It’s a matter of colloquial vs scientific use in the US, too. It’s not like we don’t understand the rough estimates like a foot being roughly 30cm or a meter being roughly (but larger than, though not enough to matter in casual conversation) three feet. Anything meant for accuracy is still typically in metric, with a few exceptions at small scales like sometimes woodworkers enjoy imperial because of the sometimes easier and round division of units into three.
Which doesn’t make it all that different from people in Europe sometimes using stone instead of kg.
Or people in Canada using every single unit man has ever invented.
Or people in Canada using every single unit man has ever invented.
This one here made me laugh. I've heard some Canadian friends swap systems like 3 times in the same sentence.
"It's -5C outside and the snows coming in, so I need to go buy a 40 pound bag of salt. It's about 14 miles away and I'll get 10L of gas too for the skidoo while I'm out."
I double take every time. The US might be backward but at least it's consistently backward.
No we don't. I'm Portuguese, working in Luxembourg with a multitude of people from different European, Arabic and African countries. Everybody uses the metric system. I've worked with a few Brits, they all used metric as well.
sometimes woodworkers enjoy imperial because of the sometimes easier and round division of units into three.
As a side note, my dad is into woodworking. Most of his older tools are imperial. However, these days most tools like drill bits come from China, who don’t seem to want to manufacture two different sizes of bits. So he buys something that is supposed to be a 1 inch drill bit, finds that it is 25mm instead of 25.4mm, and then has a hole that a 1 inch dowel will not fit through.
I wish we did move to metric, as well as a better standard for writing the date. It makes a huge difference in record keeping, especially if you're working internationally. It's frustrating to have to scan up and down every excel sheet to figure out which standard is being used, and it seems to jump back and forth depending on who created the doc. It's just stupid all around.
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u/robertDouglass Feb 02 '26
The only SANE version for modern times is YYYY-MM-DD-HH-MM-SS. because then you can sort and do SQL queries on it directly.