If the government was competent, they could rip off the bandaid and everyone would adapt within a year or two, but we need to wait at least 3 years for that to even begin to become a possibility again.
I guess you imagine we’ll all be calling half inch pipe twelve seven after this year adjustment period?
I guess people do it with bullet calibers.
Weights are even easier as pretty much everyone uses grams as the smallest daily unit and most people can convert to and from metric on the fly for ounces, lbs, kgs. Liters aren't uncommon, and ml<->gram equivalence for water is well-known. Traditional kitchen volumes probably wouldn't be displaced because metric has no answer for those in first place.
Temperature is where metric will fail to gain adoption because Celsius totally sucks unless your daily life consists only of boiling or freezing water at sea level. No advantages over Fahrenheit except maybe arguably for science, because it's Kelvin with an offset.
Perhaps as a compromise we could adopt the meter but divide it by halves, quarters, and so on. Binary fractions are so much more universal than arbitrary base ten ;)
That's only mildly sarcastic. For many people, it's become a part of being American, especially on the conservative side of the isle. Now, I personally live in celsius and work comfortably in kilometers, liters, and grams. However, it has become a weird point of pride for some Americans.
Since we humans operate 99% of our existence in a narrow band between 0 and 100 degrees celzius, I'd say its more important than starting from absolute 0 and dealing constantly with big offsets.
0 or 100 or -100 or 10 Fahrenheit is what? From Gemini: "0°F was the lowest temperature achievable with a mixture of ice, water, and salt (brine), while 96°F was set as the approximate temperature of the human body (blood heat), chosen because 96 is easily divisible by many numbers, allowing for finer divisions" - rather insignificant things.
Oddly enough if any government could just push and shove this through it might be Trump. I bet 20 years later you'd have a sizeable constituency who could be convinced that the change from imperial to foreign units was the beginning of the fall and decline and that everything could be fixed if you went back.
Your machine may spit out widgets that are plus or minus an inch. But when you set up the machine you set it up to the 1/16 regardless. Swapping all that to metric doesn't actually change anything other than the number the guy setting it up dials it in to.
I have a socket set in half-millimeter sizes for the absolute plague of cheap bolts and nuts that are being manufactured with obscene levels of slop.
The guy buying the widgets doesn't care because he's expecting a widget that's plus or minus dozens of the unit the machine is being set to. The setting is just as precise as it is in order to set the fat part of your output curve over the middle of your quality control pass range.
The machine might not even be calibrated in a direct measurement, it might be calibrated in a secondary measurement. Like tons of force or rpm or cycle speed or something that then translates to the dimension of your output part.
The units on machines mostly only exist for calibration. Beyond that they can just be made up "my amp goes to 11" type scales because they're so divorced from the outputs, either in precision (or are literally indirect as described above) that you "just have to know" that if you want a "X<unit>" widget you'll actually set the machine
Tons and tons and tons of stuff in our world is even intentionally spec'd out in this manner. A 14" tire rim is not 14, there's a tolerance. A 3" pipe isn't 3". These are all just nominal sizes. Just about everything in our world is nominally sized. A nut and bolt manufacturer doesn't care whether they're making 12mm or 1/2 on a given day. Those are just nominal sizes, arbitrary names, in their minds. It doesn't matter whether the factory runs on metric or imperial or something else because they're just shooting for an arbitrary number.
The only time your unit really matters is when interfacing with other parties and it only matters insofar as you need to know what each other are uses.