I’m an American who designs PCBs in millimeters instead of thousandths of an inch. I’m doing my part.
Military, most manufacturing is metric only thing that’s not metric are street signs, building trades and anything else the redcaps interact with daily.
Pounds are a measure of weight (force) not mass like grams. Stone is the imperial measure of mass and slug is the standard unit (US unit). In metric Newtons would be equivalent to pounds.
I think in most common usage people use pounds as a measure of mass (convertible to kg). It’s why when you really mean force the abbreviation lbf (pound-force) exists, as opposed to the now more usual pound-mass.
A pound at one gravity is equivalent to 2.2 kg at 1 gravity. Outside of aerospace there’s not really a need to distinguish between mass and weight so it kind of gets used interchangeably.
It just bothers me when people complain about units and then use the wrong kind of unit.
My point is that in common use a pound does refer to mass (not weight). For example the US Code defines that 1 pound = 0.453 592 37 kilogram. See also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pound_(mass).
I came here to say this. A chunk of mass that “weighs” 100 grams is still 100 grams on the moon. A chunk of mass that weighs 1 pound does not weigh 1 pound on the moon.
It’s a bit weird that the US uses a measurement that was created in the time where people used their body parts for measurement.
Like, the inch is around the size of a thumb, and a foot could be bigger or smaller depending of who measured.
Still, it’s still used as a measurement that only a small fraction of the world still uses.
Still, it’s still used as a measurement that only a small fraction of the world still uses.
That’s a lot of stills 🤔
But coming back to your point, yes, I have no idea why the US insists on keeping the imperial system, it’s outdated, ugly and inconsistent. Plus you cannot easily convert from one unit to another.
Sorry, english is my second language.
What amazes me is that we pretty much are converting, just very slowly, one thing at a time. In school we all learn the metric system, and it’s used all over in industry and government. At the supermarket, everything is labeled in both systems, and some things have started trending towards metric as the default. We are all used to the 2L bottle size. The old fifth of a gallon bottle, though some still call it that, has been replaced by the 750ml bottle. More recently the 20oz bottle has been phased into the .5L, mainly–I’m sure–to shrink the amount while keeping prices the same, but still it’s progress in this regard.
I think the transformation will be effectively complete when highway signs use kilometers. But I don’t see that happening any time soon.
To be fair, also in Europe imperial measurements are still used, for example in plumbing, where inches are used for some reasons still unknown, or in aviation, where they continue to measure, in part, in feet. In nautical matters it is a separate issue, measuring in knots and nautical miles, and has nothing to do with metric measurements either.
The ICAO has apparently recommended using the international system of units since 2010, but it hasn’t been widely adopted yet.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation_Organization