“You should know there’s an effort in Congress to ban [insert democratic principle here]”

Basically any headline right now

Idiocy, Actual

Fellow American convert to the metric system. Converting, in my opinion, won’t get you very far in actually understanding the measurements. To this day, the conversion rate is something I have to dig through my memory for.

For me what helped with the temperature scale was breaking it into chunks based on what I would wear, 10°-15° would be a pullover sweatshirt, 15°-20° a track jacket, etc, which got me to stop focusing so much on the conversion. Eventually you just get a sense of these things, I think that most people can only really feel a difference in air temperature of about 1°C. 0° being the freezing point cutoff is super helpful for judging things like potential road conditions if it’s wet.

For distances I first got the sense of how far things were in kilometers by being a runner and knowing distances around my neighborhood as to how they lined up with running a 5k, 10k, etc. For meters, at my height and gait, my stride length is about a meter long. A little bit on the shorter side of things, but it still helped me get an idea as to what a meter looked like in physical space, even if it’s off a bit. Centimeters and millimeters are a different story. Hard to find perfect analogs in the world, but you’ll find something eventually. I think for example long grain rice can be ~1 cm in length for example.

The biggest lesson in my own journey and seeing a lot of people online talk about trying to do the conversion is that people get overly concerned with precision when first making the switch. If you actually think about most of our daily interactions with measurements, they’re much more approximate. For example, the difference between whether it’s 71°F or 73°F is rarely pointed out. The temperature is just “in the low 70s”. We say that something is “about 20 miles away” which is almost an implicit 7-8 mile range. I would guess 80% of the time, this is how we interact with the units we use, so focus on that. No one is going to get upset if they ask the temperature and you’re off by a few degrees C.

In terms of mnemonics like US kids get in school for some of these things, everything in the metric system is a multiple of 10 from everything else, which is what makes it great. Also remember that at room temperature, water’s density is 1 g/mL, so if one of capacity or weight is easier to visualize for you, it’s a shortcut to the other. Standard disposable water bottle in the US is 500 mL or half a kilogram of water.

If only metric time had caught on too…

StoryGraph is my favorite for a Goodreads replacement

You know it. I’ve found that most of the news sites still do RSS feeds for their stuff

Some other good ones are Semafor and 404Media

NPR, BBC, and RTÉ primarily. Subscribed through RSS

Unless you take the “i” in Alien to be the imaginary number, then it’s -Alien

Not very up on biology, so not sure if this would even be a thing, but I would say some kind of internal structure like plants allowing animals to overcome the square-cube law

I may be one of these people. At least for the more obscure places, the highway pullouts and national forests and things, if I see another person parked there, I’ll typically park next to them. Safety in numbers, the more people parked in a turnout, the more legitimate it looks to park there

Don’t forget that these restrictions also apply to the Americans living in Guam, American Samoa, and the US Virgin Islands, as they all have the same status as Puerto Rico. It’s interesting too because citizens of the 50 states can vote absentee from other countries, and American Astronauts have voted from space. That would make Puerto Rico, Guam, US Virgin Islands, and American Samoa the only places in the universe an American can’t vote for President

I like the idea in theory, but I think it would be a hard sell of “hey trade in your $10k+ car for this few hundred dollar bike”

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The problem isn’t socialism in the countries I’m sure you’ve seen (Soviets, etc), it’s totalitarianism. Leaders have used the guise of socialism to get the initial public support to gain power, and they make a show of it, but the real game in town is the power structure. Look into Pinochet’s Chile for a similar example with a hardcore capitalism as the economic system

Correct me if I’m wrong, OP, but it sounds like you’re talking about retreating to the axioms of the particular belief system, as in there is a point where reason breaks down because you get to things that you (the person whose expressing their opinion) have accepted that’s different than me.

To me this is a bit of a Motte and Bailey fallacy as your question was whether or not you have a good argument and then someone replied to that and then moved to the set of assumptions which has nothing to do with argument.

For me personally, the other person has to demonstrate some level of critical reasoning for me to respect their opinions, even if their assumptions are different than mine. Beliefs that are entered into using reasoning are more useful than ones without because they can be changed which is what discourse is all about

Don’t forget the Baha’i, the Babs, and the Druze. Don’t know if they’re considered people of the book or not. Same with the Samaritan Israelites

Daniel Abraham & Ty Frank. The Expanse series evolved out of a D&D-like game they hosted together. Abraham also has a good sized Fantasy catalogue to check out too

I think I recently saw an article about a trial of the 32-hour work week in the UK that most of the companies ended up sticking with.

I work at a smallish company that has to be really precise with how much time is charged to specific (mainly government) programs, but there’s a lot of downtime. I think this would really help.

John Maynard Keynes, basically the founder of modern, macroeconomic theory predicted in 1930 that his grandchildren would only be working 15 hours a week. Ironically, up until the 80’s in the US, average work hours per employee per week was trending down and had it continued would have gotten as low as 15 by now (I think, can’t perfectly recall the trend line)

Stopped drinking soda, started walking daily. 60 lbs over the course of a year a few years ago, haven’t gained any back

About time in my opinion, but “later next year” sounds to me like this will be iOS 18. Hopefully I’m wrong with that though