We do use it where necessary; in science, engineering and the military, for example. Some of our imperial units suck, but others, like pounds and feet and inches are superior because they are more intuitive. The reality is that it's a non-issue for most people and because of that we will almost always have some version of a mixed system, as do most of the other Anglophone countries.
What? How is feet and pounds more intuitive? To me metric is more intuitive and imperials are whole another language, because I only learnt metric in school and only remember very few things in imperial (such as some dimensions on specific parts of bicycles).
Converting yards to inches in your head is near damn impossible, but you don't even need to count to know 5.25km is 5250m or 525000cm
Where are you from if I may ask? As far as I'm aware they are are pretty common, I know only of India which does them differently and maybe US / Canada? Although I think the point and the comma are switched in some countries, so a thousand Euros would be 1.000,00€
To further add to this, a unit would be something basic like litre, metre, or a gram. So 1000 litres is a kilolitre. 1000 metres is a kilometre. 1000 grams is a kilogram. You may be familiar with the computer byte. A kilobyte is 1000 bytes. A megabyte is 1000 of those. Everything is divisible by 10, and everything makes sense.
Interestingly, even though a calorie isn’t a metric unit (the joule is), the energy to raise 1 millilitre of water by 1 degree Celsius is 1 calorie.
Also, 1 gram of water is 1 millilitre. And if you measure that in size, that’s 1 cubic centimetre. So if you go buy a litre of water, you know it’ll be 1000 cubic centimetres, and it’ll weight 1kg.
And FWIW we use the metric system too. We just tend to mix it with US Customary, like how Canada and The UK does with Metric and Imperial. Except the UK uses more Metric than Imperial. Vice versa for the US. Food is sold using both. Science and computing are always in Metric. And a few other things too but it's 4am and I'm too tired to think.
Edit: I don't even know how a CPU's temperature translates to Fahrenheit, but for weather it makes perfect sense. I know that 100°F is hot for outside, and that 80°C is hot for a processor. But I couldn't tell you what is what if you swapped the measurements.
That's not what I meant but I appreciate the help, lol.
I meant that I don't know how to read my PC's temps in Fahrenheit and don't know how to read the weather in Celsius. I do understand that 80°C would kill me, just not by how much.
I guess that's like tons but damn that is frustrating to learn. You finally did it and all called it the same thing and then just messed it all up. We were so close!
Correct, except in Computing, there the Kilo, Mega, Giga ....are in uppercase, to differentiate it from the decimal system as it is based on powers of 2.
1 km is 1000 meters but 1 Kb is 1024 bytes
That is no correct. You are talking about kibi, mebi and gibi. The corresponding identifiers are Ki, Mi and Gi, not K M and G. K would mean Kelvin, M is 10⁶, G is 10⁹
Here's the deal; where metric use is necessary as in science, the military and engineering, we use it same as everyone else. As for the rest, most people really don't care, so that's why we'll probably always have a mixed system. It's just not a big issue for most people, sorry to say.
Just wait until you hear about zetta (10^21) and yotta (10^24) and their inverses zepto (10^-21) and yocto (10^-24). :D
Huh, neat! When fact-checking my statement, I just learned that there are even two more prefixes on each side of the scale: ronna (10^27), quenna (10^30), ronto (10^-27) and quecto (10^-30). They got added last year.
We aren't unitist when it comes to naming ammo. Half (ratio pulled from my ass) gets named based on US Customary units and half on Metric units. Most calibers get named in whatever unit sounds coolest. Seven point six two PRC (or any variation of the 7.62 verbalization) doesn't have the same ring or implied power as three hundred PRC.