alt Hacker NewsImperial measurements do have the benefit of more even divisors than metric.
Pretty common to talk about measurements of 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/16 of an inch and find those graduated on a ruler. Or 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, 1/8 of a cup for liquid measures, etc.
But then machinists generally work in thousandth or ten-thousandths of an inch.
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I'm a fairly experienced machinist, though it's not my occupation. At the present time, machinists have the least problem with metric. The unit conversions are built into all of the machines and measuring tools. You press the inch / mm button. The ruler has inches on one side and mm on the other.
Everything is standardized on IEEE floating point. ;-)
It's a headache to maintain collections of parts and tools such as taps and dies for both standards.
The biggest shift is simply the obsolescence of old stuff, and emergence of new stuff. And industries have adopted the practice of reducing the overall variety of parts needed. I work in the development of industrial measurement equipment, and where a design might once have had 30 different sizes of fasteners, now it's 5, all metric. Designs rarely need nuts and spacers any more. Washers are integrated into the screws. No more "philips" or flat head screws. And so forth.
The problem is that fractions suck to do math with. Rather than doing basic addition you have to do a divisor conversion and then do an addition. Heck, the third-pounder burger failed because a significant fraction of the American consumers believed it was smaller than a quarter-pounder!
And most of the kitchen stuff is a chicken-and-egg problem: the US used 1/2 cup because that's what it is used to, the rest of the world has recipes calling for 50g of flour. If the US was used to weight-based measurements everyone would have a kitchen scale with 0.1g precision lying around, instead of a bunch of measuring cups.