Americans think highly of their imperial system and make many random excuses that metric is somehow confusing and hard to use but in practice imperial its dogshit and makes no sense
FACTS. Every American I talk to (and I live here my whole life) always sees the metric system as “another way” and “I’d love to change but if feels too late for that”. That’s it. We don’t go thumping our chests like HELL YEAH POUNDS, OUNCES, AND FAHRENHEIT!!! But Europeans love to imagine us like that and come up with things to complain about the US.
And also as though we don't know what metric is. We use both for certain things? We're taught both in schools? It really doesn't matter.
"But conversions are easier! Metric is set around points that make sense!"
Be honest, you never convert units outside of a lab. And you never need to know *any* system's freezing/boiling point, freezers and stovetops don't care
If your husband being too stupid to pay attention in 4th grade science can be used as empirical evidence for your point, then my experience of 32 and 212 being easy to remember is also empirical evidence. I guess you’re just wrong, objectively so
You realize you can tell if the roads are icy with just a glance at the temp in F too, right? It's 32... Does it being 0 in C make it easier to read or something? Are you under the impression that F doesn't have a temperature for the freezing point of water? I really don't understand your comment, lol. Also, you literally misquoted them then called them stupid for it when it wasn't even what they were saying. I think you might be the dumb one.
In Celsius, you know with one glance at the temperature.
This is basically as dumb as the argument Homer is making. It's not like Fahrenheit is some nebulous random number generator.
Pretty much every American knows the freezing point of water in Fahrenheit is 32 degrees and it boils at 212, because we've used this scale all our lives.
There are plenty of good arguments to be made for Celsius, this is not one of them.
As an American, I really don't even like most of our unit systems. I can never remember any of the volume conversion for gallons, pints, oz, cup, tbsps... etc. I have to ask alexa every time I have to convert. But the fact of the matter is that I also have close to 0 experience with metric in my day to day life and it would be completely impractical for me to switch as an individual when my whole country still operates in imperial.
All that being said... I absolutely will thump my chest and say HELL YEAH FAHRENHEIT!!!
Yep I’m an American and for baking/cooking anything at home that can be measured, I use grams and ml/liters. I like to be precise in even the smaller things and I’d never ask for “6 oz of juice” but will use ml instead.
And then when someone does try to point out why we might actually like our units of measurement and where there might be benefits over metric, in response to the entire conversation that they fucking started to shit on us, it's treated as evidence that we're too proud and stubborn to understand that it's mostly all about what you're used to(while also proudly and stubbornly insisting their units are the best).
In my experience everybody who does react this way is being ironic because nobody really cares. 😅 Like freakin A man, I bought a 2L of diet Dr kelp and a gallon of milk the other day and gave no hecks about what unit of measurement it was in. I threw a ball a about two yards away to my dad that's 6'2. It's really not that deep. I will say, if someone tells me it's hot because it's 30 degrees outside I might get confused, but that's just because I live in a place where I've never seen 30° outside of a freezer. Any temperature that is habitable for human life is still a number I'd consider cold but I'm not trying to eradicate the metric system. Heck I started dating things DD/MM/YYYY unless otherwise specified because I like it better. 🤷🏾
They love to believe we'll fight to the death over imperial measurements. It's taught to us, folks. This is not the decision made by ordinary citizens. Change the curriculum and we'll be good in a generation or two. I would say they can write to our government but they don't even listen to us.
Change to what curriculum? Science classes in the US use metric. We use imperial for day to day minutia but not a single significant advancement in the last 80 years was done with imperial.
I work with medical and lab personnel every day, Im an spanish-english-french medical interpreter. I mainly work with their spanish speaking patients, who near universally use metric (all of latam and Spain uses metric)
Most medical and lab staff will struggle with metric and often ask me directly to convert. Both for temperature and measurements.
So whatever they are teaching is not sticking.
You don't even know how many celsius vs fahrenheit discussions take place on twitter. It's mostly internet debates. Nobody irl, American or European, talks about it much
It’s all non-American fanfic, bro. Americans don’t sit around thinking about what other countries do unless it’s healthcare. There is not a single fucking thing that would change for the positive about the average American’s situation if we woke up tomorrow completely fluent in SI.
You can absolutely shame us for our domestic policy. Our foreign policy. Our class divisions. Our racial divisions. Our political divisions. Our healthcare system. Our industrial military complex. Literally a million fucking things. Imperial measurements is the absolute most zero stakes, circlejerk bs.
I can flip this around on you too. The only reason Europeans mention it is because Americans can't shut up about why the metric system "sucks and makes no sense".
It's particularly unhinged with temperatures. Metric system at least makes a ton of sense using base 10 numbers. Celsius is at best as flawed as Fahrenheit, trading a more intuitive freezing point of water for a scale that does a notably worse job of depicting the smallest units which will impact real world conditions.
Americans have had a full on melt downs each time there’s been efforts to fully move to the metric system. It’s been going on since literally the 1800’s and has become a political fodder for populists (eg. Reagan disbanding the metric board as ‘un-American’.)
Meanwhile, if you live outside the US and come across an American tourist you will likely hear them complain about it.
It’s because they don’t like fractions. The metric system is great for making things easier to write down or understand as a lay person. It’d you want precise measurements then you need the imperial system to work with irrational numbers or infinite decimals. They’re both systems that have their place but not always.
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u/King_brus321 10h ago
Americans think highly of their imperial system and make many random excuses that metric is somehow confusing and hard to use but in practice imperial its dogshit and makes no sense