While we are at it, let's all (as in the entire planet) switch to 24hour UTC and the YYYY.MM.DD date format.

Americans use 9 millimeters at school all the time.

I am once again asking for yyyy-mm-dd

As a mechanical design engineer in America having dual systems creates unnecessary complexity and frustration and cost for me all day every day. I full force embrace switching to metric

Metric yes please. Also for fucks sake use the 24 hour clock. Some of us learned it from the military but it’s just earth time and way easier than adding letters to a number

There was a beautiful time back when I was young where we tried to change to metric and schools taught us nothing but. Now I'm ~50 years old and don't even know how many pints are in a gallon. Or feet in a mile. Always forget whether it's 12 or 16 that's inches in a foot / ounce to pound. Always have to look that shit up. Because they didn't teach us that garbage. Ever.

Guess what I NEVER have to look up? The measurements that tell you in their fucking prefixes how many X are in Y. What a concept.

Metric has been legally "preferred" in the US since 1975. We just don't use it.

Also while I was looking up that year I came across this wild factoid:

In 1793, Thomas Jefferson requested artifacts from France that could be used to adopt the metric system in the United States, and Joseph Dombey was sent from France with a standard kilogram. Before reaching the United States, Dombey's ship was blown off course by a storm and captured by pirates, and he died in captivity on Montserrat.

We should have gone metric in the 70s. This year will be the 45th anniversary of the Metric Conversion Act, which was signed on December 23, 1975, by President Gerald R. Ford. You may have even seen a map that has been incriminatingly illustrated to show how they are out of step with the rest of the world. It’s a compelling story and often repeated, but you might be surprised to learn that it’s simply untrue!

If you pretend to be a confused foreigner you can make them do math

You could always use the metric system, that was always allowed. Most food (I've seen) has both imperial and metric measurements. Most digital measuring devices and lots of analog ones will have options for both. Speedometers generally have both.

Really, the only one stopping you from using the metric system in your daily life is you. Unless of course you're saying you want other people to use it. Which is a distinctly different proposition.

I'm a scientist. I've used the metric system since grade school. In fact, I convert Imperial measurements to metric to do estimates.

I dunno, it'd probably be better but there's nothing stopping people from using metric in places where it makes sense. I write most of my recipes in grams because it makes them easier to multiply or divide.

At the same time, the most common thing people use units for is a point of reference, and it really makes no difference whether your point of reference is metric or traditional units.

You can't have it because of peer pressure from dead people. You gotta take them seriously, motherfuckers will haunt your ass and say shit like "thirty fathoms, gold dubloons and schooners, twenty nickel shillings". We have the metric system in our country and the ghosts suck, they don't even try to come up with sensical nonsense phrases for the sake of the bit, the lazy bastards.

Be the change you want to see in the world. Use the metric system.

You could drive this one stretch https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/i19-americas-only-metric-interstate

Natural Gas companies: No, MMBTU/scf or bust!

A few years ago I started using Celsius in my everyday life. It's been pretty easy, just remember that C scales twice as fast as F, and 32F=0C and you're set for conversations. It helps to be quick with math, but finding it difficult may make it easier to convince other people to use it instead of F near you. To acclimate yourself you'll want to change the settings on your phone to use C by default.

I haven't switched over to m in everyday use, because all the roadsigns are in Mph and doing that conversion while driving is bad juju.

I'm thinking of rewriting all my recepies in grams and liters. If I can figure out how to get our stupidly-over-designed-yet-entirely-jank oven to use C, that'd be good too. If we had one with a bimetalic strip and a knob I'd be able to just print one with the new temperature scale.