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this post was submitted on 10 Jul 2023
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No what you aren't getting is that the measurement units are arbitrary. However the divisors for those units is what makes the measurement system useful for people. If you are in construction it's much more useful to deal with whole numbers then it is to deal with fractions. Hence if you want a third of a foot, you want 4", not .166666 of a Meter. If you are drinking beer you count by the number of glasses of beer whatever size those happen to be, you don't count in Milliliters of beer. Measurements are supposed to be USEFUL to humans first and foremost, and moving a decimal to convert a unit to a different unit is trivial and can be done regardless of metric or not, and isn't really useful.
I was specifically talking about your example of .473 liters of liquid. No one using the metric system primarily is going to be serving .473 liter glasses of beer. They're going to be serving half liters. Or 500 mills. Or 200 mills. It really isn't that hard or unintuitive. Likewise, they're going to build buildings using measurements that make sense in metric. The problem is you're taking measurements that work nicely internal to the base-2 and base-12 imperial system and asking why they don't work well in the base-10 metric system. Well yeah, they don't, especially when you start out by converting from an imperial unit.
I'll pose it another way. Quick, what is a tenth of a foot? A tenth of a gallon? Ten cups in gallons? Why is a fork so bad at eating tomato soup?