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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Willie the Duck" data-source="post: 9031274" data-attributes="member: 6799660">I don't know that I agree. However, I do think that being evenly divisible by multiple factors is quite useful when the fractions are often part of the point*,  when the addition is circumstantially innate**, and most importantly when a whole unit is a sufficiently large number that divisions within the unit occur more frequently than adding multiples of the unit. In the coinage example I bring up below, I think non-decimal coinage made all the sense in the world while a whole pound/peso/dollar was a huge amount of money, and it was more important that you could split one amongst you and 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 other people than how easily you could add multiple of them (and multiple partial ones) together. I don't see this as true for construction -- you aren't spending that much time dividing an inch three ways, but you are adding two multiple-plus-fractionals-on-each-side sections of things measured in inches together. *example: you could empty a tun of ale into 8 barrels**example: you have the coins in front of you, you can lump all your coins of types into piles and add all your farthings together and then combine sets of 4 with your pennies and that odd tanner you found until you got a shilling's-worthLindybeige has an interesting <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R2paSGQRwvo" target="_blank">video</a> about the evolution of UK coinage and relation to a pound of silver. Caution: he bungles some D&D-isms, and has as much self-congratulatory speech related to his own preferences as Benjamin Olson sees in Metric System aficionados. Still worth a look.There is an interesting phenomenon I've noticed -- amongst everyone, but especially amongst nerd circles and anything on-the-internet (and to be clear, I am very very guilty of falling into this trap myself more often than I would like to admit) -- of worrying excessively that someone on the other side of an issue thinks too highly of themselves and/or is being arrogant. There certainly are people on the internet who are derisive towards... well, anything and everything; and people who try very hard to treat whatever side they aren't on as doing something inherently wrong/foolish/inferior. There are also quite a few faulty justifications for preferring metric over Imperial (and as we are discussing, many many contexts where the perceived benefits don't come into play). However, it seems odd to me to associate the metric system itself (outside some schmoe on the internet telling you you're inferior*) with arrogance -- it's literally one of the most mundane components of the day-to-day lives of billions of people (who are superior or inferior to anyone else for reasons completely separate from their use of the metric system). It would be like wearing pants or grinding flour or cars having key ignitions being arrogant in some way.*which they can do just as well with your preference of on-foot team-athletics games, preference for dogs over cats, or the right way to hang the toilet paper roll (cue bidet sub-argument).</blockquote>

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