It seems like a weird point to bring up. How often do y’all convert your measurements? It’s not even a daily thing. If I’m measuring something, I either do it in inches, or feet, rarely yards. I’ve never once had to convert feet into miles, and I can’t imagine I’m unique in this. When I have needed to, it’s usually converting down (I.e. 1/3 of a foot), which imperial does handle better in more cases.
Like. I don’t care if we switch, I do mostly use metric personally, it just seems like a weird point to be the most common pro-metric argument when it’s also the one I’m least convinced by due to how metric is based off of base 10 numbering, which has so many problems with it.
Edit: After reading/responding a lot in the comments, it does seem like there’s a fundamental difference in how distance is viewed in metric/imperial countries. I can’t quite put my finger on how, but it seems the difference is bigger than 1 mile = 1.6km
You sure? Ok, you check your pocket and see that you have 5 half-pennies, 2 sixpence, 10 shillings, a crown, two florins, 3 half-crowns, and 3 pounds. Quickly, tell me, can you buy a 2 pound 15 shilling sandwich and a 1 pound 10 shillings drink? Which coins do you use for that?
Unless I’m missing a coin somewhere, no, you’d only have 3 pounds, 19 shillings, 2.5 pence.
Now, quickly, you have six dimes, a roll of quarters, seventeen pennies, and two rolls of nickels. Can you afford a $20 meal?
No idea because I don’t know how much a dime, or a nickel is worth, nor what you define as a roll. I can guess a quarter is 25¢. None of those are a decimalized values though, and you’re giving nicknames to certain coins because you’re still holding to a non decimalized money system, it only makes the system more difficult to you.
A quick Google search let me know that a dime is 10¢, a roll contains 40 coins, a quarter is indeed 25¢, a penny is 1¢ and a nickel is 5¢. And first of all it becomes obvious you need to put large numbers to make the decimalized system appear difficult, I purposefully used small amounts of coins someone might have in their pockets, a total of 23 coins, with no coin having more than their next denomination in value, your example however needed over 130 coins, random nicknames for values and coins grouped in random amounts to try to introduce difficulty.
So the short answer is that if someone pulls out over 130 coins to pay for their meal they will be told to use a machine to count them. But because decimalization actually makes your life easier, a “roll of quarters” is worth 10, a “roll of nickels” is worth 2, and the rest is 77¢, so nope, even with your arbitrary exaggerated amounts and nicknames it’s still easy to count it to 14.77. Had I told you five scores of Bob, 3 Baker’s dozen Joeys, two threescore Florin, 17 crowns, and 3 ten bob rolls you would still be adding stuff into next week. Math is just easier with decimal currency because we use a decimal numbering system, €5/10 = 0.5€, but £5/10=10s or 120p
These aren’t nicknames, these are the standard names of US currency. Pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and half-dollars (not super common though)
Also if someone pulled out 26 coins to pay for a meal they’d also have a very annoyed cashier at minimum
The point of this was more “Coins are a pain in the ass regardless of whether we’re dealing with 100 or 240 as the base”
Quickly: No, a roll of quarters is $10. A roll of nickels won’t get you there.
Screw this, I’m going to quit counting and track down the joker who dumped all this coinage on me and box his ears with the nickel rolls.