[emmp]

I think it is a tough sell that there would actually be real value out of changing a bunch of road signage and recipe books to metric, and being a stickler about telling people to weigh themselves in kgs instead of lbs for their weight loss programs, etc. It's basically purely aesthetics. I don't think it is politically conservative to say that there's no actual productivity or social gain from expending time and energy 'moving' to these things in everyday contexts.

In scenarios where metric is actually needed or appropriate nobody has any trouble using metric. Every kid has learned it in school for decades.

[Steuard]

We lost the Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 because Lockheed Martin supplied a part that output results in pound-seconds and then that number was fed in to a NASA part that interpreted it as Newton-seconds.[1] Having US engineers speak a different language than all of the other engineers in the world imposes real, non-negligible costs for data checking and risks of failure for any project that might interact with non-US-centered expectations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter#Cause_of_...

[emmp]

I see that as an organizational issue within that company and its project management rather than a political issue. US engineers certainly all know how to use and speak metric. I actually promise you that you won't be able find one who doesn't.

[exmadscientist]

> In scenarios where metric is actually needed or appropriate nobody has any trouble using metric

This is the key point. What people asking this question often miss is that the US is actually a dual system country. Metric is quite common anywhere it is valuable to use! So the places it isn't used are mostly the places it isn't so useful, or at least where the transition cost is very high.