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
You wouldn’t believe how often I have to convert measurements because one big backwards country still clings to nonsensical imperial units.
And it’s not only length, it’s even worse in the kitchen where they seem to measure about everything in cups. Like “add one cup of spinach”.
I use metric for distance. It’s more functional and easier to use.
Meter. Cm. Mm. (But not km that much.)
I haven’t really been trying to convince people to switch, but I have been telling people I’ve switched to metric for at least temperature (so far).
And that’s less to conversation about how it’s just objectively better than fahrenheit in literally every single way, except familiarity. Which given that any switch in life would have that problem, I see that as a non-issue.
Scales should never be based on arbitrary things, or creatively-decided things. They should have a concrete, absolute, and objective thing they’re based on, and keeping it based on a certain number for scales of units is better than 12in to a foot, 3 feet to a yard, etc.
It doesn’t necessarily have to be base 10, but given that’s what it society uses, that’s probably best for us, but any base will do, as long as it’s consistent.
If scales shouldn’t be arbitrary then a temperature measurement system that picked the state change of fresh water at atmosphereic pressure where you find a bunch of salt water which has a different state change temperature, might be just slightly arbitrary. Kelvin trys to fix it by moving the zero to eliminate negatives, but doesn’t change the scale making all the other temperatures arbitrary.
Metric is great, as long as humans are living on Earth. Any other planet or a major change to the atmosphere or Sea level and everyone is going to be why did they pick such random points. Luckily nothing is happening to change the atmosphere or Sea level on Earth so nothing to worry about.
Recently I was wondering how much my pool weights when its filled with water and I could easily calculate it in my head: 4m x 2m x 1m=8m³ -> 8000dm³ -> 8000l -> 8000kg or 8t
Besides the popularity, decimal conversions are the only factor, really. Otherwise they’re both arbitrary.
it does seem like there’s a fundamental difference in how distance is viewed in metric/imperial countries
I’d like to point out that it’s literally just Liberia, Myanmar and the US. I have no idea what the difference could be, since it’s a concept that predates any system of measure and is biologically hardwired into us.
I’d like to point out that it’s literally just Liberia, Myanmar and the US.
As other people have pointed out, the UK, and Canada also use Imperial, just not officially, and it’s in a lot of different contexts. Canada had 6’ signs in most shops at the start of COVID, while government buildings all had 2 meters, as an example.
I have no idea what the difference could be, since it’s a concept that predates any system of measure and is biologically hardwired into us.
Not totally sure, either, but it does seem like there is one. There’s the funny haha one of Americans thinking driving 200 miles (~300km) is a day trip, but that’s not what it’s been feeling like. Can’t quite put my finger on it, but it’s like the whole thing where once you learn what eggshell looks like in comparison to off-white you will always see the difference, where before you really didn’t.
Canada uses imperial in certain context unofficially. Feet and inches for a person’s height, or a cut of wood. You won’t see miles or gallons anywhere, though. The UK is even weirder - they use “stone” for a person’s weight, which is a customary unit in no complete system of measurements.
I put this as part of a response to another user. But since it also answers the main question of this post I’ll repeat it here:
Because it’s not only better for me, but it’s also better for you.
It doesn’t matter if I tell you a distance in meters or kilometers, you only have to remember what that means in feet so you can convert it to whatever imperial distance you want. Just multiply/divide by 1000 afterwards by moving the decimal point. If 53 meters is 863 yards, 53 kilometers is 863000 yards.
However, it does matter what unit you choose to communicate with me. I know that 1 inch is about 25.4mm/2.5cm, but if I’m unlucky and you decide to say it in feet, I’m going to need to Google the conversion.
I don’t care what units you used for yourself, as you shouldn’t care what units I use for myself. However, if we have to communicate, we should both be as helpful as we can so we can communicate as easily and effectively as possible. Communicating with someone using imperial is a pain in the ass, while communicating with someone using metric is as easy as it gets. The only thing easier than metric is scientific notation, since with that you don’t even need to remember what the metric prefixes mean. However scientific notation is only easily written, not spoken. Speaking in scientific notation is a pain in the ass.
I do know the conversions, at least roughly enough to get the point. I will, however, point out that this same argument applies both directions. That usually results in a pidgin when it comes to language, which would be quite funny, but not very practical in this case.
Communicating with someone in metric if you already know metric is easy. The process of pulling up a calculator is the same regardless which direction you’re going from, since converting 55" to 1.375m isn’t something that most people are gonna be able to do in their heads
That is in fact incorrect. And the reason is in that other comment. To make a summary of that other comment:
If an only-metric guy wanted to communicate with an only-imperial one, each would need a table of conversions. For a basic use case, the metric cheat sheet would only need 8 entries, while the imperial one 10. That is, you need to memorize less "magic number"s for metric than for imperial. Furthermore, 5 of those entries in the metric cheat sheet are: 1000, 1000, 1/10, 1/100, 1/1000, which are obviously easy. So the real difference would be more like 3 entries to 10.
Of course, any kind of real measurement you will need a calculator. But that is reality for any unit conversion across systems. The difference is that you only need to remember 3 numbers to convert to/from metric, but you need 10 to convert to/from imperial.
Because we are used to it and doing extra mental acrobatics for any conversions seems unnecessary.
You use money right? $1 = 100 cent, thousand is 1000 dollars or 100 000 cents. Imagine if somebody suddenly tried to tell you their money is just as easy to use when in their system $1 = 187 cents and thousand means 987 dollars, or by conversion 184 569 cents. Would you not see that as ridicilulous?
No, actually, I heard about the Brits decimalizing their currency, and thought it was an unfortunate choice. It was 20 shillings to a pound, 12 pence to a shilling, and I do actually, genuinely, unironicqlly think having 240 cents to a dollar is better than 100. 144 would be better, but 240 is still better than 100 imo
144 would be better,
Gross
You sure? Ok, you check your pocket and see that you have 5 half-pennies, 2 sixpence, 10 shillings, a crown, two florins, 3 half-crowns, and 3 pounds. Quickly, tell me, can you buy a 2 pound 15 shilling sandwich and a 1 pound 10 shillings drink? Which coins do you use for that?
Unless I’m missing a coin somewhere, no, you’d only have 3 pounds, 19 shillings, 2.5 pence.
Now, quickly, you have six dimes, a roll of quarters, seventeen pennies, and two rolls of nickels. Can you afford a $20 meal?
Quickly: No, a roll of quarters is $10. A roll of nickels won’t get you there.
Screw this, I’m going to quit counting and track down the joker who dumped all this coinage on me and box his ears with the nickel rolls.
Okay so lets use your numbers and buy s sanwitch and a drink from deli. Lets say the bread is $4,50 and the drink is $2,60.
So by conversion sanwich is $4 and ¢72 and the drink is $2 and ¢86 (86,4 is the accurate, but lets just round it)
So the total is $6 and ¢158. Then we need to convert it to the wholes and its $7 and ¢14.
In base hundred system the last conversion is just easier because you can do it just by moving a decimal. And i dont see any benefit in a system that makes that harder. And that is the reason why i think units like miles and feet are worse than metric.
Yes, in base 10 it does make the conversions easier, and we do use base 10. I don’t think we should, but we do, but also the money conversion is something that is a relatively daily occurrence, not something that doesn’t frequently happen like most distance conversions. While, yes, being 5 foot 8 inches is how we usually say people’s heights, we do regularly just… Not convert. TVs are sold as 55 inch, not as 1 yard, 1 foot, and 7 inches, same as the average female height isn’t 1 meter, 6 decimeters, 7 centimeters, and 5 millimeters in the US. It’s 167.5cm.
You asked why people bring conversions up when talking about metric system and i tried to explain it. When you are used to a system where you can do it, its jarring when people try to say system where it is impossible is better.
Both systems work in everyday use just as well, but one system is superior in those situations where you need to calculate something little different from the norm.
Personal example from last year was when person who owns a road with me and few others wanted to make it wider for heavy machinery (he is fellling lot of trees and he will get better price if the trucks collecting the logs can drive closer). It was really easy for me to calculate how many m² i would loose field and forest area when the road is widened because even if the amount road is widened is in cm and the lenght of the road is in km those numbers mix well. I could easily calculate everything accurately, while in feet and miles i think i would just had to questimate it.
I’m honestly surprised you’ve never had to do that, because it happens to me all the time.
Like when I’m approaching a junction on the road and the satnav suddenly changes from saying 0.5 miles to like 500 yards, that’s jarring and breaks my mental countdown. (In Britain, the roads are imperial, yes it’s a pain.)
Or if I’m cooking an old recipe and it needs 12oz of something, but I’m doubling the quantity, suddenly I need to know what that is in lb and oz because my scale doesn’t just tell me 24oz.
Or if someone says they’re 5’ 8" tall, I have to know how many " in a ’ to conceptualise how close that is to 6’.
Meanwhile, I know when I’m out hiking what my pacing is for 100m, and if I’ve got 2.5km to go, that’s 25 lots of pacing.
Or when I’m sewing, and fabric is sold by the metre but all the pattern pieces are measured in cm or mm.
And not strictly related, but it’s handy being able to measure out water in an unmarked container using a weighing scale and the fact that 1l=1kg.
I think part of it is being used to it (I do just kiiiinda know that 5’8" is 4" shy of 6’, but I blame the same nerdiness that lead me to knowing what links, chains, and furlongs even are for that one), and the other part is I use metric in the kitchen, and don’t follow recipes directly a lot of the time. I have some master recipes memorized that get used.
My GPS doesn’t do a 500ft callout (kinda wish it did), it’s usually 200, which my brain translates “Slow down now or you will miss the turn” because the announcement is often a little behind, so it’s jarring for other reasons. Also your GPS says yards?? Mine only does feet/miles, and mine’s weird and verbally calls out “Five tenths of a mile” when I’m walking to the store.
Yes, the UK uses yards as an intermediate unit between feet and miles, and it’s displayed on signs.
Oh, wild. My GPS (I’m in the US) just goes from 1/8 mile to 100 feet. It’s kinda rare to hear people talk in yards unless it’s a vague “A few yards over”, or when it’s 1/32~1/16 miles if they need to be accurate here. Anything nearer is feet, anything farther is in eighths, quarters, or half miles.
You’ve never had to add measurements with mixed units?
Ie. 1lb 2oz + 4lb 15oz?
Or heights, 5ft 10in + 6ft 5in?
Rarely outside of a school setting
There are plenty of people though who do these kinds of calculations daily. Like engineers and scientists.
There are! Most people are not engineers, or scientists, and rarely encounter these types of situations. Also from an admittedly cursory search, it seems to be that most professionals use metric for most jobs, anyway, or a mix that causes problems.
Per the search, it seems like a lot of engineers use metric, except for government jobs, which require imperial, and sometimes specific clients demand imperial instead of metric.
Pharmacist friend uses mostly metric at work, except for creams, which come labeled in metric but measured in imperial (1 ounce but labeled as 28.5g), but they’ll sometimes come as a rounder 28 or 30g which causes the problems. There’s also one med that’s measured in grains (~64mg, not a commonly used measurement in most settinfs) for some very strange reasons.
So now you just admitted that metric is better at least for some use cases and then the conversion to imperial causes problems. So wouldn’t it be better if everyone was just using metric? Or what is the advantage of imperial?
Admittedly I do like how imperial feels on a personal scale. Like I said in the OP, I’m not anti-metric, and in a few other replies I’ve said I’m definitely more pro-switching than anti. It’s just the conversion argument always seemed like a weird one to me, given how infrequently conversions happen here. Seems like y’all do just convert more often than we do.
I used it a few times with measurements around the house but sure, it’s not a daily occurrence.
What most annoys me about imperial are the recipes. Why the fuck do you not weigh your ingredients? Instead you have to put everything in these measuring cups, shake it or even press it in so it sits flat. How many carrots is 1 cup of diced carrots? With experience you will know but if it said grams, you could weigh the whole thing in the store and be done with it. It doesn’t need to be very precise with cooking but you get the idea.
But don’t get me started on baking recipes…
Cups were invented by the pioneers. It’s easier to carry a cup around than to carry scales and a whole bunch of weights around. There is little no reason to still use cups.
TIL.
Crafty buggers
The crazy thing is that for some recipes it doesn’t even matter the exact amount, but for others it does.
When I was taking chemistry, we had specific instructions to indicate that it didn’t matter exactly how much of something you used, verse when it did matter.
I think a lot of that is tradition, since imperial almost certainly predates scales being an everyday item. Annoys the shit out of me, too, though, so I use metric in the kitchen, because I have a scale xD It does depend on the recipe, though. For pancakes I just use a jug, put the egg/butter/salt/etc in, then fill up to the 2 cup mark, then add in half cups of flour until it looks right, but at that point it’s not really measuring anything beyond the total liquid content. Easy recipe, though, and good pancakes.
How often do y’all convert your measurements?
It’s second nature in metric. All the time.
Judging by your post, it sounds like that’s not the case in imperial. But you need to understand that especially converting between mm, cm, m, and km, for example, is not just extremely common, it’s just normal. If you add up 10 times a 1000 meters, you don’t call that 10000 meters, that would be awkward. You say it’s 10 km.
We convert all the time, so that’s why we assume the same must be the case in imperial and thus the easy conversions must be focused on because clearly they would get you to understand why metric is superior.
Tl;dr: I think the different imperial units represent a shift of scale that just doesn’t happen in day to day life, given how different most of the common ones are.
Yeah, we largely… Don’t? We’re much more likely to 10x10 feet is 100 feet instead of 33 yard+1 foot. Even if we do go with something that ends on 99 feet I don’t know anyone who would convert that to yards, even the GPS just says “In 200 feet turn right.”
Anything above about 600 feet gets talked about in fractions of a mile. 1/8, 1/4, 1/2, etc, but if we’re talking feet and go into that most would just stick with feet. 200+460 feet is 660 feet, not an eight of a mile, despite being an eighth of a mile.
If we’re talking the “equivalent” to 10x1000 meters, we’d start talking about miles, not feet/yards xD I think it’s because going from one unit to the other represents a shift in scale that just doesn’t get run into frequently in day to day life? Because a yard is about a meter, 1 meter is about 7.5cm shorter, which is negligible for this discussion. A mile is 1,760 of those. I know that conversion because I’m a nerd, I doubt most people do, because it’s not common enough in day to day life to need it. Land surveyors might, I’d assume they’re more likely to know a lot of weirder ones, like feet to chains (66 feet), and maybe furlongs (10 chains) over the direct yard/miles conversion, since chains/furlongs were made for that profession, but I’m not, and don’t know a surveyor so I can’t say for sure.
I just don’t believe you at all.
There are 12 inches in a foot. So the scale of a foot is 12x that of an inch.
There are 100cm in 1m. That is 100x.
Europeans convert cm to m very frequently, and it’s a scale shift 10x larger than the one of inch-foot.
We also convert km to m frequently, which is a 1000x scale shift. It’s more than half that of yard-mile.
The reason you don’t convert often is because it is a pain in the ass to do so. Not the other way around.
The reason you say “an eight of a foot” has meaning, while “0.125 feet” does not. However, saying “125 meters” is way easier for both the listener and the talker than “an eighth of a kilometer”. If it weren’t, we’d say 1/8km, since nothing in metric prevents you from doing that.
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A: I don’t know what point you are trying to make. Could you clarify? To clarify on my part, nobody would say what you said. We would probably choose one of the following options:
- 1.675m
- 1m 67.5cm
- 167.5cm
Of course options 1 and 2 sound basically the same when spoken. And we wouldn’t measure a human height to mm precision, so 1.68m, 1m 68cm, and 168cm.
B: ad hominem.
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They’re just annoyed that we use a different system with no upside when the rest of the world all chose to establish a consistent measurement system.
Which is fair enough. But now I’m annoyed that they keep complaining about it.
tbh… being in Canada sucks ass because of it.
here’s a fun flowchart for Canadians and living with both
and don’t get me started on date formatting…
wtf is 1/4/2026. is that January, or April. who sent this… where are they located?
As always, the only correct date format is ISO 8601
WHOOOO ISO-8601 FAN CLUB!!!
[Cheers and goes running out the door]
HELL YEAH! This is honestly the worst part of my work. Half of the forms require YYYY-MM-DD, half do DD/MM/YYYY and having to switch is annoying, especially since personally I always use ISO-8601
Correct! And yet…
wtf is 2026/1/4? is that January, or April. who sent this… where are they located?
Though to be fair the chances of ISO 8601 goes up when year comes first
The date part of ISO 8601 doesn’t have slashes, it has dashes and requires double digits: 2026-01-04
I mean, if it’s normalized to ISO 8601, then you KNOW that’s January 4th even without dashes or slashes. (although preeeetty sure the standard would require zeros before the 1 and 4 in either case)
The fucking date problem I can get behind with you.
I always use year/month/day now, which pisses off everyone but computers sort it properly every time.
Oof. A good while back, I worked in a US-based company with offices globally, and they upgraded to a global ERP system. At launch of the new system, documents (such as purchase orders) printed with dates in MM/DD/YYYY format. Thankfully, my suggestion to change that to DD Mmm YYYY (eg. 31 Jan 2026) was quickly implemented without any pushback, but it totally blows my mind that a company operating globally would default to such an ambiguous date format.
yyyy-mm-dd is superior it is unambiguous and sorts well.
So you usually take your water for cooking out of the pool? ;-)
It seems to also be different between provinces. I was shopping in Ontario (from BC) and the fruit was in ounces, which threw me. And at least in BC schools cooking class uses metric not cups.
They keep complaining about it because we keep using the worse system for no reason. /shrug
It’s a better system for me, because I already know it.
Metric is very easy to learn, so I’m not sure I’d go around flaunting that reason…
It is easy to learn how to convert between metric units. But that’s not what people mean when they talk about “learning metric”. They mean having an intuitive sense for how much, say, 100 meters or 100 milliliters is. Again, the emphasis on how easy it is to remember the conversion between meters and kilometers is extraneous.
500 meters = 0.5 kilometers 🤷♂️
Yea, that’s the really easy part. It just takes exposure on a level that’s more than twice a month and it’s practically by osmosis.
The conversions are the hard part.
And that’s how I know you’re an American!
Same reason the metric people keep telling me to change. Because if I did, it would be better for them. Difference is, I don’t drone on and on about how superior my forms of measurement are
Well that’s because it isn’t lol.
My guess is, if the USA method was better:
The USA would sanction countries until they adopted it. They would embed it in the national flag and insert it in the national anthem. They would make underwear out of it and put stickers on their 20yard-long cars.
I mean, it does have the noted benefit of down-converting between units being cleaner. 1/3 of a foot is 4 inches. 1/3 of a meter is 333.333…mm
I mean, you kind of cherry-picked there. A third of an inch is…?
1 barleycorn.
This is mental illness
Its all cherry picking.
Do people struggle that much more to divide dollars compared to feet?
I mean I totally get that base 12 is pretty cool for calculator-less maths (though not as cool for base 60) but ultimately, we still have a base 10 numbering system.
So yea, base 10 units for base 10 numbers. Using the same all the way down makes it easier to learn how to handle the more complicated divisions in all cases, you don’t have to switch logic if you see what I mean.
Of course, to each their own. The best case for metric remains that it’s the system everyone else has agreed on.
I mean, not really, it’s just the lack of factors that comes from having a base 10 numbering system, which is my the single big issue I personally have with metric. I still think it should be adopted, generally, because standards are good, and in the modern world it makes more sense. I just also think we should be doing base 12 instead of base 10 xD
But how do the lack of factors even affect you in your daily life?
Regularly enough when I’m cooking/baking/doing coffee math that it’s worth being a sticking point in my mind. I divide by 3 with measurements frequently, and admittedly I have some Brain Funk that makes me more likely to be made severely uncomfortable if I cannot divide exactly (especially by 3). That’s definitely a me thing, but it’s also why I like having it as an option
I think the best ‘conversion’ thing in metric is not the mm/cm/m/km type ones but the volumetric type ones: a cubic metre of water/ 1 tonne / 1000 litres
What’s the equivalent un US units? 1 cubic yard / 1684.8 pound / 807.8961039 qt / 25852.675325 oz ?
Even then I don’t find the weight particularly useful, because it only applies to liquids with the same density of water.
Also 1 gallon is 231 cubic inches. Idk why, but it is, and I’ve already looked into all of the weird imperial measurements previously xD
Most liquids are similar to water. I will fairly often see a liquid and can do a quick estimation of weight based on volume. 40L water canister? That’s about 40kg. It takes no effort to calculate.
Fair point, it is usually things like syrup that end up having a massively different weight
Water is the most abundant liquid on our planet. And most liquids we interact with have a density very similar to water.
What’s your argument? “Oh. The ratio of volume and mass units don’t work for all the densities? Then it’s useless.”. What benefit would any other ratio that is worth to give up the 1L=1Kg water ratio?
ok, so i have a liquid (honey) with density of about 1.4 g/ml that is 1.4 tonne for the m^3
You had the same density of ~11.5lb/gal what is the above calculation?
just look at all that maths https://measuringstuff.com/how-much-does-a-gallon-of-honey-weigh/
[edit, shit my spelling is bad this morning]
231=3711, just in case you wanted to buy enough to give each of your three children 11 cubic inches of orange juice every day for a week.
Ahh, yes, the classic two and a half eggs of daily OJ
I actually do conversions on the regular but than again I live in Europe so I use the metric system and all conversions are base 10 so it is super easy. Take distance for example:
- 0.5 km
- 500 m
- 50 000 cm
- 500 000 mm Etc…
It’s not my measurements I need to convert, it’s other people’s. Don’t forget, American content is pretty overrepresented on the internet, so I actually need to do conversions pretty regularly.
Beyond the day to day, a spacecraft has burned up in the Martian atmosphere and an aircraft has run out of fuel mid-flight because of unit conversions not being done. These happenings aren’t very common, but the repercussions can be pretty big when they do, and the fact that this is a completely self-inflicted problem just makes it worse. Also, the shipping industry spends a good amount of money on unit conversions.
As for the problems with base-10, certainly a system based on base-12 would in principle be better (mind you, imperial isn’t one either). The problem is our numerals are base-10 and so our intuitions around numbers are based on that. 12 can still be dealt with, but once you get to 144 or 1728, it gets a lot harder. I can certainly name more integer divisors of 100 and 1000 off the top of my head despite having fewer of them.
That wasn’t because of unit conversions, that was a major failure of systems management.
I say this as someone in IT where we have multiple other involved people verifying work we do. Mistakes happen, so you have external validations. I’m not even permitted to touch the systems for which I’m responsible - I have to document changes, with extensive lab testing that is vetted by someone who’s never seen these systems.
NASA should be shamed for dropping the ball so badly.
Are those are the only two cases you can come up with, compared to the trillions it would take to convert, and the billions of errors that would occur with trying to convert now.
Just look at a single machine shop, that’s using lathes from 1945 (because that’s all they need for accuracy). Should they upgrade their lathes to new ones with metric indicators? How much steel is it going to take, coal, aluminum, energy just to transport the lathe to that one shop.
Then all their tools. The world doesn’t have the manufacturing capability just to make measurement tools for all the industries that would need it.
And then you’d still have the conversion problem between one business and the next during the decade’s long transition. How many conversion mistakes do you think would happen then?
You people who scream about this all the time have never had to even look at what it would take. You act like it’s a simple problem.
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.
Testing and validation are very important, but they’re no replacement for structurally making mistakes as impossible as possible to make in the first place. In fact, that was the conclusion from the Gimli Glider incident, that using mixed units increases the likelihood of mistakes being made, and so they stopped doing that. It’s kind of absurd to acknowledge that people make mistakes and therefore their work needs to be validated, but when the people doing the validation also make mistakes, they get all of the blame even when the people who made the thing did things in a way that increased their chances of making mistakes when they could have chosen not to.
Also, that’s some contrived scenario you’re painting.You make it sound as though every machine shop in the US would have to replace all of their equipment. First of all, for anything computer-controlled the units are arbitrary and software-defined. But even for purely (electro-)mechanical machines, it’s not like those can’t be (and aren’t already) modded up the wazoo. Why replace the entire machine when you can just swap out some of the gears or even just the dial? If a machine has been around since 1945, they’ll have done things like that many times already.
Of course no transition is going to be instant or painless, but it’s better than keeping up this situation forever. I mentioned two incidents because they’re the most dramatic, but things like that happen every day and the cost of lesser incidents also builds up. Somehow, almost all of the rest of the world managed to go against centuries if not millennia of tradition and momentum and transition in a fairly short amount of time during a period when precision engineering was already a thing that happened at a large scale, but the US is special? Give me a break.
Oh, absolutely. And all of those are better arguments than “It’s easy to go from meters to km! Just shift a few decimals!” despite the latter being the more common argument I see.
And yeah, imperial isn’t base 12 either. I do think base 12 numbers would be better, and I would have exactly 0 reservations about metric if we did, though it’s not like I’m exactly anti-metric now. I use it probably about as much as I use imperial day-to-day
Well, I do think that has value too. This example is going to be fairly specific to my situation, but as a programmer working on simulation software, it’s not uncommon for me to see or need to enter values in terms of meters that I think of as being in the realm of kilometers. Being able to reason more intuitively about these distances just by moving the decimal point around instead of having to multiply/divide them by 5280 or something is helpful. And the reason I have this intuition to begin with is because I use the same units in everyday life. This does require the system of units to be based on multiples of 10, however.
