And then she negates her entire argument in the closing shot of the video.

Nope, she proves it.

"but you can easily convert it!!"

Yeah, but it's a pointless waste of time. It took 10 secs for that conversion in the video. There are 323 million people in the US. If 1% of the population did the conversion once a month, that's still over 100,000 hours wasted every year (and in the real world, the figure is likely several orders of magnitude higher).

There is no good reason whatsoever to use imperial measurements.

Maybe there's no logical reason to have different systems but the reasons to have only one system are kind of thin. I am perfectly capable of using more than one system and I find that I prefer different systems for different uses. I can use imperial measurements when I build a shed and metric when I do engineering calculations. When I cook, I might use cups and tablespoons to make chili but I use grams to measure ingredients when I bake bread. And if you prefer one or the other, I can adapt. Humans are good at that. ;-)

Extend the argument and it's not logical for the world to speak more than one language. Translating between languages is a whole lot more work than translating temperature scales. We should all speak Mandarin, because it's the most spoken language in the world. But my best friend's 2 year old speaks Mandarin AND English. I suspect he'll be just fine.

Anyway, long story short, I agree we should all know how to use the metric system. That doesn't mean we all need to use it for everything.

I've lived in the US since 2013 ... I'm OK now with instantly "translating" to miles and feet and pounds and gallons in colloquial speech (at work we all use metric because I'm in science and tech with international collaboration), but Temperature??? I'm still in Celsius and can't adapt seem to adapt.

"And if you prefer one or the other, I can adapt. Humans are good at that. ;-) "

No, they're not. Or did you miss the part where some of the smartest people on the planet crashed millions of dollars into another planet? People are TERRIBLE at these kinds of things. One conversion? Fine. Ten conversions? No problem. Hundreds, thousands or millions of conversions? The probability of error tends to 100%.

It would definitely be more efficient if everyone used one common language (especially for cross cultural endeavours such as business and engineering). In fact, that kinda happens by default and that language tends to be English.

However, there are practicalities in play. First up, there aren't just two languages, there are hundreds, and there is a broad split in the number of speakers of each language. Whereas in metric v imperal, the US is the ONLY country in the developed world that hangs onto imperial.

Second, learning a new language is an order of magnitude more work than changing to using metric.

I'm speaking from experience here; in the course of my life, I've studied Irish, French, German, Spanish and Japanese, and I am in no way close to fluent in any of them

On the other hand, when I left Ireland, it was officially metric but imperial was still common (distances were in KM, speed limits in miles, people used imperial weights for humans, metric for food). When I moved to NZ, everything is metric, and honestly, relearning happens without effort. Once you immerse yourself, you eventually just start thinking in the new system.


Finally, metric is just a better system for everything. There isn't a single scenario where imperial is a more useful measurement.

Come on America, join us. It's awesome and you don't really want to use "English" units, do you? Did you fight a war to get rid of them? What would George Washington say!? It's unamerican, I tells ya!

When it comes to these things I want 3 things to happen in my lifetime:
* US to switch to metric system.
* The world to agree on common household electricity voltage.
* The world to drive on the same side of the road.

I once heard one of the reasons the US likes Fahrenheit is because it has a larger scale and ergo allows them to be more precise about exactly what temp it is...

Like people really care whether it's 25 degrees celcius or 25.63724 deg cel...

For everyday use Fahrenheit seems pretty handy. 100 °F is dangerously hot, 0 °F is dangerously cold, you know you have to take extra care if it gets out of that range. And a body temperature of 100 °F is the start of having a fever.

The only number you need to remember is that water freezes at 32 °F. I doubt you'd ever need to know the boiling point of water to cook.

Plus the much smaller increments are nice. °C is good if you're a sciency type and need to convert from Kelvin, but otherwise I don't see many advantages.

The road and electricity don't matter nearly as much as the metric system because they are geographically bound.

Generally, you drive in one country at a time, and most countries with land borders drive on the same side of the road.

With electrical appliances, they usually stay in one country and the ones that do travel (i.e. laptops, phones, etc) generally will accept any voltage.