Standards, what standards?

If there's anything I dislike more about the USA than its foreign policies, it's the fact that they insists on using a bunch of half-assed standards that the rest of the world has left a long time ago.

Take time for instance. A day consists of 24 hours, but the AM/PM system divides the day in two, leaving it open for all kinds of misunderstandings. Why do their military use the 24 hour-system? For it's accuracy of course! ("Are you saying we were supposed to bomb Baghdad at five PM? I thought you said five AM!")

The military also use kilometers as a measure of length (they call it 'klicks') instead of the highly ambiguous unit of 'miles'. And what's up with yards, feet and inches? I know illiteracy is real high in the US, but isn't the use of using body-measurements as units a little too much stone age, even for them?
The metric system on the other hand is logical and adds up, there's ten milimeter on one centimeter and ten decimeter on one meter. Pretty easy to remember, but how many feet is a yard? And how do you measure anything smaller than an inch? Not to mention pounds (with the unlikely abbreviation of lbs), gallons or ounces.

Meanwhile, on a beach in California: "How warm is it outside today?" "Well it's not boiling yet."
Yes, in a laboratory fahrenheit might be an absolute smashing way of showing heat, but most people don't live in a laboratory.
However, the standard that annoys me the most because that it's something that haunts me in my work is the plethora of paper standards that americans use instead of the metric ISO 216. I've seen designers argue that it's the most beautiful standard but GIVE ME A FUCKING BREAK. Do you think millions of office clerks would prefer the pretty or the practical format? Thought so.

The problem with standards is that they have become standards because lots of people use them, and getting three hundred million of the worlds most obnoxious and stubborn people to change is a hard task. Fortunately I'm not the only one who wish things to change, there are plans to switch in a long term perspective to most of these standards which are recognized as international standards (SI).

Perhaps in a century or so the US will have caught up with the rest of the world. With a little luck and a few wars.