The US has no issue with the metric system, and most engineering and scientific people switched decades ago. The military is mostly all metric too. The general public of the US is a harder nut to crack, asking a population of stubborn freedom lovers to change something they’ve known their whole life is damn near impossible.
I switch my stuff to metric all the time, and the usual response isn’t “oh that’s interesting”, it’s nearly always, “the fuck is wrong with you, why would you want that weird shit?!”. If the government suddenly made all weather reports metric, the T-Shirt sellers would all become millionaires overnight from selling anti-metric slogans.
Americans: go pick up the closest consumer packaged good within reach. You will find it is labeled with metric.
It would be nice to get highway signs in both units, though with Google maps obeying whatever’s selected in your settings, that matters less than ever. Some woodworking stuff is just too far gone down the imperial hole and will never come back. But other than such odd niches, you can live a metric life in the US without much trouble.
Americans: go pick up the closest consumer packaged good within reach. You will find it is labeled with metric.
Yes, but that’s likely because they want to sell it in Canada without changing the packaging design, isn’t it? Even if they have to put French on the other side for Canada, it’s cheaper in terms of development to have a single English design for both the U.S. and Canada, so it will be labeled in both Imperial and metric.
Americans use metric system for measuring bullets
And drugs!
And 2 liter bottles of soft drinks.
No? Caliber is based on the inch
heres my question. What do they use for a wood 2x4 in metric countries? And does the size actually match the name (unlike the US).
90mm x 45mm is what’s available near me for framing timber. And yes it’s more accurate.
Millimetres in general are used heavily in construction, everything is stated in them, even into the thousands where people normally would have switched to metres.
Millimetres in general are used heavily in construction, everything is stated in them, even into the thousands where people normally would have switched to metres.
Similar thing in the US but with inches vs feet. In framing, no one would ever call for a “3 foot 2 and a half inch block,” it’s just “38 and a half”
One yard two and a half inches.
This unreasonably upsets me. Haha
As I see it, the problem is that for the vast majority of people in the U.S. there is no compelling reason to change. People rarely need to convert units and rarely (but more often thanks to social media) need to talk to anyone who uses metric. I see it as a cultural quirk not unlike a dialect.
Of course for science, industry, and other situations where conversion, accuracy, and international communication are involved it very much matters and U.S. needs to use metric as much as possible.
America: Our shit doesn’t make sense and we like it that way.
Freedom units
There would be mass confusion if the US went metric.
Seemed to work fine everywhere else.
There’s mass confusion now. It’s why industry by industry is voluntarily metricating. Most famously American aerospace used US Customary until a conversion error crashed a Mars mission.
