Ah, nothing gets international rivalry boiling like soccer football and the metric system. One wonders why the metric system hasn’t taken off here in the US. I posit this: it doesn’t offer any advantage to end users, ie, regular citizens. Let’s do the use case.
Proponents of the metric system argue that it’s utterly logical. And it is; everything is decimal (base 10), so we can easily convert from grams to kilograms.
The question is, how often do we do that? To my international readers, do you ever find yourself saying, “Well, thanks for the distance in kilometers, but to get a sense of it, I prefer to think of it in decameters.”? I wager you don’t.
Similarly in the states, we think in miles. I’ve never known anyone to express a travelling distance in feet. So even though the conversion is tedious and arbitrary, it doesn’t present a practical barrier in our daily lives. Our mental models don’t require it.
There are engineers, like myself, who become convinced that our model is utterly elegant and consistent and logical. Then we observe what our users are actually trying to achieve, and discover that they don’t respond to all that useless beauty.
So it is with the metric system. Obviously, there is nothing wrong with it; it just doesn’t serve a use case at human scale.
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Side note: my background is in physics and yes, we do jump between orders of magnitude with regularity. And we use the metric system. The right tool for the right user.
The main problem isn’t the imperial system per se. Sure, the conversions are a bit simpler in the metric system but it’s nothing compared to the mismatch between the two systems. Spacecrafts have crashed because of this mismatch.
Now, even if the systems were as logical and as easy as the other, the US should go to the metric one, because they are the minority by far, and because the mismatch is harmfull. Europe have done this with its money (measure by which [i]a lot[/i] is measured). That was no more than 1 year of hassle.
While I don’t find the need to use decameters, the use of centimeters and millimeters is common. Honestly, I find that to be much more intuitive. Also, grams and kilograms are a better weight measurement, IMHO.
It’s not about not providing advantages to the end user. It’s more about the end willingness (or in this case, lack of) to change something you are used to.
The root of your writing while appearing reasonable initially, did not really sit very well with me personally after some time. Someplace within the sentences you actually were able to make me a believer unfortunately just for a very short while. I however have got a problem with your jumps in logic and you would do well to help fill in those breaks. In the event that you can accomplish that, I will undoubtedly be fascinated.
I do like the manner in which you have presented this problem and it really does supply us some fodder for thought. However, coming from everything that I have witnessed, I simply hope when the actual commentary stack on that individuals keep on point and don’t embark upon a tirade of some other news du jour. Still, thank you for this outstanding point and though I can not agree with it in totality, I regard the point of view.