Comments by "SmallSpoonBrigade" (@SmallSpoonBrigade) on "Is The Metric System Actually Better?" video.

@jclosed2516 It's not a practical scale in any way shape or form. The units are very close together and with 0 being where it is, when it's winter outside you have a much greater likelihood of extra headache when comparing temperatures in neighboring cities. What's more, it completely breaks if you're not operating under standard conditions and netiher 0 nor freezing are anywhere near body temperature which leads to additional headaches with estimating temperatures as the only natural temperature to compare with is body temperature. Fahrenheit isn't perfect, but based upon when it was created, it's rather impressive.
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@jclosed2516 it's really not. That's what people say, but it's not true, the metric measures just suck. I lived outside the US long enough to know the system and it just became obvious how much it sucks. The people saying otherwise either don't know both systems or spend most of their time doing science. And no, water doesn't boil at 100C universally, that's only true at sea level on this planet. Try that in Colorado or Nepal and see how that works for you. Spoiler alert, it won't, the water will boil before it hits 100, guaranteed.
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There's no real doubt that the metric system sucks amongst people that actually know what they're talking about. I've used both personally and professionally and the metric system sucks for pretty much everything outside of a very narrow scope. The reason that the ignorant think otherwise is that they've never actually learned to use the imperial measures. They're awesome for use without a calculator as they have a large number of factors. The units themselves are generally much closer to what you want than the metric ones are and you can even talk in terms of tenths of them if that's more convenient than converting to a smaller or larger unit. What's more, because the metric system is arbitrarily based on the dimensions of the Earth and a very particular lump of French metal, it's going to be completely useless if we ever get off the Earth and out of the solar system as you'd have no way of directly calibrating anything at that point.
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You'd have that problem regardless of what measuring system you're using. Specifying something as being 20x20 without specifying the lengths can lead to a model Stonehenge that's only intimidating to little people and children.
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Yes and when the metric measures do something that actually makes it worth the inconvenience of switching over we might do so. The reality here is that absent contrived examples of people doing things that they're not likely to ever do, people have a hard time coming up with reasons to switch other than other countries are doing it. We already use the metric system in the areas where it actually makes sense. But, outside of science and medicine, there' just scant benefit from switching and plenty of times where it's less convenient.
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Yep, we also all knew that the video was going to get it wrong. The only way for imperial measures to lose is to go into all these niche situations that very few people actually encounter. Seriously, the only reason that people think that metric is better is that they were told that it's better. They never bothered to learn how the imperial measures work. I used to live in a country that uses metric measures and thank god that I no longer have to put up with that stupidity. None of the units of measure actually make things easier. seriously. If for some reason I want to talk about pounds and don't want to deal with ounces or fractions of a pound, there's no law that says that we can't decimalize the pound. In fact, that goes on regularly. However, the same cannot be said of the metric system, people don't typically use fractions as part of it, except for very simple ones.
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It's all well and good, but you have to realize that the metric system was created because the French didn't have a functioning measuring system. And most of the remaining places where it was adopted either didn't have a defined and enforced measuring system or were too small to be able to compete. I think it's really interesting how the truly ignorant like to make fun of the imperial system without really understanding how it works and why we might not be so keen on changing. I've had to live with the metric system when I lived overseas and my god is it inconvenient for pretty much everything. Even over the months, I was living with it, I never encountered anything outside of science and medicine that made me appreciative of it. And that shouldn't be surprising, it was designed to solve a problem that we didn't have in the US. In the US we had and have the Bureau of Weights and Measures that defined the various units we use. We had and have several agencies responsible for ensuring that any measurements being used in commerce are accurate. Then there's the issue of the convenience and I'm sorry, but base 10 is a shitty reason to bad mouth the imperial measures. Not only is there no rule against doing that with our measures, but we do it literally all the time. Engineers working on roads have decimal based measuring tapes when they want it. We regularly have things that are 5.25 feet when we're lazy about converting into inches. Similarly, we can say that a distance is 10.636 miles or we could convert that into some mixture of miles, yards, feet and/or inches if we wanted to.
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Only if it wanted to be factually incorrect. I've used both systems in daily living and you're fooling yourself if you think the metric makes anything other than science easier. Seriously, I expected that at least once in the nearly 18 months that I was stuck with the metric measures that I'd find things easier. Nope, not even once in any of the situations that I found myself in did I find the metric measures to be of any help whatsoever. The reality is that people hear about the imperial measures, never learn to use them and just assume that they're inferior. The reality is that if they really were inferior, the US would have abandoned them in the 18th century right after adopting them. But, that hasn't happened because they just aren't that helpful. You get used to the imperial measures and you pretty much always have a unit that's appropriate to the situation without having to cheat. Things tend to be sold by the half kilo because the kilo is too large of a unit to sell food by. Oddly enough, half a kilo is just slightly more than a pound. And the meter is too long for practical uses and the centimeter is too short. You wind up with 1.7m of height or 170cm and people seem to agree by consensus to ignore the 17 decimeters that that same person would be, which again is relatively close to a foot.
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@hamzerpanzer not really. The system avoids weird decimals, but lets you use then anyways if you like. The reality is that a base 12 metric system would have been an improvement over the base 10 one that they're trying to cram down or throats. Most of the genuine problems with imperial measures are in obscure units that aren't used much. Because they aren't used much, there's no inherent reason that they couldn't be redefined or replaced to solve the problem,
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@olivinator this is generally true except that the kilogram and not the gram is the official unit for some reason and is 10 000 kilometers to the north pole rather than 10 000 000 meters.
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@olivinator you use decimal points. This comment exemplifies why nobody should take pro metric people seriously. If you don't know our system and we know yours, how do you know we're wrong? Anyways a base 12 metric system would probably have gotten us on board as that woud have contributed something of value that we didn't already have, we'd get to keep most of the benefits of tee imperial measures and gain additional benefits. 144 degrees being boiling is much less ridiculous than 100 is.
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@Rashed1255 I'm guessing that it was probably 1/8 of a kilo. 1/2 a kilo is slightly more than a pound, so if you quarter that, you get something closer to 1/3 of a pound.
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@not_herobrine3752 that's just to contextualize it. You see that more regularly with large items. For example Libraries of Congress for data storage.
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