of metric we have now. I remember a few years ago when several greengrocers refused to display prices or weights in metric - some of them happy to even go to jail over it!

Finally. Get with the times haha.

if chip has not already been compromised (that would be surprising) it wont be long, and then it just becomes less easy than skimmers

recently heard about a group that was intercepting credit card terminals on the way to retailers, defeating countermeasures (which were not just technological) used by manufacturer, then picking up credit card data via bluetooth after terminals installed

recently in canadian grocery stores i noticed metric except for pounds of meat, thought that was interesting