> I blame organized religion

You have no idea how accurate and profound your statement is. The mid 1800s religious extremism still survives in the US and plagues its public discourse and institutions in the form of anti-intellectualism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism#United_St...

The American anti-intellectualism is far stronger compared to all the forms of anti-intellectualism across the world, and its surprisingly wide-reaching - a lot of the anti-intellectual behaviors of the religious American crowd of 1850s survive today and manifest themselves in different forms. From opposing science to conservatism in silly things like the resistance to the metric system and more.

French intellectuals want us to divide by the number of fingers we have, because man is the measure of all things. They’re also in league with mathematicians and some foreign Arabian number system.

English engineers much prefer a 12-based system where you can design, construct and build easily— dividing measurements by 2, 3, and 4– where practicality is foremost.

I do think French atheism is at the root of it yes.

P.S. completely trolling/kidding! P.P.S. Long before the metric system, the French were calling a dozen dozen “grosse”. The prejudice goes long back and it isn’t from us Angle-iPhones.

> the French were calling a dozen dozen “grosse”. The prejudice goes long back and it isn’t from us Angle-ophones!

Hell yeah it is - the never-ending English, later British propaganda against France goes back 600 years. Against Spain, it goes back 500 years. A lot of that seems to have been carried over to its former colonies.

Those dang mathematicians with their factoring.

I think at one time, we probably went our own way because we were first or best.

But today it just seems hardheaded. And it's not just metric...you have ANSI vs ISO, electrical systems, 4g and 5g radio bands, etc. With a world population 20 times the US population, I foresee a lot more companies just deciding it doesn't make financial sense to bother with the US market. We already see that with smartphones.

You can have the best of both worlds: when I'm fixing my daughter's curtain rail, I use mm to measure distance from the window frame because if I use fractions of an inch I'm far more likely to bugger up the maths. But if I want to tell someone my height, I will use feet and inches as those are more human-scale and convenient than metric. For packaging and products there seems no logical reason to not cite both, although the EU mandated metric-only