Ryan McCreesh

This topic is very interesting. When companies hire more robots, lots of people would lose their jobs. Therefroe, they will get no money. However, the companies which use robots will make more profits.
It seems like taxing robots is a good idea, because rising costs will make hiring robots not so appealing. And, the government will get tax to help the unemployment.

I think this is an interesting topic as automation becomes more and more commonly used in many industries. Automation processes, the used of robot, in many sense is not a 1 to 1 replacement ratio, but in many cause one to many ratio. Not only does robots replace the amount of workers needed in large ratio, it can also increase productivity, efficiency. and other potential benefits. Yet, such investment in automation will also increase unemployment rates. Vast majority of government’s money comes from income taxes and payroll taxes; with more and more companies relying on automation, hundreds of billions of tax dollars would be lost. Thus, if properly constructed like in South Korea, then such system can help reduce falls in government revenue caused by automation.

This is a great summary of a great article.
I think the answer to the question you posed at the end, whether if it is the US or a team who makes the decision to adopt metric, depends on their ability to reconcile the needs of different stakeholders.
On one side, administrators, organizers, and some trainers can rely on the standardized metric system to make better measurements and decisions on how to represent achievements of their teams. On the flip side, you have spectators and coaches who are familiar with the imperial system, for whom a change will create some hefty costs.
This points out the an aspect of metric that we haven’t touched on in our readings: it seems the value of a metric is also dependent on the network effect. However, in the case of metric vs imperial, there are just two different networks.

Unless something major happens to change the way Americans use the measuring system, I do not believe the US will be embracing the metric system any time soon. This goes back to the concept of “see, feel, change” that we learned in MIS 3535. To create lasting change, the US audience needs to see why the metric system is better, which will make them feel like a change is needed to improve the measurement system. In this case, I believe that there is no major benefit in changing it to the metric system to compel the US to make the change; it is just two different ways of measuring distance.