It seems like a weird point to bring up. How often do y’all convert your measurements? It’s not even a daily thing. If I’m measuring something, I either do it in inches, or feet, rarely yards. I’ve never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can’t imagine I’m unique in this. When I have needed to, it’s usually converting down (I.e. 1/3 of a foot), which imperial does handle better in more cases.
Like. I don’t care if we switch, I do mostly use metric personally, it just seems like a weird point to be the most common pro-metric argument when it’s also the one I’m least convinced by due to how metric is based off of base 10 numbering, which has so many problems with it.
Edit: After reading/responding a lot in the comments, it does seem like there’s a fundamental difference in how distance is viewed in metric/imperial countries. I can’t quite put my finger on how, but it seems the difference is bigger than 1 mile = 1.6km
Metric is a relatively recent invention. Every single country has had to ditch their measuring equipment in order to convert to metric.
The reason it’s so expensive in the US is because they refused to change for so long. As the economy grows, the amount of equipment grows, so the more time you take to switch systems, the more expensive it will be.
If the US wanted to switch relatively painlessly, they’d just gradually make some measurements officially in metric. You can produce products labeled in metric with imperial tools. If those tools are precise enough, or the error margins big enough, you would not notice the difference between imperial tools and metric ones. In fact, there’s probably many tools out there that can produce in both systems.
It’s not a simple problem. But if it never starts to get solved, it will never be solved.
The main obstacle is not economic, it’s cultural. People in the US are used to using imperial, many only used metric at school. They advocate online that their system is better, and keep using it.
If USAians used metric in day-to-day life, they would prefer consuming products with metric info on them, so companies would produce more metric products, so they would have more incentives to adapt their tools to metric.
How do you change culture? Simple. The first step is to make something “official”. Making metric official and “deprecating” imperial would mean that communication with the government would be in metric. Laws would have metric measurements, technical documents provided by the government would have metric measurements.
If someone wanted to use imperial, they would have to constantly convert the numbers of the government, and you can’t ignore the government. So you either stubbornly convert each time, or you give up and start using metric yourselves.
Of course in the early stages, the government could provide imperial measurements too, as a sidenote, a footnote or an appendix. But the main content would be in metric.
But the US has decided it doesn’t want to do that. I don’t want to get too geopolitical, but that only works while the US is an economic superpower. We’ll see what happens once that is no longer the case.
In the meantime, all I can do from the outside is try to convince random people from the internet. If they don’t switch to metric, they might at least stop advocating for imperial, and that would be a win.