Intentional change happens through years of dedicated work and organization. Very few people accidentally improve themselves overnight. Even fewer wake up to discover they’ve improved society.
I mean, you’re just going to have to take my word on it about Australia saving 10% until I can dig up that proper article, but here’s another article that references American businesses saving money when they switched to metric.
Also, dude, you learned imperial in elementary school. You learned it so early it doesn’t feel like you did any learning, but you absolutely spent time on it. I still remember learning all about feet and inches and how to estimate sizes using your body parts (which is a little absurd, considering we were children).
I once read a proper academic article explaining how Australia saved about 10% on average across their entire economy, largely from fewer mistakes having to be fixed and not having to maintain two sets of tools. However, I can’t find it now. This random website will have to do. But essentially, pretty much everyone who switches assumes there’s going to be this big cost and hassle and then it turns out they end up saving money and they just kind of quietly forget they ever thought it was going to be a big hassel.
They’re not useful? I’m literally using one right now in a way that can’t be done on a dumb phone. Look, I love dumb phones, and I would actually have one if my lifestyle allowed it, but I get so much value out of my smart phone it’s just not practical to use a less capable device.
You’re already dealing with it there’s loads of stuff that’s built in metric, especially everything that’s imported. The question is if you want to continue using a system that invites mistakes in order to avoid the pain of switching. The pain will subside pretty quickly, and only come up every time you have to retrofit old construction and whatnot. As the years go on more and more things will be switched until it’s rare to see imperial. I lived in a house built in the 1800s, but we still had modern windows and insulation because those things are obviously better and we improved the building when it was convenient and necessary to do so.
Sure, but your measuring system dictates what lengths you actually design things to be. You would never actually use 0.6875, but if some jerk designed something with that length, it will be easy to tell exactly how big it was. If you switched to metric, your smallest practical unit for woodworking would almost certainly be a millimeter.
1/16 of an inch is slightly smaller than a millimeter, you’d just end up using a millimeter or half again as your tolerance limit.
The big issue with imperial is all the fractions and strange conversions. On more then one occasion I’ve caught myself mixing up eighths and quarters, because my brain views them more as concepts then as numbers. Which is bigger, 11/16 or 3/4? Now, you’ll get the answer, sure, but you had to think about it and it goes against the natural intuition that larger numbers are bigger. Compare that with, which is bigger 0.6875 or 0.75 and it should be trivial to see which is easier to learn and use.