[cupofjoakim]

The US being stuck in imperial is such a meme nowadays with "freedum units" and the like. It's yet another odd thing that makes it easy for the rest of the world to laugh at the US. In these isolationist times I doubt this will change soon though, but it'd definitely help international collaboration.

[yurishimo]

Everyone who wants to collaborate internationally is already doing it. Science in the US is entirely metric. Construction and domestic measurements are the two biggest holdouts and honestly they’re both negligible. Given the proliferation of global manufacturing, most businesses are converting at the end before retail for US customers.

If the government was competent, they could rip off the bandaid and everyone would adapt within a year or two, but we need to wait at least 3 years for that to even begin to become a possibility again.

[kevin_thibedeau]

The US has gone almost fully metric on plywood thickness due to globalization.

[t-3]

Honestly, I don't think anyone would raise much of a fuss over changing distance measurements to metric. Both centimeters and inches are easy enough to eyeball or rule-of-thumb, meters and yards are basically the same, and larger units are only relevant for speed limits and travel planning. Metric lacks a good "foot", but I guess people would get used to eyeballing things in ~50cm increments instead.

Weights are even easier as pretty much everyone uses grams as the smallest daily unit and most people can convert to and from metric on the fly for ounces, lbs, kgs. Liters aren't uncommon, and ml<->gram equivalence for water is well-known. Traditional kitchen volumes probably wouldn't be displaced because metric has no answer for those in first place.

Temperature is where metric will fail to gain adoption because Celsius totally sucks unless your daily life consists only of boiling or freezing water at sea level. No advantages over Fahrenheit except maybe arguably for science, because it's Kelvin with an offset.

[kakacik]

Now sure what sucks on Celsius, water freezing and boiling have been some of the most important scientific and just plain existence facts of mankind since we evolved. We humans have 10 fingers so its split by decimal system.

Since we humans operate 99% of our existence in a narrow band between 0 and 100 degrees celzius, I'd say its more important than starting from absolute 0 and dealing constantly with big offsets.

0 or 100 or -100 or 10 Fahrenheit is what? From Gemini: "0°F was the lowest temperature achievable with a mixture of ice, water, and salt (brine), while 96°F was set as the approximate temperature of the human body (blood heat), chosen because 96 is easily divisible by many numbers, allowing for finer divisions" - rather insignificant things.

[t-3]

In Celsius, my daily life uses values from ~ -20 to +30 for the weather, but from ~0 - 90F. For cooking both are equally arbitrary, as the only place I set or read a temperature when cooking is candymaking, setting the oven, or cooking large amounts of meat.

[shoxidizer]

> Metric lacks a good "foot", but I guess people would get used to eyeballing things in ~50cm increments instead.

Perhaps as a compromise we could adopt the meter but divide it by halves, quarters, and so on. Binary fractions are so much more universal than arbitrary base ten ;)

[ungovernableCat]

In a country where every single facet of life is being increasingly politicised, you think this wouldn't cause a fuss?

Oddly enough if any government could just push and shove this through it might be Trump. I bet 20 years later you'd have a sizeable constituency who could be convinced that the change from imperial to foreign units was the beginning of the fall and decline and that everything could be fixed if you went back.

[ebiester]

Oh, you bet they would. Nothing causes old white people to riot like mild inconvenience.

That's only mildly sarcastic. For many people, it's become a part of being American, especially on the conservative side of the isle. Now, I personally live in celsius and work comfortably in kilometers, liters, and grams. However, it has become a weird point of pride for some Americans.

[walthamstow]

re construction, we use 8x4ft sheets of timber in Britain still, same as before, we just call them twelve-twenty-by-two-four-forty now.

[cucumber3732842]

The unit itself doesn't actually matter. Even industries with the least precision set their stuff up with so much precision that the unit you use basically doesn't matter.

Your machine may spit out widgets that are plus or minus an inch. But when you set up the machine you set it up to the 1/16 regardless. Swapping all that to metric doesn't actually change anything other than the number the guy setting it up dials it in to.

[relaxing]

1/16” is just over 1.5 mm, so yes, the guy setting the machine in millimeters is giving you more precision. In the real world measurements aren’t just abstract figures you can move around losslessly.

I have a socket set in half-millimeter sizes for the absolute plague of cheap bolts and nuts that are being manufactured with obscene levels of slop.

[throwway120385]

He's not giving you more accuracy though. A machine that's accurate to 1/32" is accurate to .75mm. If those cheap bolts were in US customary they would still need to be in smaller increments.

[cucumber3732842]

You're missing the point.

The guy buying the widgets doesn't care because he's expecting a widget that's plus or minus dozens of the unit the machine is being set to. The setting is just as precise as it is in order to set the fat part of your output curve over the middle of your quality control pass range.

The machine might not even be calibrated in a direct measurement, it might be calibrated in a secondary measurement. Like tons of force or rpm or cycle speed or something that then translates to the dimension of your output part.

The units on machines mostly only exist for calibration. Beyond that they can just be made up "my amp goes to 11" type scales because they're so divorced from the outputs, either in precision (or are literally indirect as described above) that you "just have to know" that if you want a "X<unit>" widget you'll actually set the machine

Tons and tons and tons of stuff in our world is even intentionally spec'd out in this manner. A 14" tire rim is not 14, there's a tolerance. A 3" pipe isn't 3". These are all just nominal sizes. Just about everything in our world is nominally sized. A nut and bolt manufacturer doesn't care whether they're making 12mm or 1/2 on a given day. Those are just nominal sizes, arbitrary names, in their minds. It doesn't matter whether the factory runs on metric or imperial or something else because they're just shooting for an arbitrary number.

The only time your unit really matters is when interfacing with other parties and it only matters insofar as you need to know what each other are uses.

[mgoetzke]

The fact that canadian lumber companies seem to be switching their machinery to metric is funny though. https://woodcentral.com.au/canadas-sawmills-weigh-metric-swi...

[FridayoLeary]

They got rid of the penny. Just suggest that the Imperial system is some leftist conspiracy and they'll have moved over by the end of the month.

[neutronicus]

Construction is negligible?

I guess you imagine we’ll all be calling half inch pipe twelve seven after this year adjustment period?

I guess people do it with bullet calibers.

[bluGill]

There is nothing half inch in a half inch pipe. One inch emt is not one inch, it is 27mm outside diameter (for some reason I know that one)

[criddell]

I believe 1/2" pipe is exactly the same as DN15 pipe. 1/2" and 15mm are both just nominal sizes. Calipers will only help you if you happen to know the pipe schedule.

[strken]

You might eventually end up calling 15mm pipe half-inch, depending on where the cheapest pipe can be sourced from.

[leosarev]

Ironically, a lot of countries with metric system calling half inch pipe a "1/2" :-)

[deadbabe]

Most likely the current administration will pass executive orders banning the use of metric system, and then force other countries to switch to imperial or face heavy tariffs.

[zahlman]

Jokes of this form were tired by about November 5, 2024.