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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TwinBahamut" data-source="post: 4164822" data-attributes="member: 32536">The problem with metric units is that, while you can make them work, each individual application of the units is slightly off from what would be a perfectly functional usage. I mean, look at the unit of an acre. An acre was originally literally defined as the amount of land that a man and an ox could plow in a single day. Pints and cups are units that indicate appropriate quantities for a person to imbibe in one sitting, and cups and pounds or are appropriate for cooking recipes designed to feed a normal family (the classic cup of sugar and half-pound of butter).A big problem with the Metric system is the absolute arbitrariness of the starting units. There is no reason they could not have used a more traditional and functional unit for the base units (meter, liter, and gram). Heck, gram doesn't even work properly for the math... You need to treat kilograms as the base unit in order to even out the math for scientific purposes. There is no reason they couldn't have used the foot and the pound as a basis for metric units.This is completely false. The same logic you mistakenly tried to use to counter my point above completely destroys this argument. You can't divide liters into fourths in the sense that there is no named unit for such a practical division. In the sense that you can divide a liter by fourths into quarter-liters, you can divide US standard gallons in to .1 gallons, or .001 gallons, or 1245.768 gallons. The mathematical advantage of metric only really exists in the realm of conversion to arcane units like the Joule (kilogram times meters squared per second squared) or Ohm (meters squared times kiolgrams, divided by cubic seconds times amperes squared), not in any kind of conversion related to day to day activities. The truth is that for the most part, people don't ever need to convert units in day to day life. Simple fractions and multiples of existing units always works, and metric has no real advantage over traditional units in this regard.So? The simple truth is that traditional units were in use and useful before they were standardized, and metric units were not in use or useful before they were standardized. Standardization for traditional units was simply the process of averaging out the minor differences between widely used units that were already tied into the language and culture of a society, or occasionally adding new units to help clarify other units and fill in gaps. Metric units were designed without regard to the usefulness of the units themselves, only with regards to the simplicity of conversion (and as the SI kilogram/gram problem shows, they managed to bungle that one up too).</blockquote>

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