I'm American, and Idesign things -- electronic things and mechanical things. I use metric. All my circuit boards are an even # of millimeters in size, all the screw holes are on even mm. All the holes are metric. I use metric screws and nuts.
But I also use inches / feet / yards when appropriate.
It's really not a problem. What's baffling is other countries being fucking weird about this stuff.
I'm an American engineer and if you gave me a fluid dynamics problem in imperial units, I'd convert it to metric, solve it there and convert it back rather than work on the fucking imperial system, because it would be easier and more intuitive.
What's truly baffling is why the US clings to the imperial system despite the entire rest of the world having moved on.
And your computer converts it to 32 bit floating point numbers before crunching the numbers for you. It kind of doesn't really matter because conversion is easy?
The reason why is that changing would come with extreme costs for no benefits. One example would be changing all road signs in the US to Metric.
Sure you could do it during replacement but then your going to have fucking mismatch of signs till they are all phased out, or you leave them in miles because there is no tangible impact by keeping them the same or changing them out.
There are plenty of benefits to being on the same page with the rest of the world. Wanna compete in the global economy? Better build your products in metric. Ain't nobody buying imperial tools to work with it otherwise. But now you've got to tool up in both.
2
u/MrSurly 6h ago
I'm American, and Idesign things -- electronic things and mechanical things. I use metric. All my circuit boards are an even # of millimeters in size, all the screw holes are on even mm. All the holes are metric. I use metric screws and nuts.
But I also use inches / feet / yards when appropriate.
It's really not a problem. What's baffling is other countries being fucking weird about this stuff.