In my lifetime I want to see the US convert to metric. It’s so much easier.

I live in Canada where everything is metric. Contractors still use feet and inches. Concrete people talk about how many "yards" they are getting delivered (but the slips are in m³ – never figured that out).

I'd like to see the US switch as well, so that we can switch to 5x dimensional lumber

The Canadian experience is probably the short distance from the USA. Contractors in metric Australia use millimetres. If mm get a bit ridiculous then we use metres. The translation between the two is simple (1m = 1000mm). Context is usually enough to know which unit is being used.

I compute in metric in the lab, and imperial in the garage. Seems to work out just fine. I don’t really see what the big deal is about switching to metric. Adding fractions of an inch is really not that hard.

And until they can get time into base 10 (60 seconds to the minute, 12 months in a year, 24 hours in day??) it all fails on consistency anyway.

Metric might be easier but there are some things I prefer in Imperial. Temperature can be interesting. 22 can be to cold in the winter and 23 can be to warm. I set my thermostat to Fahrenheit where I could control the temp more precisely (76). Speed is anther interesting measurement. When you drive 5 - 7 miles over the limit in the US (and along time ago in Canada), the police typically won't pull you over since the fine is basically per mile over. But in Canada that same 5-7 MPH is 8 -12 KPH and might get you a ticket since the fine is based per KPH over.

Like OP said, anyone in construction in Canada is using Imperial Measurements on the job site (even the guys from Europe). Just makes more sense somehow.

I grew up with both systems (Canada switched when I was a teenager) and to this day strangely still prefer Imperial for measurement, temperature, speed, and weight.

I think the units just don’t make physical sense. Three orders of magnitude between canonical units is just way too much. You always end with either too much precision or too little.

Having worked on Australia building sites I'd like to say that even at distances of 10m you still want to cut with a precision of 1mm. So it's common to hear that cut described as 10,000.

The big jump between units (mm and m) is really useful as even the most preoccupied of coworkers will notice if the scale is out by a thousand. If the units were closer -- say 10x -- then there would be more ordering errors. That explains the absence of centimetres (10mm) from construction sites even though centimetres is a popular household unit.

Millimetres dominates construction as being close to the width of a cut it is the perfect-size unit. It's simple to work with because you simply count: in imperial a tad more than 1⅜" is 1½"; in metric a tad more than 35 is 36.

Even though we retain the same size of timber as in the imperial past, those sizes are now expressed in metric -- common sizes are 90x35, 120x45. So you can measure up an old house for a repair and order in timber of the same size. There are not pre- and post-metric timbers.

That’s interesting about the mm. Most carpenters (having been one) will measure to the 1/16th of inch, rather than the 1/8th. If you’re cutting trim, sometimes you need a bit more precision. There’s a lingo for that, “11 and 5/16 plus a c* hair.” I suppose metric could be useful to move the job site towards political correctness...

For what it’s worth, 1/16” is also about a saw kerf. But in my experience, that doesn’t really matter because, as I was taught, you don’t take the line, but keep the blade completely on the waste side.

i work in the us (optics, making) and switch between metric and english all the time. it's not a problem. it's not worth the effort to switch.

Unless you're designing a Mars lander :D

Apparently this is an obscure reference now. And it was an orbiter not a lander, but the point still stands.[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter