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Comment by perilunar | Hacker News Reader

It's inevitable that you will switch, you are just making it much more painful than it needs to be.

Did you notice that the SpaceX webcasts only use metric for the speed and altitude displays?

The only people that think it's painful are the folks who keep telling us we need to switch. We know the measurements we use pretty well, and even then there are plenty of things already measured in metric.

Plus, it's not like everyone else has fully switched. The UK still seems perfectly comfortable talking about weight in stones and all their cars measure speed in mph just like the US.

Yes nearly every country is in some sort of hybrid state. In Europe you have the UK with one foot in the empire, but other countries also mix in e.g inches for tv’s, car wheel sizes and so on. It’s almost not a measurement, it’s more like a size scale (you don’t measure your wheels in absolute terms but you know what 19” rims look like compared to 17”). Ironically we put mm sized tyres on these rims.

I think the US should try to switch one area at a time. Just like we will eventually measure Tv’s in metric (Australia does already I believe) the US could probably ease into metric by adding more and more areas that use it.

It's funny, as an Australian, TV's are probably the only think I know exclusively in inches.

At one point TVs were in centimetres and computer monitors were in inches, but now they've seem to have given up and sell both in inches (which is probably against some regulation somewhere).

I lived in Australia in 2002 and was surprised to see things like TVs be marketed in cm. Did that change? Makes sense to use the same marketing as manufacturers since model names will have inch sizes in them.

All screws here are metric, except for PC computer cases, harddrives etc. And screens, as mentioned. Everywhere the US influences global technology, the imperial units show up.

Ireland is 100% metric, yet you go into the grocery store and the butter is in 454g blocks.

That's because their main commercial partner (both because of geographical proximity and shared language which allows using the same packaging) isn't fully metric.

It used to be the same in Canada (or at least Québec) but I've heard that more products are sold in round metric quantities these days.

That's true for some sausages and jams, but all butter is sold in multiple of 250g in Britain.

https://www.tesco.com/groceries/en-GB/shop/fresh-food/milk-b...

Nearly all the butter you see here is labeled Irish, as is most of the other dairy and meat. The north has the opposite, most of the meat/dairy is labeled from NI. (With the exception of some of the branded stuff, like kerrygold butter which is available on both sides of the border. )

Even for TV size?

In the UK the metric system is used in business, construction, science etc. Really anything serious. Imperial measures seem to persist informally for things that are difficult to visualise, like body weight or speed. Or things that are customary like a pint. I will ask for a pint because that is how much beer I want to drink. Not because I actually care what unit it is in. And young people haven't got a clue how to add up pounds and ounces or inches and feet.

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