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Why do people who try to convince others to switch to metric focus so much on the conversions? (herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 5 hours ago) by klymilark@herbicide.fallcounty.omg.lol to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world

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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

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[–] klangcola@reddthat.com 2 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

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

[–] davidagain@lemmy.world 5 points 11 hours ago

The date part of ISO 8601 doesn't have slashes, it has dashes and requires double digits: 2026-01-04

[–] MotoAsh@piefed.social 6 points 22 hours ago

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)