Imperial Wastes So Much Time

Also 1L water ~ 1kg

Just came here to nit-pick that the metric prefix for 10³ is k and not K.

Case in point: Platinum melts around 2kK.

BUT THIS IS HOW WE ALWAYS DID IT

Ah yes, the reason I am teaching myself as an American adult the metric system

We were taught it in my rural red state elementary school in the '80s. Maybe because metrification seemed like a more real possibility, I guess.
- A lot of thing’s seemed more possible in the 80’s
Should be pretty easy to learn, right? I mean, that's the whole point.
- except for intuition formed from a lifetime of daily usage

I'm an American and every last bit of my shop is metric. It is the superior unit of measurement in every aspect. I don't bother with imperial at all. If I have to list dimensions online in imperial, just multiply mm x 25.4 which gives me inches. That's as far as Ill go into inches and feet.

I've said this before and Ill say it again, the US was robbed of the superior unit of measurement.

What temperature is the shop kept at?
- Fahrenheit. Switching to Kelvin soon, tho. For shop temp accuracy!
Thank you for your efforts!
Uh, I'm pretty sure you divide mm/25.4 to get inches.
- Yes. I misspoke. Millimeters ÷ 25.4= inches. Inches x 25.4 = mm.
So, from my perspective, your experience gives me the exact opposite view. The fact is: no one is stopping us. Anyone in American can use metric any time they want. We use Imperial a significant amount of time because it's useful. Feet and inches are related to body parts. Kilometers are too small for our giant country. I design surgical tools, and I use metric. I design buildings, and I use feet and inches.
I don't really think it's slowing us down to have more than one system.
- Kilometers are too small for our giant country.
  Kilometers aren't the biggest measurement in metric though.
  It goes: Kilometer x1000= Megameter x1000= Gigameter x1000= Terameter. A Terameter is about 10¹² meter
  Just as it goes smaller like: Milimeter /1000= Micrometer /1000= Nanometer /1000= Picometer
  And even those are still not the biggest or smallest measurements possible in metric.
- I don't really think it's slowing us down to have more than one system
  Say that to the Mars Climate Orbiter
- Kilometers are too small for our giant country.
  Fortunately for NASA, space is actually smaller than the USA. Otherwise km would be totally unworkable.
  I'm guessing that you have to use meters instead of yards when designing tall buildings? Yards would be too small for most skyscrapers.
- Lol. Dude, with all due respect, did you skip breakfast or something? First, body parts? Take a drink of water, please. You're dehydrated. Also, although I agree imperial isn't completely useless, one of its strengths is not because the size of the contental United States. It's not like miles and kilometers are orders of magnitude different when measuring an identical distance. Lightyears and astronomical units are terrible units to use to describe a drive from LA to NYC for this reason, but is it really that big if a deal between choosing miles and kilometers? I don't see it that way.
  The main reason why I use metric with my work is because I commonly deal in millimeters / sub-inches. If I used inches, everything would be shitty fractions and I hate fractions. To me, metric is just cleaner when increasing or decreasing magnitudes. Which I generally stay within cm and mm.
  Within industrial applications, such a building a structure in the US, yeah, it makes sense to stick ti imperial because it is indeed the national unit of measurement. But outside that reason, I don't find much of a benefit. Coincidentally, I moved off grid 3 weeks ago and am building a cabin way out in the woods. Because its just me and I plan to stay here until my end, I'll definitely use metric. If I was just developing a place I intended to flip, I'd use Imperial singularly because I'm in the US.

I like metric weight for cooking (on the rare occasion I make something that involves careful measuring, and for my bread making) and MILES can fuck right off, km are fine for measuring long distance. And fine with meters, cm for short distance.

But I do like how feet are 12 inches, because 12 is so evenly divisible, and like that a gallon splits in half and half again and again until you get cups. It's like RAM,

Cup is 8 oz

Pint is 16 oz

Quart is 32 oz

Half Gallon is 64 oz

Gallon is 128 oz.

That doubling sequence is satisfying.

Your 16 oz pints are a pathetic 455ml. Europeans have 500ml.
Meanwhile a true UK pint is 568ml.
You can see why we cling to Imperialism.
specifically woodworking I like doing in inches, because 12. For the tasks I often do in the wood shop, fractional inches work well.
I'm confortable working in both systems, but I build furniture in inches.
- In metric, the 12 really isn't important anymore which kinda invalidates that. We normally go to the nearest mm or, if needed, some fraction of that (not normally needed in my life at least)

It annoys me so much that a small decision could have had me growing up with metric.

Damn Tucker Carlson must’ve stumbled upon this post. Someone should tell him that Russians use metric.

Being purposefully stupid and arrogant about it is the single most American thing.

One of the many failures of American public education system that I was subjected to. It's speaks volumes about how normalized exceptionalism is in this country.

"Oh, the measurement standard the rest of the world uses? You don't need to learn that. You're an American, so people from other countries will just accomodate you because they want to be like us."

I was taught the metric system in American elementary school.
- I don't doubt it. My elementary education out in East Bumfuck, New Hampshire in the late 80s/early 90s wasn't exactly top notch. My third grade teacher taught us that the appendix was located in the leg and banned certain books and items from the classroom for being "satanic".
One of the most annoying things in the world are American websites that claim to sell internationally but they only offer USD and all provided measurements are in American imperial.
Right up there with online stores that only have boxes for "state" and "zip code" even if the selected country doesn't use those.
Americans are really falling behind these day in all the metrics 😂
We actually use both. Imperial is easier to break into 3rds, but can still break down into other bases easily without any irrational numbers. Metric is more useful for science, but my mom who does landscaping prefers Imperial for her designs because it’s not stuck in base-10.
Europeans are the ones who refuse to learn more than one system lol

"1 brick equals about 1kg" - Plain. Boring. No pizazz.

"1 brick equals about 37 baby chicks." - Fun. Whimsical. Oozing pizazz.

Ah, you need The Reg online standards converter
So, a 1kg brick = 0.1149 Adult Badger
- I did not know this page. Thanks for the link. This is so 100% The Register! Shoutout to the team from the "guy with the open university style beard" ;-)

Growing up in the Metric environment, I only have to deal with the Imperial system very rarely before the Internet. But later, I found out there's a whole country that only use Imperial, and that they almost always demand you convert your system to the one they understand, and almost never bothered with Metric when they write anything. But then again, I found out that they also use units that are totally novel. I just have to accept that this is the character of them, and continue using Metric.

It's because they believe they're so exceptional that everything that works for the rest of the world doesn't work for them.
That includes not only the metric system but also things like healthcare, student debt and gun control.
There is no country that only uses Imperial. Americans use grams for weed. And technically what the US uses is called US Customary. Some units are different from Imperial. Funny thing is both Imperial and US Customary are legally defined in metric.
- Yeah measures like a foot were never standardized across countries using imperial before napolean introduced metric, as the french foot was 13 inches or so, making napolean at least as tall as putin and not the 5 1 under that measure.
Probably. Because their understanding of metric is next to none. So they don't even know what to convert it to. We also often take for granted with that we grow up with.
It wasn't until I was 25 that I realized woodworking and sewing, isn't part of the normal elementary school curriculum abroad.
It's far from easy for someone that grew up in a different system to get a good reference of what different units feel like. It's the kind of change you need multiple new generations for.
The only reference Americans have for metric is 9mm
- The only reference Americans have for metric is 9mm
  Way to show your ignorance. We also buy our soda in liters.
I'm having way too much fun with refusing to convert to or even learn that abomination of a system. Whenever a Murrican starts a conversation with inches, feet, ellbows or whatever I ask them what they mean and whether they can convert that to real units please.
Middle Earth?

Being a mechanical engineer in the US constantly switching between both systems really sucks. And for much more than just length and temperature

This could’ve been dealt with decades ago if people weren’t afraid of change.
- If the brits were able to mostly switch in the 20th century the americans should have been more than able to.
- And if the weights didn't fall into the ocean.
How many British thermal units does it take to heat up a slug of water 1 degree Celsius?

But it's really easy. Wanna know how many inches are in a mile? One inch is 0.0254 m. One mile is 1609.344 m. 1609.344 / 0.0254 is 63360. There.

But what if there are no inches in that mile, only yards? Or parsec? Oh, wait...
- or just eagle elbows
- i tooked astronomy in college a while ago, to know how long is 1 parsec.
I always assumed 1km = 0.6 miles because all all of the car guys yapping about 0-100 and 0-60. Good enough, tbh. Inch is 2.5cm, and there are 12 of them in a foot for some reason. Pint is slightly less than half a liter, pound is slightly less than half a kilo, and anyone mentioning stones gets stoned to death. Simple enough.
- Just wait until you try to understand American cooking recipes. Cups everywhere! My favorite was "A cup of spinach", without any mentioning if they were talking about fresh spinach (losely or densily packed) or cooked/frozen one.
- I always assume there's absolutely no point in expending brain cells to store this information and therefore exclusively deal in metric. (Except for DnD for some reason, but that's also about to change)
Wanna know how many inches are in a mile?
No. Nobody wants to know that. Nobody needs to know that.
Nobody needs a measurement with a magnitude of a mile to the precision of an inch. And if they did, they'd either measure the whole length in inches or decimal miles, not some bullshit multiple-unit travesty.
Ya'll are solving a problem that never existed in the first place.
- Railways? Large tunnels? Bridges?
- Well the main reason why the metric caught was there were many many mny versions of older systems in place. You may have heard a french inch was different then an English inch. But it was way more complex then just that.
  Even in a single country different industries could all use a gallon but have it be different. Need 39 yards of rope for your ship? Well is that paris or vince yards? Also better remember the currency conversion.
  Having one system was better since everyone could now agree on how long something was. This is also why metric time failed to catch on. Everyone agreed on days, weeks, years etc etc.
I've never wanted to know how many of any unit are in a mile. It's just something I've never had reason to care about. So there's 1000 meters in a kilometer. That's just trivia to me. There's no need to know that.

1g water == 1ml water == ~~1cm^2~~ 1cm^3 water

At 3C. 1 liter at room temperature will be about 2-3g off.
Nah you made it even worse.
Squared centimeters for a volume measurement?
- Oops! A mistake, of course
- Their 2.5L bottles must be huge

Then there's my favorite cursed unit: the kip! 1 kip=1000 lbs. "Kip" is short for "kilo-pounds." It's a unit used frequently in American civil and structural engineering. And it is so deliciously cursed.

It's also about 31 slugs.
Fun fact: the SI (international system of units) actually defines a multiplier "Ki", but it is not a factor of 1000. A Kisomething is 1024 something. As in 1KiB = 1024B (Kilobytes resp. Bytes).
- As in 1KiB = 1024B (Kilobytes resp. Bytes)
  Isn't it even more convoluted than this?
  Doesn't KiB translate to Kibibytes? Because "kilo" is 1000 (powers of 10).
  Kibi is 1024, the "bi" is supposed to mean "binary", or powers of 2.
I think the mil/thou is pretty cursed.
Back in the early days of telephones at&t used kft to measure lines. Yes that is kilofoot

Bring forth the ceremonial cudgels, it's imperial units bashing time.

The chain (abbreviated ch) is a unit of length equal to 66 feet (22 yards), used in both the US customary and Imperial unit systems. It is subdivided into 100 links. There are 10 chains in a furlong, and 80 chains in one statute mile. In metric terms, it is 20.1168 m long.

ahhh good hit, that's the stuff.

'Ow many stone does the chain weigh guv'nah?

I want to prefer imperial, but using fractions for tools is super fucking annoying when millimeters are easy, and then stores giving me price per ounce in the store, other products price per pound making me do the fucking Mental Math multiplying times 16 pisses me off.

Fractions are a stupid way to measure small distances, and ounces are a stupid way to measure it small amounts of weight.

It's just a binary search
- I could honestly care if Imperial wants to fuck men or women or both, I just don't want it to be fucking annoying when I'm trying to do work.
But at the same time, fractions are actually a better way to measure precisely. If you need to record a precision that's greater than a whole unit without being 10x as precise, decimal kinda sucks. If your precision is 1/8 a cm, you either have to round up or imply that the precision is accurate to 0.001 cm.
You can always play with a denominator to show greater precision with fractional measurements (1/8 vs 2/16 vs 8/64), but you can't easily imply lower precision with decimal.
- I do not agreed that fractions are a better way of measuring small distances. Decimals can be broken down infinitesimally. I don't see anything hard to understand about it, meanwhile fractions you have to like compare and contrast the denominators to find the values or break out some long division or a calculator. Fuck that.

Yeah but can we talk about time?

        Our units of temporal measurement, from seconds on up to months, are so complicated, asymmetrical and disjunctive so as to make coherent mental reckoning in time all but impossible. Indeed, had some tyrannical god contrived to enslave our minds to time, to make it all but impossible for us to escape subjection to sodden routines and unpleasant surprises, he could hardly have done better than handing down our present system. It is like a set of trapezoidal building blocks, with no vertical or horizontal surfaces, like a language in which the simplest thought demands ornate constructions, useless particles and lengthy circumlocutions. Unlike the more successful patterns of language and science, which enable us to face experience boldly or at least level-headedly, our system of temporal calculation silently and persistently encourages our terror of time.

    ...It is as though architects had to measure length in feet, width in meters and height in ells; as though basic instruction manuals demanded a knowledge of five different languages. It is no wonder then that we often look into our own immediate past or future, last Tuesday or a week from Sunday, with feelings of helpless confusion. …

    —Robert Grudin, Time and the Art of Living.

As quoted in the GNU coreurils documentation for date input formats

The units are complicated because our world is complicated. The moon orbits the earth in a certain interval, the earth orbit the sun and the earth revolves around itself. Those are the major points of reference but none of them line up.
- Best of all, none of those natural reference values are constant. They drift gradually, and lunar months won’t be 30 days forever just like a day won’t be 24 hours in the future.
- The way we split them is still purely arbitrary though. We could have metric time that uses multiples of 10 just by adjusting the duration of a second accordingly and adjusting how we divide time in a day.
  Days of the calendar would be more challenging. But it's still possible to make something much more workable I'm sure of it.
When the metric system was defined and adopted during the French revolution they changed the calendar as well.
Months were changed to be 30 days each with an extra 5-6 days at the end of the year, weeks were 10 days long, days were 10 hours of 100 minutes, each minute lasted 100 seconds.
Unfortunately it did not stick and the decimal time system was reverted.

In the US, we should make things even more confusing to anger the metric folks. I propose we redefine the "foot" every four years. The length of the foot will always correspond to the actual measured foot length of the current US president.

the fact that you think this will anger metric folks who already don't make sense of your dumb system rather than ruin many aspects of your country ... uh ... never mind, you're already ruining many aspects of country. ignore what I was going to say. carry on.
- Yeah, and she gonna be mad as fuck about that too!
We should bring back hogsheads, rods, fathoms, etc.
- IIRC some of those crazy units are still referenced in certain laws of old...
What if we defined a foot such that a cubic food of some good, say potatoes or something, is a specific amount of money. So it's tied to inflation.
What a wondefull idea!

Can anyone with a deeper understanding of the history of the metric system explain why a gram is the base unit of weight, and a litre the base unit of volume?

I thought the foundation of the system was that a kilogram is the weight of a litre of water. But then why not name them 1 thing = 1 thing rather than 1000x a thing = 1 thing.

And yes I've had four cups of coffee and no sleep today.

A gram is not the base unit, it started with one meter (hence, metric).
Kilo means thousand in Latin, so 1000 meters became one kilometer (aka, one thousand meters), and when they need smaller units, they took to Latin again, simply because the language was en vogue for science:
Deca (ten): Decimeter (dm, nowadays hardly used, but it exists) = 0.1m
Centum (hundred): Centimeter (cm) = 0.01m
Mille (thousand): milimiter (mm) 0.001m
Weights were then adopted from the dimensions based on practicality, i.e. one liter was a common enough volume that people could use it in a household, and it's defined by 1dm height x 1dm length x 1dm width. Or 10cm10cm10cm (same thing, but the base notation was units of one).
- Or 10cm10cm10cm (same thing, but the base notation was units of one).
  Just FYI - Lemmy uses Markdown for formatting. In Markdown, if you surround some text in asterisks, it italicises whatever's in between.
  So if you write: *this is italicised*, you get this:
  this is italicised
  To write 10cm*10cm*10cm you have three options:
  Use in-line code (what I did twice here) - surround the text in backticks (usually the ones on the left of the number 1 on the keyboard).
  Use "x" instead of "*".
  "Escape" the asterisks by adding "" before them. You'd write it like this: 10cm\*10cm\*10cm, and you'd get: 10cm10cm10cm.
- The big prefixes (kilo, mega, etc) are actually Greek and the small ones Latin.
- The only use of the decimetre I've seen in real life, is that the standard school rulers, being 20 cm long are commonly called "double décimètres" (in France). Maybe other places use them more.
  Sub-units are a bit like regionalisms, France likes cl for liquids, many places like adding zeroes and using ml, maybe some use dl...
First they defined the meter and then one litre was defined as one dm^3.
That’s an interesting question that I’d never thought about before.
I asked chatGPT, which predictably bullshitted me and said they’d decided grams made more sense than kilograms for scientific lab work.
But then I searched and found this from the user tomalator on Reddit:
“When the French were developing the metric system, they suggested the unit be called a grave (pronounced grav) being the mass of 1L of water (1000 cm3)
The French at this time being in the middle of a revolution against the rich notice that it sounded a lot like the word Graf, being a word for Duke or Earl, and they wanted to avoid affiliating with the nobility, so they changed the measurement to be the mass of 1mL of water (1 cm3) and called it the gramme
They then noticed that it was inconvenient to use a mass unit so small, so they changed back to the 1L of water definition, but kept the name gramme for the base, and threw out the word grave in favor of the kilogramme.
And that's why the kilogram is the base SI unit and not the gram. I had the exact same question when I learned the SI unites.”
The kilogram is mass, not weight. Weight is force. Force is measured in Newtons.
4 cups, you have had a quart of coffee, sir ;)
I believe a gram is the weight of a cubic centimeter of water, and a liter is 100 cubic centimeters of water.
The meters are kind of out there though that is something to do with like the meridian and distance between lattitudes or something I forget.
- a liter is 100 cubic centimeters of water
  1000 cc of any substance -- or even pure volume without substance

I have a chip on my shoulder about the metric system as it appears in sci-fi writing.

It drives me nuts that in books like The Expanse (and I think the Bobiverse and Andy Wier's works) that the writer will call distances in "thousands/millions of kilometers".

Really feels more reasonable to just go full send and call them megameters and gigameters, but maybe that's just my American non-metric mind trying to force full use of a system in a way those born to it don't actually do.

Anyway, thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

It's certainly a good observation. I would agree that a more practical way of measuring the vast distances is to up the scale. Giga, Terra, whatever.
A kilometer in space is nothing. It must be the equivalent of saying "it's only a million millimeter drive away"
Megameters just is fun to say, we could make it a thing, if enough use it it becomes proper.
- I’m onboard. Let’s get rid of the tonne also. Megagram sounds way cooler.
There we go imperial-y again, with distance to sun, distance based on angle to gobbledigook, and what not.

Ugh. Kelvingram again.

💔
but at least there's a space

American exceptionalism (& imperialism) at it's finest

They’re really proving it in the comments. Maga loves imperial the most.

As a brit, the only thing I care about is the extra 68ml I get in my pint.

Amerifats cant get over their imperialist england brain to work in tandem with rest of the world. It creates just enough division and tribality between the world the US to justify its colonial nature and settlement enterprise in the americas.

You cant bury your disgusting history.

Yes, the US is trying to sow discord in the world with it's choice of measurement system in order to further its imperialist agenda.
Nevermind the documented instances of US government military intervention and collusion with far right-wing groups to disrupt popular leftist movements and governments across the world. It's the measurement system that's the problem.
- You are being insidious. This also contributes to the main directives. It wasnt JUST THIS.
  People dont hate Trump because he is orange. But it definitely doesnt fucking help it either.
  Or teams dont choose green as their team color because it helps them win more. But having these features helps with the morale.

My favorite fact about the metric system that blows imperial believer's minds is that if you take a 1cm thick tube you put 1 liter of water it weights 1kilogram and it it 1 meter tall the measure.

Everytime I see one of these posts I have to make the same comment. The US is metric, everywhere that it matters. In the military, in the medical field, and in the scientific field. The ONLY reason we haven't converted every other part of our lives to metric is that our country is 50 times the size of the average European country. Do you know how expensive it would be to replace the infrastructure we've built and maintained over the past 200 years? The tax payers could not handle that burden, and it would require every state to agree to the terms of the change for a total conversion.

At this point, it is just part of our identity. It would be like asking the French to eat day old bread. They could, but why?

Then why are all your english content in freaking fantasy units???
Every country switched at one time in history, the longer you wait the more expensive it becomes.
- One, they aren't fantasy units— this is real life, son.
  Two, the country was built on imperial, so the trades use imperial to maintain the country. Everyone in the US grows up learning in imperial, and then learns metric when they get into physics and chemistry.
  Three, I addressed the fact that WE CAN NOT AFFORD TO SWITCH. It does not matter if it is going to be more expensive in the future. We can't afford it NOW.
  I understand the spirit of your reply. This is just the reality of what having 50 different states, who can't agree on anything and are loosely tied together by an over-arching government, is like.
  There are 27 counties in the European Union, and they are filled with reasonable people in government(for the most part). We have 50 states that are filled with greedy little assholes who will do everything in their power to gain more power to leverage in a bid to destroy what they deem "the enemy", so they can make even more money and gain more power.
  We are never going to convert wholesale to metric. We can't even agree, as a country, that poor people are people, at a government scale. That is entirely motivated by profit and nothing more.
  It simply does not pay to switch to metric.
I have seen US companies try, but it is so slow.
We did customs tooling. In the 80s 90s it was inch sizing and inch components. Late 90s still inch tooling but Metric components, and so drawings would have REAM for .236 Dowel ( instead of 6mm) LOL In mid 2000s tooling was metric sized as long as it was close to a purchasable inch size from the steel foundary. So block would be 608mm wide, to order a 24" block.
So 2025 mostly you can see places working full metric.
Then there are places I have worked recently that still use Fractional inch on projects and then wonder why assembly problems arise. Like design intent is 8.541 and maybe clearance to adjacent part has to be .039". Drawing has 8 9/16 + 1/32, so not only is sizing wrong compared to mating part, the fractional inch means dude uses a tape measure by eye, rather than a 3 place decimal measure tool. It's such a mess.
It's also that imperial uses body measurements for basic stuff. Your foot is about a foot long, so you can pace off distances. One yard is about the length from your collarbone to the opposite wrist, so I can roughly measure fabric quickly. From your fingertip to the crook of your thumb is about five inches, and the knuckles on your fingers are about an inch apart.
I used to do industrial embroidery at an immigrant-owned shop, and the boss switched from metric to imperial because measuring a couple inches with your fingers is faster than finding a meter stick and measuring centimeters exactly. When you've got multiple inches in your margin for error, there is no need for the precision of metric, and the speed of imperial just makes more sense.

That first diagram looks exactly like the dumbass step functions in my company

This thread is full of middle schoolers who don’t realize that you can measure things in whatever system you want, regardless of country. The whole premise of this circlejerk is faulty.

You can but there are real examples where mixing units results in failure. NASA lost a 125 million dollar mars probe in 1999 because JPL and NASA use metric but Lockheed Martin added acceleration data in American imperial units.
It might be a circle jerk but it is also best practice to use a standard system and there's really only one holdout on not using that system. I say this as an American who wishes people would just use metric because it's just easier unless you just fucking love fractions of an inch.
- Your example of not mixing systems up within projects is somewhat valid, but not applicable to the whole. There are a lot of uses for Imperial, and using Imperial in landscaping does not have a chance of causing catastrophic failure in rocket science.
anyone can do whatever on their own, but if it affects anyone else than that one person its not just that one person's business. I cant see the insistence of using imperial system as anything else than america has used it in the past, and therefore its american system and because america is the best it must be the best system to use and to claim anything else is to hate america.
- I’m sorry that you can’t seem to see it any other way, but that is just not reality. The imperial system has many uses that the metric system is not apt for.

Instead of fighting over the best arbitrary unit system we should all sit together and create a truly logical system that makes conversions - even between units - as simple as possible.

Why should we? There are only 3 countries that don't use metric.
Why should we accommodate to something less than 5% of the population uses? Especially if it is so wildly inconsistent in every form it takes?
xkcd 927
To do that, we first need to switch our number system from Base-10 to Base-12.
A metric system in Base-12 would be clean and elegant. It would play nice with geometry, trigonometry, unit circle, angular measurement, etc.
Base-10 is fucking cursed. If some Base-12 aliens came here tomorrow, they'd look at our number system like we'd look at Base-7 or Base-14.
Finance and hours, please?

So you admit your precious meter isn't up to the task of being decided by three and you have to find ways to compensate for its inadequacy.

Metre*

Why are we converting between units all the time? Why is this so big of a deal?

When in your daily lives do you actually need the precision of a millimeter and the magnitude of a kilometer?

You do know we have everything between a millimeter and a kilometer as well, right?
- Of course. And you select the unit you need based on the degree of precision required for the task. You're not arbitrarily bouncing decimal points around for shits and giggles. The ability to do that is a cool bit of trivia, but in practice, it's not particularly useful.
ask NASA i guess.
the point is you don't have to go that far in the metric system: converting between two neighboring sizes (cm and mm) is as easy as adding/removing a zero or shifting the decimal separator by one digit. but you can also convert between mm and km by doing the same thing six times without a problem.
you can't do the former with imperial units as easily, let alone the latter.
sometimes you just have numbers that are too small or big for a unit. convert 1079 inches to feet. or convert 0.000419 miles to inches. I can do 1079 cm to m or 0.000419 km to cm instantly.
- convert 1079 inches to feet. or convert 0.000419 miles to inches. I
  Or convert 0.002 cents to dollars.
- You're not addressing my criticism at all here. Yes, I get it: you can slide back and forth between kilometers and millimeters with the greatest of ease. Cool. Awesome.
  My criticism isn't about the ease in converting. My criticism is more "when are we actually using that feature?"
  And the answer is, of course, "rarely". Rarely do we find a practical need for a single measurement with both the magnitude of a kilometer/mile and the precision of a centimeter/inch.
  As a practical matter, the ability to easily make that conversion is nice, of course. But not particularly useful.
You don't have to mix foot, inches, and 1/8 inches? So how do you measure a room? Is it "Ten foot and a bit" or "Ten foot, 5 3/8 inches"? Or do you break it down to smaller units like "125 3/8 inches" or "1003 1/8 inches"?
- Or do you break it down to smaller units like "125 3/8 inches" or "1003 1/8 inches"?
  This. Building a house, wall studs are on 16" (sixteen inch) centers, not 1'4" (one foot four inch), even though those are the same length. Roof joists are usually on 24" centers, not 2', even though those are the same.
  Most of your lumber is going to be 120" or less, so most of the measurements you're going to be making are less than that.
  If I'm measuring a room in feet, it is to give a rough estimate. It's easy to compare two different bedrooms by saying one is 8x10 and the other is 10x12. The actual dimensions might differ by up to 6", but they are close enough for a reasonable comparison.
Yes
Outside half of the job market? Pretty often.
Yes, lol. Nobody says 3500 meters or 0.159 Kilometers. But it is easy to convert if needed.
- Athletics competitions would like a word...
My job. Lol

Please divide one of your fancy meters in a third. I'll wait here for you to finish repeating the number 3.

Unlike Americans, we aren't actually afraid of decimals.
- You should, rounding errors can be a real problem
If you live in a metric country you'll quickly find that nothing is sold in 1 meter length, but in steps of 300mm (wood for example).

300mm divided by 2 is 150mm. 300mm divided by 3 is 100mm. 300mm divided by 4 is 75 mm. 300mm divided by 5 is 60mm. 300mm divided by 6 is 50mm.
Even when you buy something advertised as "1-foot" you'll find it measures 300mm, because we don't buy a foot of wood here, and when you divide it by 3 you get exactly 100mm; which easily converts with any other metric measurement.
Additionally, Imperial measurements are no more, or no less, exact than metric measures. Because Imperial measures are defined using metric measures in the first place.
Edit: Also this argument would carry more weight if Imperial measures were base 12 across the board, and it isn't.
- As a carpenter and lover of math, and since we're using mm and wood, cutting a 300mm length of wood equally in 3, results in 3 pieces of wood that are 100mm less the thickness of the blade.

Metric is useful but it lacks enough units for everyday use. Like milimeter is useful for measuring somethings, and meter is useful for somethings but not having a foot equivalent makes it less useful. I'd rather say 4 feet than 1.3 meters. Same with grams and kilos; not having an ounce is an oversight. I'd rather order an 8 ounce burger than a 226gram burger. Mililiters and liters are useful but not having a fl ounce makes it clumsier.

A foot equivalent? You mean like a decimeter?
An ounce equivalent? You mean like a dekagram?
Metric has everything you claim it doesn't. And much more than your little imperial brain can comprehend.
Your preferences mean nothing. You prefer what's familiar, just like everyone else.
- I'm familiar with Metric AND Imperial and not just because the US uses a blend but because both science and science fiction have been interests of mine since early childhood. Americans just hate syllables. 4 feet is two syllables while 1.3 meters is 5 syllables. Hell, quarts are almost the same thing as liters just with fewer syllables , same as yards and meters.
Definitely not. Anything below the meter is usually measured in cm; Metalworkers and engineers use mm there, and it's not an issue. Your four feet are our 120cm (not 130!), or maybe 1.2m, and it is not "odd". I'm 175cm or 1.75m high, both are commonly used.
Same with weight: Up to and around a kilogram it's just grams. And you won't find a "226gram" burger here, just to cuddle your ounces. Here, that burger would be 250g, plain and simple.
What even is a fluid ounce? And what feet, yours, mine?
I may be not accustomed to US lifestyle but why in the fuck anyone would order a burger by the weight of the patty? Can you order 7,5 ounces? 12?

who the fuck are these absolute twats that are simping over a system of measurement? good for you, your governance made a good choice, but it was hardly like OP invented it or was responsible for the adoption, so whoop de fuckin' doo. or Le Whoop if you must convert.

we don't like imperial, it's not like you'll find people (outside hicksville or maga) claiming to defend it's superiority.

and get off your silly pretensions, for all your metric elegance the UK is still measuring shit in stones and miles.

Well the UK isn't in Europe anymore. They moved away a couple years ago. Besides the best system is the French Revolutionary System
- The UK isn't in the EU anymore. As far as I know their island didn't drift away from our continental plate.
- hon hon hon mes oui yeah whatever
Honestly who uses stone to measure their weight? And if we switched to km for roads tomorrow I'd be happy, might take a minute to adjust but it's fine.
- Brits, and only for body weight, as far as I know.
- Honestly who uses stone to measure their weight?
  elder limeys
They use a blend of metric and imperial as do we.
- the secret of the sauce is just the right blend. give them predictable units for most things then hit them with the hogshead when they get comfortable
Mad?
- Nah, about what? I didn't make the decisions. you didn't either, so if you're proud, that's fucking dumb too.
we don’t like imperial, it’s not like you’ll find people (outside hicksville or maga) claiming to defend it’s superiority.
Every time metric vs imperial comes up on the internet there will be a gazillion Americans defending their system, claiming it is more "human" or some similar sort of nonsense. So yes, are a lot of Americans who will defend its alleged superiority.
- Every time metric vs imperial comes up on the internet there will be a gazillion Americans defending their system, claiming it is more “human” or some similar sort of nonsense. So yes, are a lot of Americans who will defend its alleged superiority.
  pfft ok bud. there are schmucks in the UK that love stones. it's a tiny minority on both sides.