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Why do people who try to convince others to switch to metric focus so much on the conversions?
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this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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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
Gross
I'm very much an advocate for base 12, which would have 100 be 144 (12^2, same way 100 is 10^2)
That would make more sense if we also counted in base 12 in general, which we don't.
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?
No idea because I don't know how much a dime, or a nickel is worth, nor what you define as a roll. I can guess a quarter is 25¢. None of those are a decimalized values though, and you're giving nicknames to certain coins because you're still holding to a non decimalized money system, it only makes the system more difficult to you.
A quick Google search let me know that a dime is 10¢, a roll contains 40 coins, a quarter is indeed 25¢, a penny is 1¢ and a nickel is 5¢. And first of all it becomes obvious you need to put large numbers to make the decimalized system appear difficult, I purposefully used small amounts of coins someone might have in their pockets, a total of 23 coins, with no coin having more than their next denomination in value, your example however needed over 130 coins, random nicknames for values and coins grouped in random amounts to try to introduce difficulty.
So the short answer is that if someone pulls out over 130 coins to pay for their meal they will be told to use a machine to count them. But because decimalization actually makes your life easier, a "roll of quarters" is worth 10, a "roll of nickels" is worth 2, and the rest is 77¢, so nope, even with your arbitrary exaggerated amounts and nicknames it's still easy to count it to 14.77. Had I told you five scores of Bob, 3 Baker's dozen Joeys, two threescore Florin, 17 crowns, and 3 ten bob rolls you would still be adding stuff into next week. Math is just easier with decimal currency because we use a decimal numbering system, €5/10 = 0.5€, but £5/10=10s or 120p
These aren't nicknames, these are the standard names of US currency. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars (not super common though)
Also if someone pulled out 26 coins to pay for a meal they'd also have a very annoyed cashier at minimum
The point of this was more "Coins are a pain in the ass regardless of whether we're dealing with 100 or 240 as the base"
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.