It seems like a weird point to bring up. How often do y’all convert your measurements? It’s not even a daily thing. If I’m measuring something, I either do it in inches, or feet, rarely yards. I’ve never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can’t imagine I’m unique in this. When I have needed to, it’s usually converting down (I.e. 1/3 of a foot), which imperial does handle better in more cases.
Like. I don’t care if we switch, I do mostly use metric personally, it just seems like a weird point to be the most common pro-metric argument when it’s also the one I’m least convinced by due to how metric is based off of base 10 numbering, which has so many problems with it.
Edit: After reading/responding a lot in the comments, it does seem like there’s a fundamental difference in how distance is viewed in metric/imperial countries. I can’t quite put my finger on how, but it seems the difference is bigger than 1 mile = 1.6km
They’re just annoyed that we use a different system with no upside when the rest of the world all chose to establish a consistent measurement system.
Which is fair enough. But now I’m annoyed that they keep complaining about it.
tbh… being in Canada sucks ass because of it.
here’s a fun flowchart for Canadians and living with both
and don’t get me started on date formatting…
wtf is 1/4/2026. is that January, or April. who sent this… where are they located?
As always, the only correct date format is ISO 8601
WHOOOO ISO-8601 FAN CLUB!!!
[Cheers and goes running out the door]
HELL YEAH! This is honestly the worst part of my work. Half of the forms require YYYY-MM-DD, half do DD/MM/YYYY and having to switch is annoying, especially since personally I always use ISO-8601
Correct! And yet…
wtf is 2026/1/4? is that January, or April. who sent this… where are they located?
Though to be fair the chances of ISO 8601 goes up when year comes first
The date part of ISO 8601 doesn’t have slashes, it has dashes and requires double digits: 2026-01-04
I mean, if it’s normalized to ISO 8601, then you KNOW that’s January 4th even without dashes or slashes. (although preeeetty sure the standard would require zeros before the 1 and 4 in either case)
The fucking date problem I can get behind with you.
I always use year/month/day now, which pisses off everyone but computers sort it properly every time.
Oof. A good while back, I worked in a US-based company with offices globally, and they upgraded to a global ERP system. At launch of the new system, documents (such as purchase orders) printed with dates in MM/DD/YYYY format. Thankfully, my suggestion to change that to DD Mmm YYYY (eg. 31 Jan 2026) was quickly implemented without any pushback, but it totally blows my mind that a company operating globally would default to such an ambiguous date format.
yyyy-mm-dd is superior it is unambiguous and sorts well.
So you usually take your water for cooking out of the pool? ;-)
It seems to also be different between provinces. I was shopping in Ontario (from BC) and the fruit was in ounces, which threw me. And at least in BC schools cooking class uses metric not cups.
They keep complaining about it because we keep using the worse system for no reason. /shrug
It’s a better system for me, because I already know it.
Metric is very easy to learn, so I’m not sure I’d go around flaunting that reason…
It is easy to learn how to convert between metric units. But that’s not what people mean when they talk about “learning metric”. They mean having an intuitive sense for how much, say, 100 meters or 100 milliliters is. Again, the emphasis on how easy it is to remember the conversion between meters and kilometers is extraneous.
500 meters = 0.5 kilometers 🤷♂️
Yea, that’s the really easy part. It just takes exposure on a level that’s more than twice a month and it’s practically by osmosis.
The conversions are the hard part.
And that’s how I know you’re an American!
Same reason the metric people keep telling me to change. Because if I did, it would be better for them. Difference is, I don’t drone on and on about how superior my forms of measurement are
I mean, it does have the noted benefit of down-converting between units being cleaner. 1/3 of a foot is 4 inches. 1/3 of a meter is 333.333…mm
I mean, you kind of cherry-picked there. A third of an inch is…?
1 barleycorn.
This is mental illness
Its all cherry picking.
Do people struggle that much more to divide dollars compared to feet?
I mean I totally get that base 12 is pretty cool for calculator-less maths (though not as cool for base 60) but ultimately, we still have a base 10 numbering system.
So yea, base 10 units for base 10 numbers. Using the same all the way down makes it easier to learn how to handle the more complicated divisions in all cases, you don’t have to switch logic if you see what I mean.
Of course, to each their own. The best case for metric remains that it’s the system everyone else has agreed on.
I mean, not really, it’s just the lack of factors that comes from having a base 10 numbering system, which is my the single big issue I personally have with metric. I still think it should be adopted, generally, because standards are good, and in the modern world it makes more sense. I just also think we should be doing base 12 instead of base 10 xD