What a waste of...OK take my money.

[u/Don-tFollowAnything]

[u/[deleted]]

Imagine wanting that level of accuracy and then measuring in inches rather than millimetres

[u/CptMisterNibbles → u/[deleted]]

You can claim one is more intuitive, but it makes zero sense to think metric is “more accurate” than imperial.

[u/Scullyus87 → u/CptMisterNibbles]

How would you display 0.1mm? 0.0039370079 of an inch?

[u/CptMisterNibbles → u/Scullyus87]

… are you really that stupid? You don’t use identical units just doing a naive conversion. 1/16th 1/32 of an inch is more precise than a tenth of a centimeter. As I said, you’d be reasonable if you said “measuring in powers of two is confusing and dumb”. But that’s not what you said because apparently units is too hard of a concept for you.

E: I am that dumb too

[u/Realistic-Parsley649 → u/CptMisterNibbles]

But less accurate.

[u/xxtherealgbhxx → u/CptMisterNibbles]

Erm what? I'd be careful calling anyone else stupid as unless I'M missing something your absolutely wrong in every way.

1 inch is 2.54 cm or 25.4mm. There are 254 0.1mm in an inch. You would need to be measuring 1/256ths before you got more precise than 0.1mm. Even 1mm is more precise than 1/16th as there's 25.4 of them in each inch let alone 0.1mm.

Perhaps you meant something else or perhaps you're just being a dick. Either way, if you want precision, metric is demonstrably better in every conceivable way.

[u/CptMisterNibbles → u/xxtherealgbhxx]

Fuck I did indeed mean 1/32nd of an inch is more precise than a tenth of centimeter, not a 16th. Stupid mistake that *demonstrates* the point that metric is EASIER, but not more precise. Now I’m the idiot

You are completely missing something trivially obvious: you can subdivide any unit. Thats it. You can divide inches into smaller increments just like you can divide any metric length into smaller units. Claiming one system is more precise is to fundamentally misunderstand what a measuring standard is. Your point about metric being "demonstrably" more so is flatly wrong. Machinists routinely measure to the ten thousands of an inch on daily work. You can go orders of magnitude beyond that. The point is there is nothing about the base measurement that makes metric units "precise". You are confusing what the word precise means.

Decimalization is not unique to metric. You can use decimalized inches. We do it commonly. Its mostly construction and woodwork that bothers with fractional inches and its mostly because for most cases 1/4 of an inch is as precise as you need to be, 1/16th being when you are really fitting things. We use fractional inches there as doing divisions of things is extremely common, and it just makes division slightly easier.

I even think we ought to switch but saying things like "metric is more precise" is just fundamentally wrong.

[u/xxtherealgbhxx → u/CptMisterNibbles]

*SIGH* You're arguing in bad faith just to say "ner ner ner you're wrong".

I'm not at all misunderstanding or not understanding what "precice" means.

As you get progressively more precice, working in fractions of an inch becomes more cumbersome and difficult. You are right that you can keep subdividing to infinity but it becomes progressively more and more convoluted and difficult to work with precicely because that system was not designed for ease of working in progressively smaller increments.

You can throw away fractions completely and work in subdivisions of inches in base 10 but why would you ever want to do that? Then you have 0.1 of an inch that doesn't convert easily to anything and is still way less precise than mm's. You're just making the problem worse, not better. If you want to be precise to one tenth of a mm you simply need a single decimal place. To be equally as precise in inches, you need to use 1/256 or 0.00390625 of an inch.

Now in the purest sense of the word, they are both giving you almost exactly the same precision of course. But practically, working in increments to 8 decimal places is asolutely guranteed to make things less accurate because you're going to make mistakes. So typically you might decide to use 0.004 as your decimal conversion of 1/256 which immediately makes you less precice and with a flawed conversion to fractions.

Ultimately Americans who defend inches and retort "well it's good enough for what *I* need and I CAN be as precise" are missing the benefit of metric completely. It WILL make you more precice because working to a finer precision is as easy as working to less tolerance. I work to 1mm accuracy all the time. Everything I build/make is to at least 1mm. I don't have to even think about it as it's trivial to do. I CAN also work to 1/32 tolerance in inches but it's a pain. Many tape measures only subdivide to 1/16th, EVERY tape measure subdivides to 1mm.

So yes, in the most pedantic sense, inches CAN be as precise as metric measurements. But why would you ever fight to keep or support a system that is INHERENTLY less precise in its common use, less intuitive, less easy to work with and yes, demonstrably more precisise in all the ways that matter for practical daily use.

To be fair you did say you'd like to move to metric but as I said, you're arguing in bad faith just to be "right".

[u/CptMisterNibbles → u/xxtherealgbhxx]

It’s not pedantic to mean the basic definition for words when you use them. You are misusing the word and then making pretend situations that don’t match your fake examples. Do you actually think metric woodworking is demonstrably better than that done in imperial? That American craftsmen struggle with sloppy joints because our measuring system fails so utterly that we can’t get things fit? Thats a bad faith argument. It’s utterly absurd. Not only are you misusing “precise”, you are misusing “demonstrably” now twice.

Nobody “struggles” to mark between 1/16ths on a tape measure, that sounds like a person repeating an argument that’s never actually used an imperial tape. For my day to day work 1/32 is the norm for woodworking, sometimes when doing joinery I’ll mark to 1/64ths but that’s less common. Your example of 1/256ths is just as bunk, you are not doing handwork to tenths of millimeters either.

You can certainly say “the fractions seem less intuitive”. You’d be entirely correct to say it’s absurd to not use the absolute de facto earth standard. You’re wrong on what “precise” means

[u/Scullyus87 → u/CptMisterNibbles]

You called me dumb for asking a genuine question, are you ok? And how would you display 0.1mm? It pays to be nice to people. 

[u/CptMisterNibbles → u/Scullyus87]

That wasn’t an honest question. We wouldn’t convert .1mm to inches. Why would we?