| ▲ | coldpie a day ago |
| The trouble is there is just very little gain. It really just doesn't matter. All the systems are fine, they all work. If you come live here, you'll adjust after 2 years. If I moved to Europe, I would adjust in 2 years. Once in a blue moon you have to bother with converting units but c'est la vie. There's bigger things to worry about. |
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| ▲ | int_19h a day ago | parent | next [-] |
| I've been living in US for 15 years now and I still can't remember which unit scales are factor-of-3 and which ones are factor-of-4. How many cups are there in a gallon? How many yards in a mile? I don't want to waste my brain cells on stuff like this, yet it comes up all the time in e.g. cooking, or using maps for navigation. |
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| ▲ | bigstrat2003 a day ago | parent | next [-] | | Two cups to a pint, two pints to a quart, four quarts to a gallon. That makes sixteen cups to a gallon. There are 5280 feet in a mile, and three feet to a yard, so that makes 1760 yards to a mile (if I did the math correctly in my head just now). These are conversions I know off the top of my head, I didn't need to look them up. Which is the point the GP was making: it's not hard to memorize the handful of conversions you will encounter in everyday life. Most people living here did it as children and have never had to think about it since. That's why there's no actual gain for us to switch to metric units. On the other hand there would be quite a bit of pain as everyone had to adjust to estimating things in kilos vs pounds, grams vs cups (in recipes), and so on. So for the typical American, it is actually a net negative for the country to switch to the metric system. It isn't just stubbornness. | |
| ▲ | coldpie a day ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yeah, every system has pros & cons. I think the lack of an approximately-one-foot (30 cm) unit in metric is clumsy to work around, and I think degrees-C are too wide. We can argue about the details if you find it fun ("yards in a mile" does not come up all the time), but they're all evolved from hundreds of years of usage, and that means they all work fine at the end of the day. |
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| ▲ | lproven 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > All the systems are fine This is not true and that's trivially verifiable. No calculator, no references, no Google: How many inches are in 5 and three-quarter miles? How much does 5 & 3/4 gallons of water weigh? |
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| ▲ | Spooky23 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| If you’re not the biggest, it matters alot. |
