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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)
this post was submitted on 30 Jan 2026
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I just don't believe you at all.
There are 12 inches in a foot. So the scale of a foot is 12x that of an inch.
There are 100cm in 1m. That is 100x.
Europeans convert cm to m very frequently, and it's a scale shift 10x larger than the one of inch-foot.
We also convert km to m frequently, which is a 1000x scale shift. It's more than half that of yard-mile.
The reason you don't convert often is because it is a pain in the ass to do so. Not the other way around.
The reason you say "an eight of a foot" has meaning, while "0.125 feet" does not. However, saying "125 meters" is way easier for both the listener and the talker than "an eighth of a kilometer". If it weren't, we'd say 1/8km, since nothing in metric prevents you from doing that.
A: The average height of a woman in the US is 1 meter, 6 decimeters, 7 centimeters, 5 millimeters.
B: You seem like a tremendously fun person to be around.
A: I don't know what point you are trying to make. Could you clarify? To clarify on my part, nobody would say what you said. We would probably choose one of the following options:
Of course options 1 and 2 sound basically the same when spoken. And we wouldn't measure a human height to mm precision, so 1.68m, 1m 68cm, and 168cm.
B: ad hominem.