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Why do people who try to convince others to switch to metric focus so much on the conversions? (herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 23 hours ago) by klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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It seems like a weird point to bring up. How often do y'all convert your measurements? It's not even a daily thing. If I'm measuring something, I either do it in inches, or feet, rarely yards. I've never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can't imagine I'm unique in this. When I have needed to, it's usually converting down (I.e. 1/3 of a foot), which imperial does handle better in more cases.

Like. I don't care if we switch, I do mostly use metric personally, it just seems like a weird point to be the most common pro-metric argument when it's also the one I'm least convinced by due to how metric is based off of base 10 numbering, which has so many problems with it.

Edit: After reading/responding a lot in the comments, it does seem like there's a fundamental difference in how distance is viewed in metric/imperial countries. I can't quite put my finger on how, but it seems the difference is bigger than 1 mile = 1.6km

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[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol -1 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

There are! Most people are not engineers, or scientists, and rarely encounter these types of situations. Also from an admittedly cursory search, it seems to be that most professionals use metric for most jobs, anyway, or a mix that causes problems.

Per the search, it seems like a lot of engineers use metric, except for government jobs, which require imperial, and sometimes specific clients demand imperial instead of metric.

Pharmacist friend uses mostly metric at work, except for creams, which come labeled in metric but measured in imperial (1 ounce but labeled as 28.5g), but they'll sometimes come as a rounder 28 or 30g which causes the problems. There's also one med that's measured in grains (~64mg, not a commonly used measurement in most settinfs) for some very strange reasons.

[–] saimen@feddit.org 3 points 18 hours ago (1 children)

So now you just admitted that metric is better at least for some use cases and then the conversion to imperial causes problems. So wouldn't it be better if everyone was just using metric? Or what is the advantage of imperial?

[–] klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol 0 points 18 hours ago

Admittedly I do like how imperial feels on a personal scale. Like I said in the OP, I'm not anti-metric, and in a few other replies I've said I'm definitely more pro-switching than anti. It's just the conversion argument always seemed like a weird one to me, given how infrequently conversions happen here. Seems like y'all do just convert more often than we do.