Why are physicians generally huge jerks?

[golentan]

The Cauchat issue had nothing to do with metric vs. imperial, but arose because of shoddy conversion to the standard US cartridge. A shoddy conversion to any cartridge more powerful (less-powerful cartridges would create a different set of issues) than the French 8mm would cause similar problems.

As for the Mars Climate Orbiter, blaming the loss purely on an imperial/metric mismatch is somewhat oversimplified. While that was the nature of the error, several more errors had to be made (and were) for it to be an issue, while you could swap any of a dozen other problems in for the original mismatch and gotten the same result. Had any of the several personnel who noticed the probe was off course been listened to, the probe would not have been lost.

I was given to understand that in addition to the cartridge change, the bicycle factory where the chauchats were manufactured screwed up the metric-imperial measurements on several components, leading to them not fitting as they should have, contributing to being unable to fire more than about 3 rounds without jamming.

And yeah, it's a simplification, and other mistakes had to be made in both cases. But you know what would make it a lot harder to screw up like that when dealing with conversions between imperial and metric parts, designs, measurements, or whatever else? If we used the same units on both sides.