And to remember the number of yards in a mile: 1 San Francisco

One-seven-six-oh

Not in defense of the imperial system, but if you're curious why it's so arbitrary, it's a crazy story about untangling a ton of proprietary guild measurements. The mile itself isn't quite proprietary (it was defined as 8 furlongs, and you can blame the English for ruining a perfectly good roman measurement) but they needed to make it a certain number of chains, rods, yards, and feet, plus a few other obscure measurements I forget about. Naturally that results in a stupid conversation rate (mostly vs yards and feet since it was basically a different system).

Why we still use it, dunno. I can see an argument for keeping feet and inches for things like carpentry (in the similar way I like hexadecimal in programming) but miles is not that. It's about as logical as this point as fahrenheit, which is to say it's outdated nonsense.

Imperial actually makes sense if there system was invented by someone who only had polyhedral dice to count with.

If Americans don't stop the foot thing soon I will bring back the havoc and destruction of using local measure!!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_units_of_measurement

No I will not define it. I will just tell you I ran 2/3 mile and that I am prussian, now you have to look it up, convert it to meters, convert that back to your mile and then you know what I am talking about.

Btw this mile is way easier to remember because a mile is 24000 feet.

So whose foot exactly?

Did someone say feet?

It's not helpful for us seriously distracted people. To remember a number, I must remember a smaller number. Damn, how many was it? Three tomatoes? Eight tomatoes?

Why not just keep it simple and use the 5.4 microseconds * speed of light approximation? People just love making things overly complicated.

Oh, get off your high horse

Your basic unit for speed is m/s, but for most day-to-day purposes you use km/hr. The conversion between the two isn't even an integer!

Not only that, but your system, by virtue of being decimal, inherits all the shortcomings of our quite flawed numbering system. You can't divide something by the second smallest prime number without breaking out repeating decimals.

In my opinion, a good measuring system would make up for those shortcomings instead. It should be divisible by at least the numbers you can count on one hand. Decimal covers 2 and 5, so ideally the measurement unit would cover 3 and 4. So that would be a base 12 system. Technically 4, being 2², would be covered too, so 3 would do just fine. Ta-da! 12 inches in a foot, 3 feet in a yard.

My ideal would be 21 though, get that 7 factor

If you like intervals of 1000, you'll be delighted (or mortified like me) to know that 7×11×13 is almost exactly 1000 (it's 1001)