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Comment by nutjob2 | Hacker News Reader

By "some countries" you mean United States, Liberia, and Myanmar

and also by ‘some countries’ they mean about 4% of the earth’s population, or 1 in 25 people.

But 26.3% of the world’s GDP.

In India, decades after metric, many will only understand feet and inches for height, length etc.. Think it's the same in many Asian countries, though some have moved on.

But miles has gone out of fashion. Pounds too..

Some of use in India don't even grok inches, miles, pounds, pints, ares or cubits. In fact, I haven't met anyone in the professional fields (science, engineering and medicine) who is comfortable with imperial or any other non-metric systems. Not even our parents are comfortable with them. It was a nightmare when we were faced with such units in public exams. That's an arcane skill that disappeared 3 or 4 generations ago. To be clear, I'm not claiming that the whole of India is like that. But I'm pointing to the fact that there are entire regions in India where it has been like that for generations.

Its not uniform across domains. For example in Singapore or Hong Kong if you ask someone's height it's CM but flat apartment area or price is psf. Ounces are unknown. I guess it's same in India.

Yes in a large country it could be regional variations.

Science progresses one funeral at a time.

The kids need to learn a new system first for things to change. Canada understood this. The US insists on teaching future generations imperial units, so it won't change quickly.

Fwiw, Myanmar has been transitioning to metric since 2013 but, well, they had other worries.

Likewise, Liberia set up a transition program in 2018.

AFAIU both still use a bunch of traditional non US units too, like the UK.

You’ll find imperial units in lots of Chinese products too.

After all, they’re the ones manufacturing the imperial screws, etc.

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