Yeah, I’m realizing this is just a bias toward familiarity on my part. There’s several bad assumptions that I made in there which I hadn’t really given too much thought; bad practice on my part, I’ll admit.

Fair. I’ll acknowledge I’m biased here in retrospect. In particular, I’ve realized my argument for Fahrenheit (increased granularity) is directly contradictory to my argument against centimeters (too much granularity). Indeed, my view (however poorly conveyed) was that imperial units of length measurement, and the foot in particular, lend themselves to day to day estimation of size, as meters require estimation with fractions/decimals and centimeters require estimation in quantities too large to be reasonably accurate, so I was of the view that the lack of decimeters in common usage was a problem, but you make a good point that this is a fundamentally flawed assumption. After all, if you’re familiar with metric already, it’s not particularly difficult to just say ‘10cm’ and estimate in relation to tenths of a meter.

Well argued, and certainly more impassioned than my tepid defense of imperial. Consider me convinced; I’m switching teams lol.

If I might make an argument for the imperial system? I’ll acknowledge that it is bad, particularly from a scientific perspective, but one advantage that imperial has over metric is its use case for human related issues. Most of the stuff you interact with daily is much more easily measured in feet and inches vs meters and centimeters (this ignores decimeters, but I’ve literally never seen anyone use decimeters in my entire life). Another good example is temperature. Celsius is more objective, but when dealing with the standard sorts of temperatures humans are generally concerned with, Fahrenheit gives you more granularity within that range.

All that is to say: If I’m at work and someone uses imperial for an official measurement, I’m putting my fist through the drywall, but from a day to day perspective, I actually prefer imperial.

Also, the mile is fucking indefensible. I’ll happily leave all 5280 of its feet out to rot.

Just because it’s arguable doesn’t mean I’m arguing that. Besides, my point was more intended to mean that the symbol used there is correct for the sound that is being conveyed (and I wanted an excuse to share information I thought was interesting.)

Also, smfh, spoilers dude, Beowulf literally just came out 🙄

Huh. I hadn’t heard anything about that, but that’s interesting. Seems strange to me as, if anything, an LLM would be better equipped to interpret that than most people lol

Fair. It’s certainly not great from a clarity perspective, I just thought it was a fun fact to share.

That’s actually the ‘thorn’ symbol, representative of the ‘th’ sound. It was used in old English, with the example everyone might know being for the word ‘the’. It was spelled þe, with ‘y’ being used as a placeholder representation of thorn, and so thus we got “ye olde”.

Could be an intentional stylistic choice, could be that they are Icelandic (as thorn is still used in their modern alphabet iirc), but it’s arguably not technically incorrect.

Sorry I’m late to reply but I agree 100%. It would be reductive to say that no Americans are making or have made an effort to do the right thing - I know plenty personally who act as excellent countervailing evidence, and that’s in fucking Utah - and my primary issue with the American political climate isn’t even the rise of the far right, as you’re spot on that far right populism is on the rise globally; people are suffering under late capitalism and they want a change, any change, and we aren’t unique there. My main gripe is more at the lack of will in the American public (outside of the far right) to actually do anything about it. The 2024 election could not have been more clearly a Rubicon-type moment going into it; Republicans had already given us their entire playbook with Project 2025 and they did not mask the language there. Still, somehow, even a Republican-endorsed book that is essentially “US Authoritarian takeover for Dummies” wasn’t enough to galvanize the American people into actually showing up, so now we find ourselves here. We’ve taken “it’s the economy, stupid” and turned it into “stupidly, it’s the economy” and if we won’t even change our voting priorities for something like the continued existence of our democratic structures, that tells me that we need a fundamental cultural shift about what your civic duties are as a citizen in a democracy. Shame did the trick for Germany (sort of, that’s also kind of reductive but it serves a point), so maybe if we’re lucky we can do the same and find some semblance of a silver lining there.

Also, Gucci Sweats Planet is a banger. Five stars. If we want a sci-fi edge we could always go with “High Octane Terraforming”. Sounds cool, covers the unprecedentedly rapid change in temperature, contains a reference to gasoline, is future proofed for our inbound nuclear winter(s), and has an apt acronym.

I mean, climate change is probably a more accurate description of the situation. Sure, globally on average the planet is warming alarmingly quickly, but it doesn’t always feel that way on a local scale, so a lot of people had an easy time ignoring it, but it’s almost impossible to deny, wherever you live, that our climate is changing if one is capable of remembering their childhood. Temperature extremes get more extreme each year, storms get more intense, ocean levels rise, ecosystems vanish and change, etc. All of these things are a result of warming and greenhouse gases, but unless you’ve got a hard science background, you probably wouldn’t intuitively link all of these things together, so I can see a compelling argument for a better umbrella term. All that said, though, we all kept ignoring it regardless, so what the fuck do I know.

As for your point about America, though, I 100% agree. “The Department of Defense” has always been a euphemism, the convenient kind that lets you look pretty and get away with murder. What’s concerning to me, though, is that a Euphemism only dies for one of two reasons. Either everybody realizes what the euphemism actually means and it becomes synonymous with the phrase they were trying to avoid, or (and this is the much more common case) it becomes unneeded because they no longer need to varnish the truth; a mask off moment. And generally? The euphemism dies right before things get much, much worse.

All I can hope, as an American, is that we come out the other side of this fucking ashamed. Ashamed of ourselves, our beliefs, our actions, and our countrymen. Maybe then we can actually build a nation worthy of calling great, but I’m not holding my breath.