The US House voted Tuesday to pass a measure to enact year-round Daylight Saving Time across the country, springing Congress forward into an issue that has long stumped lawmakers and spurred impassioned pleas by parents, farmers and others with sharply divergent views.
It will now head to the Senate for approval before going to the president for his signature — though its chances in the upper chamber remain unclear.
Oh, you’ll still have to do that. Maybe your grandchildren can do away with the SAE tools … as long as they don’t work on old stuff very much.
But for all of us alive today, it won’t change much. Those SAE fasteners are still out there in use all over the place, and they’re not going to magically go away or convert to metric sizes. Even modern production lines producing things after the official change will still probably keep using SAE sizes for a while – converting the production line to metric sizes would require expensive retooling and would bring in zero profit to recoup those costs. Eventually things would switch over to metric sizes, but brand new fasteners in SAE sizes will probably continue in production for at least a decade or two after the switch … and the machines those fasteners are used in may continue in use for a long time even after new production is finally transitioned.
My guess is even if the US fully committed to the metric system today, it would still be ~50 years before someone like an auto mechanic could reasonably expect to work without ever needing SAE tools.