TonyG

My original profession was that of Quantity Surveyor. I arrived into it just after the profession went metric, in 1974. I have to admit that feet and inches and shillings and pence was an absolute arsehole to work in!
I am totally bi-lingual and have no difficulty with either, but when I was working in the US supervising a very large (even by US standards) very beautiful colonial house that I had designed, working in imperial and 1/16ths of an inch was a bit of a culture shock.
The Americans had no difficulties as it was all they had known, but I much preferred metric and constantly switched between the two.
I prefer stones, pounds and ounces, especially with food and my weight, feet and inches for height and room sizes, metric for working in.
It should be left to personal choice.
Miles and pints for roads and drinks!

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Besoeker

I generally agree with that.
Metric units for engineering often makes calculations somewhat simpler.
That also has come in different flavours.
CGS, (ergs and dynes) MKS and SI.
We use SI for for new design.

But sometmes there is a need to interface with equipment with, for example, Imperial dimensioned copper busbars. In such cases metric or SI is just not an option.

So there are strong arguments on a practical level for keeping Imperial alive.

On a matter of principle...
If I want to buy six-inch nails and you want to sell six-inch nails we could come to an agreement and enter into a contract as buyer and seller. I don't need dual marking and you probably don't either. Call them what they are - six-inch nails. The units suit both of us. That's our business arrangement - not that of an external agency. As far as I am aware, that would not contravene any law.

But god help you if you want to offer them to the public at large as six inch nails.

Rather, you'd have to mark them as 152mm and then have the punters not versed in metric try to figure out what that means in their real world units.

Metric has its merits.
Forcing it on people doesn't.

TonyG

Agreed.
Also, most plumbers that I know more often than not refer to 1/2" and 3/4 pipe, but when they go to order it, it will be 15mm and 22mm.
Whatever works, as long as it doesn't lead to mistakes should be fine and the government should have better things to concern itself with.

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NickIrons

152.40.............
But we've spoken about this before haven't
we