- 1. I come to praise metric, not to bury it.
The plain truth is that imperial is better. It always was, and always will be. I say this not out of ignorance of metric: I understand it, and lived "under" it. You pick it up fast enough, and it works, kind of. This is not a case of being backward, or forward. These are concepts that metric was invented to address, and failed at.
Where to begin? There are too many flaws, but I will start with the decimal concept. It IS easier to convert from one subset to another, simply by adding zeroes or subtracting. For instance, If one knew the distance between two cities - say Paris and Riga - were "X" km, then the conversion of that measurement to Meters, CM, MM is a simple matter of adding zeroes to it. The same can be said of weight measure.
Now, if one knew the distance between say New York City and Apache Junction, then if someone asked the question "How many inches is that?" The answer, of course, is "What is wrong with you?" One would only ask this kind of a question, in metric or imperial, if one were a complete a-hole.
That doesn't mean this is not an unanswerable question. You can figure it out, and you can even commit the conversion to memory. But that is the beauty of the imperial measure: it takes into account humanity. The designers of imperial (Summerians, Israelites, Greeks, Romans, etc) knew that some things were big (miles) and some things were small (inches). So, the concept of having them inter-relate was secondary, as they knew, and all people know, that conversions are largely irellevant.
Another point to consider is the human eye. When one buys a piece of artwork, where do they typically hang it on the wall? Typically, one wants it to be a third of the way down, or 2/3rds up. What is a third of the meter?
Now, imperial measure has all of that built in. Want a half? Got it. Want a quarter? Got it. Want a third? Got it, and built in, part of the system.
Imperial is better.
Uwe's Edit: As a lawyer I can appreciate brilliant advocacy even for a non-sensical system/lost cause!