As a first generation Chinese-American, I run into a similar problem converting back and forth between Chinese and English -- where English only has words for t

As a first generation Chinese-American, I run into a similar problem converting back and forth between Chinese and English -- where English only has words for thousand and million, the Chinese prefer to speak in units of ten thousand (wan). You get a feel for how unintuitive it is to say things like "twenty-five ten-thousands" to read the number 250000, or "a thousand ten-thousands" for ten million. With regards to why America doesn't make the change to metric, I recall reading somewhere that the American manufacturing base didn't want to have to convert all their infrastructure, currently set up to manufacture screws, bolts, and other such tools in units of inches, half-inches, five-eighths inches and so forth. It's not just a question of cultural shifts in intuition -- there's a physical cost associated with making the change as well. Knuth's quote comes to mind -- the root of all evil being premature optimization. I wonder about the full price when you integrate the little costs of these scenarios of suboptimal standards -- not just in the realm of physical measurement, but the QWERTY keyboard, pi vs. tao, English grammar rules, even the base ten number system among others. But at some point you have to declare "good enough", and stop refactoring to instead pay upkeep on the accumulated technical debt. Perhaps it is a shame that America chose not to refactor to metric, but maybe some day down the road we will find a generation generous enough to raise their children with better-optimized standards, and pay the costs of re-learning a new intuition themselves.