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It's even easier if you use UTC-0. Joking aside, after enough usage you don't even need to do the +12 maths. Personally, I'd take using metric over converting people to 24 hour time. My day job involves working with UTM spatial data (all metres) but our public facing outputs are all feet and miles for our American audience. It's trivial to convert but drives me insane when a customer asks if I can convert something from feet to miles. I don't think I have ever seen a compelling reason for the US not to convert to metric. Every other country faced the same expense and learning curve.



> I don't think I have ever seen a compelling reason for the US not to convert to metric.

It's expensive, the benefits are minor, and our system is fine (it could be better of course: a switch to nautical miles would be nice, and making a gallon 256 cubic inches would be great). I've never seen a compelling reason to convert — and neither have Americans in general.

> Every other country faced the same expense and learning curve.

If every other country jumped off of a bridge, would you? The French system really isn't as good as it's cracked up to be.

French units optimise for abstract unit conversion (e.g. inches to feet or millimetres to kilometres); standard units optimise for concrete manipulation (e.g. dividing a gallon into cups, or a litre into decilitres). The thing is, unit conversion really isn't that common compared to manipulation (after all, what do units of measure exist for if not to manipulate objects?).


And yet 98% of the world decided that the benefits were worth the expense. Standardization is so prevalent in many aspects of our world for good reason - suggesting that the metric system is somehow immune to these benefits is ridiculous.


> And yet 98% of the world decided that the benefits were worth the expense.

It was imposed on much of the world by Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin (much like right-hand driving, as it happens); one can't really say that many folks had any choice in the matter.

> Standardization is so prevalent in many aspects of our world for good reason - suggesting that the metric system is somehow immune to these benefits is ridiculous.

I'd never deny it. There really are benefits to standardization. The rest of the world is free to standardize on feet and pounds any time it wants grin




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