The super-slow conversion of the U.S. to metric (2025)

https://www.thefabricator.com/thefabricator/blog/testingmeasuring/the-super-slow-conversion-of-the-us-to-metric

45•itvision•1h ago

Comments

jxdxbx•58m ago

The metric systems's worse flaw was doubling down on base 10 instead of the plainly superior base 12.

c048•51m ago

Only in certain fields. For most interactions divide by 10 is far easier than divide by 12, and you'd end up with far, far more "eyeballed" measurements.

So no, as a human being, I'm fine with base 10.

rob74•46m ago

Or you'd have to go all in and write numbers in base 12 too, then dividing by 12 would be easier...

p-e-w•50m ago

Being able to count using fingers is more valuable than having one more prime factor.

jabl•46m ago

You can actually count to 12 on your fingers using one hand. Use the thumb as a pointer, then for each of your other fingers you have three joints. So 3*4=12.

hans_castorp•42m ago

Or use a hand as a 5-bit integer, then you can count to 31 :)

t-3•29m ago

It's hard to actually count using more than 4 bits/hand though. The quickest methods that require the least dexterity are those that count the knuckles (which are actually used in some counting traditions, unlike binary finger-counting).

wongogue•42m ago

If you include the tip, you can do base 16.

Let’s go hexadecimal all the way.

JamesTRexx•30m ago

This is why men are superior to women, we can always count to one higher. (or two including the tip, as someone suggested with the fingers) :-p ducks

adornKey•24m ago

But all the techniques to multiply numbers with your fingers are more confusing in base 12.

https://www.wikihow.com/Multiply-With-Your-Hands

Those techniques can be useful. If you add toes, multiplying numbers up to 20 (like 16x18) is easy.

jabl•49m ago

As long as we count in base 10, it makes sense for the unit system to also be based on base 10.

As for changing the world to counting in base 12, yes there would be some advantages, but really, good luck with that.

pornel•46m ago

Too bad there are 11 players on the pitch, otherwise US could switch entirely to the football fields measurement system.

kalleboo•43m ago

The right time to fix that mistake wasn't in metric, it was while creating our numbering system.

atoav•43m ago

Consider marking it with /s next time.

tom_•43m ago

This can make sense for currency, but units of weight and distance and so on are infinitely divisible. You can just have a third of a metre if you like. Or 333 mm if the inaccuracy is acceptable. And so on.

wongarsu•24m ago

And it's not like 1 is some special value. If you start from a base of 120cm you get enough even divisions that you rarely run into the need for fractions

fainpul•40m ago

Obviously base 60 is superior to all

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R9m2jck1f90

unglaublich•38m ago

Lol sure, in no A0 years!

kstenerud•36m ago

The metric system is the tool of the devil! My car gets 40 rods to the hogshead and that's the way I likes it!

bluGill•4m ago

Someone else must be paying for your fuel. Nobody who pays for their own fuel likes that.

duskdozer•27m ago

Base 12? That's a small number. Now base 13? 13's a big number. The biggest number, perhaps. That's what they're saying at least. Base 13, 13 colonies, now that's America.

thomasmg•15m ago

The PDF standard uses base 85 encoding (Ascii 85).

vidarh•26m ago

Unless everyone worked in base 12 numbers too, that'd be a mess. Part of the beauty of metric is how often calculations devolve to shifting the decimal point.

altern8•20m ago

Isn't base 10 easier because you just add/remove zeros, and also we have 10 fingers to count..?

bluGill•1m ago

No, converting units is not a useful evercise. airplanes are measured in mm - even the full lenght is in mm not decameters or even hecameters (i had to look those prefives up)

rob74•55m ago

Oh, he means that companies are adopting metric internally. If there would have been significant progress in adoption of the metric system in any public-facing field lately, Trump would have surely railed against it, same as he does against renewable energy and other subjects he perceives as "progressive"...

c048•27m ago

I've heared Americans, unironically, state that the metric system is less precise than the imperial system.

I have no clue what the origin is of this myth, but at this point I wouldn't be surprised if Trump held this belief too.

vpol•23m ago

> origin is of this myth

poor education system

bluGill•5m ago

Depends on the field - it happens that 1\1000 inch is a good tolerance for many machining operations, while metric doesn't have a convient round number close enough to that range to be useful. That doesn't slow down mathinists though, they know the fraction of mm tolerance they need to use and it is what is marked on their tools.

cjs_ac•53m ago

> U.S. customary (the more accurate name for what’s sometimes the called the British Imperial system)

For those wondering why there is this distinction, the British Imperial units were created by the Weights and Measures Act 1824; US customary units follow the Winchester Standard of 1588.

pjc50•49m ago

And in a few places they're different (US measuring "cup" vs UK, US gallon, etc)

edit: ref https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zfnjb7h

beardyw•41m ago

UK doesn't use cups in recipes and fuel is dispensed in litres.

Road signs are still in miles.

ljf•35m ago

It has been a long time since fuel was sold here in the UK in gallons, but most cars still are spoken of in terms of MPG (miles driven per gallon of fuel). There are steps to move this to L per 100km - but most people here still use MPG.

We also use Pints in pubs, which are a different size to US pints.

beardyw•16m ago

Engines have been in litres since forever it feels.

arethuza•32m ago

I'll drive 80 miles to walk 25 km to climb mountains because they are over 3000ft high (Munros) even though I think about the heights on the mountains in metres!

ch_123•9m ago

As someone who generally uses metric units, but grew up around English Imperial units - if an American says that a person weighs a certain number of pounds, I need to convert to stone and pounds in my head in order to get a meaningful mental model of how much that person weighs.

cupofjoakim•47m ago

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•39m ago

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.

mgoetzke•31m ago

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...

neutronicus•16m ago

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.

strken•10m ago

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

bluGill•10m ago

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)

kevin_thibedeau•16m ago

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

FridayoLeary•13m ago

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.

t-3•10m ago

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.

ecommerceguy•29m ago

Aren't imperial units considerably easier to calculate on the fly in construction and when squaring? They seem to come more natural for me.

NuclearPM•27m ago

No. They are only more natural to you because you are used to it.

pineappleoreos•24m ago

When one of familiar with something, it always feels more natural.

Ronsenshi•24m ago

Can you give an example? I can't imagine calculating conversions between inches and feet to be easier than using millimeters/centimeters/meters. Or using mostly millimeters in construction in Europe. You have one unit to deal with that generally tends to be integer value. No need to fractions.

bluGill•20m ago

You don't convert. Airplanes are designed in mm and you never need meters. Houses are in inches - we say 92 5/8. Or sometimes 2 feet 3 inches. Our measurement tools have both marks so we can do it without coversion.

bluGill•22m ago

Depends. they are designed so the whole units are easy for the common things you do with that size. this is a common case for things will still do today like we did 200 years ago (like build houses). But even in those areas a lot of things are not round units.

When things are not nice round units though both systems are equally hard. This is common in the modern world where we do a lot of things impossible 200 years ago.

in reality you almost never calculate on the job. You measure what is on the print and anything not on the print is figured out 'when you get there' by measuring the space left when you get there - which also corrects for previous measurement errors

NuclearPM•26m ago

The US is converting faster to fascism than the metric system.

rf15•11m ago

ah, if only the french would've lead with that, we would be all on the same page by now

sarchertech•24m ago

The problem is that Fahrenheit is a bit more convenient for describing the weather. Inches and feet are a bit more convenient for measuring human scale things and for being easily divisible by more numbers. And we’re used to the rest of it.

Unless someone comes along and forces it on you, for the average person, there’s not enough incentive to switch.

plaguna•20m ago

"Fahrenheit is a bit more convenient for describing the weather" - you might need to show us an example here that is not biased. Because to me, Celsius is a bit more convenient for describing the weather.

bluGill•15m ago

It is what you are used to for both of you. you could make your own measurement system and it would work fine once you get used to it - until you need to communicate with someone else who isn't used to it.

ghaff•5m ago

A big part of it is certainly what you're used to.

The other part, which I'm sympathetic to, is that for human scale everyday things, Fahrenheit 0 degrees lines up with really darned cold, 100 degrees with really hot outside of an oven, and the degree size is about twice as granular as Celsius.

And while Celsius degree size is indeed widely used in engineering calculations, you're often using Kelvin as the absolute temperature scale. (Which does use Celsius degree increments of course.)

sarchertech•12m ago

On the Fahrenheit scale, the majority of daily temperatures in the vast majority of the US fall between 0 and 100, which is -17 and 37 Celsius, and it’s more granular without introducing a decimal point.

bryanlarsen•11m ago

Not as laughable as "metric is more convenient for human scale things". "Human scale things" includes fractions of an inch and fractions of a mile, which are horrible in customary units, and includes both the foot and yard which are used confusingly interchangeably. Metric is far superior for human scale measurements.

And that's only length. It gets worse outside of length. Like WTF is an ounce?

MarkusWandel•19m ago

Oddly enough as a person born in a metric country, now living in Canada which is metric, and always educated in metric, I agree with you on the feet and inches. "A couple of inches" doesn't imply nearly the precision that "5 centimeters" (using the US spelling on purpose) implies. Similarly my own height of 5'10 is much more "human scale" than the 178cm that it says on my passport.

Not for engineering though!!! Being able to add 1/64 and 5/16 and 17/32 etc. in your head without stumbling is a skill that I did not acquire.

Don't agree on the Fahrenheit though and for the same reason! Degrees are just the right scale, and besides, anchored at freezing (0) and typical boiling (100) points. But that's just habits. Probably if I'd grown up with Fahrenheit, I'd prefer it too. And besides the oven defaulted to Fahrenheit and we never changed it. 350F...

jventura•14m ago

As someone born and living in a country that uses the metric system, I do not understand a bit of what inches and feets mean. Tell me something has 10-15 cm, and I know what it means. I measure 173cm, I know what one meter is about. 5'10? What the hell is that?! 5 feet and 10 inches? Some people have small feet, some have larger. And what is an "inch"? :)

Oh, and fahrenheit, what the hell it means? 0ºC means ice, 100ºC means boiling water, 40º feels summer around here..

I guess I'm saying that you understand the values of the imperial system because you're used to them, as I'm used to values in the metric system..

prmoustache•23m ago

funny related video from Loic Suberville.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/XiEM57ifX54

alkonaut•18m ago

Having converted science, manufacturing etc, what's the first (or next) true consumer facing thing that could change?

mschild•5m ago

Grocery sizes. In fact, a lot of them already have it on the items. Typically because a lot of products are also sold in Canada so they put the ml measurement next to the gallons.

sevensor•5m ago

> manufacturing

This is sadly far from the truth. Manufacturing is nowhere near metric conversion. Horsepower, foot-pounds, and my all time least favorite unit, the mil, are everywhere. And relatedly, manufacturing execution systems that use localtime internally cause all manner of hilarity twice a year. It’s like we’re just deliberately trying to be bad at measuring things.

altern8•17m ago

Why change? Imperial was Washington's dream, after all... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JYqfVE-fykk

threemux•9m ago

I'd part with cups and teaspoons/tablespoons and the like, but you'll pry inches/feet/yards and fahrenheit from my cold, dead hands. They're both more convenient for daily use. I think I'd prefer to keep miles as well but I don't have a good reason for that one.

Fahrenheit has more precision without using decimals for the thing 99% of people are using temperature measurements for: air temp. Where I live, we generally experience 5 degrees F - 100 degrees F at different points of the year. That's 95 degrees of precision with no decimal. In C, that's -15 to 37.8, a mere 52.8 degrees. The difference between 75 (usually a beautiful day) and 85 (hot) is 23.8C to 29.4C. Everything packed into this tight range.

Inches/feet being base 12 divides better into thirds and fourths, which is very useful in construction.

For science, sure, I'll use metric.

hk1337•8m ago

Seems like the U.S. uses metric for most of the important areas and just lets everyone continue to use imperial, whatever they want everywhere else.

Show HN: I built a screenshot beautifier because I hate subscriptions

Why I Stopped Reading and Embraced Audiobooks

Show HN: Ethbacknode – a back end-oriented Ethereum node abstraction (Go)

Show HN: Procjail – Building a process isolator in Go using Linux namespaces

How to Rebuild American Industry

Thing: Temperature-Sensitive LED Faucet Light

Show HN: Kitful – AI Blogging Platform

Glimpses of the Future (1979)

What Context Can Bring to Terminal Mouse Clicks

Swedish Alecta has sold off an estimated $8B of US Treasury Bonds

FOSS for Digital Sovereignty in the EU

Human Debt

Quad9 9.9.9.9 DNS slow today

A cooler climate solution: Air-conditioning without the compressor

Show HN: Claude Code prompts to turn voice AI exports to a personal knowledge

Nested Code Fences in Markdown

Could US Congress Stop Trump from Taking over Greenland?

Show HN: Receiptly – keep receipts so you don't miss warranties

Show HN: A Simple MCP Server That Lets Agents Talk to Users

Astra – Authorization with Semantic Task-Based Restricted Access

Show HN: EmbodIOS – AI Operating System with Kernel-Level Inference

Show HN: A self-hosted news aggregator with custom tabs and local caching

Delegated Authorization Constraining Agents to Semantic Task-to-Scope Matching

Internet voting is insecure and should not be used in public elections

Show HN: KeyleSSH – SSH auth where the private key never exists

Microservices for the Benefits, Not the Hustle

Europe must act now: the post-NATO world has begun

Show HN: A WASM A* Library – 2–3.5× Faster Than Alternatives

Swedish pension fund Alecta cuts US Treasury holdings citing US politics

Hume is better at explaining modern capitalism than Marx