Technically the metric system is “the preferred system of weights and measures for United States trade and commerce” as per the Metric Conversion Act of 1975.

You’re just also allowed to use lbs and feet and stuff and most people do.

When I find a wood working video on YouTube from the states it blows my mind how anyone can not just adopt metric “This is 5” 4/57 and we need to cut it to 5” 5/45 and a half” bzzzzzzz.

Those aliens have 3 fingers. A decimal system to them is like a system based on 14, 196, 2744, 38416, … would be like to us - probably worse than US Customary

Base 12 is way more logical than base 10, I bet aliens would think we’re stupid for counting in base 10 just because we have 10 fingers, my opinion on this is infallible fight me

I find imperial vs metric to be a question of practicality vs ideality, and as an engineer I tend towards the former. Either way it doesn’t really matter, because unit conversions are easy math, and a good engineer can work in any unit system.

In defense of imperial, to balance things out here:

• I almost never need to go from inches to feet to yards to miles. Conversions like that play almost no role in my daily life. Easily going from mm to cm to m to km is a solution in need of a problem.

• Because imperial isn’t bound by a constant conversion factor, you can use several points of reference. An inch is about the size of one knuckle. A foot is roughly the size of… A foot. Most of the time, I don’t need anything more than this. Although to be fair, I rarely need this even. Smaller than an inch is all metric though, easily.

• Imperial is sometimes more convenient. Twelve seems like an usual number for inches to feet, but twelve is also easily divisible by 2, 3, 4, and 6. I can instantly convert from fractional feet to inches for the most common fractions.

• I’m going to say it, both temperature scales make sense. Celsius being based on water makes a lot of sense, it’s the most ubiquitous substance. Fahrenheit makes sense too in terms of climate and the weather that people experience – it’s harder to go more simple than 0 = very cold and 100 = very hot.

• Conversions actually aren’t universally good for metric. Joules are great for abstract concepts, but not so much more realistic matters. The energy required to raise 1 g of water by 1 deg C is 4.184 Joules – or more simply, 1 calorie. Calorie is actually neither imperial nor metric. Metric here loses the intuitiveness of water, while SI takes a big W. Another example, mass and weight. In metric, 1 kg is 9.8 Newtons. Most places don’t bother with Newtons and stick to kg. In imperial, 1 pound mass is 1 pound weight. They have been set equal to each other by definition. Mass to weight calculations will always be much easier in imperial, and that’s rather nice for looking at chemistry and flowrates and equipment requirements.

• Imperial is better for K-12 education, another unpopular opinion. It requires children to learn going from inches to feet to yards, which uses math far more regularly than metric does. For lengths, it’s great for teaching fractions. Unit conversions between systems are taught often, which gives students a basis when you’re converting other units, like moles and kilograms in chemistry.

• It teaches you to always label your fucking units. It’s incredibly bad engineering practice to do this, even if you work solely in one unit system, because you almost certainly aren’t using just one unit. Hell when it comes to pressure, with kPa, psi, atmospheres, and bar, it really doesn’t matter what unit system you’re using.

• Metric defines some units in a way that’s good for science but bad for everyday life. A pascal is 1 newton of force per square meter. Our atmosphere is 101,125 Pascals. You see kPa used constantly because the defined unit is absurdly small. The same goes for a Joule, it’s the work done to move a 1 newton object 1 meter. Chemical reaction energy is measured on the basis of kJ per mole (or kg). The defined unit is really small.

TLDR: Convenience + Practicality vs Ideality + Logic

Outside of school I don’t think I’ve ever had to convert feet to miles or yards to miles.

I feel like this is my wheel house.

Could Always Use both it’s not confusing at all

Every time anyone talks about this, I feel obligated to inform them: there’s also a counting system that’s not based on ten, and it’s way superior. Do people know about it? Most don’t. The Wikipedia page stupidly calls it the “ten-plus-two” system, and there have been heated arguments there with the dumbasses who refuse to change it to the logical name. That’s how stupidly-biased people are towards the ten-based system.

You make a “metric” measurement system based on 12-based counting and then everyone wins. Everyone. It’ll never happen of course.

Looking forward to your new animated series!

It’s not entirely without logic. Base 12 is actually better that base 10 for a start, as it allows for a lot more fractions that have clean representations, so 12 inches in a foot is fine. The next thing is that people seem to think we have all of these strange units with strange conversions, when in reality we have 3 units for short distances, and then a seperate unit for long distances. 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard, and then nobody cares how long a mile is in terms of feet or yards. Once you realize that the mile is not even really part of the same measuring system as inches, feet and yards, the weird conversion makes sense. We exclusively use miles to talk about long distances above 0.1 miles, and then yards are used below 500 yards (which has an overlap of 324 yards). And then for the logic, it is entirely based on actual human scale shit. A foot is called a foot because it is roughly the size of your foot. A yard is approximately how long one stride is. Saying something is 100 yards away means it is approximate 100 steps away. Obviously there will be a bit of variance for how accurate that will be for any given person (and children will have to base it off of an adult obviously), but because it is based more on human things it is more useful for measuring human scale things. It was designed to not use decimals or large numbers because humans don’t comprehend those very well.

Everyone focuses on why learning metric would be better in the first place, and they’re right. No one has come up with a good argument for me to throw away all of my measuring tools, convert all my recipes and relearn an entirely new system when the system and stuff I have works for me now.

Ah nice, this should be a constructive dialogue between open minded and empathetic individuals.

grabs popcorn

how about we all agree that the best system is american units with metric prefixes. After all it is obvious that it takes an hours to drive 318 kilofeet

A truly logic system would be entirely designed around a base-12 number system. But we were born with an imperfect set of 10 fingers and that doomed us.

Those aliens have 6 fingers. It’s an absolutely ironic twist that their discussion on measuring systems is super illogical for them, and yet logical is the verbiage they use.