this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2026
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way easier to learn/remember or to convert things in your head. less chance of getting it wrong.
but once you've spent years and years getting used to the mess that's US customary measurements, you've already put the work in, so metric doesnt look that much easier (and if you're unfamiliar with it, will look downright harder).
Is it that much easier? I think y'all make US customary out to be more complicated than it is.
Fractional math of a US tape measure is certainly more complicated than it needs to be. Iβd rather just add and subtract directly than find the common denominator and subtract that in my head.
US car manufacturers got halfway through converting to metric, but decided to keep a few things that require SAE tools, cluttering up a garage or shop with slightly different tools.
Ounces vs fluid ounces is infuriating. So is having a recipe call for a pint of blueberries but blueberries are sold by the dry pint. Making larger or smaller portions in grams/weight is way easier than figuring out what sort of measuring spoon combinations you need for making a smaller/larger portion of a quart ingredient.
The only thing on US cars that isn't metric these days may be bolt threads, but I'm pretty sure even those are metric now, except maybe for wheel nuts.
it's so complicated i definitely don't remember ounces in a pint or quart or yards in a mile, let alone any of the less common ones despite living in this shithole.
division by 10 is the easiest division you can have in base 10
When have you ever needed to know yards in a mile?
less often than knowing the mass of a volume of water would have been useful, which is trivial in metric.
yes, it's generally easier to remember 10 as the conversion number and nothing else, and it's also easier not to have to add/multiply fractions of an inch in your head.
this also works between types of units, so it's pretty simple to remember that ~~10cm^3~~ i'm a fucking idiot, it's a 10cm x 10cm x 10cm cube, so 1000cm^3 is 1l is ~1kg of water, for example.
I already know how many cups to a pint, pints to a quart, and quarts to a gallon there are bad fractions are so simple that we learn them in the 1st grade.
it's still more stuff to remember than you have to in metric. but yes, of course, now that you've already spent years memorizing this shit and practicing fraction addition/multiplication in your head a lot, it seems easy to you.