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.
It’s not my measurements I need to convert, it’s other people’s. Don’t forget, American content is pretty overrepresented on the internet, so I actually need to do conversions pretty regularly.
Beyond the day to day, a spacecraft has burned up in the Martian atmosphere and an aircraft has run out of fuel mid-flight because of unit conversions not being done. These happenings aren’t very common, but the repercussions can be pretty big when they do, and the fact that this is a completely self-inflicted problem just makes it worse. Also, the shipping industry spends a good amount of money on unit conversions.
As for the problems with base-10, certainly a system based on base-12 would in principle be better (mind you, imperial isn’t one either). The problem is our numerals are base-10 and so our intuitions around numbers are based on that. 12 can still be dealt with, but once you get to 144 or 1728, it gets a lot harder. I can certainly name more integer divisors of 100 and 1000 off the top of my head despite having fewer of them.
Oh, absolutely. And all of those are better arguments than “It’s easy to go from meters to km! Just shift a few decimals!” despite the latter being the more common argument I see.
And yeah, imperial isn’t base 12 either. I do think base 12 numbers would be better, and I would have exactly 0 reservations about metric if we did, though it’s not like I’m exactly anti-metric now. I use it probably about as much as I use imperial day-to-day