this post was submitted on 24 Apr 2026
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Never got this. I saw one fucking dumb american actually defend the rrtarded system by saying "It's actually more precise" - what a fucking stupid thing to say, when you don't even have a smaller unit than freaking Inches. Atleast we have mm. You guys use 1\4 Inch. Wtf is that??
Fractions are pretty good for quick ratios, which is why it's popular in carpentry, but I'd never call it "more precise" than decimal numbers. Anything that needs tighter tolerances than 1/16" is probably going to use metric measurements.
I will say that for most people it doesn't impact their life either way. If the Imperial system (or the modern American system based on it) were truly inferior they would have been replaced but it's mostly an issue in laboratories and engineering.
They’ll use 1/1000th of an inch, a “thou”. But at that point it’s basically metric but worse.
I fully forgot about thousandths even though I see them all the time as "mils". Definitely metric but worse.
... Is anyone going to tell him we use millimeters too if the need is that small?
That is even more stupid. Then why not just use centimeter then?
We do, but centimeters are in a weird spot. In general they are just a bit too small to be used in place of inches and too big to be used when you need millimeters. Also, inches easily go into feet which then go into yards. Probably the closest function to that would either be decimeters or fractions/decimals of a meter but that doesn't really feel great either. There's also something to be said about functional accuracy; for measurements that don't have to be exact imperial units feel pretty good. For example, I might say that a cardboard box is about 1cubic foot if it looks about 1 ft in length on each side. If I instead used meters, 1 ft is about 30 cm (30.48 cm) or 0.3 m which would translate to 27,000 cubic cm or 0.027 cubic m. You might round that 0.027 to 0.025 or 0.03 cubic m depending on if it's more or less than but it's still feels like a weird unit for our rough approximation.
Another quick example, my foot size is approximately a foot in length and I paced off a room at 10ft x 20ft so the area is about 200 sq ft. The equivalent would be that my foot is approximately 0.3 m so 10 steps x 0.3 m x 20 steps x 0.3 m = 18 sq m.
Imperial units work well when you want to use relatively small whole numbers and high accuracy isn't super necessary, but ultimately it just comes down to preference.
It's a fraction. So like if you had one apple to split between four people then we would all get one quarter of a whole apple.
1 apple per 4 people = 1 per 4 = 1/4 = 0.25
I don't know that I would say that fractions are more or less precise than decimal.
Precision has nothing to do with the unit system. Or notation of fractions.
0,001m is as precise as 1mm
1/1000m is as precise as 1mm
In SI you don't even have prefixes, you use scientific notation with base units. You don't say neither 1mm nor 0,001m. You say 1x10^-3^. Which is exactly the same as the other magnitudes of this comment.
If you want precision in imperial, you could as easily say 0,00000000001 inch. It would be as precise as 0,000000000255 mm, or whatever the conversion is.
Yeah, but let's see if they get the apple example before we throw all that at them.
we have fucking picometers how is an inch more precise
So that guy was an idiot, but you're wrong about the smaller units.
Fractionals commonly go all the way down to the 32nd. If you need to be even more precise than that we have the thou, which is defined as 1/1000 of an inch or 0.0254mm.
We have even less than mm
through the power of the decimal separator!
The only argument they have is for temperature, because they're afraid of decimal points.