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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   30623 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 22, 2025

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Same reason we don't use the metric system

We don't use the metric system because it's not in the rational interests of people to switch. The imperial system sucks for kids (because they have to memorize the conversions), and if you have to do the math by hand I guess, but your typical adult already knows the conversions they need and has a calculator to handle the math. So they get no benefit, but would have to put up with learning all the new measurements. There's no upside for them.

What you describe is a textbook example of an inadequate equilibrium.

Most people will only need a few formulas. A carpenter is going to encounter yards, foots and inches, but unless they are building a really long fence, they are unlikely to encounter miles.

Still, it does create friction, making everything slightly more complicated than it would have to be, otherwise.

Not that SI is perfect, either. The Faraday constant being 96kC/mol instead of 1C/mol is not very reasonable, and the Boltzmann constant should be one as well. If I were to design a system from the scratch today, I would anchor mass so that a mole is a nice round number, like 1e24. Still, SI is a valiant effort, at least, and making it so that the density of water is approximately one (or 1000, if you go for cubic meters) was a brilliant move for everyday usability.

As an European, I have happily never been subject to having to learn that there are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon. The closest I got to this was having to suffer through seven years of music education in school, which even in Europe used a terrible archaic notation which works well to represent C major which was then improperly extended in a way which would make even ISO 8859-* blush with shame. Exams had tasks like "transpose this melody to a different scale", which would be utterly trivial in any adequate system -- "add three to every integer on this list". In short, it was the equivalent of a math class deciding to teach multiplication with Roman numerals.

Personally, I found this to be a big turn-off. Reasonably smart kids will grasp the difference between things being complicated because they are intrinsically complicated (there is no way to make pi come out to be three in Euclidian geometry) and things being complicated because none of the practitioners could be arsed to make them less complicated. So if I had had a physics teacher who was a proponent of imperial units and expecting me to learn all the weird conversion factors decreed by Queen Anne or whomever, I would reasonably have concluded that physicists have no interest in describing the world in easy terms and instead use their cleverness to build pointless mind mazes for their own amusement.

As an European, I have happily never been subject to having to learn that there are 231 cubic inches in a US gallon.

As an American, I have never been subject to that either. Europeans love to bust out obscure conversions that nobody knows as evidence for the imperial system being bad, but nobody knows it because nobody needs to ever make that conversion. So who cares? I long ago memorized the very short list of conversions one encounters in everyday life:

  • 12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard (also 5280 feet to a mile though that isn't exactly everyday)
  • 16 ounces to a pound, 2000 lbs to a ton
  • 3 tsp to one tbsp
  • 2c to a pint, 2 pints to a quart, 4 quarts to a gallon

I'm willing to concede that metric conversions are easier than these. But they aren't hard to learn either, and there aren't that many of them. It's not actually onerous in practice. I think that the inadequate equilibrium framing is not wrong, but it risks overstating the extent to which the equilibrium is actually causing problems in anyone's life.

12 inches to a foot, 3 feet to a yard (also 5280 feet to a mile though that isn't exactly everyday)

You can easily derive the 5280 feet from 3 feet to a yard, 440 yards to a quarter mile.

16 ounces to a pound, 2000 lbs to a ton

Except troy pounds which are 12 (slightly larger) ounces. Though if you're dealing with troy pounds you can hire someone to remember that. Also the ton can be the long ton of 2240 lbs.

3 tsp to one tbsp

And 2 tbsp to the fluid ounce.

I never quite understood why Europeans think that somehow there is a huge amount of friction with the every day usage of US customary units. They are customary for a reason.

Like if a carpenter in the US dealing with dimensional lumber the US you deal with a 2x6 on 2 foot centers. That is nominally 2 inches by 6 inches, but of course not actually. If you were building the same wall in Europe you are dealing with a 6x2 on 60 cm centers. That is nominally 6 by 2 cols but actually 148 mm by 48 mm. No one who does not deal with that stuff every day has to care about why the nominal or exact dimensions are not the same in either system. People who deal with it every day are used to it and there would be a cost for them to switch. Clearly 2 and 6 as nominal measurements are easier to deal with than exact measurements of 148 and 48, that's why there is a customary unit that those timbers are still sold in. Marking off in units of 60 is not easier than marking off in units of 2. 60 is used because it is divisible by 3 while the nice round 50 is not. This is not a problem in customary units because the next unit down from feet is already divisible by 3.

Not that SI is perfect, either.

There is also the strange habit of talking up the metric system, but then acting like everything is in SI. This is not the case. For scientific use CGS is still extremely common for practicing professionals.

There are also extremely common metric customary units that are in use that are not SI. You still have to specify the unit, no one who regularly deals with a given application is confused by that unit, and if you have to make a conversion it's trivial to look up. This is exactly the same as if you deal with US customary units.

For example tire pressures are often quoted in the metric customary Bar in Europe. The SI unit of pressure is the Pascal. You also see in the extant literature depending of field: technical atmospheres, standard atmospheres, Torr, and mmHg. That's 6 metricish systems for the same unit. No one who deals with Bar when they pump up their tiers and Torr when they pump down their vacuum chamber gets confused or thinks its hard. Just like no one who deals with psi when they pump up their tiers and Torr when they pump down their vacuum chamber gets confused or thinks its hard.

The Americans similarly often seem to think that there's a huge amount of friction in the everyday use of the metric, though. "Lol do women in Europe put "no men under 182.88 cm" in their dating ads?" No, though they might put no men under 180 cm.

I think it's because the United States already uses imperial, switching over carries a cost, the United States is large enough that there is no pressure to switch for the sake of standardisation with neighbours, and the United States is historically quite bad at top-down standardisation and national reform. There are fifty states, some might embrace metric and some would resist it, and the federal government would struggle to make it compulsory - it would incur both state resistance and widespread popular resistance. Whichever government tries to make the switch is going to face a lot of complaints, and the other party is inevitably going to seize the issue and portray themselves as soming to save your measurements. Lastly, Americans hate being made to conform with the rest of the world - there is a very strong sense of national exceptionalism and defiance. The ingrained sense of "but we're different" wins out - from everything from climate agreements to conventions on landmines, the US has a tradition of being the exception. Telling the rest of the world to piss off usually goes down well domestically. It's a bit like the British attitude to EU regulations, or the Japanese attitude to whaling. Maybe on its own it wasn't a big issue, but the moment it becomes an issue of pushy, arrogant foreigners telling us what we ought to do, the US goes, "You know what? I'm gonna start doing it even harder."

Disclaimer: I'm Australian, Imperial units are garbage, metric is superior.

There's also just a massive amount of equipment, material, hardware, and even facilities designed around imperial units, sometimes practically irreplaceable. Switching over to metric, even solely for new projects, isn't just or even mostly a matter of getting people to use new units on drawings.

But again: somehow the rest of the world did. Their precious tooling using only Troy ounces, Whitworth screws and French inches except when needing å°º instead was swapped decades ago. Weird how the other 96% of the globe somehow managed.

It doesn't really help the "switch to metric" argument that unit conversions are typically done by computer these days anyway. The marginal cost of doing calculations in "harder" units isn't worth it because the calculations aren't really the hard part any more. Consumer products are pretty universally labelled with both, but the imperial units are round numbers: the box in front of me here is "16 oz (1 lb) 454 g".

Raw material stock sizes are probably a more difficult transition at this point: changing to size of the "2x4" (1.5 x 3.5 inches, naturally) would impact pretty much all construction heavily with seemingly little upside.

I think the best bet would be California mandating metric. "If you want your products sold in CA, they have to state weights in kg and dimensions in meters. Gas stations are required to (also) display liters for fuel and hPa for tire pressure." Most manufacturers would probably print both imperial and SI units on their products.

Almost all products sold at my grocery store are labelled in both metric and imperial. A quick search suggests this has been federal law since 1992, with a few exceptions.

Weird the entire rest of world somehow switched.

Yeah, weird. Almost as though they had different conditions which led to them taking different actions.

They almost all either switched prior to mass education and industrialization in their countries, or they half-assed it and ended up with a weird Frankenstein system like the UK, Canada, and Australia

Most of Europe also did not switch entirely voluntarily. Probably the best thing Napoleon ever did. Too bad he never invaded England, though.

The only thing Australians generally still do in Imperial is human height measurement.

In Canada:

Air temperature (as in the weather) is in C. Pool temperatures are in F. Cooking temperatures are in F. Body temperature in F.

Short distances are in In/Ft/Yd, but laws often are written with metric (for instance, in driving), but travel distances are in km.

People's weight and height are in Lbs and Ft/In.

Volume units in cooking are lol whatever; there's a preference for imperial measures but you'll have to deal with stuff in liters too (milk, soft drinks are sold by the L or 2L).

Note also that:

  • 400m is almost exactly 1/4 mile, which is part of why highway signs are marked like that instead of a round number
  • A full-sized plastic jug of milk is still a "gallon", and cans are all in a weird number of milliliters because they're a round number of ounces (when things are rounded off in metric it's generally done to hide shrinkflation)
  • The measure of land is still an acre until it's a forest fire (nobody knows nor cares about what a hectare is)
  • People who give their weight and height in metric are generally recognized as being obtuse/snooty

Canada's a great case study for why English Imperial measurements are better than French Imperial metric when you're operating on human-sized scales. But then again, that's not what the French were going for when they designed that system, they designed it with the intent on forcing it on everyone else at gunpoint under the banner of rationalism.

But there's a reason nobody copies the French.

That's my experience, anecdotally. People sometimes measure things in feet and inches, but I take that as just because feet are a practically useful, everyday measure that there isn't a good metric equivalent for. Every now and then I hear people say 'miles', but at least in my generation, every time I hear 'mile', I need to mentally multiply by 1.6 in order to visualise what it means.

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