Sure but a pint is defined as 568ml. The only one that really is quirky is how people haven't yet grasped kilometers yet they're the easiest to grok, it's just 1.6 * miles.

This way round makes more sense -- "how much will it cost to travel X km" is a more common question than "how far can I travel with Y litres or £Z".

There just hasn’t been much of a reason for the purely-domestic parts of the market to switch: house builders are looking for 2x4 lumber, and won’t buy from a lumberyard that calls it 50x100mm. Knowing that, the sawmills continue producing the 1.5x3.5 inch profile that’s called “2x4” and anything else is a specialty item. Who has an incentive to push through the change?

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendenhall_Order

And also because that's what was used to actually design the container. Milk bottles in 1 / 2 / 4 / 6 pints (imperial pints, not US pints), 454 g jam jars.

- People’s heights are, I guess, officially metric. My drivers’s license lists me as 173cm. But at the exit from most convenience stores, there’s a measuring stick on the wall (for the security cameras to have a height reference), and they’re exclusively in feet-inches.

- Peoples’ weights on home scales are still pretty much exclusively in pounds. Doctors may have switched to kilograms, but I’m pretty sure asking someone how much they weigh in kg would result in a blank stare while they try dividing by 2.2 in their head.

- The entire official highway system has moved to kilometres, and you’ll pretty much never see a sign in miles. But... the grid system for gravel roads (from the Dominion Land Survey) is in miles and obviously we can’t go around changing everyone’s property boundaries, so they’ll stay in miles forever. Most rural folks know the 1 mile x 2 mile grid, and directions from one farm to another will almost always be (2 miles east, 3 miles south)

- I think oven temperatures remain in Fahrenheit because of our collective shared culture with the US. Most recipes you’re going to find have cooking temperatures in F. More things have shifted towards C though; growing up I recall house temperatures to generally being in F, and now they’re frequently in C.

- Fuck gallons.

(Source: Saskatchewan resident)