> It would have been objectively better from a usability to have just set '1 meter = 1 foot' Which foot: the international foot (0.3048 meters) or the US surve

> It would have been objectively better from a usability to have just set '1 meter = 1 foot' Which foot: the international foot (0.3048 meters) or the US survey foot (1200/3937 meters)? * https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/geodesy/international-foot.html https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/geodesy/international-foot.htm... * https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot https://www.nist.gov/pml/us-surveyfoot Here's another one: which weighs more, a pound of gold or a pound of feathers? It's a pound found of feathers that weighs more. This is because gold (and other precious metals) are measured in the Troy system, where one pound is the equivalent of 373g: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_weight Whereas most other things use the Avoirdupois system, where one pound is the equivalent of 454g: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoirdupois https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avoirdupois Now, which weighs more: one ounce of gold or one ounce of feathers? In this case the gold, because the Troy system has 12 ounces per pound, so you'd have 31g, while the Avoirdupois has 16 ounce per pound, so you'd have 28g of feathers. And remember that there are British/Imperial units and US customary units, so things like cups are different between countries: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_customary_units So when you say "We should have used unit X as the basis of Y", whose unit of X should have been used? Also worth noting that the US has used the metric system as the foundation of the customary system since 1893: > Under the Mendenhall Order of 1893, metric standards, developed through international cooperation under the auspices of BIPM, were officially adopted as the fundamental standards for length and mass in the United States, though some metric standards were used in practice before then. The definitions of United States customary units, such as the foot and pound, have been based on metric units since then. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_States#19th_century https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_Stat...