I will grant that Celsius vs. Fahrenheit (or equivalently, Kelvin vs. Rankine) is the least compelling piece of the metric system. In fact, I’d say that Rankine is superior to Celsius, as a serious system for measuring temperature.
About 30% of the world’s population lives in the 60-odd countries that drive on the left.
The comparison to Metric is beyond silly.
Well, given a bit over 24% of the worlds GDP come from non-metric counties I’m not sure that’s a totally robust rebuttal.
Both RHS drive and metric … now you are talking! 
Where I am?
You forgot one pretty populous country, there.
Bu sure, happy to switch, not particularly attached to which side of the road I drive on. Certainly not going to invent some elaborate rationale for why it makes more sense, or anything…
Metric units have been the defining standard in the U.S. since 1893. An inch is defined as 2.54 cm, for example. From Wikipedia:
Under the Mendenhall Order of 1893, metric standards, developed through international cooperation under the auspices of BIPM, were officially adopted as the fundamental standards for length and mass in the United States, though some metric standards were used in practice before then. The definitions of United States customary units, such as the foot and pound, have been based on metric units since then.
See, this is the kind of thing that happens when you post before going to bed - people come to calm agreement in your absence. Maybe we need to standardise waking hours and abolish timezones.
Because the behavior of water isn’t relevant for your day to day life?
-1C means “watch out: shit is frozen”.
Traffic will be horrible, stuff will be slippery, some plants will die.
Never mind that 0F and -1F are set at some point that has no (0!) impact on anything. Making your point extra, doubleplus moot.
At what temperature do you put your oven to bake a lasagna?
You don’t even need to look up a conversion factor or find a calculator. I have a lot of metric conversion factors memorized, but for the ones I don’t, or when I’m feeling too lazy to do the math, Google does the conversion of whatever you type directly in the search window. Example:
An Android phone with voice-to-text makes it even easier, i.e. you literally just speak “537 miles in kilometers” and you get the answer.
For What Its Worth, an article on this subject:
So you’re saying that following a standard that is only used by a minority of countries in the world doesn’t cause you any inconvenience in your day-to-day activities, and when you do have conform to the rest of the world - driving in Europe, for example - you simply adapt?
I mean, you’re right - right-side versus left-side driving is not perfectly analogous to Standard to Imperial units. But it makes the point that for quotidian, humble uses, we don’t absolutely require perfect uniformity.
I’m reminded about a video from a funny British internet humourist, Lindybeige. He loves explaining history and life through “just so stories” and he always takes his own opinions and personal views as dead logical, which unintentionally makes his videos even more humorous to skeptical moi.
And the US will fully adopt metric just as soon as the North Sentinelese Islanders do. We promise.
FWIW, I’m an American who really wishes we could go metric. For me it would really help with weight and length measurements. I don’t do much building, etc., but when I have it was really a pain having to deal with fractions of inches.
Some say to use inch decimals but to me that’s no help because decimalized inches don’t line up with decimalized feet and yards.
As for temperature, it makes no difference to me. I used Celsius no problem when I lived in Europe. It’s just getting accustomed to different numbers. Temperature would be a simple thing to either not change (stay F in the US) or to use both systems at the same time. You don’t have multiply and divide temperatures (the way you do length and weight) very often outside of specialty niches.
I don’t think we can slowly drip, drip, drip adopt the metric system because until you go all the way you’re still having to do conversions.
I wonder how much money is lost in the US for the time and labor spent on converting units? Has to be in the billions of dollars.
Considering the other issues that the US has at the moment, I’m pretty sure going metric is pretty far down on my list of priorities.
I mean, large groups of people have cultural inertia. The US population is greater than that of Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Spain combined. It’s not surprising to me that there is significant resistance to a change in comfort level for that many people. If you ask a typical person about the metric system as it exists in the US today, I venture that they would say, “But we do use it. I see metric measurements on products and materials all the time. But my life has a lot of non-metric aspects to it and that’s fine. Why do I want to make other people happy at my expense? What? It would save me as an individual about $25 a year? To heck with that. Not worth it.”
What? I thought the whole point these days is diversity.
It’s not like that, for the most part. We use both systems daily. Tool sets come in mm and inch. In science, we use the International Systems of Units, like everyone else, For driving, we like miles. 60 mph and 60 minutes per hour makes the math works well. For temp we like Fahrenheit. 0 is cold, 100 is hot. In C, minus 16 is cold, 38 is hot. C seems clinical, F has a human touch.
Quick: How many gallons to fill a 25x50 yard swimming pool that is 8 feet deep? But in metric its trivial to calculate how many liters in a 25x50 meter pool that is 2.25 meters deep.
Or how heavy will the hot tub be when you fill it? Length, volume, and the weight of water are all related in the metric sysytem.
I see the point you’re trying to make, but I’m not getting in your 4C pool water.
That seems to only uphold his point. How often do you need to know that “quick” and can’t just pull out a calculator? Filling a quarter acre swimming pool feels like a rare enough event that you can take a moment to figure it out instead of lamenting why you’re not using metric.
Also, it’s trivial to convert yards into feet anyway and calculate the cubic footage so it’s not the best example.
One reason the conversion to metric went off the rails in the US was over precision. For example, in a baseball park the outfield fence would say 327 feet and underneath would be “99.67 meters” instead of just “100 meters”, even though the measurement in feet was not exact to begin with. It made metric look complicated.