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It blows our hivemind that the United States doesn't use the ISO 216 paper size standard (A4, A5 and the gang).
Like, we consider ourselves worldly people and are aware of America's little idiosyncrasies like mass incarceration, the widespread availability of assault weapons and not being able to transfer money via your banking app, but come on - look how absolutely great it is to be European:
The American mind cannot comprehend this diagram
[Diagram of paper sizes as listed below]
ISO 216 A series papers formats
AO
A1
A3
A5
A7
A6
Et.
A4
Instead, Americans prostrate themselves to bizarrely-named paper types of seemingly random size: Letter, Legal, Tabloid (Ledger) and all other types of sordid nonsense. We're not even going to include a picture because this is a family-friendly finance blog.
Well, milk is still sold by the gallon, butter is still divided into tablespoons, nutrition facts are still defaulted to cups and ounces. Wood is still sold by the foot or yard, cars still measure speed in miles per gallon, people still know their height and weight in feet and inches and pounds.
Could be worse but could be a lot better, too.
The gallon of milk makes it incredibly easy to divide it into quarters. That makes it easy to simply double things - 2 pints = 1 quart. 2 quarts = 1/2 gallon. Two 1/2 gallons makes 1 gallon. This dates back to the days when you went to the market and told the seller that you want 1/2 or 1/4 of that container of whatever was in that container. Simple math for simple needs.
Your 1/4 of a pound of butter or one stick, (again simple divisions for a simple use), is marked with rough marks of tablespoons for cooking if you are using such measurements. But you are quite free to ignore them if you are using a scale. Not really any issue.
Yes, in the US travel distances are measured in miles. But that slowly becoming meaningless also. People, (no matter the units used to measure the psychical distance), care more about "how long does it take to get there" rather than the actual distance traveled. But, you are free to push a button and switch to kilometers if you choose.
Measuring height and weight in feet and inches and pounds is pretty much the only thing the medical system uses US Customary for. And I can't imagine the sheer number of man hours and cost it would take to go back and convert all those medical records to centimeters and kilos. Somethings are just not worth the effort and cost for a minor data point that only matters only as a long term trend. (just like a single blood pressure is a meaningless data point but over a year may reveal a trend or not)
Each measurement system, US Customary or Metric, has it's own advantages and disadvantages. To think one is better than the other is a chauvinism based on what you are most familiar with and nothing more.
How did you reach the conclusion that liters can't be halved or quartered? You could call 250ml a 'quart' if you wanted to.
Metric butter also has markings on it.
Those medical records should be stored digital anyways, and then it's a matter of a few man hours to tell the computer to convert them.
Imo metric can do everything US customary can, but not the other way around, because it's missing the simple conversions. But that's it. Everything else is same same but different