(inb4 “where u yesterday”: I made the mistake of not only watching a video at 11:55p but showing it to my husband at the same time and feeling rude if I stopped midway to post a middling comment about evil dads)
I can’t return to the US, since I lost my passport and birth certificate. Which is also going to make renewing my Permanent Residency here in Canada tricky…
I mean, you can either try and joke about it or curl up in a corner sobbing due to the realization that at the very least one political party will always stand in the way of even TRYING to solve that particular issue
Meh, I just know someone who was a victim of gun violence, (not at a school though) also I’m black, so gun violence based burns are just a sensitive issue in general.
Sandy Hook was the end of the Gun Control debate in America.
Once we decided that the deaths of elementary school children was acceptable, then everything else was on the table. There’s nothing that can happen that won’t be defended as the ‘price of freedom’.
Both political parties. One will pay lip service to coming up with a solution, the other won’t even bother to do that, because both parties are heavily owned by Gun Manufacturers, whose profits go up every time there is a mass shooting (as people buy more guns to defend themselves)…
Yeah, I think the “lol America thinks it’s so great then why do children die” joke Brits like to make (and yeah, it’s like, almost always Brits) has become really tasteless and obnoxious. I’m not really invested in getting mad at a drunk Jason for it, but I did want to come here and just, like, note that it’s not a good burn and I’ve literally ghosted one British sort-of-friend in particular for making it. Zero regrets. Europeans and ex-Europeans whose political personality is “lol at least we’re not Americans” are worse than Buttigieg voters.
I have so much sass as a trans girl I could make at British politics and I am withholding it because it’s a merry-go-round of dumb one-upmanship about things that aren’t really worth gloating about. Bleh. I know it’s my pet peeve so that’s why I’m getting my gripes out here.
My go to is just cracking jokes about how certain countries seem to be in a competition with each other to see who can make the most atrocious, fuckwitted discriminatory policies possible
Europeans are every bit as ridiculous as Americans, and worse in some ways. “Lol at least we’re not Americans” Okay mate, but one country tried to leave Europe because they didn’t want to let brown people in, there was a major refugee crisis where all the European nations tried saddling the others with the refugees (not that the US responded well to that crisis either), and most of western Europe is AT LEAST as responsible for fucking up the world with colonialism as the US is with post colonial cold war fuckery. And that’s not even touching on how Brits think “lol your kids shoot each other” is an acceptable response to “lol Brits say Chewsday and YouChewb.”
I think there’s just a gap between British and American ripping here.
Our humour tends to be cynical, pessimistic and hyperbolic, we exaggerate these things all the time, regardless of the country.
Hell, the majority of the people I’ve known think our entire political system of old farts yelling at each other is ridiculous. Just don’t take it too seriously.
Honestly, as a Brit a lot of people find the whole “chewsday and YouChewb” thing stupid for two reasons:
1) The UK has many different dialects
2) You couldn’t think of anything better?
Yeah, I don’t care. Go ahead and find the dialect thing a bit dumb, it’s literally a harmless joke with no stakes whatsoever. Meanwhile, the response is “Hey, isn’t it funny how Americans can’t manage to figure out their gun problem and stop their children from killing each other, despite the fact that about half the country really really wants to do just that and keeps getting stonewalled by the half that’s revealing itself to be fascists? Isn’t that hilarious?” You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t see those things as being remotely on the same level of okay.
I can understand the disparity between the tone of the issues surrounding each subject, but I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to restrict what can and cannot be joked about simply because it’s a real-world issue.
Why should anyone get to choose the line which can’t be crossed here?
It’s a bit ironic too, with America’s core values of “freedom of speech”, don’t’cha think?
Freedom of speech means the government cannot restrict your speech outside of harmful or treasonous speech. Generally, I find that if someone is relying on the “freedom of speech” argument, they’re probably being an asshole.
Again, you are mocking children’s deaths in response to a harmless jibe at regional accents. Most people would agree accents are funny. I don’t think most people would agree that children’s deaths are funny or in good taste.
I mean, this is an issue that half of the US has decided should be handled by teaching kids to hide in classrooms, possibly arming teachers, and redesigning schools to make it harder for shooters to kill people. The easy solution, the one that requires less work and less loss of life, is to reduce access to the weapons, but that goes against people’s “freedoms” so it doesn’t happen. My son or daughter could die today or tomorrow because some kid decides they need to shoot the place up, but hey, at least you can dunk on me when that happens, amirite?
Man, just fuck off if you’re gonna keep saying that shit’s okay.
I don’t know about whoever you’re responding to about accents, since nobody here did that, but in today’s comic Jason brings up shootings as a response to Americans claiming their country is the greatest in the world and isn’t actually mocking the dead children. Frankly, that’s how I see it far more commonly that whatever you’re on about.
As a Brit, I find the whole mass incidences of school shootings, “but we can’t restrict access to guns!” thing shocking and deplorable. It’s one excellent example of why lobbying is gross, and why political donations should be limited and made transparent. Jason’s comment to me reads like an angry “how can America/Americans think they’re superior to other countries when this is a routine happenstance?!” That’s not mocking. That’s not eacalation. That’s two foreigners in a strange land bonding over both routine mocking aimed in their direction and shocking, horrific differences between our countries and yours (I assume) that they refuse to let themselves mentally reclassify as normality.
Just like Godwin’s Law is a thing that actually happens, I’m sure SOME people use it as a shut-down for everything, but I sincerely hope the percentage of people who will pull up lists of incidences or victims’ names and LAUGH over the volume of dead children, or your politicians’ inability to get out of bed with the NRA and properly shut it down, is tiny.
I assure you, most of us are here hoping that public opinion tips over far enough to the “gun laws need to be tightened RIGHT up” side that your politicians HAVE to listen, and that your kids get to grow up in safety and have children who don’t need to have active shooter drills, and grandchildren who are stunned to learn that this was a thing, in their country, in living memory.
Everyone gets to choose the line which can’t be crossed. That line is called a personal boundary and you’re being absolutely ridiculous by suggesting that someone saying “that’s not funny, it’s cruel” is tantamount to opressing freedom of speech.
Some jokes aren’t funny to some people. Some jokes are objectively in poor taste but might tickle you. Some jokes are aimed directly at oppressing and mocking people who are already minorities and victims of severe oppression. Jokes are not a monolithic thing where if you accept one you must accept them all.
TL;DR – People are allowed to have boundaries and think less of you for crossing them. You do not have a “right” to not get called out for being unfunny or cruel.
I agree I jumped the gun (heheheh) on the whole “freedom of speech” thing, but my main point is that these jabs aren’t targeted towards any individual incident as much as the occurrence as a whole.
This is also why I brought the cultural difference between these two countries, as gallows humour regarding these incidents aren’t generally seen as targeting towards the victim of these incidents.
As a sidenote, if you never actually inform the person who’s overstepped your personal boundary, the behaviour won’t stop as they’re unaware that it was an issue in the first place.
You say that British people are happy with that kind of cynical humour, but I remember when Nish Kumar made a few relatively mild jokes about British colonialism and in response his TV show was cancelled.
Btw can we please not pretend Americans don’t also escalate stupidly when you criticize their country? It’s always “We probably beat you in a war/saved you in war/have nukes” like oh thanks for being proud of your insane, over funded, over bloated, imperialist murder force that you like to whip out every time some 3rd world country discovers oil or democratically elects a socialist leader.
I’ve nearly never seen school shootings comments as jokes, more as ‘hey, USA, how about you deal with the sequoia forest in your eye before ragging on the speck in mine?’
I know that American and Canadian politics differ in Avery pivotal way.
When Canada resolves judicial disputes, the case is never really “closed”, so to speak. When a decision is reached there, the issue is settled for the moment but is still open to question.
In America, however, once a case is closed, it’s closed, and it’s very difficult to open back up again.
From here, you can see how the two countries politics can go in wildly different directions.
The example I had in mind regarded free speech in Canada, featured in Stanley Fish’s essay, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech…and it’s a good thing too”.
jason said it and he’s not drunk so personally i don’t think he gets a pass; brits just love being insufferable about the fact that their ancestors’ horrible actions turned out worse for everyone else than for them.
haha people are suffering and dying in nations that wouldn’t have existed if not for our nation going on a worldwide murder spree, fucking hilarious
Oof, yeah, good point. I think Europe, the UK and Canada developed this sort of mystique for American liberals where the latter enabled the former for years in feeling smugly superior about everything from gun violence to racism to political dignity to health care systems.
The one good thing about Brexit is it kind of finally laid bare that perhaps the only country with a dumber, more childish and utterly bigoted political system than America is the country that oversaw our founding. Add Britain being the world’s TERF capital and I’m just not on board for fetishizing British politics anymore.
I’m not sure that’s exactly what Jason said. Also the US is one of those nations. Maybe it’s fair to say the Brit’s went on a murder spree, but it’s equally fair to note that the US wiped out entire Japanese cities filled with mostly civilians. And finally, when people make fun of the US they are generally punching up, so we can afford to be not so thinned skinned.
That’s fair. Not sure if it’s really punching up coming from Jason tho. It’s more like punching sideways or at a best a soft diagonal. Especially since Jason’s here on a Visa implying he chose to live here. Also not a great look for a privileged white dude to be making cracks about gun violence in America that statistically effects more minorities and people of low income, and is often perpetrated by dudes similar to him (At least superficially). But I’m like super nit picking now when I should probably have thicker skin myself.
America isn’t a “bad” country. Just a very, very powerful one. And while the average American has very, very little influence on the country, the country they call theirs still has immense influence over the world.
The US has the world’s largest military and controls a huge portion of the world’s media, including the internet. Until the last couple years I knew more about America’s politics then my own country’s and it only changed because I put effort into it. I definitely still know more about American history and geography than my own. People outside the US know so much the US. Of course they will complain about America. Is what they complain about the fault of the average citizen? No. Is Australia’s terrible climate change policies my fault? No, but that doesn’t stop it affecting the various low lying island countries near us. Sometimes you belong to a powerful group and even if you have little power within it you still have more than others outside the group.
Imo any bad thing you can say about the US is punching up, given y’all have your gnarled claws deep in the entire western world in a way that rivals og colonialism. Ofc I also enjoy dunking on terf island for said colonialism and terfiness, though they’re at least marginally better than the gun sub continent for having the NHS.
Since there is not much you can do about it as a foreigner, I think making fun of it is the only option left. And it‘s not even a humorous exaggeration.
Making fun about things, even grim stuff, that is the result of people’s choices (a majority in fact) is fair game. The fact as such is not funny at all but sometimes laughing is all you can do.
It’s easier to digest when you realize it’s not the Gun Violence problem so much as the Violence problem period, the guns are just an aspect of a much deeper issue. Of course, actually acknowledging that isn’t as convenient, comfortable or handy.
Other than guns magnifying the problem by making it so much quicker and easier to kill people. Without them, you might have as much violence, but you’d definitely have a lot fewer dead bodies.
I honestly could probably do fairly well in France. Spent all of high school taking French classes, and ended up getting a minor in it just because I tested into 4th semester when I started college (figured it couldn’t hurt). So yeah, France could work. That or Australia, I’ve got some cousins out there.
France has been getting a major Islamophobia problem the last, er … decade? Probably longer. Remember how they almost elected the National Front candidate as president a few years back?
Funny thing, when people say “europe” they always thing of England,France,Germany, italy .
but never really consider the other countrys
Places like Sweden ,Norway, Finnland or Switzerland might be really good to live there too
now i am not really familiar with these countrys ,i am just saying that cause it seems people always seem to forget about them when talking europe
When Americans talk about how awesome Europe is they often do have the Nordic countries or the Netherlands in mind, to the point of needing reminding that not all of Europe is like Norway.
It’s true that everyone loves Canadians and they have no enemies, between Quebec and their friendly neighbors to the south, they don’t actually need enemies.
Other than the indigenous people they are literally still perpetuating a genocide against.
And all the enemies they super casually share with America due to being allies while simultaneously getting let off because they say “about” in a cute way.
While there is still major racial discrimination problems associated with Canada’s indigenous people, I would say “literally still perpetuating a genocide against” is quite a bit of a stretch.
Cuba could be an option. Spanish and English as main languages. Free health care system, a very good school system and awkwardly democracy (in the meaning of power to the people) has much higher value.
Although yearly hurricans and power shortages are a bit of a blast.
Not exactly democratic. Conditions so awesome that Cubans will risk their lives trying to boat to the US. Doctors used as semi-forced labor abroad with their families hostage in Cuba.
If I knew Spanish even halfway decently I’d consider moving to Cuba. Sadly the last time I even used any Spanish was in high school over a decade ago, so I’ve forgotten most of what I learned.
I know people from Cuba. They never want to go back to Cuba.
Also as a neighbor to the country, we’ve only had like 2 or 3 hurricanes in the past decade, MAYBE 4 if I’m forgetting something.
I live in Miami, FL, and we still have hurricanes and power outages 😛
Also, I was born and raised in Latin America and still would never even dream about moving to Cuba of all places, like, why?? My country (that I immigrated from) has the highest murder rate in the entire world and I’d still rather go back there before living in Cuba.
For arguing with others about the precise temperature at which the thermostat must be set AND NO HIGHER THAN THAT I SWEAR TO DINA OR I WILL BE BOILED ALIVE–
This but unironically! Fahrenheit is a really intuitive system for approximating temperatures. “0 feels pretty darn cold, 100 feels pretty darn hot, 60 is kinda on the warmer side, 30 is where water freezes but you don’t need too many layers”.
They’re all good systems with their own intended purposes.
Also, I appreciate that we have this very chill bubble amid the –
“JOKING SMUGLY ABOUT SHOOTINGS SUCKS” (it does)
“CANADA AND ENGLAND HAVE MASSIVE PROBLEMS TOO” (they do)
“well, i think that the celsius measurement system possesses numerous drawbacks and benefits that”
Is that only because you are used to it? Like, what actual daily benefits are there to having a smaller range between 76 and 77°F compared to 20 and 21°C? Especially as most thermostats will have a .5°C option?
I think it all depends what a person has used all of their life. Personally, I have grown up with weather in Celcius, body temperature in both celcius and farenheit. If someone says to me, oh it’s 84 all day, I have no idea what that means.
Putting aside that Ruth has quite possibly sabotaged a good thing here,, I will say it’s pretty impressive she’s managed to get drunk in the time it’s taking Daisy to drop a load. Just A class work here.
To be fair, Ruth you’re an alcoholic and you’ve apparently convinced yourself that because it’s legal now it’s fine to drink. That’s the alcoholism lying to you.
I dont think jennifer has a problem with other people being bisexual just not her because she is “normal” she even seemed well aware of what being nonbinary was when booster was introduced.
The kingdom of Egypt thought they would last forever.
They did not.
The empires of Rome and Great Britain thought they would last forever.
They did not.
Now, what makes you think it’s gonna be different this time around? Must I remind you what year it is? And what has been happening?
I get what you’re saying, but might not be the best idea to bring up Rome and Egypt in that context since the Roman Empire lasted over a thousand years (and half again as long if you add in the Roman Republic, which toward its end was practically indistinguishable from the early Empire) and a unified Egypt lasted over three thousand years. 😛
The Roman Empire did *NOT* last over 1,000 years. The *Eastern Roman Empire* Survived the fall of the Roman Empire; but it was scarcely the same entity (different language, different legal foundation, different culture, different capital, different branch of religion, different economic system, etc), and only a century or so after it’s founding, what was more or less the final attempt at resurrecting the cold, dead corpse of the Roman Empire ended with Justinian. The Roman Empire itself lasted around four/five centuries, from circa 50BC to circa 450AD (take your pick of start and end dates).
If you’re going to include any empire, no matter how tenuous, that has had Rome as part of it’s title, then ‘the Roman Empire’ survived until the final collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in the early years of the modern period.
If you’re including the imperial (expansionist) period of the Republic, you can add another three or four centuries, but if we’re talking about a nation based on Rome, it still doesn’t span over a thousand years.
If you’re going to be pendantic about that, at least be more pedantically accurate; I can admittedly see a pretty good argument argument for the end of the Roman Empire, in an institutionally unbroken continuum specifically, having taken place in 1204 with the Venetian crusaders’ sacking of Constantinople and replacing its government with a puppet government that lasted roughly two generations (the Palaeologian Restoration took place in 1261), but the Eastern Roman Empire was not an “in-name-only” empire, like the Holy Roman Empire was – the concept of the “Byzantines” as separate from “Roman predecessors” was not a contemporary attitude, and was only invented for the first time well over a century after anyone who could remember the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 was dead and gone.
While Greek language and culture did certainly rise to greater prominence in the east as time went on, it was already an incredibly-common language in the Empire even before its administrative division into two (and even before it became, well, an Empire – you can thank the Macedonian conquests for that). A different capital only makes a difference if you’re being pedantic about “the Roman’s (city’s) empire”, rather than “Roman Empire” as an overall institution, which – again – had an essentially unbroken streak from Augustus up until 1204, barring a civil war over succession every so often (which is something the Romans had in spades all the way back to their republican era, as they never quite figured out that whole “how to have regular peaceful transitions of power” thing). Did Russia stop being Russia when they moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, or Japan stop being Japan when they moved the capital from Kyoto to Tokyo? The religion thing only became a done deal in 1054, by which point emperors had ruled from Constantinople for well over seven centuries (and this is where I also bring up that Constantinople had been the Imperial capital for decades before the final division, and Rome hadn’t been the capital of anything for over a century by that point).
I could go on for longer, but it’s half past three where I am, I’ve been writing this for over an hour, and I need sleep. 😛
You’ve written all of that, without even managing to recognize the point of contention- whether the Western or Eastern empire was the ‘true’ Rome.
After Justinian failed to reconquer the West, the Eastern Roman Empire ceased to have reasonable claim to being the empire of Rome, an actual location.
A hypothetical modern equivalent would be if England fell tomorrow to a sudden spate of French aggression, and the royal family moved to Canada- it would not be reasonable to then call Canada Britain/England, even though the symbolic or actual head of government existed in unbroken chain from the British Government.
To repeat, the Eastern Roman Empire is a different thing from the Roman Empire, which many hold fell with the sacking of Rome.
Many do hold that, but that’s mostly because our scholarship comes from (Western) Europe which grew out of the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire.
My understanding is that people of the time didn’t really consider the Western and Eastern parts of the Roman Empire two distinct things, but one Empire with two rulers. How true that was practically speaking is questionable.
The “point of contention” is invalid. Neither of them were the “true” Rome with the other relegated to being something else and therefore the loss of one capital and much of the territory doesn’t change that.
If England annexed Canada, the people in Canada all considered themselves English, everyone referred to Canada as a part of England, and this continued for several hundred years, and *then* Britain was taken over by France, then I think it would be reasonable to keep calling Canada England.
To add to what thejeff and 00A86B above me said: even dating the end of the Western Roman Empire to “the sack of Rome” is wrong, since firstly – it was sacked twice in the Imperial era (410 by the Visigoths, 455 by the Vandals), secondly – it hadn’t been the capital for a century by then (Ravenna was the capital in the west during both sackings, it in turn having replaced Milan as the new capital), and thirdly – no matter whether you’re talking about the Visigothic or the Vandal sack, the majority historical opinion doesn’t place the end until either the deposition of the fittingly-named Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476 (the last Emperor in the West to rule from Italy), or the assassination of Emperor Julius Nepos four years later (by which point the western Empire had been reduced to just Dalmatia).
I cede your specific knowledge of Roman history- I do not cede the point that the Roman Empire survived through to the high middle ages- virtually no new nation grows in a vacuum; most have some form of continuity with ‘what came before’. That People in the East viewed their empire as being the legitimate continuation of the Roman Empire does not mean that people in the West did, otherwise there would not have been room for the creation of the Holy Roman Empire as a propaganda tool for Charlemagne.
To hold to the broad view that the Empire lasted until the fall of the East is needless. A narrower and more precise view, that portions of the Empire survived intact, is quite reasonable, and was acknowledged as such from the start.
The point that 00A86B brings up is rather ironic- because I specifically chose Canada as my nation of choice for my example for the very reasons that 1) England took ownership of Canada (from the French), 2) Many of the people in Canada considered themselves to be English, and 3) that state of affairs lasted for a multiple hundreds of years.
Lastly, and as a light-hearted closing remark; I think our avatar pictures, of Robin and Asher, are very fitting, given the smugness that they’re both exuding.
One of the specific reasons as to why Charlemagne was crowned “Holy” Roman Emperor, at the time he was crowned, was because Constantinople had just recently crowned Irene as Roman Empress in her own right – and the last thing Pope Leo III wanted was icky girl cooties touching the oh-so-sacred title of “Roman Emperor”, and so he declared that the Roman throne was actually vacant and then “handed it over” to Charlemagne, the most powerful monarch in the West at the time. Prior to that, the Emperors in Constantinople were more or less viewed as the legitimate Roman Emperors, even in the West (keep in mind that all this was over three centuries after the deposition/death of the last Western Roman Emperor).
And heh, that is a funny little coincidence with regards to the gravs, yeah. 😛
A unified China has been a thing since 200 BC or so; and you could go back another thousand years for China as a civilization. Countries can stick around for a long time.
China hasn’t been continuously unified since 200 BC. I give you Western Han vs. Eastern Han, Three Kingdoms period, Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, the Western and Eastern Jin, the Sixteen Kingdoms, the Northern and Southern Song, *and more*.
It’s not as arbitrary as it might seem at first glance.
0 Fahrenheit is the freezing temperature of a 50/50 salt/ice mixture.
32 F is the freezing point of fresh water at sea level
212 F is the boiling point of fresh water at sea level, and was pegged as 180 degrees higher than freezing because that was a figure scientists were used to working with.
“Normal” body temperature was supposed to be 100 degrees, but Dr. Fahrenheit screwed up and so it’s 98.6 instead.
Nah fahrenheit is dumb. The conversion formula is so dumb my highschool physics teacher told us not to bother. And at least you can spell Celsius without looking at it
That’s still a personal preference though. That’s fine and it’s seriously not a big deal, but in my experience it’s mostly (though not universally) only true if you grew up with Fahrenheit. Like, my first reaction to ‘it’s more intuitive’ is usually ‘Not really? To me, 80 degrees just sounds like you should be dead’.
Here in Texas the weather can occasionally get a bit warm. It is possible to survive days that are 100 degrees Fahrenheit, as I personally have, but not so much for 100 degrees Centegrade. So, you see, for us, Fahrenheit is objectively cooler.
You should go with milligrade, then, which is 5 times more precise still. Wonder why nobody does?
The truth is Fahrenheit is not better than Celsius. You know how I know? Because I have never heard someone praise Fahrenheit who didn’t just happen to grow up getting used to it, but I have on occasion for Celsius.
As someone who has grown up with the metric system and Celcius, this argument always seems a bit weird. If I need more precision than a particular unit gives, I don’t invent a new unit: I just add an extra decimal place of precision. For example, my kitchen thermometer displays readings accurate to a tenth of a degree.
Because Fahrenheit are ~half the size of Celsius degrees, making it more precise, particularly when it comes to matching personal sensation preferences. IE: I prefer it when it is 71f (21.6c) but my wife prefers 72f (22.2c). In Celsius these temperatures are effectively the same, but in Fahrenheit they are one degree apart.
I guess I just don’t see the extra usefulness in a degree vs a decimal of a degree but fair enough. Ultimately the whole temperature thing isn’t a big deal so I’m happy to shrug it off and just say I don’t see it.
My point was more that both of those round to 22 c. I put in the decimals for clarity, but I’ve never heard people, even those using c, refer to the temp in anything other than round numbers – except when doing specific scientific measurements, where C fits formulas better and thus is the better scale.
I say this as an American who prefers using metric whenever possible when it comes to things like weight and length. Meters are far more user friendly than feet, for example, and for much the same reason (centimeters offer far more precision than inches).
I can’t speak for others thermostats, but mine does show the decimals. People do just use the round number because people usually round when they talk about numbers, but it’s possible to get the precision down.
Like I said, it’s not a big deal. Temperature discourse is pretty much pure personal preference, but I figured it was a pretty harmless one to make jokes about.
Oh, but we the Celsius people do use decimals with them.
Admittedly, not usually when talking about room temperature, but always when talking about body temperature.
My experience is that people tend to find that the more intuitive one is the one they’re used to, big surprise 🙂
to me, Celsius makes more sense because it’s rooted in stuff that registers as objective (freezing/boiling points of water seems “easily observable”)
Needfuldoer was kind enough to elucidate that
“0 Fahrenheit is the freezing temperature of a 50/50 salt/ice mixture.
32 F is the freezing point of fresh water at sea level”
and the first one resonates with me,
but the second I’m all “ok, but why did you pick 32 and not a nice round number like 0, 10, 100 ?”
Anyway, to me it’s a charming American quirk. Sure, I’m confused all the time when I’m there and trying to work out what it means in practice, but cultural differences are the whole point of traveling. I wouldn’t go to Japan and be like “no lol, you’ve gotta say your first name first THEN your surname, that’s why it’s called a first name”.
In metric countries, (digital) thermostats almost always use 0.5C increments. That’s about the only time you’d actually want to differentiate between 21.5° and 22.0°. You definitely don’t do it in daily conversation.
I don’t think most people can identify any given temperature to half a degree of accuracy though. Especially when any given temperature can feel wildly different based on humidity and other factors.
I’ve never heard anybody wish for it (though I’m not surprised, people are the worst) but we definitely do talk about it when it comes to ‘Why America isn’t as great as some Americans act like it is’ talks.
Just gonna second brute, ’cause yeah, I had a semi-friend (sardonically) tell me something along the lines of, “cool, enjoy your next school shooting” because we were bickering about our respective political sh*tstorms. We’re not friends anymore.
Eh, the royal family is essentially state-sponsored celebrities at this point, you want to make fun of the British for dumb politicians, you have to go after Boris Johnson.
They can literally turn off the government if someone picks up a royal mace from a table
Like, I know the royal family doesn’t “technically” rule Britain, but they still wield significant political power and are subsidized to a genuinely sickening degree. You can compare them to the Papacy, if you like, but legally the Queen still has to show up to certain events to give them legitimacy. Britain has a political system largely governed by norms, not actual laws. The fact that they still revere their royals, and remain nostalgic for the old royal glory, is my whole point.
The royal family can turn off about a half-dozen governments around the world. A lot of the major players of the Commonwealth have been working towards disabling that loophole over the last few decades, but it’s still in place for enough to be a problem.
It’s mostly a non-crisis at this point because Elizabeth isn’t an idiot, but I, for one, am waiting for Charles’ ascension with bated breath, because I have much less faith in him.
It’s going to be interesting when Elizabeth passes away. A lot of places are considering doing away with the monarchy when that happens. I know a lot of people in Canada have talked about it.
Yeah, I get these dunk sessions happen because American Exceptionalists are EXTREMELY annoying and they can be cathartic but in serious terms, there’s no room for anybody else to be feeling smug.
I guess where I come from on it is that dissing America because of the exceptionalists kind of reminds me of dissing the South because of the racists, in that it neglects the massive swaths of effectively occupied territories that America encompasses. Implying that America is represented entirely by white beer-swilling suburbanites is still erasing everyone who isn’t that.
I’m not saying this at you, to be clear, just adding to the conversation.
As an American who also hates American Exceptionalists, I regret to inform you they’re even worse when you share a country with them. (Especially coming off of Memorial Day, which has been pretty thoroughly divorced from its original context and become American Exceptionalism Jingo Hour.)
In no small part because you know they’re wrong, and yet you’re still stuck in a country where school shootings are endemic and needing medical care can and will bankrupt you.
Among many, many other structural and systemic failings of this country. I could kvetch more here but frankly it will only make me angry at policies being held hostage by a couple self-centered assholes in Congress and *grumble*.
@ Imogen – For sure, but when people are dealing with American Exceptionalists (as is often the case when dealing with tourists/visitors/etc. or even just American media) it IS cathartic to bongo about it. I’m sure it is for Americans who aren’t assholes too (Heck, I know plenty of people who like to join in those sessions). It’s important to bear in mind that it’s not everyone in America, but when you hear no less than 5 times a week ‘America is the greatest country in the world’ it gets VERY hard not to go ‘Oh, REALLY?’ That doesn’t mean all Americans are jingoistic assholes and it doesn’t mean other countries should be feeling smug about their own failings (Canadian Exceptionalism is not better dammit, I have salt for them too. There isn’t a best country in the world overall, get over it. Every country has failings.), but that’s where a lot of these conversations come from.
@ Regalli – I can only imagine. Feel free to join in the bongoing. I’ll happily join in if you wanna have a ‘Complain about Canadian Exceptionalism’ session later.
Would you take it from a 3rd world country who’s elections your country has meddled in in the past to make sure that big bad scawy socialism doesn’t happen (Jamaica) , and who’s just generally sick of the modern American imperialist complex? Bc I say america is reactionary, and awful as a country with a half brainwashed population, and I think Americans online should just take their licks when people joke about/point out how bad their country is. It’s punching up
I’ve seen a couple of conversations go bad that way on Tumblr. (I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about it happening on Twitter since Twitter seems to be adopting everything terrible that was/is on Tumblr.)
It’s not as common as people wishing a natural disaster wipes out your city/state for political reasons, though.
I mean most of human history has basically been just asking various deities to murder everyone in a country you didn’t like, were just being less literal now.
It’s the opposite of “wishing kids get shot.” See also TheOnion’s recurring “Nothing could have been done to prevent this, says the only country where this regularly happens,” series.
Welp, it seems my hopes for a Daisy/Ruth Slipshine are fading rapidly. That’s a bummer, also Jason should do the responsible thing and cut her off now.
Sometimes people over 60 (maybe 70 now) will do it because they grew up before the switch, and newspapers overwhelmingly read by the old and bitter will do it for hyperbole. But people under the age of 40 as a general rule have no real sense of the Fahrenheit scale.
Celsius is more logical, but Fahrenheit scales a bit better in the range of human experience. I just want to know why anyone though Rankine was a good idea. It was apparently proposed after Kelvin already existed, so why would anyone bother? It’s like the temperature equivalent of a mullet.
Fahrenheit had a larger following in the English-speaking world at the time. Starting from absolute zero was useful idea, but it didn’t require switching to Celsius to implement.
To be fair her date had to go empty her bowels because the very thought of getting laid turned her into a damn chihuahua and we have no idea how long she’s been gone
How is it going wrong because of this conversation? What, is Ruth supposed to be standing around bored and in her head? Jason’s right there, and if Daisy takes exception to her date having a good time, he’s got a perfectly-adequate consolation prize.
This is the most animated Ruth has been since the story caught up to her at the restaurant, and that’s concerning. Whether that was self-sabotage in not giving Daisy a chance, or because she’s drinking again, or a combination of both, it didn’t seem like she really wanted to be there until the last couple strips.
It’s not going wrong because of the conversation while you are away, it’s going wrong because she’s got more chemistry with the guy who she’s having the conversation with in a few minutes then you’ve had in the whole date.
Different chemistry. A soft gentle bonding moment is nice and all, but once you screech about your bowels and flee to the bathroom, it’s open season on any form of entertainment in the venue. Claw machines, TV, placemat mazes, English bartender, makes no difference. As long as Ruth and Daisy close out the date with each other, it’s not a complete toss-out.
Hell, our money is a) way cooler b) Australian design (they own the tech; we license it) c) way more secure d) far more durable e) not beholden to propping up the cotton industry as far as its materials go
I have heard it’s also easier for people who are blind or have vision problems to use since it’s both in different colors and the bills are different sizes.
Nothing is wrong with Fahrenheit for day to day use. Now miles, yards, pounds, fluid ounces, etc., THOSE are nonsense units that can truly be done away with.
Standardization of measures of distance, volume, and weight? Elimination of various forms of monetary units?
Probably thinks the Euro and the EEC is a good idea too.
Certainly going metric would help tabletop gaming.
The “five food square” is absurd. A 1 meter square makes far more sense and matches the size of the miniatures far more accurately.
I believe those are called “boozles”, and at the very least they’re an indication that Ruth’s becoming intoxicated. Which, considering her history of alcoholism…
I mean from our perspective we know Ruth is an alcoholic so the development is slightly worrying but honestly there’s nothing inherently wrong with getting drunk on your birthday. The night might not even turn out too bad depending on how Ruth handles her drinking and how Daisy responds to it. You know if you want to be optimistic about this.
Nothing inherently wrong with getting drunk on your birthday, but doing it while your date for the night is a huge red flag.
But mostly, Ruth is an alcoholic apparently falling of the wagon for the first time in months, so this way beyond “slightly worrying”. Ruth is not okay.
Never really saw the appeal of social media. Just another obligation I don’t want, into a Skinner Box hoop-juming cycle to take up effort, time and ego I don’t have, all for an over-glorified number of friends that aren’t reall.
One party is openly fascist. The other is trying to do something about it, but has marginal control over the Senate and a couple of holdouts unwilling to make the change we need.
That anyone can still blur the difference between the two after the last 4 years just boggles the mind.
Wait, I am not recalling, is Ruth into guys as well? Do I need to do a Ruth search to figure out in how much trouble these next couple of strips are about to be?…
I live in Australia and once at Uni an American exchange student was collecting money for some fundraiser and I handed her a $5 note and she asked, “What note is this? I’m not familiar with your money yet.” and I was so confused like…read the number written on the note? That’s presumably how Americans tell their cash apart from each other right???
Nah. What we generally do is memorize the faces, and sometimes the backs. That’s why 100-dollar-bills are referred to as “Ben Franklins”, as an example.
Now… I read the number. But I also read the serial number, so I’m not exactly typical.
See also: the failure of every single $1 coin effort in the US. We’ve either made them identical in size and color to another existing coin (the Susan B. Anthony dollar vs Washington quarter), or gone half-assed and not pulled bills from circulation (the presidential and Sacajawea dollars). If I had to guess, there are two stumbling blocks:
– No room in some coin drawers. Just eliminate the worthless penny and use its slot for $1 coins
– The Mint makes coins, but bills are printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. There’s got to be some sort of territorial bickering going on there.
Of course, right now you know any change will be violently fought against by angry-at-the-world cretins who would pull stunts like smugly buying things with “real money” (the superseded currency).
I’ve occasionally encountered Usonians online who trot out the ‘wur the freest country in the world!’ bumf. My usual counterstrike is pointing out that American Exceptionalism is Juche for white people.
Upon investigation, the freedom they’re so enthusiastic about boils down to ‘being aggressively evangelical Christian in public’ and ‘guns’, not necessarily in that order.
It is however apparently easy to get an armed population to oppress the rest of the country for you. It only took a little propoganda to get the faction that talks about needing guns to fight government tyranny to rally behind spurious claims of election fraud and an attempted insurrection.
Yeah, I think a lot of the mockery tends to be backlash to the increasingly inane nonsense the exceptionalist crowd tends to spout on a daily basis.
As European, I think most of us aren’t actually smug when talking about America’s failure to live up to its own ideals – we’re horrified about what’s going on.
Especially the regular mass shootings.
I think the way the Onion once phrased it actually sums up why that issue in particular bothers non-Americans a lot.
“No way to prevent this” says only country where this happens regularly.
The mockery tends to be aimed at the people who pretend this shit is normal and unavoidable, not at Americans as a whole, in my opinion.
I’ve got to say, after I read today’s comic, I expect the Fahrenheit/Celsius discussion, but I didn’t expect the passionate attacks on anyone criticizing the US on school shootings. Where the hell did that come from?
Except for sex workers.
Or drug use.
Or even property rights. (Try building something other than a detached single-family house in most places. Japan is much closer to a “free market” in property than the US.)
This is entirely believable. Not that believable is the standard for comics, but I can see it and, what’s more, I like it. And more than Ruth/Daisy. The bonding over not being American while in the US can only be topped by the bonding of being American while not in the US.
Hm… what has always ticked me is this tendency of people living abroad of their own country to meet exclusively with their teammates. I mean, if your social need of meeting “foreign” people is fulllfilled with work, then you have a great work, but part of the thing, imo, is to meet also with different people.
I mean, it makes sense for economic and political migrants to meet with their peers as it’s most of the time not their chosen land they’re living in, but why would someone who’s chosen to live in another country not meet the people that live there? It’s not like a country is even a thing without these people in it.
I mean, the alternative is to ignore your countryfolk if you bump into them while abroad. You’re implying anyone ever said not to interact with the locals.
As someone living in a foreign country, it can be pretty daunting to overcome the cultural differences enough to make close friends. Not to mention that locals have their own social circle. Whereas another expat is more likely to be in the same boat as you.
Interesting fact, Fahrenheit aligns far more closely to human sensory perceptions than Celsius [meaning you can estimate against a single degree of Fahrenheit, rather than attempting to form a decimal estimation via Celsius, or over/under estimating by rounding to the nearest Celsius]. Similarly, there’s no rational basis for teaching Celsius over Kelvin [which uses the exact same formula, but has a different start point], as Kelvin is not only the scientific standard, but has more memorable key points (outside of water freezing and boiling) than Celsius’s adjusted numbers.
Rather, Celsius is taught out of a combination of tradition and a blind belief that teaching “this is where water boils and freezes” is not only relevant and valuable (despite it being exceptionally rare to also teach how elements such as minerals, elevation, etc can affect such), but easier for children to learn (thereby somehow justifying adults having learnt it).
In short, both Fahrenheit and Kelvin make more logical sense than Celsius, which is mostly abided by solely due to tradition and indoctrinated beliefs than due to logical factors. That’s not to say Fahrenheit is perfect, just that the “what even is Fahrenheit” argument makes about as much sense for non-Americans as sticking to imperial measurements does for Americans. Both are senseless adherences.
Ideally, we’d end up using Kelvin for science, and the Rankine (a similarly adjusted-to-absolute-zero variant of Fahrenheit, as Kelvin is to Celsius) for human temperature determinations. The conversion formula between Kelvin and Rankine is a MUCH easier to remember ( °R × 5/9 = °K ), and both R and K make inherent sense for usage.
Thus, to sum this all up, neither Fahrenheit nor Celsius using nations are using reasonable temperature measurements, but Celsius using ones have less justification for their adherence and stick to it as blindly, belligerently, and in as tradition-obsessed a manner as Americans stick to the Imperial measurements system.
Of course, the Imperial Measurement system is.. a special kind of nonsensical, so it still takes the crown as far as lacking justifiability. Seriously, am I multiplying by 3 this time? 4? 16? Why are we using Liters in the US anyway, and what was the formula for converting that into Quarts? WHAT EVEN IS NUMBERS.
Well, in any case, there’s always one thing we can be sure of.. Whatever measurement scale we use, the temperature in the midwest is still somehow going to suck. -.-
Since “(thereby somehow justifying adults having learnt it)” is perhaps not quite clear, let me restate that: Generally, teaching children a method because it’s easy [assuming that the water association really DOES help, which is uncertain], doesn’t typically justify the education creating a weakness in an adult’s development. In other words, it’s inefficient to teach Celsius, since it creates unnecessary conversions between Celsius and Kelvin and Rankine/Fahrenheit, relative to simply teaching Kelvin outright. More simply put, less effort early in exchange for far more effort later on is not exactly an ideal approach.
Sorry, you lost me about half down the rant. I never tried to estimate temperature by feel with the idea to get a technical accurate result, but, if I‘m used to one measure, I don’t see why the measure itself should affect my ability to reference it. Correctly identifying a tone of 440Hz is an ability that doesn‘t care if you say it’s 440Hz or tuning tone A or I call it some other thing that conveys that information to people it’s relevant to.
As to using Kelvin in everyday life? Why use a scale which lowest point is something no one really can imagine or understand, which, to boot, requires us to remember three digit numbers for everyday use, when we have a perfectly fine scale (or two) that uses reference points anyone can unterstand and just requires us to use two digits (maybe three for exceptional events if you are using Fahrenheit)?
If you live in a country, you get used to the system used there, just like you get used to the currency they use (yes, mentally I still reference D-Mark sometimes even though the Euro has been around for 20 years, but it’s just a habit related to finding things too expensive).
Few people need to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade and vice-versa and I bet while 30 years ago, at least half of those who needed to could do it in their heads in no time, nowadays that’s maybe about 10%, because everyone else just types „What‘s x Fahrenheit in centigrade‘ into their browser and is done.
“Interesting fact, Fahrenheit aligns far more closely to human sensory perceptions than Celsius [meaning you can estimate against a single degree of Fahrenheit, rather than attempting to form a decimal estimation via Celsius, or over/under estimating by rounding to the nearest Celsius]. ”
If you say so. To me, Fahrenheit numbers just feel exaggerated and ridiculous.
It’s not a very sensible argument. A person will always be able to tell (more or less) what temperature it is because they have Fahrenheit or Celsius built into their… cultural context so to speak. They Know what any particular temperature feels like. If I go outside and it’s scorching hot I’m like “Oof it’s 30+ today”. If it’s chilly and I need to put a sweater on I’m like “Oh, must be around 10 or below”. It doesn’t really matter which set of measuring systems you use.
Que? How are numbers not a sensible argument? o.O;;
I literally already covered your entire point in the first paragraph.
“Interesting fact, Fahrenheit aligns far more closely to human sensory perceptions than Celsius [**meaning you can estimate against a single degree of Fahrenheit, rather than attempting to form a decimal estimation via Celsius, or over/under estimating by rounding to the nearest Celsius**]”
If I recall the study correctly, an average human can recognize a deviation of temperature change based off.. I believe it was .85F? But it’s been a while since I read the study, so no firm push on that. And as I said, Celsius strictly doesn’t make sense based on the fact that you either have to choose between decimal formatting or less precise rounding. Neither is generally considered ideal, but it’s certainly a matter that won’t matter relative to specific contexts, sensory sensitivity deviations, or to those apathetic to the distinctions.
tl;dr version, your entire post agreed entirely with overall sentiments already expressed within my post, while presenting an argument already answered in my first paragraph. :/
Like I said, it doesn’t matter Because it’s based on subjective experience. A person knows and can operate such a measuring system by Instinct Because they were raised in it. They know, by instinct what temperature it is. They don’t Need hyper-specific measurements down to a decimal point. Have you ever actually met anyone saying “Oh it’s 20,53 degrees Celcius outside.”, of course not. People don’t need anything this specific unless it’s for use in science.
Do you use regularly half-degrees in Celsius, though? If humans can tell temperature differences of .85F (or R), which is .47C (or K), you surely ought to use the more specific measurement. But since it’s close to half a degree Celsius in difference (ie half a Kelvin), it’s pretty sensible to just use half-degrees to increase the fineness of the gradations.
I do think, while of course whether 30 degrees sounds like it “should” be hot or cold is mostly dependent on what temperature scale you were raised to use, there is something nice about temperatures that humans generally encounter falling between 0 and 100 degrees (more or less). Although perhaps it’s somewhat nullified by the fact that your range of experience depends on where you live… I’m in the US South, so a temperature below twenty deg F… that is, less than -6.5 deg centigrade… is just about unimaginable 😛 Still, considering climate change and the Texas freeze, it might not be long until people everywhere have to get accustomed to temperatures of both 0 and 100 deg F… x.x
(I will say that I do wish zero degrees corresponded to freezing! That’s a very convenient reference point. Perhaps could outweigh the “human experience” argument, even. I don’t think the boiling point of water comes into play nearly as often as the freezing point, though, either in human experience [snow!] or science, from what I remember of university chemistry labs. Perhaps a temperature scale of F – 32… well, that might be a little silly 😛 )
Yeah that’s kind of the point of my other reply. The temperature range I experience is somewhere between -30 to 35 degrees Celsius. In Winter it used to be around -10/20 on average with -30 being relatively rare though not uncommon.
“Interesting fact, Fahrenheit aligns far more closely to human sensory perceptions than Celsius [**meaning you can estimate against a single degree of Fahrenheit, rather than attempting to form a decimal estimation via Celsius, or over/under estimating by rounding to the nearest Celsius**]”
No, it really doesn’t unless (mostly, but not universally) you live somewhere using Fahrenheit. Like I said, Fahrenheit numbers sound ridiculous and exaggerated to me. Most people don’t estimate ‘It’s 78 degrees out’ when I talk to Americans. It’s ‘Oh, I dunno, somewhere in the 70s-80s’. That’s not different than me going ‘Iunno, 35-40ish?’
Yeah! Also if you live in a country with very cold winters, like I do, «water freezing» is ABSOLUTELY a useful point to determine where to measure from. Below zero degrees outside means taking time to remove ice from the car and possibly put on spikes on my shoes if the ground is icy. Around zero means I need to stock up on wool and warm shoes. Fahrenheit zero being around -17 celsius makes no sense to me as the temperature can get colder than that around here, so it’s not like it is a low point either. I am just very confused.
Okay, that seems bizarrely disassociated at first glance, but I assume you meant that by having an easy to reference temperature you know when to prepare for certain weather conditions, without either going outside or looking at advisories?
Again, there’s an issue with general education there that’d need to be addressed, but if all you’re intending to use it for is a ballpark (rather than, say, survival or cooking-associated purposes), then that’s not high priority.
Your argument is simply in having easy to reference places for freezing and boiling, but those are going to be easy to reference no matter what. There’s no difficulty at all in remembering X70- water freezes at 270K and boils at 370 [technically, 73.15 for both, but the entire argument I’m addressing is based in rough associations, so I assume that isn’t an issue].
Rather, as Eldritchy noted, we’re going to intuitively learn temperature ranges naturally regardless of system used, so even if you don’t learn precise freezing or boiling points, you’re going to still have exactly the same grasp of when to engage in certain wardrobe choices or lifestyle activities.
Compared to the loss associated with not being able to naturally associate to the region’s scientific standard of measurement, it’s a bizarre justification, as the loss exceeds the (rather dubious, and even somewhat superstitious) gain. Remember, conversions in science are HEAVILY discouraged, as a simple mistake can lead to disasterous and/or expensive misfortunes. So not only is it an inconvenience, it’s an additional potential risk in the sciences. Of course, not as big an issue as converting between imperial and metric, but nevertheless, that’s why there’s pushback against Celsius.
Now, mind the entire argument on this front relates to objective benefits, relative to usage. The only reason Kelvin is pushed over Celsius is because it’s the standard and also because the concept of “absolute zero” as a reference point is appreciated in science. Rankine’s only real push is due to the similar zero association, and that it makes conversion to Kelvin much simpler.
Simply put, if it was possible (it flat out isn’t, as too many technical systems base in the current measurement systems) to switch to an entirely new system, there are better potential options that could ideally fit all desires presented. However, since that’s not possible, discussions on the matter associate to the present systems, relative to their ubiquity of usage, form of usage, and benefit relative to usage.
Again, here are the benefits:
* Fahrenheit has a more natural [relative to human perceptions] scaling between temperatures. Ie, the +/- factor is deemed to have benefit. There may be a more natural scaling possible, but of the existing prevelent systems, Fahrenheit is the only one with that advantage. Fahrenheit has no benefits in regards to simplicity of reference points.
* Kelvin and Rankine benefit based on having an absolute reference point. This also provides the benefit of straightforward conversion between these two systems.
* Kelvin benefits from being dominant in scientific fields.
* Celsius benefits solely off a historic principle of associating to 0 and 100, back when temperature associations weren’t deeply ingrained and numerical education was limited (making having clear reference points for association useful).
Celsius was always a slapped together system, as suggested by it initially (until the 1740s, prior to it being heavily marketed) having its 0 and 100 associations swapped. Kelvin (the only unit of temperature in international standards, as celsius is listed as a reference point relative to K in that) only uses the Celsius scaling due to Celsius being prevelant at the time Lord Kelvin determined absolute zero.
As I noted, there’ve been systems created since that are considered better, but unfeasible to implement. As far as Celsius, it’s frowned upon by international / scientific standards [relative ot Kelvin], but retained just because of its common usage. Were it easy to reeducate, there are more benefits associated with teaching Kelvin than with teaching Celsius. The water argument is generally pushed off as being nothing more than cultural association [ie, indoctrinated thinking, as the (uncertain) importance of that association is weirdly emphasized in European schools] from those perspectives.
I haven’t personally seen any validations for Celsius, but do let me know if they exist, as my point here is to promote objective analysis, not in blind (dis)preferencing.
In summary, Celsius is the only measurement system in meaningful use that has any disfavoritism towards it. Fahrenheit, by comparison, is generally slammed on simply because it ISN’T Celsius- which is fundamentally the same logic those using imperial measurement use against the metric system, despite the overwhelming superiority of the latter.
Honestly the 0 in Celcius is pretty significant because it’s a transition point between two completely different weather states.
What I mean is that people keep a close eye on it for a lot of different reasons: need for warmer clothing, road conditions, how budding and growing plants will react to it, danger of people freezing to death, needing to focus on keeping the houses warm. It’s basically a warning point, it says that you need to be more careful from now on. I feel like Winter might be a bit more significant in Europe because we live considerably further up north than most Americans.
Certainly people can just look at -17 in Fahrenheit and have the same reactions but as someone who grew up with Celsius it just feels more natural to me.
I gave it a bit more thought and it might just be that Fahrenheit is more suited for the warmer, more temperate climates. The 0-100 for Fahrehnheit is more aimed at “How pleasant or unpleasant the weather is right now.”
Celsius on the other hand is aimed more at extreme differences between temperatures with focus on the transition point between those the two weather states (The 0). Like the thermometer which I have outside the window goes from -50 to 50 and it’s not an unreasonable scale, especially if you live in Russia for example where you can have 40 degrees in Summer and -40/60 in the Winter.
Agreed, it might not make as much sense if you live in places that get far below freezing, but in warmer climes like here in the American South, it seems pretty sensible to have 100 as an upper limit of “normal” temperatures and 0 as … well, if it ever reaches 0, I may never go outside again! But at least cold temperatures are on the low end of the scale. (But yeah 0 for freezing seems a lot better, doesn’t it! Often temperatures are measured below freezing when it gets into snowy temps, and you have to think for a second to remember that twelve below is probably 20 degrees F rather than -12 deg F! (At least my dumb ass usually does, lol.)
Native Us dude here. Where I live it can be as cold as -10F in the winter to over 100F in the summer. But most times in casual conversation I’m not specifically saying a temperature, but more of a range, if say my wife asks what the weather is. “It’s in the 70’s today” is the usual type of answer. In this way, Fahrenheit in daily use is a 0-10 scale for how comfortable he weather is.
But it’s also what I’m used to. If I’m somewhere that uses Celsius, I know a few set points and extrapolate from there – 0 is water freezing, 25 is roughly room temp, and 37 is body temp. If someone says it’s 15, its somewhere between freezing and room temp so I’d better get a jacket!
“If you say so. To me, Fahrenheit numbers just feel exaggerated and ridiculous.”
I’m not sure about exaggerated, but both systems feel rather ridiculous under the right consideration. Fahrenheit definitely has the more ridiculous background behind its creation, if you look into how its scaling and reference points were calculated, however.
Again, my sole points in these posts is that Fahrenheit isn’t worse than Celsius*, that Celsius feels unnecessary relative to Kelvin, and that a swap to Kelvin and then to Rankine could make for a much easier overall conversion formula between imperial and metric.
* You can argue against better; It really amounts to if you prefer easy water related references or prefer not having to make half-degree references (keeping in mind that F is just over half a C, given their 5/9ths ratio). Ultimately, they’re fairly comparable systems, and precision relative to usage (in this case, human senses) is generally the favorable point when engaging in such comparisons.
Well, if I was pushing a point based on personal preferences, rather than in simply trying to reference existing information to simply point out that Celsius isn’t superior to Fahrenheit (unlike the metric system on the whole over the imperial system on the whole), I’d be pushing for a different system altogether, over the C/F based ones. :S
tl;dr version: Fahrenheit isn’t necessarily great, but Celsius is definitely not superior.
In regards to Celsius vs Kelvin, the temperature in the UK will usually range from about -5°C to about 35°C. Changing that range to 268K to 308K definitely seems less intuitive.
And I definitely doubt “most humans can identify temperate to within one degree of accuracy”. Depending on other factors 19 degrees C can be t-shirt weather or require a light jacket.
They feel exaggerated because summers with Fahrenheit end up somewhere in 70s-100. I’m always like ‘WTF, you should be dead’. Again, because Fahrenheit is not inherently more intuitive to people on the day to day. People who say it is usually either grow up with it or moved to the US and got used to using it.
Just to pick up the maybe most important point of my post above: if I rant about one measuring system/currency vs another, never mind the facts. It’s about how a I feel about them, what my mind or emotions relate to in connection with using them.
To Ruth, living in Canada with it’s different temperature system is related to being happy and the move to the US with its other system relates to her parents‘ death. Nor sure why Jason goes into it though, maybe he would have preferred to stay in Britain but that’s not possible by his father is still alive?
Huh, kind of opposite parallels there…
I’m not educated on this particular subject. Does it matter if Daisy’s bi, if Ruth is in the middle, so to speak? I’d assume it works sorta like a V, more than a triangle.
Pretty sure that poly partners’ orientations really only have to match their own partners, and that it’s normally a V instead of a triangle, but an OT3 where everyone is attracted/dating everyone else sounds fun, doesn’t it?
Although for a triad, of course, it’s possible someone would be uncomfortable — but not necessary, of course! To paraphrase Lonely Island, it’s not straight if it’s a three-way. With a bi girl in the middle, there’s some leeway! lol
i don’t really have personal experience in being in an official poly relationship though so
Daisy’s taking a shit. If it’s a problem for Ruth to respect her own time and find a way to stay occupied, then tough. In Daisy’s place, I’d love to exit the bathroom and find my date in an improved mood.
I mean, it would take the option of naked mattress-wresting off the table for sure, but I’d probably join in on the drinking. More than one way for a date to go.
If we wanted to go out drinking, fine. If I came back after a few minutes away and found her in the bar pounding shots, that’s a whole different story.
It IS a rare temperature in °C though. It’s not a temperature air gets to in nature. It’s not hot enough to prepare most foods, it’s too hot for dough to rise, it’s too cold for a sauna and too hot for a turkish bath.
I believe you can boil eggs at 69°C and kill the germs without changing the structure of the proteins, but that’s about it. I’d have to double-check that to be sure.
I mean, we did have that one straight year where there was a school shooting damn near every day. It’s literally a fad in this stupid backwoods hellhole.
And it’s less that people mock the shootings, but the fact that there’s a a sizable number of people (including people in power) who treat this as a) normal and b) unavoidable.
And the same people defending that pretty horrible status quo simultaneously hold up the US as the greatest country on Earth.
In all honesty the problem isn’t guns but the people who use them. I heard of at least several attacks on school in China where the assailant murdered a bunch of kids with a knife.
The focus should be on the assailants, not the means. I once did a bit of looking through and majority of school shooters were mentally ill. Improving the mental care should be a priority here.
That is a good point though there is the issue that majority of crimes in US are committed with illegally obtained arms so not sure how regulations for regular people would be able to prevent that.
Also, even for the crimes committed with illegally obtained guns, part of the reason it’s so easy to get guns illegally is that the country is so full of them it’s easy for some to go missing and appear on the black market.
Okay but how do you deal with people who need guns for their own protection? Like most people living outside of cities who, if they call police, will have to wait for half an hour or so?
How about a limit, like one gun per person, or two guns per household? Also nobody needs an AK47 or whatever, so restrict machine gun sales. Military can have ’em i guess but nobody else should need them.
Even people living outside of cities don’t really need guns for their own protection. It’s a myth. The dangers are greatly exaggerated (usually oddly enough by scaring rural people about the cities) and the protection offered by a gun is even more exaggerated.
With possible exceptions for cases where there is a specific known threat to an individual, having a gun in the house increases your risks – of suicides, of domestic murders and accidental shootings, far more than it protects you from some amorphous dangers.
This is untrue. The majority of guns used to commit crimes are obtained legally. It’s also been shown that when a state has tougher gun control laws, gun-related crimes go down in surrounding states too. Also, the majority of mass shooters are NOT mentally ill. That’s a stereotype and a rather ableist one.
Yeah, see, Daddy buys his gun nice and legal, and when something goes slightly less than perfectly for Little Billy Whitebread, all he has to do is “borrow” it for a few hours.
Hell, you don’t even need to borrow one if you’re already legally an adult. Even if the most cursory background check would field a fucking color guard of red flags, depending on the state or neighbors’ laws, it can be disturbingly easy to get a gun. I seem to recall at least one mass shooting where the perpetrator reportedly bought their weapons shortly beforehand.
In the coldest possible terms, though? It’s harder to kill a lot of people with a knife than it is with a gun, particularly the assault rifles that have been used in some of the most deadly shootings of late. They fire fast, and they fire a lot of bullets before needing reloading, whereas a knife pretty much has to be used at close range (ie, where someone could conceivably wrestle it away or otherwise subdue their attacker) and one person at a time. An attempted mass murderer with a knife will be less deadly than the mass murderer with a gun, which equals more people alive at the end. Even discounting assault rifles, automatic and semi-automatic weapons, guns can still be effective at a much wider range than knives.
Yes, cracking down on guns would be an imperfect solution because people will try to get them anyway. That doesn’t mean we abdicate responsibility for doing ANYTHING about them, it means we use the imperfect solution and keep looking for ways to improve it.
At least the media finally stopped deifying the perpetrators after that. I think the attention and “fame” was just encouraging additional shitheads to go on rampages of their own.
Either that or we just became numb to school shootings, which is just depressing to think about.
It’s the numbness thing, sadly. And the deification resumed after about two weeks, just like everything shitty resumes after everyone’s done high-fiving each other’s cocks over how great they feel for retweeting some streamer’s milquetoast opinion.
One thing that will always boggle my mind is how the 45th President once complained about taking in immigrants from countries like Africa instead of ones like Europe. All without not only realizing how low key offensive that was but also that no one from Europe in theit right mind is going to give up living in a country with prepaid tax-funded health care and education too migrate to a country where you have a high chance of getting shot on any given day and being put in debt from medical bills if you survive.
I believed him to be to stupid to know half the shit that’s coming out of his mouth. Though even if he did I doubt he would care considering how much of a jackass he is.
Well, my state legislators just passed constitutional carry where any idiot can carry a gun with no license or training, and yet as hard as it may be to understand, no-one has shot me yet, though of course the year is still young. My insurance pretty much covers what Medicare doesn’t and whenever I go in for a regular doctor’s visit, the additional cost is under what the insurance allocates and they send me a small check. Not everybody is so fortunate, but I’m not at all tempted to leave.
If you think that in the US you have high odds of being shot on any particular day and that medical bills bankrupt most people, you should maybe switch to a different news source. None of which helps the people who do live on the edge of disaster, where I lived a number of years myself.
And Ruth begins to feel dizzy again. Jennifer had told Daisy not to make her drink and now… Daisy will be mad at herself for this, she will feel guilty and maybe she will have to drag Ruth around losing any interest and sympathy for her. The efforts made by Ruth in the last few months are gone. This is a disaster! Jason has failed, everyone has failed!
You’re not free now, with an anti-democratic extremist government that silences dissent and suppresses the opposition with every means short of violence.
Which is already a significant improvement over living in fear of Soviet armored columns driving into my country to beat people into compliance to the Soviet Union.
Don’t overreact, current politic clique is doing some shady shit but so did all the other ones. It came, it will go. This kind of shit is inevitable after 200 years of not being to decide things for yourself.
You’re looking at it through a very distorted lens. Communism brought more oppression, but also improvements in living standards and more rights for women. PiS is establishing a right-wing one party state, which is just as bad as a left-wing one. Don’t underreact – you’re surrendering your freedom to an evil, corrupt and anti-democratic regime, and shrugging it all off by saying “oh well, but communism”. That’s the exact same attitude the communists used in the past – sure, bad things happen, but it’s not like it’s as bad as fascism, so everyone should just ignore it.
Communism murdered thousands of our leaders, intellectuals, officers and replaced pretty much our entire leadership with party-obedient puppets. Every time “But Communists did good” is brought up I say “It could have been done WITHOUT all the bloodshed and terror”. It’s like saying “Yay we beat HIV… by shooting everyone infected with it in the head.”
All I hear from you is “I support Imperialism, Colonialism and destruction of Indigenous Culture”.
As for PiS, they are on the verge of losing majority power. It came, it will go.
Your strawman-argument doesn’t stick. Re-read my post. I’ve just explained that the communists used the exact same reasoning you’re using to defend right-wing abuse. Maybe you should also study your countries pre-WWII history. The Piłsudski-dictatorship set the stage.
You want to view one side through rosy-tinted glasses, the other as pure evil, and employ strawmen when challenged. That strongly suggests you need to broaden your perspective considerably.
As for PiS, they may be down from the last election, but they are still by far the largest party in the polls and seem unlikely to give up power.
You know what… No. I was having a good day, I made a positive message, I did not pick any fights and so I’m not going to ruin my day fighting fights that are not mine.
Have a good day.
Like I agree with you, I see communism as having the potential for good, even though sovietism is clearly not. Which would mean that the argument is a semantic one.
But like, what you’re doing here is really weird. As a third party it reads like gaslighting. Like you’re saying that someone’s lived experience isn’t real: it’s a strawman. And that’s….that’s fucked up. I’d be concerned about a country slipping and falling to an authoritarian regime on the right because they ended up blaming the oppression on the economic part of the system, but this isn’t really the way to go about that.
I’m cool with calling people who lived through the red scare in NA out because they’re victims of propaganda, but anyone in eastern europe who lived through that period actually suffered at soviet hands and I don’t think calling them out is justified at that point.
Maybe don’t tell people who had to live in fear that it improved their lives and they need a broader perspective. It makes you look as bad as the idiots that argue that the descendants of people brought over here as slaves should be grateful because it improved their lives. It’s a pretty despicable position to take both ways.
By all the non-existent gods, I wish the US would covert to the metric system and Celsius temperature. All the imperial measurements does for us is to hold back our kids, and screw up cooking measures by being unnecessarily complicated.
In all honesty switching to metric would be a pretty significant undertaking considering that US infrastructure, construction etc. etc. are built around the Imperial units.
I think a big part of it at the time was the automotive industry. Everything was based around fractional units.
We had a few transition years where body hardware switched to metric, but legacy engines (cough small block V8s cough) still used imperial, and service manuals had soft conversions between the two. This left us with wacky crap like 13/16ths SAE sockets.
I think they finally sorted things out sometime in the intervening decades.
Jackson was a fairly unpleasant fellow with buffoonish tendencies and a wickedly racist attitude towards native Americans…like the vast majority of Americans in his day. He also greatly democratized American politics – the common people would not have had a voice in American politics without the Jacksonian Democratic party (and their opponents were just as murderous and evil towards Native Americans – they just acted very remorseful about it whenever such a show was required).
History is rarely simple, people are rarely pure good or pure evil.
None of that really washes out the fact that the guy engaged in ethnic cleansing (to put it mildly) and told the Supreme Court to piss off when they told him to stop it.
Well, at least he’s actually finally being removed from the bill.
If you want to go that route, Hitler also revitalised the entirety of German industry, lifting the country from the absolute dreck that it was after the end of WW1. But the important part is that he DEvitalised a bunch of innocent people.
Who uses Farenheit? British people, that’s who. Like, all the time. I mean, mostly British people over the age of fifty, admittedly, but it’s still a weird thing for Jason to use as a slam against the US.
Americans have this strange idea that the UK is more than nominally on the metric system. The UK public is roughly divided into people who like the metric system but were never taught it properly, people who don’t like the metric system because they were never taught it properly, and people who hate the metric system because it was invented by foreigners.
In 2007 we were given special permission by the EU to stop pretending we were ever going to convert our road signs to kilometres, because we clearly weren’t.
Jason isn’t over 50 though. And aside from getting to go “the temperature has hit 100” when it’s really hot, almost everyone does the weather in Celcius. Like, no-one in my office has any idea how warm 84°F is.
(But yeah, we absolutely use miles all the time. Apparently for people who record their runs on apps like Strava it’s a 50/50 split between those you use minutes per mile and minutes per kilometer for pacing.)
Yeah, I wasn’t entirely clear, but my thinking was “It makes sense for Jason to use Celsius, because he’s young, but he still wouldn’t use Farenheit as an example of a weird thing Americans do, because his dad probably uses it.” My mum certainly does, because she complains that the car thermometer keeps resetting to Celcius.
I should probably also admit at this point that I’m dyscalculic, and don’t really have a firm grasp of either temperature scale.
And thinking about it further, given it’s Ruth who gives the Fahrenheit example (hooray, I finally remembered it has two “h”s) and Jason just says “Right?”, it wouldn’t make sense for him to add a bunch of caveats to it anyway. Objection withdrawn, your honour.
I’m Canadian and I remember when they started teaching metric in school here. I remember the speed signs changing from mph to kph. But we are a weird mix of metric and imperial here. We never fully moved over. Temps are all in Celsius for most except those of the older generations unless you are talking oven temps then you typically go with Fahrenheit. If you are in construction everything is in feet and inches for the most part but distances are in meters and kilometers. In Ontario I’ve noticed stores using grams and kilograms as the primary for weights but yet prices in fliers are per lb quite often. I haven’t the foggiest idea what anything is in Fahrenheit unless it’s oven temps where the opposite is true. We do baking measurements in teaspoons and cups though I personally move to metric (easier to calculate) when doing conversions. Imperial measurements (feet and inches) are the devil…I hate fractions. Metric measurements (mm, cm, m) are much better for measurements. Just a strange mix of both.
Strangely, I think it’s the weebs who are switching over to metric on the height front. Since Japan measures height on metric, anyone who gets deep enough that they care about character and/or seiyuu height are eventually gonna find it easier to convert their own height into cm and memorize that, then to continuously convert all of their heights into ft’in”. Particularly the moment they realize that their metric height is on their ID (if they’ve updated it since their growth spurt)
Oh man, the bonding between these two is so fun to watch 🙂 I think, between this comic and Fire Emblem: Three Houses, my favorite part of an ensemble cast is when the writer can pair up disparate characters and have them bounce off each-other in a way that surprises you with how much they have in common.
This will end in tears and maybe a hospital visit. Daisy and Ruth should not have gone anyplace with a bar. Not the sexy birthday we were promised. DYW.
Man I have a feeling i know where this is going but i just want these two to be friends. Remove the alcohol and this seems like something very good for both of them
I will stand by Fahrenheit as a better temperature scale than Celsius if for no other reason than the smaller degrees make it more precise. The Celsius people just prattle on and on about how “convenient” it is because of simple base 10 counting but that is SO arbitrary, in fact it only works at sea level, since “freezing at 0, boiling at 100” for water can easily change depending on local air pressure.
I mean, yeah it changes but not enough for me to think of it as a reason for concern. It’s not like the weather is ever stable enough for precision to mean much (particularly at zero), but being able to tell if it’s gonna be cold or not at a glance just by checking if there’s a – before the number is a feature I really appreciate.
That and I only have to remember what each 10s feels like over 7 levels (30 to -40), whereas in farenheit the same range would be 14 levels (90 to -40). Might mean less further south where cold doesn’t play as much a role in the climate.
Only a handful of Presidents related over the centuries. Two Bushes, John and John Quincy Adams, the Harrisons. Zachary Taylor and James Madison were distantly related, as were the two Roosevelts.
At lower levels there are more examples of course, but it’s still a small minority of politicians at any level.
I think Robo means lower down the scale – the name that springs to mind when I hear “US political dynasty” is Kennedy. Of course, this is in great part a reflection of the most-definitely-not-limited-to-the-US phenomenon “people with money have much easier access to the halls of power”.
That’s certainly true, but even lower down the scale, there are still far more people with no dynastic connections than with them. They stand out because they’re rare.
I spent several years living outside of the US courtesy of Uncle Sam, mostly in Canada and North Africa, and there are a few things about the US that need fixing, like health care, and extrajudicial executions (lynching for those in the back), but there is a lot that the US shares in needing to fix, like automobile-centric infrastructure.
I can’t speak to North Africa, but compared to other developed countries, the US is *particularly* car-centric. There’s a lot of room between the average postwar US on one end or Tokyo and Amsterdam on the other.
The best answer to that is a robust public transit system, that most credible estimates say would pay for itself four times over in economic growth, by allowing people who can’t afford a car to get to workplaces farther away.
Unfortunately, billionares like the Koch brothers are deeply invested in most aspects of the self-owned automobile economy (highways, gas stations, etc), and deliberately crush most initiatives to build such mass transit systems that they cannot themselves profit from.
There are valid reasons for a lot of the hatred directed at 1%ers; many of them are quite content to run the entire country into the ground just to squeeze a little more blood out of everyone else’s stones.
I’m happy to hate on the plutocrats when they deserve but they’re not the big problem, for once. The problem with public transit in most of the (sub)urban US is that the population density is too low for economical service, and often you also have tons of cul-de-sac layouts that make an efficient system design difficult. And this goes back to zoning codes, vigorously defended by the ordinary American homeowner. (Those codes also drive much of the US housing crisis.) When you require single-family houses on 1/4 acre lots, and all businesses to be surrounded by seas of parking, you can’t really have good transit, let alone transit that’s tempting relative to driving.
Also note that the goal isn’t a 100% transit life as an alternative to a 100% car life. The non-car life centers around walking or bicycling for many needs, with transit extending accessible range (especially to get to work.) And again, that human-scale walkability has been outlawed by zoning laws, at the behest of the American homeowner and driver.
So, in a vacuum, I don’t think Celsius or Fahrenheit are better than the other. All the pleading about Fahrenheit being intuitive is probably just down to familiarity; OTOH Celsius doesn’t have the advantages that metric units of length, mass, volume, etc. do. And for Real Science you need an absolute scale like Kelvin.
OTOH again, 96% of the world’s population uses Celsius and other metric units, so this American who likes to travel has put effort into trying to be bilingual in measurements.
I dunno, many non-Americans I know in the US have refused to learn “your stupid units”, so I question how ‘bilingual’ viewers are. Besides, how often do units come up in media?
I dunno if celsius based thermostats do half degrees but if not then one advantage of fahrenheit is that each degree is equal to half a degree of celsius. Is there any advantage to celsius other than being a bit more intuitive in situations where you’re thinking about freezing or boiling water?
Man have I gotten in some arguments over the convivence of Imperial system.
Everyone’s got an argument over how much more ‘normal’ whatever they grew up with was, it becomes ingrained and ‘default’ to them. But trying to imagine beyond that takes some critical thinking.
And critically:
Metric is based off of water.
Imperial is based off of humans.
Metric is far, FAR better for scientific or other ‘official’ measurements.
Imperial is better for general human relativity.
10° difference in Celsius at a time jumps from “A freezing winter night” to “Chilly” to “Hot, bordering on uncomfortably hot.” At a point 10 degrees jumps from “A summer day” to “fatal heat.”
10° difference in Fahrenheit jumps between freezing and cold, cold and chilly, chilly and temperate, temperate and warm, etc etc etc.
Or just going 0-100…
0 in C is “it’s really cold,” vs 100 is “you’re VERY dead.”
0 in F is “it’s REALLY cold,” vs 100 is “it’s REALLY hot.”
50lbs is the weight of an average child. 100 the weight of an average teenager. 150 is smack in the middle of a healthy weight of an average heighted adult.
A cup is a small drink. A pint is a large drink. Quart, Half Gallon, and Gallon are small, medium, and large ‘container of liquids’ larger than you’d generally consider drinking in a sitting.
The only one I’d say generally doesn’t matter is ‘distance’… except any time I’ve heard someone’s height listed officially in metric they do it in cm. Centimeters? No decimeters with cm in change, no “He’s about 18dm tall”, no, he’s “180cm tall.” I’m all for meters and kilometers over yards and miles, but why measure humans in freaking centimeters!?
If you’re ‘used to’ metric and it’s casual to you, great. More power to you. You never have to translate between when jumping from scientific to ‘human’.
But Imperial really is more ‘human relative’ in nearly all cases. Based on humanities general ‘base 10’ numbering, or scaling things 1-100, it’s where we fit.
A) I wish our money WAS more colorful. Throw in some more Blue, Teal, Creamsickle Orange, Lemon Yellow, and Salmon! And maybe it should include more landmarks instead of people. (Grand Canyon, Devil’s Tower, Old Faithful, Gateway Arch, Half Dome, Hoover Dam, The Everglades, Empire State Building, Arches National Park, etc.)
B) I use Kelvin personally. 293 K is my favorite temp.
I think I saw it on Tumblr, but someone had reimagined/redesigned the US currency. I think the bills were in different sizes, with smaller denominations being the smallest, and they had interesting information on each one, like the bill of rights, or when slavery was abolished/women could vote/poc could vote. It looked cool!
Also, the country itself is almost as big as all of Europe, don’t need a passport to see a different culture, just hop in a car and drive a couple of states over
I mean I live here and I saw nothing wrong with what they said haha Granted there is some room to argue but this is America. When you encounter someone that doesn’t want to see our countries flaws after a while you get tired of arguing and just let them carry on. I wish we were on the metric system, I think it’s ridiculous that we are not.
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(inb4 “where u yesterday”: I made the mistake of not only watching a video at 11:55p but showing it to my husband at the same time and feeling rude if I stopped midway to post a middling comment about evil dads)
[the video was https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bv1mw4yjjl4 ]
I was JUST watching this with my hubby-to-be. No worries. I understand. Good to have you back! ^-^
Ruth how much have you had
…this is very not good
I think that’s only her second shot. Maybe Ruth is a lightweight.
Best. Drug interaction. Ever.
But yeah speaking as an American who has never once left the country I will readily admit they’re right
Never mind leaving the country, I’m struggling to remember the last time I ventured more than 50 miles from home.
… 2002? I don’t get out much.
I have been to Canada, but I haven’t left the country in about 20 years since I don’t have a passport. I should really get one.
I can’t return to the US, since I lost my passport and birth certificate. Which is also going to make renewing my Permanent Residency here in Canada tricky…
I went to a wedding in the US once, and I met some people there who never met a foreigner before, let alone a European.
Of course, our countries tend to be a lot smaller so you’re never that far away from a border.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07Y_Q_RvPa8
Enough to have drunk bubbles floating above her head, apparently.
In the last panel she had officially hit the tipsy bubbles phase
I don’t really think America’s gun violence problem is really that fun a burn but one’s drunk so I guess I’ll let it pass.
I mean, you can either try and joke about it or curl up in a corner sobbing due to the realization that at the very least one political party will always stand in the way of even TRYING to solve that particular issue
Meh, I just know someone who was a victim of gun violence, (not at a school though) also I’m black, so gun violence based burns are just a sensitive issue in general.
Sandy Hook was the end of the Gun Control debate in America.
Once we decided that the deaths of elementary school children was acceptable, then everything else was on the table. There’s nothing that can happen that won’t be defended as the ‘price of freedom’.
Both political parties. One will pay lip service to coming up with a solution, the other won’t even bother to do that, because both parties are heavily owned by Gun Manufacturers, whose profits go up every time there is a mass shooting (as people buy more guns to defend themselves)…
Yeah, I think the “lol America thinks it’s so great then why do children die” joke Brits like to make (and yeah, it’s like, almost always Brits) has become really tasteless and obnoxious. I’m not really invested in getting mad at a drunk Jason for it, but I did want to come here and just, like, note that it’s not a good burn and I’ve literally ghosted one British sort-of-friend in particular for making it. Zero regrets. Europeans and ex-Europeans whose political personality is “lol at least we’re not Americans” are worse than Buttigieg voters.
I have so much sass as a trans girl I could make at British politics and I am withholding it because it’s a merry-go-round of dumb one-upmanship about things that aren’t really worth gloating about. Bleh. I know it’s my pet peeve so that’s why I’m getting my gripes out here.
your gripes are valid and i support them
My go to is just cracking jokes about how certain countries seem to be in a competition with each other to see who can make the most atrocious, fuckwitted discriminatory policies possible
Europeans are every bit as ridiculous as Americans, and worse in some ways. “Lol at least we’re not Americans” Okay mate, but one country tried to leave Europe because they didn’t want to let brown people in, there was a major refugee crisis where all the European nations tried saddling the others with the refugees (not that the US responded well to that crisis either), and most of western Europe is AT LEAST as responsible for fucking up the world with colonialism as the US is with post colonial cold war fuckery. And that’s not even touching on how Brits think “lol your kids shoot each other” is an acceptable response to “lol Brits say Chewsday and YouChewb.”
I think there’s just a gap between British and American ripping here.
Our humour tends to be cynical, pessimistic and hyperbolic, we exaggerate these things all the time, regardless of the country.
Hell, the majority of the people I’ve known think our entire political system of old farts yelling at each other is ridiculous. Just don’t take it too seriously.
Honestly, as a Brit a lot of people find the whole “chewsday and YouChewb” thing stupid for two reasons:
1) The UK has many different dialects
2) You couldn’t think of anything better?
Yeah, I don’t care. Go ahead and find the dialect thing a bit dumb, it’s literally a harmless joke with no stakes whatsoever. Meanwhile, the response is “Hey, isn’t it funny how Americans can’t manage to figure out their gun problem and stop their children from killing each other, despite the fact that about half the country really really wants to do just that and keeps getting stonewalled by the half that’s revealing itself to be fascists? Isn’t that hilarious?” You’ll have to forgive me if I don’t see those things as being remotely on the same level of okay.
I can understand the disparity between the tone of the issues surrounding each subject, but I don’t think it’s necessarily fair to restrict what can and cannot be joked about simply because it’s a real-world issue.
Why should anyone get to choose the line which can’t be crossed here?
It’s a bit ironic too, with America’s core values of “freedom of speech”, don’t’cha think?
Freedom of speech means the government cannot restrict your speech outside of harmful or treasonous speech. Generally, I find that if someone is relying on the “freedom of speech” argument, they’re probably being an asshole.
Again, you are mocking children’s deaths in response to a harmless jibe at regional accents. Most people would agree accents are funny. I don’t think most people would agree that children’s deaths are funny or in good taste.
I mean, this is an issue that half of the US has decided should be handled by teaching kids to hide in classrooms, possibly arming teachers, and redesigning schools to make it harder for shooters to kill people. The easy solution, the one that requires less work and less loss of life, is to reduce access to the weapons, but that goes against people’s “freedoms” so it doesn’t happen. My son or daughter could die today or tomorrow because some kid decides they need to shoot the place up, but hey, at least you can dunk on me when that happens, amirite?
Man, just fuck off if you’re gonna keep saying that shit’s okay.
I don’t know about whoever you’re responding to about accents, since nobody here did that, but in today’s comic Jason brings up shootings as a response to Americans claiming their country is the greatest in the world and isn’t actually mocking the dead children. Frankly, that’s how I see it far more commonly that whatever you’re on about.
As a Brit, I find the whole mass incidences of school shootings, “but we can’t restrict access to guns!” thing shocking and deplorable. It’s one excellent example of why lobbying is gross, and why political donations should be limited and made transparent. Jason’s comment to me reads like an angry “how can America/Americans think they’re superior to other countries when this is a routine happenstance?!” That’s not mocking. That’s not eacalation. That’s two foreigners in a strange land bonding over both routine mocking aimed in their direction and shocking, horrific differences between our countries and yours (I assume) that they refuse to let themselves mentally reclassify as normality.
Just like Godwin’s Law is a thing that actually happens, I’m sure SOME people use it as a shut-down for everything, but I sincerely hope the percentage of people who will pull up lists of incidences or victims’ names and LAUGH over the volume of dead children, or your politicians’ inability to get out of bed with the NRA and properly shut it down, is tiny.
I assure you, most of us are here hoping that public opinion tips over far enough to the “gun laws need to be tightened RIGHT up” side that your politicians HAVE to listen, and that your kids get to grow up in safety and have children who don’t need to have active shooter drills, and grandchildren who are stunned to learn that this was a thing, in their country, in living memory.
…what?
Everyone gets to choose the line which can’t be crossed. That line is called a personal boundary and you’re being absolutely ridiculous by suggesting that someone saying “that’s not funny, it’s cruel” is tantamount to opressing freedom of speech.
Some jokes aren’t funny to some people. Some jokes are objectively in poor taste but might tickle you. Some jokes are aimed directly at oppressing and mocking people who are already minorities and victims of severe oppression. Jokes are not a monolithic thing where if you accept one you must accept them all.
TL;DR – People are allowed to have boundaries and think less of you for crossing them. You do not have a “right” to not get called out for being unfunny or cruel.
I agree I jumped the gun (heheheh) on the whole “freedom of speech” thing, but my main point is that these jabs aren’t targeted towards any individual incident as much as the occurrence as a whole.
This is also why I brought the cultural difference between these two countries, as gallows humour regarding these incidents aren’t generally seen as targeting towards the victim of these incidents.
As a sidenote, if you never actually inform the person who’s overstepped your personal boundary, the behaviour won’t stop as they’re unaware that it was an issue in the first place.
Freeze Peach send tweet
You say that British people are happy with that kind of cynical humour, but I remember when Nish Kumar made a few relatively mild jokes about British colonialism and in response his TV show was cancelled.
Btw can we please not pretend Americans don’t also escalate stupidly when you criticize their country? It’s always “We probably beat you in a war/saved you in war/have nukes” like oh thanks for being proud of your insane, over funded, over bloated, imperialist murder force that you like to whip out every time some 3rd world country discovers oil or democratically elects a socialist leader.
I wish I could upvote this comment, so just pretend I can and did
I’ve nearly never seen school shootings comments as jokes, more as ‘hey, USA, how about you deal with the sequoia forest in your eye before ragging on the speck in mine?’
I know that American and Canadian politics differ in Avery pivotal way.
When Canada resolves judicial disputes, the case is never really “closed”, so to speak. When a decision is reached there, the issue is settled for the moment but is still open to question.
In America, however, once a case is closed, it’s closed, and it’s very difficult to open back up again.
From here, you can see how the two countries politics can go in wildly different directions.
Can you give an example of this kind of “open to question” that differs from the American system?
The example I had in mind regarded free speech in Canada, featured in Stanley Fish’s essay, “There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech…and it’s a good thing too”.
jason said it and he’s not drunk so personally i don’t think he gets a pass; brits just love being insufferable about the fact that their ancestors’ horrible actions turned out worse for everyone else than for them.
haha people are suffering and dying in nations that wouldn’t have existed if not for our nation going on a worldwide murder spree, fucking hilarious
Oof, yeah, good point. I think Europe, the UK and Canada developed this sort of mystique for American liberals where the latter enabled the former for years in feeling smugly superior about everything from gun violence to racism to political dignity to health care systems.
The one good thing about Brexit is it kind of finally laid bare that perhaps the only country with a dumber, more childish and utterly bigoted political system than America is the country that oversaw our founding. Add Britain being the world’s TERF capital and I’m just not on board for fetishizing British politics anymore.
The USA tried to leave the WHO during a pandemic.
UK has universal health care at least, even if the Tories are chipping away at it.
Brexit is stupid. US gun and car deaths are still stupid too.
I’m not sure that’s exactly what Jason said. Also the US is one of those nations. Maybe it’s fair to say the Brit’s went on a murder spree, but it’s equally fair to note that the US wiped out entire Japanese cities filled with mostly civilians. And finally, when people make fun of the US they are generally punching up, so we can afford to be not so thinned skinned.
That’s fair. Not sure if it’s really punching up coming from Jason tho. It’s more like punching sideways or at a best a soft diagonal. Especially since Jason’s here on a Visa implying he chose to live here. Also not a great look for a privileged white dude to be making cracks about gun violence in America that statistically effects more minorities and people of low income, and is often perpetrated by dudes similar to him (At least superficially). But I’m like super nit picking now when I should probably have thicker skin myself.
I don’t think you’re nitpicking, actually I hadn’t given that line much thought but you made me realize that it was fairly insensitive.
Jason is choosing to live in the US because he wants to be away from his father.
Dad is rich, powerful super villain type guy.
Living in the US lets him live far away from father’s immediate gaze and influence.
Probably had to negotiate with his father over which foreign country he went to study in.
So it is a better choice than living in the UK, but maybe not his first choice.
America isn’t a “bad” country. Just a very, very powerful one. And while the average American has very, very little influence on the country, the country they call theirs still has immense influence over the world.
The US has the world’s largest military and controls a huge portion of the world’s media, including the internet. Until the last couple years I knew more about America’s politics then my own country’s and it only changed because I put effort into it. I definitely still know more about American history and geography than my own. People outside the US know so much the US. Of course they will complain about America. Is what they complain about the fault of the average citizen? No. Is Australia’s terrible climate change policies my fault? No, but that doesn’t stop it affecting the various low lying island countries near us. Sometimes you belong to a powerful group and even if you have little power within it you still have more than others outside the group.
Imo any bad thing you can say about the US is punching up, given y’all have your gnarled claws deep in the entire western world in a way that rivals og colonialism. Ofc I also enjoy dunking on terf island for said colonialism and terfiness, though they’re at least marginally better than the gun sub continent for having the NHS.
*Dabs in third world country*
I don’t think it was a burn. He’s literally just countering the idea of “lol Murica best country” with a legit criticism
Since there is not much you can do about it as a foreigner, I think making fun of it is the only option left. And it‘s not even a humorous exaggeration.
Making fun about things, even grim stuff, that is the result of people’s choices (a majority in fact) is fair game. The fact as such is not funny at all but sometimes laughing is all you can do.
It’s easier to digest when you realize it’s not the Gun Violence problem so much as the Violence problem period, the guns are just an aspect of a much deeper issue. Of course, actually acknowledging that isn’t as convenient, comfortable or handy.
Other than guns magnifying the problem by making it so much quicker and easier to kill people. Without them, you might have as much violence, but you’d definitely have a lot fewer dead bodies.
All of these are incredibly valid points. If I had the money I’d probably leave the US and never look back
And go where?
England is looking rather less than ideal lately.
They could go to France. That would solve everything.
I honestly could probably do fairly well in France. Spent all of high school taking French classes, and ended up getting a minor in it just because I tested into 4th semester when I started college (figured it couldn’t hurt). So yeah, France could work. That or Australia, I’ve got some cousins out there.
France has been getting a major Islamophobia problem the last, er … decade? Probably longer. Remember how they almost elected the National Front candidate as president a few years back?
And I’m given to understand that Australia is kind of picky about who’ll they’ll take.
Not to mention that beer is arguably the only non-human thing in Australia that isn’t actively trying to kill everyone.
Right, the beer just passively tries to kill you.
Quokkas. They give you babies to cuddle.
US has an increasing white nationalism problem. Remember how we actually elected a white supremacist candidate 4 years ago?
Funny thing, when people say “europe” they always thing of England,France,Germany, italy .
but never really consider the other countrys
Places like Sweden ,Norway, Finnland or Switzerland might be really good to live there too
now i am not really familiar with these countrys ,i am just saying that cause it seems people always seem to forget about them when talking europe
I had a friend making legitimate plans to move to Iceland before covid shut down everything.
I’m escaping to the Netherlands as soon as I’m allowed
the Netherlands is actually one of the very few countries I’d actually consider moving to
When Americans talk about how awesome Europe is they often do have the Nordic countries or the Netherlands in mind, to the point of needing reminding that not all of Europe is like Norway.
There is an English man and a Canadian woman in this comic, and having ruled out England you have no further ideas?
I mean, Canada for sure has issues…there is a big one in the news right now…but surely it at least deserves to be considered and dismissed first.
It’s true that everyone loves Canadians and they have no enemies, between Quebec and their friendly neighbors to the south, they don’t actually need enemies.
Pretend there was a ‘but’ before ‘between’.
“And they have no enemies”
Other than the indigenous people they are literally still perpetuating a genocide against.
And all the enemies they super casually share with America due to being allies while simultaneously getting let off because they say “about” in a cute way.
While there is still major racial discrimination problems associated with Canada’s indigenous people, I would say “literally still perpetuating a genocide against” is quite a bit of a stretch.
Funny cause they were: A) Sanctioned for genocide by the UN recently and B) are still forcibly sterilizing indigenous girls as young as 9.
Since you clearly have no idea what’s going on how about you educate yourself rather than spouting an opinion based in “I don’t want to feel bad”
Antarctica FTW
Cuba could be an option. Spanish and English as main languages. Free health care system, a very good school system and awkwardly democracy (in the meaning of power to the people) has much higher value.
Although yearly hurricans and power shortages are a bit of a blast.
Not exactly democratic. Conditions so awesome that Cubans will risk their lives trying to boat to the US. Doctors used as semi-forced labor abroad with their families hostage in Cuba.
If I knew Spanish even halfway decently I’d consider moving to Cuba. Sadly the last time I even used any Spanish was in high school over a decade ago, so I’ve forgotten most of what I learned.
I know people from Cuba. They never want to go back to Cuba.
Also as a neighbor to the country, we’ve only had like 2 or 3 hurricanes in the past decade, MAYBE 4 if I’m forgetting something.
I live in Miami, FL, and we still have hurricanes and power outages 😛
Also, I was born and raised in Latin America and still would never even dream about moving to Cuba of all places, like, why?? My country (that I immigrated from) has the highest murder rate in the entire world and I’d still rather go back there before living in Cuba.
It’s a common problem. “This piece-of-shit country doesn’t deserve me! First chance I get, I’m moving to… er… some other piece-of-shit country.”
I’m above all that.
First chance I get, I want to get off this piece-of-shit planet and on to some other piece-of-shit planet.
Never before have needed to see a friendship so much and not known until I had received it
If you’re doing science, use Celsius/Kelvin. If you’re not doing science, why do you even need a number?
For arguing with others about the precise temperature at which the thermostat must be set AND NO HIGHER THAN THAT I SWEAR TO DINA OR I WILL BE BOILED ALIVE–
–obviously.
This but unironically! Fahrenheit is a really intuitive system for approximating temperatures. “0 feels pretty darn cold, 100 feels pretty darn hot, 60 is kinda on the warmer side, 30 is where water freezes but you don’t need too many layers”.
They’re all good systems with their own intended purposes.
Also, I appreciate that we have this very chill bubble amid the –
“JOKING SMUGLY ABOUT SHOOTINGS SUCKS” (it does)
“CANADA AND ENGLAND HAVE MASSIVE PROBLEMS TOO” (they do)
“well, i think that the celsius measurement system possesses numerous drawbacks and benefits that”
Zero is freezy
Ten is not
Twenty is breezy
Thirty is hot
There. That’s Celsius in a nutshell.
Such a short range. Fahrenheit is actually more useful.
Is that only because you are used to it? Like, what actual daily benefits are there to having a smaller range between 76 and 77°F compared to 20 and 21°C? Especially as most thermostats will have a .5°C option?
20 is hot, as far as I’m concerned. 30 is hellishly hot. But I do not represent most Canadians.
It is intuitive because you are used to it, to me it is anything but. Celsius on the other hand is really intuitive to me.
as a scientist in America, I use both, but I still prefer Farenheit (I cannot spell this) for talking about the temperature when I step outside.
Fahrenheit is superior because the ideal temperature is 69
That’s your reason?
I have it on good authority that 69 sucks.
It’s a nice temperature.
Budum tish
Fahrenheit is better because you can set it to 69° and be nice and comfortable
Cooking? Heating or cooling a room? Checking for fever? There’s a lot of reasons the average person might need to measure temperature.
I think it all depends what a person has used all of their life. Personally, I have grown up with weather in Celcius, body temperature in both celcius and farenheit. If someone says to me, oh it’s 84 all day, I have no idea what that means.
What’s worse, Fahrenheit can be a spelling bee killer (like Nietzsche)
But eh, Britain’s smaller than it looks WE WANT ROADS
ERB?
Somewhat.
Spite, the true source of all friendship!
Welp RIP to Daisy’s chances because Ruth seems to be having a lot more fun with someone else on this date.
To be fair, shit-talking America is a much better icebreaker than, uhm, talking about how much you suck.
(To be less fair, Ruth you are on medication that alcohol cannot be a good idea)
Yeah it looks like she’s gonna leave disappointed.
Putting aside that Ruth has quite possibly sabotaged a good thing here,, I will say it’s pretty impressive she’s managed to get drunk in the time it’s taking Daisy to drop a load. Just A class work here.
Maybe drying out for a little while killed her tolerance. Or maybe it’s interacting with her meds. Or maybe a little of both.
Good God, just how long is that dump Daisy is taking?
The dump was quick. The panic attack we’ll be cutting to her having shortly is another matter entirely.
To be fair, Ruth you’re an alcoholic and you’ve apparently convinced yourself that because it’s legal now it’s fine to drink. That’s the alcoholism lying to you.
Are we going towards a Billie “But you like GIRLS” breakdown?
painful if true.
Although in this strip painful is just fun to read with extra steps
I dont think jennifer has a problem with other people being bisexual just not her because she is “normal” she even seemed well aware of what being nonbinary was when booster was introduced.
I appreciate that this narrative is a win either way.
“And don’t get me started on healthcare.”
too late.
Yeah, that’s America’s catchphrase basically.
The kingdom of Egypt thought they would last forever.
They did not.
The empires of Rome and Great Britain thought they would last forever.
They did not.
Now, what makes you think it’s gonna be different this time around? Must I remind you what year it is? And what has been happening?
I get what you’re saying, but might not be the best idea to bring up Rome and Egypt in that context since the Roman Empire lasted over a thousand years (and half again as long if you add in the Roman Republic, which toward its end was practically indistinguishable from the early Empire) and a unified Egypt lasted over three thousand years. 😛
Eh. Considering advents in ICT, I suspect you’ll find that it follows a curve.
Closer to two thousand, if you count from the beginning of the Republic to the fall of the eastern empire.
Since this is going into historical territory…
The Roman Empire did *NOT* last over 1,000 years. The *Eastern Roman Empire* Survived the fall of the Roman Empire; but it was scarcely the same entity (different language, different legal foundation, different culture, different capital, different branch of religion, different economic system, etc), and only a century or so after it’s founding, what was more or less the final attempt at resurrecting the cold, dead corpse of the Roman Empire ended with Justinian. The Roman Empire itself lasted around four/five centuries, from circa 50BC to circa 450AD (take your pick of start and end dates).
If you’re going to include any empire, no matter how tenuous, that has had Rome as part of it’s title, then ‘the Roman Empire’ survived until the final collapse of the Holy Roman Empire in the early years of the modern period.
If you’re including the imperial (expansionist) period of the Republic, you can add another three or four centuries, but if we’re talking about a nation based on Rome, it still doesn’t span over a thousand years.
If you’re going to be pendantic about that, at least be more pedantically accurate; I can admittedly see a pretty good argument argument for the end of the Roman Empire, in an institutionally unbroken continuum specifically, having taken place in 1204 with the Venetian crusaders’ sacking of Constantinople and replacing its government with a puppet government that lasted roughly two generations (the Palaeologian Restoration took place in 1261), but the Eastern Roman Empire was not an “in-name-only” empire, like the Holy Roman Empire was – the concept of the “Byzantines” as separate from “Roman predecessors” was not a contemporary attitude, and was only invented for the first time well over a century after anyone who could remember the Fall of Constantinople in 1453 was dead and gone.
While Greek language and culture did certainly rise to greater prominence in the east as time went on, it was already an incredibly-common language in the Empire even before its administrative division into two (and even before it became, well, an Empire – you can thank the Macedonian conquests for that). A different capital only makes a difference if you’re being pedantic about “the Roman’s (city’s) empire”, rather than “Roman Empire” as an overall institution, which – again – had an essentially unbroken streak from Augustus up until 1204, barring a civil war over succession every so often (which is something the Romans had in spades all the way back to their republican era, as they never quite figured out that whole “how to have regular peaceful transitions of power” thing). Did Russia stop being Russia when they moved the capital from Moscow to Saint Petersburg, or Japan stop being Japan when they moved the capital from Kyoto to Tokyo? The religion thing only became a done deal in 1054, by which point emperors had ruled from Constantinople for well over seven centuries (and this is where I also bring up that Constantinople had been the Imperial capital for decades before the final division, and Rome hadn’t been the capital of anything for over a century by that point).
I could go on for longer, but it’s half past three where I am, I’ve been writing this for over an hour, and I need sleep. 😛
You’ve written all of that, without even managing to recognize the point of contention- whether the Western or Eastern empire was the ‘true’ Rome.
After Justinian failed to reconquer the West, the Eastern Roman Empire ceased to have reasonable claim to being the empire of Rome, an actual location.
A hypothetical modern equivalent would be if England fell tomorrow to a sudden spate of French aggression, and the royal family moved to Canada- it would not be reasonable to then call Canada Britain/England, even though the symbolic or actual head of government existed in unbroken chain from the British Government.
To repeat, the Eastern Roman Empire is a different thing from the Roman Empire, which many hold fell with the sacking of Rome.
Constantine (and Constantinople) be damned. XD
Many do hold that, but that’s mostly because our scholarship comes from (Western) Europe which grew out of the fall of the western half of the Roman Empire.
My understanding is that people of the time didn’t really consider the Western and Eastern parts of the Roman Empire two distinct things, but one Empire with two rulers. How true that was practically speaking is questionable.
The “point of contention” is invalid. Neither of them were the “true” Rome with the other relegated to being something else and therefore the loss of one capital and much of the territory doesn’t change that.
If England annexed Canada, the people in Canada all considered themselves English, everyone referred to Canada as a part of England, and this continued for several hundred years, and *then* Britain was taken over by France, then I think it would be reasonable to keep calling Canada England.
To add to what thejeff and 00A86B above me said: even dating the end of the Western Roman Empire to “the sack of Rome” is wrong, since firstly – it was sacked twice in the Imperial era (410 by the Visigoths, 455 by the Vandals), secondly – it hadn’t been the capital for a century by then (Ravenna was the capital in the west during both sackings, it in turn having replaced Milan as the new capital), and thirdly – no matter whether you’re talking about the Visigothic or the Vandal sack, the majority historical opinion doesn’t place the end until either the deposition of the fittingly-named Emperor Romulus Augustulus in 476 (the last Emperor in the West to rule from Italy), or the assassination of Emperor Julius Nepos four years later (by which point the western Empire had been reduced to just Dalmatia).
I cede your specific knowledge of Roman history- I do not cede the point that the Roman Empire survived through to the high middle ages- virtually no new nation grows in a vacuum; most have some form of continuity with ‘what came before’. That People in the East viewed their empire as being the legitimate continuation of the Roman Empire does not mean that people in the West did, otherwise there would not have been room for the creation of the Holy Roman Empire as a propaganda tool for Charlemagne.
To hold to the broad view that the Empire lasted until the fall of the East is needless. A narrower and more precise view, that portions of the Empire survived intact, is quite reasonable, and was acknowledged as such from the start.
The point that 00A86B brings up is rather ironic- because I specifically chose Canada as my nation of choice for my example for the very reasons that 1) England took ownership of Canada (from the French), 2) Many of the people in Canada considered themselves to be English, and 3) that state of affairs lasted for a multiple hundreds of years.
Lastly, and as a light-hearted closing remark; I think our avatar pictures, of Robin and Asher, are very fitting, given the smugness that they’re both exuding.
One of the specific reasons as to why Charlemagne was crowned “Holy” Roman Emperor, at the time he was crowned, was because Constantinople had just recently crowned Irene as Roman Empress in her own right – and the last thing Pope Leo III wanted was icky girl cooties touching the oh-so-sacred title of “Roman Emperor”, and so he declared that the Roman throne was actually vacant and then “handed it over” to Charlemagne, the most powerful monarch in the West at the time. Prior to that, the Emperors in Constantinople were more or less viewed as the legitimate Roman Emperors, even in the West (keep in mind that all this was over three centuries after the deposition/death of the last Western Roman Emperor).
And heh, that is a funny little coincidence with regards to the gravs, yeah. 😛
A unified China has been a thing since 200 BC or so; and you could go back another thousand years for China as a civilization. Countries can stick around for a long time.
China hasn’t been continuously unified since 200 BC. I give you Western Han vs. Eastern Han, Three Kingdoms period, Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms period, the Western and Eastern Jin, the Sixteen Kingdoms, the Northern and Southern Song, *and more*.
I’ve known for years that the American Empire would someday end.
*looks around, and back at the last four years*
… I admit, I was not expecting this.
As long as it’s an Interstellar empire, I’m good with that.
Celsius for science, Fahrenheit for day to day temperature.
Or just ditch Fahrenheit entirely because it’s really really stupid.
It’s not as arbitrary as it might seem at first glance.
0 Fahrenheit is the freezing temperature of a 50/50 salt/ice mixture.
32 F is the freezing point of fresh water at sea level
212 F is the boiling point of fresh water at sea level, and was pegged as 180 degrees higher than freezing because that was a figure scientists were used to working with.
“Normal” body temperature was supposed to be 100 degrees, but Dr. Fahrenheit screwed up and so it’s 98.6 instead.
I just like making fun of Fahrenheit. Might’ve gone over better with a 😛 or a XD but apparently I chose violence tonight.
Nah fahrenheit is dumb. The conversion formula is so dumb my highschool physics teacher told us not to bother. And at least you can spell Celsius without looking at it
Zero is the point when water starts to turn to ice
One hundred’s when it starts to boil and cook an egg real nice…
i like how every time someone points out why fahrenheit is actually useful, someone’s gotta reply with “no its dumb”
okay thanks child, go back to naptime please
Well, when someone can give a reason why it’s useful other than subjective opinion (“It’s more intuitive”) people will stop replying that way.
On a scale for day to day temperature, I can choose between 40 degrees of variance or I can choose between 100 degrees of variance.
Why would I ever want to go with less precision?
That’s still a personal preference though. That’s fine and it’s seriously not a big deal, but in my experience it’s mostly (though not universally) only true if you grew up with Fahrenheit. Like, my first reaction to ‘it’s more intuitive’ is usually ‘Not really? To me, 80 degrees just sounds like you should be dead’.
Here in Texas the weather can occasionally get a bit warm. It is possible to survive days that are 100 degrees Fahrenheit, as I personally have, but not so much for 100 degrees Centegrade. So, you see, for us, Fahrenheit is objectively cooler.
That’s why I said it SOUNDS like you should be dead to me.
You should go with milligrade, then, which is 5 times more precise still. Wonder why nobody does?
The truth is Fahrenheit is not better than Celsius. You know how I know? Because I have never heard someone praise Fahrenheit who didn’t just happen to grow up getting used to it, but I have on occasion for Celsius.
As someone who has grown up with the metric system and Celcius, this argument always seems a bit weird. If I need more precision than a particular unit gives, I don’t invent a new unit: I just add an extra decimal place of precision. For example, my kitchen thermometer displays readings accurate to a tenth of a degree.
Because Fahrenheit are ~half the size of Celsius degrees, making it more precise, particularly when it comes to matching personal sensation preferences. IE: I prefer it when it is 71f (21.6c) but my wife prefers 72f (22.2c). In Celsius these temperatures are effectively the same, but in Fahrenheit they are one degree apart.
I guess I just don’t see the extra usefulness in a degree vs a decimal of a degree but fair enough. Ultimately the whole temperature thing isn’t a big deal so I’m happy to shrug it off and just say I don’t see it.
My point was more that both of those round to 22 c. I put in the decimals for clarity, but I’ve never heard people, even those using c, refer to the temp in anything other than round numbers – except when doing specific scientific measurements, where C fits formulas better and thus is the better scale.
I say this as an American who prefers using metric whenever possible when it comes to things like weight and length. Meters are far more user friendly than feet, for example, and for much the same reason (centimeters offer far more precision than inches).
I can’t speak for others thermostats, but mine does show the decimals. People do just use the round number because people usually round when they talk about numbers, but it’s possible to get the precision down.
Like I said, it’s not a big deal. Temperature discourse is pretty much pure personal preference, but I figured it was a pretty harmless one to make jokes about.
Oh, but we the Celsius people do use decimals with them.
Admittedly, not usually when talking about room temperature, but always when talking about body temperature.
My experience is that people tend to find that the more intuitive one is the one they’re used to, big surprise 🙂
to me, Celsius makes more sense because it’s rooted in stuff that registers as objective (freezing/boiling points of water seems “easily observable”)
Needfuldoer was kind enough to elucidate that
“0 Fahrenheit is the freezing temperature of a 50/50 salt/ice mixture.
32 F is the freezing point of fresh water at sea level”
and the first one resonates with me,
but the second I’m all “ok, but why did you pick 32 and not a nice round number like 0, 10, 100 ?”
Anyway, to me it’s a charming American quirk. Sure, I’m confused all the time when I’m there and trying to work out what it means in practice, but cultural differences are the whole point of traveling. I wouldn’t go to Japan and be like “no lol, you’ve gotta say your first name first THEN your surname, that’s why it’s called a first name”.
In metric countries, (digital) thermostats almost always use 0.5C increments. That’s about the only time you’d actually want to differentiate between 21.5° and 22.0°. You definitely don’t do it in daily conversation.
I don’t think most people can identify any given temperature to half a degree of accuracy though. Especially when any given temperature can feel wildly different based on humidity and other factors.
this is also a good argument for the Base 34 system you realize
i chose that number at random please stop emailing me to change it
But base 36 makes ever so much more sense. In base 36, 50 degrees is a straight line and twice that takes you all the way around to where you started.
I assumed it was a Rule 34 Joke.
It might be a rule 6 joke, but there is no rule 6 joke.
If its wasn’t it should be.
Here’s a fun fact. The original Celsius scale was actually read upside down!
Doesn’t that make the blood rush to your head?
Like our highly evolved brains don’t have room for both systems….
I seem to recall that we crashed a Mars mission once on account of our highly evolved brains using two measuring systems at one time.
That’s why we physicists ALWAYS put the units after any quantity!
How many physicists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
If you exclude any other means of screwing in light bulbs, only one is necessary.
One what?
Now THAT was masterful.
Nice one.
Bahaha that was perfect ^^
Hey were you deliberately setting this one up Cliff?
Wait, were you setting this one up Wagstaff???
….maybe.
Maybe not.
Yup, the Mars Climate Orbiter.
The US government entity (NASA) was using metric, and the private contractor (Lockheed) assumed US customary units.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
As a Canadian, I can confirm that this is how non-Americans talk about you guys behind your backs.
That’s okay, we have nukes.
Which can’t be used without ending the world.
Well, if whoever is in charge of that is even remotely as dangerously self-destructive as I am, we might have a problem going forward.
I have terrible news.
I’m honestly dumbfounded that it didn’t happen in the last four years.
Yeah, that’s definitely gonna stop the psycho death cult that’s in charge of the fuckin’ things.
Fair enough but still, ow.
this is also how y’all talk to us directly
also wishing for our kids to get shot because we made a joke about an accent or whatever
I’ve never heard anybody wish for it (though I’m not surprised, people are the worst) but we definitely do talk about it when it comes to ‘Why America isn’t as great as some Americans act like it is’ talks.
Just gonna second brute, ’cause yeah, I had a semi-friend (sardonically) tell me something along the lines of, “cool, enjoy your next school shooting” because we were bickering about our respective political sh*tstorms. We’re not friends anymore.
I can see why they’re an ex-friend.
I just can’t take “haha America’s so reactionary” from the countries respectivel ruled by Prime Minister Blackface and a literal royal family.
Eh, the royal family is essentially state-sponsored celebrities at this point, you want to make fun of the British for dumb politicians, you have to go after Boris Johnson.
It’s not like he doesn’t give plenty of ammo.
They can literally turn off the government if someone picks up a royal mace from a table
Like, I know the royal family doesn’t “technically” rule Britain, but they still wield significant political power and are subsidized to a genuinely sickening degree. You can compare them to the Papacy, if you like, but legally the Queen still has to show up to certain events to give them legitimacy. Britain has a political system largely governed by norms, not actual laws. The fact that they still revere their royals, and remain nostalgic for the old royal glory, is my whole point.
The royal family can turn off about a half-dozen governments around the world. A lot of the major players of the Commonwealth have been working towards disabling that loophole over the last few decades, but it’s still in place for enough to be a problem.
It’s mostly a non-crisis at this point because Elizabeth isn’t an idiot, but I, for one, am waiting for Charles’ ascension with bated breath, because I have much less faith in him.
It’s going to be interesting when Elizabeth passes away. A lot of places are considering doing away with the monarchy when that happens. I know a lot of people in Canada have talked about it.
But y’all have to admit, Texas does exceptionalism better than anybody.
Reply to the wrong conversation. See below.
I think she’s going to outlive Charles, just out of sheer spite.
I thought they had made some arrangement so that the succession would skip over Charles and go to one of the sons?
Yeah, I get these dunk sessions happen because American Exceptionalists are EXTREMELY annoying and they can be cathartic but in serious terms, there’s no room for anybody else to be feeling smug.
I guess where I come from on it is that dissing America because of the exceptionalists kind of reminds me of dissing the South because of the racists, in that it neglects the massive swaths of effectively occupied territories that America encompasses. Implying that America is represented entirely by white beer-swilling suburbanites is still erasing everyone who isn’t that.
I’m not saying this at you, to be clear, just adding to the conversation.
As an American who also hates American Exceptionalists, I regret to inform you they’re even worse when you share a country with them. (Especially coming off of Memorial Day, which has been pretty thoroughly divorced from its original context and become American Exceptionalism Jingo Hour.)
In no small part because you know they’re wrong, and yet you’re still stuck in a country where school shootings are endemic and needing medical care can and will bankrupt you.
Among many, many other structural and systemic failings of this country. I could kvetch more here but frankly it will only make me angry at policies being held hostage by a couple self-centered assholes in Congress and *grumble*.
@ Imogen – For sure, but when people are dealing with American Exceptionalists (as is often the case when dealing with tourists/visitors/etc. or even just American media) it IS cathartic to bongo about it. I’m sure it is for Americans who aren’t assholes too (Heck, I know plenty of people who like to join in those sessions). It’s important to bear in mind that it’s not everyone in America, but when you hear no less than 5 times a week ‘America is the greatest country in the world’ it gets VERY hard not to go ‘Oh, REALLY?’ That doesn’t mean all Americans are jingoistic assholes and it doesn’t mean other countries should be feeling smug about their own failings (Canadian Exceptionalism is not better dammit, I have salt for them too. There isn’t a best country in the world overall, get over it. Every country has failings.), but that’s where a lot of these conversations come from.
@ Regalli – I can only imagine. Feel free to join in the bongoing. I’ll happily join in if you wanna have a ‘Complain about Canadian Exceptionalism’ session later.
Would you take it from a 3rd world country who’s elections your country has meddled in in the past to make sure that big bad scawy socialism doesn’t happen (Jamaica) , and who’s just generally sick of the modern American imperialist complex? Bc I say america is reactionary, and awful as a country with a half brainwashed population, and I think Americans online should just take their licks when people joke about/point out how bad their country is. It’s punching up
I’ve seen a couple of conversations go bad that way on Tumblr. (I wouldn’t be surprised to hear about it happening on Twitter since Twitter seems to be adopting everything terrible that was/is on Tumblr.)
It’s not as common as people wishing a natural disaster wipes out your city/state for political reasons, though.
Wouldn’t shock me either. People suck.
I mean most of human history has basically been just asking various deities to murder everyone in a country you didn’t like, were just being less literal now.
Fascinating. You’ve basically just described the Bible in a most accessible language! Think of the implications!
It’s the opposite of “wishing kids get shot.” See also TheOnion’s recurring “Nothing could have been done to prevent this, says the only country where this regularly happens,” series.
Yeah, that’s how I see this and really just don’t understand the reaction today.
Honestly
“also wishing for our kids to get shot because we made a joke about an accent or whatever”
Are you basing this on your personal experience or something? Because it doesn’t reflect anything in the comic.
What do you mean, “behidn their backs”?
I was trying to be polite, but if we’re being honest, yeah, it’s to their faces plenty often.
This is also how we talk about ourselves.
Ruth: Plus they think they own the world! Like they can go and just tell other countries what to do!
Jason: Can we not talk about that.
I like this.
yeah!! fuck the imperial system!
Welp, it seems my hopes for a Daisy/Ruth Slipshine are fading rapidly. That’s a bummer, also Jason should do the responsible thing and cut her off now.
*plays Suzanne Vega’s “Ninety-Nine Point Nine Fahenheit Degrees” on the jukebox*
Aren’t the British infamous for using Fahrenheit whenever it hits sixty?
Nah, we never use Fahrenheit. 60 degrees sounds like we should be boiling alive!!
Sometimes people over 60 (maybe 70 now) will do it because they grew up before the switch, and newspapers overwhelmingly read by the old and bitter will do it for hyperbole. But people under the age of 40 as a general rule have no real sense of the Fahrenheit scale.
They’re gonna bang aren’t they
I certainly hope so. They’re an attractive fictional character and a British fictional character, so it’s basically all I could ask for.
Celsius is more logical, but Fahrenheit scales a bit better in the range of human experience. I just want to know why anyone though Rankine was a good idea. It was apparently proposed after Kelvin already existed, so why would anyone bother? It’s like the temperature equivalent of a mullet.
Fahrenheit had a larger following in the English-speaking world at the time. Starting from absolute zero was useful idea, but it didn’t require switching to Celsius to implement.
Ruth, how long have you been talking to the bartender instead of actually being on your date?
Also, the longer hair looks nice on Jason.
To be fair her date had to go empty her bowels because the very thought of getting laid turned her into a damn chihuahua and we have no idea how long she’s been gone
This is true! She might still be in the bathroom.
We never see Daisy again, because she disappeared into the pocket dimension that swallowed Chuck Cunningham.
The toilet is actually a blender.
I have to say, I thought there was a fair chance of Ruth’s date with Daisy going poorly, but this isn’t quite how I pictured it going wrong…
How is it going wrong because of this conversation? What, is Ruth supposed to be standing around bored and in her head? Jason’s right there, and if Daisy takes exception to her date having a good time, he’s got a perfectly-adequate consolation prize.
This is the most animated Ruth has been since the story caught up to her at the restaurant, and that’s concerning. Whether that was self-sabotage in not giving Daisy a chance, or because she’s drinking again, or a combination of both, it didn’t seem like she really wanted to be there until the last couple strips.
Cause she’s drinking.
Which is more concerning than anything else about the date.
Let a girl relapse and maybe even spiral into the worst state since Michigan. It’s her birthday, doncha know.
It’s not going wrong because of the conversation while you are away, it’s going wrong because she’s got more chemistry with the guy who she’s having the conversation with in a few minutes then you’ve had in the whole date.
Different chemistry. A soft gentle bonding moment is nice and all, but once you screech about your bowels and flee to the bathroom, it’s open season on any form of entertainment in the venue. Claw machines, TV, placemat mazes, English bartender, makes no difference. As long as Ruth and Daisy close out the date with each other, it’s not a complete toss-out.
Ruth is back to bonding with her true love. The cheap whisky in her glass.
Hell, our money is a) way cooler b) Australian design (they own the tech; we license it) c) way more secure d) far more durable e) not beholden to propping up the cotton industry as far as its materials go
Granted, way less people use cash now.
Also, yeah, Celcius/Kelvin are way better.
I have heard it’s also easier for people who are blind or have vision problems to use since it’s both in different colors and the bills are different sizes.
May be true for the pound, but this is not true for the Canadian dollar.
However, IIRC the Canadian bills have braille on em so that’s neat.
Yup, we Australians invented polymer plastic banknotes. They’re great.
…they’re gonna bang,aren’t they?
Nothing is wrong with Fahrenheit for day to day use. Now miles, yards, pounds, fluid ounces, etc., THOSE are nonsense units that can truly be done away with.
Standardization of measures of distance, volume, and weight? Elimination of various forms of monetary units?
Probably thinks the Euro and the EEC is a good idea too.
(points at plasticwrap)
THIS PERSON IS A PAWN OF THE NEW WORLD ORDER!
(forgot to close the sarcasm tag)
People should just use furlongs per fortnight like Jesus did.
Certainly going metric would help tabletop gaming.
The “five food square” is absurd. A 1 meter square makes far more sense and matches the size of the miniatures far more accurately.
It would make measuring distances way easier. No more counting in 5s, just count 1, 2, 3… And be done with it.
Nothing is inherently wrong with it, but it’s one of those ultimately harmless things other countries like to joke about.
Don’t you mean malms, yalms, ponzes, and onzes?
daisy about to get her girl stolen rip
Are those little white circles over Ruth’s head a sign that things are about to go south?
I believe those are called “boozles”, and at the very least they’re an indication that Ruth’s becoming intoxicated. Which, considering her history of alcoholism…
A HREF=”https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BriffitsAndSqueans”>Boozles, Briffits, Squeans, and Grawlixes
lets try that again ….
Boozles, Briffits, Squeans, and Grawlixes
Oh, spit!
Curse you for reminding me of Tv Tropes, I had stuff to do today.
I mean from our perspective we know Ruth is an alcoholic so the development is slightly worrying but honestly there’s nothing inherently wrong with getting drunk on your birthday. The night might not even turn out too bad depending on how Ruth handles her drinking and how Daisy responds to it. You know if you want to be optimistic about this.
Nothing inherently wrong with getting drunk on your birthday, but doing it while your date for the night is a huge red flag.
But mostly, Ruth is an alcoholic apparently falling of the wagon for the first time in months, so this way beyond “slightly worrying”. Ruth is not okay.
Bonding!
A country where we’ll elect just about anybody with money and notoriety to public office, scruples be damned.
Where half the country doesn’t want the other half to even vote.
Where we spend more on our military than all other developed nations combined.
Where gun ownership matters more that the lives of children.
Where more people (pretend to) read the Bible than anywhere else on Earth.
Where the people who run public schools are actively trying to make kids dumber.
Where cars racing in a circle and twenty-two guys crashing into each other are considered sports.
Where someone thought Facebook and Twitter were good ideas.
To be honest, Facebook was a fairly clever idea.
I never saw the point of being limited to a tweet. Just encouraged unnecessary links.
Never really saw the appeal of social media. Just another obligation I don’t want, into a Skinner Box hoop-juming cycle to take up effort, time and ego I don’t have, all for an over-glorified number of friends that aren’t reall.
Email is an obligation. Facebook is a firehouse you turn on when you want a drink.
At least alcohol isn’t smart enough to learn how to increase our habit.
Yet.
All of that, and people still find time to care about what numbers we use for how hot it is outside.
A country where both major parties really only serve the rich and the big corporations while pretending to actually care about the people.
Hell, one of them doesn’t even pretend to care about anything but hate and control anymore.
Yeah, and the other party stopped pretending they don’t have a public humiliation fetish.
One party is openly fascist. The other is trying to do something about it, but has marginal control over the Senate and a couple of holdouts unwilling to make the change we need.
That anyone can still blur the difference between the two after the last 4 years just boggles the mind.
TBF, about half of these count towards the UK as well. At least your guys crashing into each other are sensible enough to wear helmets.
Doesn’t stop them getting brain damage, does it?
Nothing good can come of the drinking, but I am actually onboard with Ruth and Jason’s Irate Immigrants (bro?)mance.
But also, if she does hook up with Jason rather than Daisy, poor Daisy.
Wait, I am not recalling, is Ruth into guys as well? Do I need to do a Ruth search to figure out in how much trouble these next couple of strips are about to be?…
Ruth is bi, yes.
We’ve only seen her with Jennifer on-screen, but according to her grandfather she had a boyfriend back home in Ontario.
harsh but also no lies detected
I live in Australia and once at Uni an American exchange student was collecting money for some fundraiser and I handed her a $5 note and she asked, “What note is this? I’m not familiar with your money yet.” and I was so confused like…read the number written on the note? That’s presumably how Americans tell their cash apart from each other right???
Nah. What we generally do is memorize the faces, and sometimes the backs. That’s why 100-dollar-bills are referred to as “Ben Franklins”, as an example.
Now… I read the number. But I also read the serial number, so I’m not exactly typical.
Y’know what, valid. I couldn’t tell you who’s on what bill off hand because I just look at the colour.
I think you may have been talking to what we Midwesterners call a “dipshit”.
Honestly I think here in Europe we have it pretty good, colour coding and size makes it easily recognizable long before you even look at the front.
You’ll never mistake a 5 euro note and a 50 euro note
See also: the failure of every single $1 coin effort in the US. We’ve either made them identical in size and color to another existing coin (the Susan B. Anthony dollar vs Washington quarter), or gone half-assed and not pulled bills from circulation (the presidential and Sacajawea dollars). If I had to guess, there are two stumbling blocks:
– No room in some coin drawers. Just eliminate the worthless penny and use its slot for $1 coins
– The Mint makes coins, but bills are printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing. There’s got to be some sort of territorial bickering going on there.
Of course, right now you know any change will be violently fought against by angry-at-the-world cretins who would pull stunts like smugly buying things with “real money” (the superseded currency).
I’ve occasionally encountered Usonians online who trot out the ‘wur the freest country in the world!’ bumf. My usual counterstrike is pointing out that American Exceptionalism is Juche for white people.
Upon investigation, the freedom they’re so enthusiastic about boils down to ‘being aggressively evangelical Christian in public’ and ‘guns’, not necessarily in that order.
and that’s all the freedom(s) anyone needs!
It *is* hard to oppress an armed population; it’s just the side effects that’ll kill you.
It is however apparently easy to get an armed population to oppress the rest of the country for you. It only took a little propoganda to get the faction that talks about needing guns to fight government tyranny to rally behind spurious claims of election fraud and an attempted insurrection.
Yeah, I think a lot of the mockery tends to be backlash to the increasingly inane nonsense the exceptionalist crowd tends to spout on a daily basis.
As European, I think most of us aren’t actually smug when talking about America’s failure to live up to its own ideals – we’re horrified about what’s going on.
Especially the regular mass shootings.
I think the way the Onion once phrased it actually sums up why that issue in particular bothers non-Americans a lot.
“No way to prevent this” says only country where this happens regularly.
The mockery tends to be aimed at the people who pretend this shit is normal and unavoidable, not at Americans as a whole, in my opinion.
I’ve got to say, after I read today’s comic, I expect the Fahrenheit/Celsius discussion, but I didn’t expect the passionate attacks on anyone criticizing the US on school shootings. Where the hell did that come from?
It comes from a place of deep embarrassment and defensiveness.
Your country’s capitalists are so unpatriotic, they constantly fraternize with my country’s capitalists!!!
Well that was definitely not supposed to go here. Oh well!
We’re the freest!
Except for sex workers.
Or drug use.
Or even property rights. (Try building something other than a detached single-family house in most places. Japan is much closer to a “free market” in property than the US.)
Nations who land people on the Moon use Fahrenheit, that’s who!
(I’ll just note here that metric measurements, including degrees Celsius, are NASA-standard.)
For future reference, do the Chinese use Fahrenheit?
But not their subcontractors!
Press F in chat for the poor Mars Climate Orbiter.
Fuck the moon. Nothin’ up there but rabbits, Ascians, and a giant three-fingered handprint.
To be fair, the handprint was an accident.
You mean NASA who actually uses metric and Celsius for their space travel ever since they started going to space? 🙂
Pfff, you believe in the moon?
Except NASA doesn’t use imperial units in space travel, and one of the times one of their contractors did, it didn’t go well.
The Soviets beat you to space though and they used metric. As does NASA.
This is entirely believable. Not that believable is the standard for comics, but I can see it and, what’s more, I like it. And more than Ruth/Daisy. The bonding over not being American while in the US can only be topped by the bonding of being American while not in the US.
Hm… what has always ticked me is this tendency of people living abroad of their own country to meet exclusively with their teammates. I mean, if your social need of meeting “foreign” people is fulllfilled with work, then you have a great work, but part of the thing, imo, is to meet also with different people.
I mean, it makes sense for economic and political migrants to meet with their peers as it’s most of the time not their chosen land they’re living in, but why would someone who’s chosen to live in another country not meet the people that live there? It’s not like a country is even a thing without these people in it.
I mean, the alternative is to ignore your countryfolk if you bump into them while abroad. You’re implying anyone ever said not to interact with the locals.
As someone living in a foreign country, it can be pretty daunting to overcome the cultural differences enough to make close friends. Not to mention that locals have their own social circle. Whereas another expat is more likely to be in the same boat as you.
Interesting fact, Fahrenheit aligns far more closely to human sensory perceptions than Celsius [meaning you can estimate against a single degree of Fahrenheit, rather than attempting to form a decimal estimation via Celsius, or over/under estimating by rounding to the nearest Celsius]. Similarly, there’s no rational basis for teaching Celsius over Kelvin [which uses the exact same formula, but has a different start point], as Kelvin is not only the scientific standard, but has more memorable key points (outside of water freezing and boiling) than Celsius’s adjusted numbers.
Rather, Celsius is taught out of a combination of tradition and a blind belief that teaching “this is where water boils and freezes” is not only relevant and valuable (despite it being exceptionally rare to also teach how elements such as minerals, elevation, etc can affect such), but easier for children to learn (thereby somehow justifying adults having learnt it).
In short, both Fahrenheit and Kelvin make more logical sense than Celsius, which is mostly abided by solely due to tradition and indoctrinated beliefs than due to logical factors. That’s not to say Fahrenheit is perfect, just that the “what even is Fahrenheit” argument makes about as much sense for non-Americans as sticking to imperial measurements does for Americans. Both are senseless adherences.
Ideally, we’d end up using Kelvin for science, and the Rankine (a similarly adjusted-to-absolute-zero variant of Fahrenheit, as Kelvin is to Celsius) for human temperature determinations. The conversion formula between Kelvin and Rankine is a MUCH easier to remember ( °R × 5/9 = °K ), and both R and K make inherent sense for usage.
Thus, to sum this all up, neither Fahrenheit nor Celsius using nations are using reasonable temperature measurements, but Celsius using ones have less justification for their adherence and stick to it as blindly, belligerently, and in as tradition-obsessed a manner as Americans stick to the Imperial measurements system.
Of course, the Imperial Measurement system is.. a special kind of nonsensical, so it still takes the crown as far as lacking justifiability. Seriously, am I multiplying by 3 this time? 4? 16? Why are we using Liters in the US anyway, and what was the formula for converting that into Quarts? WHAT EVEN IS NUMBERS.
Well, in any case, there’s always one thing we can be sure of.. Whatever measurement scale we use, the temperature in the midwest is still somehow going to suck. -.-
Since “(thereby somehow justifying adults having learnt it)” is perhaps not quite clear, let me restate that: Generally, teaching children a method because it’s easy [assuming that the water association really DOES help, which is uncertain], doesn’t typically justify the education creating a weakness in an adult’s development. In other words, it’s inefficient to teach Celsius, since it creates unnecessary conversions between Celsius and Kelvin and Rankine/Fahrenheit, relative to simply teaching Kelvin outright. More simply put, less effort early in exchange for far more effort later on is not exactly an ideal approach.
Also, for proper context, I’m originally from a Celsius-using nation, living in the American midwest. 😛
Sorry, you lost me about half down the rant. I never tried to estimate temperature by feel with the idea to get a technical accurate result, but, if I‘m used to one measure, I don’t see why the measure itself should affect my ability to reference it. Correctly identifying a tone of 440Hz is an ability that doesn‘t care if you say it’s 440Hz or tuning tone A or I call it some other thing that conveys that information to people it’s relevant to.
As to using Kelvin in everyday life? Why use a scale which lowest point is something no one really can imagine or understand, which, to boot, requires us to remember three digit numbers for everyday use, when we have a perfectly fine scale (or two) that uses reference points anyone can unterstand and just requires us to use two digits (maybe three for exceptional events if you are using Fahrenheit)?
If you live in a country, you get used to the system used there, just like you get used to the currency they use (yes, mentally I still reference D-Mark sometimes even though the Euro has been around for 20 years, but it’s just a habit related to finding things too expensive).
Few people need to convert Fahrenheit to centigrade and vice-versa and I bet while 30 years ago, at least half of those who needed to could do it in their heads in no time, nowadays that’s maybe about 10%, because everyone else just types „What‘s x Fahrenheit in centigrade‘ into their browser and is done.
“Interesting fact, Fahrenheit aligns far more closely to human sensory perceptions than Celsius [meaning you can estimate against a single degree of Fahrenheit, rather than attempting to form a decimal estimation via Celsius, or over/under estimating by rounding to the nearest Celsius]. ”
If you say so. To me, Fahrenheit numbers just feel exaggerated and ridiculous.
It’s not a very sensible argument. A person will always be able to tell (more or less) what temperature it is because they have Fahrenheit or Celsius built into their… cultural context so to speak. They Know what any particular temperature feels like. If I go outside and it’s scorching hot I’m like “Oof it’s 30+ today”. If it’s chilly and I need to put a sweater on I’m like “Oh, must be around 10 or below”. It doesn’t really matter which set of measuring systems you use.
Que? How are numbers not a sensible argument? o.O;;
I literally already covered your entire point in the first paragraph.
“Interesting fact, Fahrenheit aligns far more closely to human sensory perceptions than Celsius [**meaning you can estimate against a single degree of Fahrenheit, rather than attempting to form a decimal estimation via Celsius, or over/under estimating by rounding to the nearest Celsius**]”
If I recall the study correctly, an average human can recognize a deviation of temperature change based off.. I believe it was .85F? But it’s been a while since I read the study, so no firm push on that. And as I said, Celsius strictly doesn’t make sense based on the fact that you either have to choose between decimal formatting or less precise rounding. Neither is generally considered ideal, but it’s certainly a matter that won’t matter relative to specific contexts, sensory sensitivity deviations, or to those apathetic to the distinctions.
tl;dr version, your entire post agreed entirely with overall sentiments already expressed within my post, while presenting an argument already answered in my first paragraph. :/
Like I said, it doesn’t matter Because it’s based on subjective experience. A person knows and can operate such a measuring system by Instinct Because they were raised in it. They know, by instinct what temperature it is. They don’t Need hyper-specific measurements down to a decimal point. Have you ever actually met anyone saying “Oh it’s 20,53 degrees Celcius outside.”, of course not. People don’t need anything this specific unless it’s for use in science.
Do you use regularly half-degrees in Celsius, though? If humans can tell temperature differences of .85F (or R), which is .47C (or K), you surely ought to use the more specific measurement. But since it’s close to half a degree Celsius in difference (ie half a Kelvin), it’s pretty sensible to just use half-degrees to increase the fineness of the gradations.
I do think, while of course whether 30 degrees sounds like it “should” be hot or cold is mostly dependent on what temperature scale you were raised to use, there is something nice about temperatures that humans generally encounter falling between 0 and 100 degrees (more or less). Although perhaps it’s somewhat nullified by the fact that your range of experience depends on where you live… I’m in the US South, so a temperature below twenty deg F… that is, less than -6.5 deg centigrade… is just about unimaginable 😛 Still, considering climate change and the Texas freeze, it might not be long until people everywhere have to get accustomed to temperatures of both 0 and 100 deg F… x.x
(I will say that I do wish zero degrees corresponded to freezing! That’s a very convenient reference point. Perhaps could outweigh the “human experience” argument, even. I don’t think the boiling point of water comes into play nearly as often as the freezing point, though, either in human experience [snow!] or science, from what I remember of university chemistry labs. Perhaps a temperature scale of F – 32… well, that might be a little silly 😛 )
Yeah that’s kind of the point of my other reply. The temperature range I experience is somewhere between -30 to 35 degrees Celsius. In Winter it used to be around -10/20 on average with -30 being relatively rare though not uncommon.
“Interesting fact, Fahrenheit aligns far more closely to human sensory perceptions than Celsius [**meaning you can estimate against a single degree of Fahrenheit, rather than attempting to form a decimal estimation via Celsius, or over/under estimating by rounding to the nearest Celsius**]”
No, it really doesn’t unless (mostly, but not universally) you live somewhere using Fahrenheit. Like I said, Fahrenheit numbers sound ridiculous and exaggerated to me. Most people don’t estimate ‘It’s 78 degrees out’ when I talk to Americans. It’s ‘Oh, I dunno, somewhere in the 70s-80s’. That’s not different than me going ‘Iunno, 35-40ish?’
Yeah! Also if you live in a country with very cold winters, like I do, «water freezing» is ABSOLUTELY a useful point to determine where to measure from. Below zero degrees outside means taking time to remove ice from the car and possibly put on spikes on my shoes if the ground is icy. Around zero means I need to stock up on wool and warm shoes. Fahrenheit zero being around -17 celsius makes no sense to me as the temperature can get colder than that around here, so it’s not like it is a low point either. I am just very confused.
Okay, that seems bizarrely disassociated at first glance, but I assume you meant that by having an easy to reference temperature you know when to prepare for certain weather conditions, without either going outside or looking at advisories?
Again, there’s an issue with general education there that’d need to be addressed, but if all you’re intending to use it for is a ballpark (rather than, say, survival or cooking-associated purposes), then that’s not high priority.
Your argument is simply in having easy to reference places for freezing and boiling, but those are going to be easy to reference no matter what. There’s no difficulty at all in remembering X70- water freezes at 270K and boils at 370 [technically, 73.15 for both, but the entire argument I’m addressing is based in rough associations, so I assume that isn’t an issue].
Rather, as Eldritchy noted, we’re going to intuitively learn temperature ranges naturally regardless of system used, so even if you don’t learn precise freezing or boiling points, you’re going to still have exactly the same grasp of when to engage in certain wardrobe choices or lifestyle activities.
Compared to the loss associated with not being able to naturally associate to the region’s scientific standard of measurement, it’s a bizarre justification, as the loss exceeds the (rather dubious, and even somewhat superstitious) gain. Remember, conversions in science are HEAVILY discouraged, as a simple mistake can lead to disasterous and/or expensive misfortunes. So not only is it an inconvenience, it’s an additional potential risk in the sciences. Of course, not as big an issue as converting between imperial and metric, but nevertheless, that’s why there’s pushback against Celsius.
Now, mind the entire argument on this front relates to objective benefits, relative to usage. The only reason Kelvin is pushed over Celsius is because it’s the standard and also because the concept of “absolute zero” as a reference point is appreciated in science. Rankine’s only real push is due to the similar zero association, and that it makes conversion to Kelvin much simpler.
Simply put, if it was possible (it flat out isn’t, as too many technical systems base in the current measurement systems) to switch to an entirely new system, there are better potential options that could ideally fit all desires presented. However, since that’s not possible, discussions on the matter associate to the present systems, relative to their ubiquity of usage, form of usage, and benefit relative to usage.
Again, here are the benefits:
* Fahrenheit has a more natural [relative to human perceptions] scaling between temperatures. Ie, the +/- factor is deemed to have benefit. There may be a more natural scaling possible, but of the existing prevelent systems, Fahrenheit is the only one with that advantage. Fahrenheit has no benefits in regards to simplicity of reference points.
* Kelvin and Rankine benefit based on having an absolute reference point. This also provides the benefit of straightforward conversion between these two systems.
* Kelvin benefits from being dominant in scientific fields.
* Celsius benefits solely off a historic principle of associating to 0 and 100, back when temperature associations weren’t deeply ingrained and numerical education was limited (making having clear reference points for association useful).
Celsius was always a slapped together system, as suggested by it initially (until the 1740s, prior to it being heavily marketed) having its 0 and 100 associations swapped. Kelvin (the only unit of temperature in international standards, as celsius is listed as a reference point relative to K in that) only uses the Celsius scaling due to Celsius being prevelant at the time Lord Kelvin determined absolute zero.
As I noted, there’ve been systems created since that are considered better, but unfeasible to implement. As far as Celsius, it’s frowned upon by international / scientific standards [relative ot Kelvin], but retained just because of its common usage. Were it easy to reeducate, there are more benefits associated with teaching Kelvin than with teaching Celsius. The water argument is generally pushed off as being nothing more than cultural association [ie, indoctrinated thinking, as the (uncertain) importance of that association is weirdly emphasized in European schools] from those perspectives.
I haven’t personally seen any validations for Celsius, but do let me know if they exist, as my point here is to promote objective analysis, not in blind (dis)preferencing.
In summary, Celsius is the only measurement system in meaningful use that has any disfavoritism towards it. Fahrenheit, by comparison, is generally slammed on simply because it ISN’T Celsius- which is fundamentally the same logic those using imperial measurement use against the metric system, despite the overwhelming superiority of the latter.
Honestly the 0 in Celcius is pretty significant because it’s a transition point between two completely different weather states.
What I mean is that people keep a close eye on it for a lot of different reasons: need for warmer clothing, road conditions, how budding and growing plants will react to it, danger of people freezing to death, needing to focus on keeping the houses warm. It’s basically a warning point, it says that you need to be more careful from now on. I feel like Winter might be a bit more significant in Europe because we live considerably further up north than most Americans.
Certainly people can just look at -17 in Fahrenheit and have the same reactions but as someone who grew up with Celsius it just feels more natural to me.
I gave it a bit more thought and it might just be that Fahrenheit is more suited for the warmer, more temperate climates. The 0-100 for Fahrehnheit is more aimed at “How pleasant or unpleasant the weather is right now.”
Celsius on the other hand is aimed more at extreme differences between temperatures with focus on the transition point between those the two weather states (The 0). Like the thermometer which I have outside the window goes from -50 to 50 and it’s not an unreasonable scale, especially if you live in Russia for example where you can have 40 degrees in Summer and -40/60 in the Winter.
Agreed, it might not make as much sense if you live in places that get far below freezing, but in warmer climes like here in the American South, it seems pretty sensible to have 100 as an upper limit of “normal” temperatures and 0 as … well, if it ever reaches 0, I may never go outside again! But at least cold temperatures are on the low end of the scale. (But yeah 0 for freezing seems a lot better, doesn’t it! Often temperatures are measured below freezing when it gets into snowy temps, and you have to think for a second to remember that twelve below is probably 20 degrees F rather than -12 deg F! (At least my dumb ass usually does, lol.)
Native Us dude here. Where I live it can be as cold as -10F in the winter to over 100F in the summer. But most times in casual conversation I’m not specifically saying a temperature, but more of a range, if say my wife asks what the weather is. “It’s in the 70’s today” is the usual type of answer. In this way, Fahrenheit in daily use is a 0-10 scale for how comfortable he weather is.
But it’s also what I’m used to. If I’m somewhere that uses Celsius, I know a few set points and extrapolate from there – 0 is water freezing, 25 is roughly room temp, and 37 is body temp. If someone says it’s 15, its somewhere between freezing and room temp so I’d better get a jacket!
“If you say so. To me, Fahrenheit numbers just feel exaggerated and ridiculous.”
I’m not sure about exaggerated, but both systems feel rather ridiculous under the right consideration. Fahrenheit definitely has the more ridiculous background behind its creation, if you look into how its scaling and reference points were calculated, however.
Again, my sole points in these posts is that Fahrenheit isn’t worse than Celsius*, that Celsius feels unnecessary relative to Kelvin, and that a swap to Kelvin and then to Rankine could make for a much easier overall conversion formula between imperial and metric.
* You can argue against better; It really amounts to if you prefer easy water related references or prefer not having to make half-degree references (keeping in mind that F is just over half a C, given their 5/9ths ratio). Ultimately, they’re fairly comparable systems, and precision relative to usage (in this case, human senses) is generally the favorable point when engaging in such comparisons.
Well, if I was pushing a point based on personal preferences, rather than in simply trying to reference existing information to simply point out that Celsius isn’t superior to Fahrenheit (unlike the metric system on the whole over the imperial system on the whole), I’d be pushing for a different system altogether, over the C/F based ones. :S
tl;dr version: Fahrenheit isn’t necessarily great, but Celsius is definitely not superior.
In regards to Celsius vs Kelvin, the temperature in the UK will usually range from about -5°C to about 35°C. Changing that range to 268K to 308K definitely seems less intuitive.
And I definitely doubt “most humans can identify temperate to within one degree of accuracy”. Depending on other factors 19 degrees C can be t-shirt weather or require a light jacket.
They feel exaggerated because summers with Fahrenheit end up somewhere in 70s-100. I’m always like ‘WTF, you should be dead’. Again, because Fahrenheit is not inherently more intuitive to people on the day to day. People who say it is usually either grow up with it or moved to the US and got used to using it.
Just to pick up the maybe most important point of my post above: if I rant about one measuring system/currency vs another, never mind the facts. It’s about how a I feel about them, what my mind or emotions relate to in connection with using them.
To Ruth, living in Canada with it’s different temperature system is related to being happy and the move to the US with its other system relates to her parents‘ death. Nor sure why Jason goes into it though, maybe he would have preferred to stay in Britain but that’s not possible by his father is still alive?
Huh, kind of opposite parallels there…
For everyone commenting “poor Daisy”, might I note this possibility :
Bisexual triad slipshine?
(Preferably without poopin’ or pukin’.)
(Man, that clause is even creepier without context.)
Polyamorous love >>>>>>>>>>>>> Ship war.
Is Daisy bi though?
I’m not educated on this particular subject. Does it matter if Daisy’s bi, if Ruth is in the middle, so to speak? I’d assume it works sorta like a V, more than a triangle.
Pretty sure that poly partners’ orientations really only have to match their own partners, and that it’s normally a V instead of a triangle, but an OT3 where everyone is attracted/dating everyone else sounds fun, doesn’t it?
Although for a triad, of course, it’s possible someone would be uncomfortable — but not necessary, of course! To paraphrase Lonely Island, it’s not straight if it’s a three-way. With a bi girl in the middle, there’s some leeway! lol
i don’t really have personal experience in being in an official poly relationship though so
I don’t think so?
But maybe she doesn’t mind being in a polycule
She was into the polyamorous squad in the Walkyverse, but that was all women at the time.
Now I want them to be freinds
I wonder if Daisy will find a loudly drunk Ruth as attractive as she does the quiet, depressive version?
Confidence is sexy. Loudness is nature’s substitute for confidence.
Having more fun with somebody other than you on the date though, not so much.
Daisy’s taking a shit. If it’s a problem for Ruth to respect her own time and find a way to stay occupied, then tough. In Daisy’s place, I’d love to exit the bathroom and find my date in an improved mood.
Would you love to find your date drunk? Cause that’s where we’re going.
I mean, it would take the option of naked mattress-wresting off the table for sure, but I’d probably join in on the drinking. More than one way for a date to go.
Even if you were told by her ex not to let her drink, implying they have an alcohol problem?
If we wanted to go out drinking, fine. If I came back after a few minutes away and found her in the bar pounding shots, that’s a whole different story.
Especially, as BBCC says, if I’d had warning.
the only good thing about fahrenheit is that you can say its 69 degrees
You can in Celsius too if you are dedicated enough!
Not for long.
It IS a rare temperature in °C though. It’s not a temperature air gets to in nature. It’s not hot enough to prepare most foods, it’s too hot for dough to rise, it’s too cold for a sauna and too hot for a turkish bath.
I believe you can boil eggs at 69°C and kill the germs without changing the structure of the proteins, but that’s about it. I’d have to double-check that to be sure.
even in fiction British people can’t go 5 minutes without mocking school shootings when talking bad about america.
I mean, we did have that one straight year where there was a school shooting damn near every day. It’s literally a fad in this stupid backwoods hellhole.
And it’s less that people mock the shootings, but the fact that there’s a a sizable number of people (including people in power) who treat this as a) normal and b) unavoidable.
And the same people defending that pretty horrible status quo simultaneously hold up the US as the greatest country on Earth.
In all honesty the problem isn’t guns but the people who use them. I heard of at least several attacks on school in China where the assailant murdered a bunch of kids with a knife.
The focus should be on the assailants, not the means. I once did a bit of looking through and majority of school shooters were mentally ill. Improving the mental care should be a priority here.
No, guns are definitely the problem, at least the easy access to them.
Somebody who wants to kill will always find some kind of weapon to use, but easy access to guns definitely makes it easier.
That is a good point though there is the issue that majority of crimes in US are committed with illegally obtained arms so not sure how regulations for regular people would be able to prevent that.
Also, even for the crimes committed with illegally obtained guns, part of the reason it’s so easy to get guns illegally is that the country is so full of them it’s easy for some to go missing and appear on the black market.
That is true, though you can hardly do anything about that, trying to de-gun US is pretty much impossible.
In the short term, yes.
It might take decades, but it would be possible if we could stop adding to the problem.
Okay but how do you deal with people who need guns for their own protection? Like most people living outside of cities who, if they call police, will have to wait for half an hour or so?
How about a limit, like one gun per person, or two guns per household? Also nobody needs an AK47 or whatever, so restrict machine gun sales. Military can have ’em i guess but nobody else should need them.
Even people living outside of cities don’t really need guns for their own protection. It’s a myth. The dangers are greatly exaggerated (usually oddly enough by scaring rural people about the cities) and the protection offered by a gun is even more exaggerated.
With possible exceptions for cases where there is a specific known threat to an individual, having a gun in the house increases your risks – of suicides, of domestic murders and accidental shootings, far more than it protects you from some amorphous dangers.
This is untrue. The majority of guns used to commit crimes are obtained legally. It’s also been shown that when a state has tougher gun control laws, gun-related crimes go down in surrounding states too. Also, the majority of mass shooters are NOT mentally ill. That’s a stereotype and a rather ableist one.
Mhm, sorry I was wrong the mass shootings were done mostly with legally obtained ones.
Yeah, see, Daddy buys his gun nice and legal, and when something goes slightly less than perfectly for Little Billy Whitebread, all he has to do is “borrow” it for a few hours.
Hell, you don’t even need to borrow one if you’re already legally an adult. Even if the most cursory background check would field a fucking color guard of red flags, depending on the state or neighbors’ laws, it can be disturbingly easy to get a gun. I seem to recall at least one mass shooting where the perpetrator reportedly bought their weapons shortly beforehand.
In the coldest possible terms, though? It’s harder to kill a lot of people with a knife than it is with a gun, particularly the assault rifles that have been used in some of the most deadly shootings of late. They fire fast, and they fire a lot of bullets before needing reloading, whereas a knife pretty much has to be used at close range (ie, where someone could conceivably wrestle it away or otherwise subdue their attacker) and one person at a time. An attempted mass murderer with a knife will be less deadly than the mass murderer with a gun, which equals more people alive at the end. Even discounting assault rifles, automatic and semi-automatic weapons, guns can still be effective at a much wider range than knives.
Yes, cracking down on guns would be an imperfect solution because people will try to get them anyway. That doesn’t mean we abdicate responsibility for doing ANYTHING about them, it means we use the imperfect solution and keep looking for ways to improve it.
At least the media finally stopped deifying the perpetrators after that. I think the attention and “fame” was just encouraging additional shitheads to go on rampages of their own.
Either that or we just became numb to school shootings, which is just depressing to think about.
It’s the numbness thing, sadly. And the deification resumed after about two weeks, just like everything shitty resumes after everyone’s done high-fiving each other’s cocks over how great they feel for retweeting some streamer’s milquetoast opinion.
well if America could go 5 minutes without having another shooting
*snickers from Australia at all these snarks*
People in glass houses shouldn’t throw eggs, mate.
One thing that will always boggle my mind is how the 45th President once complained about taking in immigrants from countries like Africa instead of ones like Europe. All without not only realizing how low key offensive that was but also that no one from Europe in theit right mind is going to give up living in a country with prepaid tax-funded health care and education too migrate to a country where you have a high chance of getting shot on any given day and being put in debt from medical bills if you survive.
[laughs in Polish half-year+ queues when you have cancer]
People from Western Europe, yeah. Central and Eastern? Oh they’d love to move to US.
You say that, but good luck getting any treatment without bankrupting yourself (unless you’re rich).
No difference between Poland and US and at least you can make money in US and then go back to Poland with them.
Very debatable considering the state of the job market overall.
Yeah it does kinda suck now…
You think he didn’t realize how offensive that was? Or that it was “low-key”?
That was the “shithole countries” discussion.
I believed him to be to stupid to know half the shit that’s coming out of his mouth. Though even if he did I doubt he would care considering how much of a jackass he is.
Well, my state legislators just passed constitutional carry where any idiot can carry a gun with no license or training, and yet as hard as it may be to understand, no-one has shot me yet, though of course the year is still young. My insurance pretty much covers what Medicare doesn’t and whenever I go in for a regular doctor’s visit, the additional cost is under what the insurance allocates and they send me a small check. Not everybody is so fortunate, but I’m not at all tempted to leave.
If you think that in the US you have high odds of being shot on any particular day and that medical bills bankrupt most people, you should maybe switch to a different news source. None of which helps the people who do live on the edge of disaster, where I lived a number of years myself.
And Ruth begins to feel dizzy again. Jennifer had told Daisy not to make her drink and now… Daisy will be mad at herself for this, she will feel guilty and maybe she will have to drag Ruth around losing any interest and sympathy for her. The efforts made by Ruth in the last few months are gone. This is a disaster! Jason has failed, everyone has failed!
Jason is there to sell booze. How has he failed?
Hey Willis! How do you like the political storm that’s been brewing here?
I suspect Willis knows his audience pretty well.
And yet he puts up with us.
Oh, no. I think I ship it. Damn it!
As an Irish man I relate to this so much
The metric system
Use it please
It’s not that hard
Texas is 0.8 kilomiles from North to South and 0.77 kilomiles from East to West.
This strip really makes me wish more of my fellow Americans realized just how not-awesome-at-all this country actually is.
Here is a thing from a Polish person. Thanks for standing up against Communism. If it wasn’t for you, we wouldn’t be free.
@Eldritchy:
You’re not free now, with an anti-democratic extremist government that silences dissent and suppresses the opposition with every means short of violence.
Which is already a significant improvement over living in fear of Soviet armored columns driving into my country to beat people into compliance to the Soviet Union.
Don’t overreact, current politic clique is doing some shady shit but so did all the other ones. It came, it will go. This kind of shit is inevitable after 200 years of not being to decide things for yourself.
@Eldritchy:
You’re looking at it through a very distorted lens. Communism brought more oppression, but also improvements in living standards and more rights for women. PiS is establishing a right-wing one party state, which is just as bad as a left-wing one. Don’t underreact – you’re surrendering your freedom to an evil, corrupt and anti-democratic regime, and shrugging it all off by saying “oh well, but communism”. That’s the exact same attitude the communists used in the past – sure, bad things happen, but it’s not like it’s as bad as fascism, so everyone should just ignore it.
Communism murdered thousands of our leaders, intellectuals, officers and replaced pretty much our entire leadership with party-obedient puppets. Every time “But Communists did good” is brought up I say “It could have been done WITHOUT all the bloodshed and terror”. It’s like saying “Yay we beat HIV… by shooting everyone infected with it in the head.”
All I hear from you is “I support Imperialism, Colonialism and destruction of Indigenous Culture”.
As for PiS, they are on the verge of losing majority power. It came, it will go.
@Eldritchy:
Your strawman-argument doesn’t stick. Re-read my post. I’ve just explained that the communists used the exact same reasoning you’re using to defend right-wing abuse. Maybe you should also study your countries pre-WWII history. The Piłsudski-dictatorship set the stage.
You want to view one side through rosy-tinted glasses, the other as pure evil, and employ strawmen when challenged. That strongly suggests you need to broaden your perspective considerably.
As for PiS, they may be down from the last election, but they are still by far the largest party in the polls and seem unlikely to give up power.
You know what… No. I was having a good day, I made a positive message, I did not pick any fights and so I’m not going to ruin my day fighting fights that are not mine.
Have a good day.
Is it really a strawman though?
Like I agree with you, I see communism as having the potential for good, even though sovietism is clearly not. Which would mean that the argument is a semantic one.
But like, what you’re doing here is really weird. As a third party it reads like gaslighting. Like you’re saying that someone’s lived experience isn’t real: it’s a strawman. And that’s….that’s fucked up. I’d be concerned about a country slipping and falling to an authoritarian regime on the right because they ended up blaming the oppression on the economic part of the system, but this isn’t really the way to go about that.
I’m cool with calling people who lived through the red scare in NA out because they’re victims of propaganda, but anyone in eastern europe who lived through that period actually suffered at soviet hands and I don’t think calling them out is justified at that point.
Maybe don’t tell people who had to live in fear that it improved their lives and they need a broader perspective. It makes you look as bad as the idiots that argue that the descendants of people brought over here as slaves should be grateful because it improved their lives. It’s a pretty despicable position to take both ways.
When you’re defending Communism to a Pole, you’re defending Stalin and Hitler dividing up Poland.
By all the non-existent gods, I wish the US would covert to the metric system and Celsius temperature. All the imperial measurements does for us is to hold back our kids, and screw up cooking measures by being unnecessarily complicated.
We got close back in the 70s, but I think the plug got pulled due to public outcry.
Of course now if they tried, we’d have 24/7 screeching about how “tHeY” are “taking away your inches and pounds”. *facepalm*
In all honesty switching to metric would be a pretty significant undertaking considering that US infrastructure, construction etc. etc. are built around the Imperial units.
I think a big part of it at the time was the automotive industry. Everything was based around fractional units.
We had a few transition years where body hardware switched to metric, but legacy engines (cough small block V8s cough) still used imperial, and service manuals had soft conversions between the two. This left us with wacky crap like 13/16ths SAE sockets.
I think they finally sorted things out sometime in the intervening decades.
Jason’s new look is really nice.
Any joke that Americans make about other countries’ money can be rebutted with “You have Andrew Jackson in your bills.”
@JBento:
Jackson was a fairly unpleasant fellow with buffoonish tendencies and a wickedly racist attitude towards native Americans…like the vast majority of Americans in his day. He also greatly democratized American politics – the common people would not have had a voice in American politics without the Jacksonian Democratic party (and their opponents were just as murderous and evil towards Native Americans – they just acted very remorseful about it whenever such a show was required).
History is rarely simple, people are rarely pure good or pure evil.
None of that really washes out the fact that the guy engaged in ethnic cleansing (to put it mildly) and told the Supreme Court to piss off when they told him to stop it.
Well, at least he’s actually finally being removed from the bill.
And Hitler did some nice paintings and was nice to dogs. Your point?
Like, imagine describing the dude responsible for the Trail of Tears as “fairly unpleasant”.
Well, they did add “wickedly racist”, but the “greatly democratized American politics” part goes well beyond “some nice paintings and nice to dogs”.
How to balance people who did some horrible things and some great ones is not a trivial question.
If you want to go that route, Hitler also revitalised the entirety of German industry, lifting the country from the absolute dreck that it was after the end of WW1. But the important part is that he DEvitalised a bunch of innocent people.
Expats bonding at bars is a thing.
And what’s about traditional american food? So full of fat…
Who uses Farenheit? British people, that’s who. Like, all the time. I mean, mostly British people over the age of fifty, admittedly, but it’s still a weird thing for Jason to use as a slam against the US.
Americans have this strange idea that the UK is more than nominally on the metric system. The UK public is roughly divided into people who like the metric system but were never taught it properly, people who don’t like the metric system because they were never taught it properly, and people who hate the metric system because it was invented by foreigners.
In 2007 we were given special permission by the EU to stop pretending we were ever going to convert our road signs to kilometres, because we clearly weren’t.
Jason isn’t over 50 though. And aside from getting to go “the temperature has hit 100” when it’s really hot, almost everyone does the weather in Celcius. Like, no-one in my office has any idea how warm 84°F is.
(But yeah, we absolutely use miles all the time. Apparently for people who record their runs on apps like Strava it’s a 50/50 split between those you use minutes per mile and minutes per kilometer for pacing.)
Honestly I think Britons just use Celsius so we can’t make fun of them when they complain about it being hot and it’s like 75 degrees.
Yeah, I wasn’t entirely clear, but my thinking was “It makes sense for Jason to use Celsius, because he’s young, but he still wouldn’t use Farenheit as an example of a weird thing Americans do, because his dad probably uses it.” My mum certainly does, because she complains that the car thermometer keeps resetting to Celcius.
I should probably also admit at this point that I’m dyscalculic, and don’t really have a firm grasp of either temperature scale.
And thinking about it further, given it’s Ruth who gives the Fahrenheit example (hooray, I finally remembered it has two “h”s) and Jason just says “Right?”, it wouldn’t make sense for him to add a bunch of caveats to it anyway. Objection withdrawn, your honour.
I’m Canadian and I remember when they started teaching metric in school here. I remember the speed signs changing from mph to kph. But we are a weird mix of metric and imperial here. We never fully moved over. Temps are all in Celsius for most except those of the older generations unless you are talking oven temps then you typically go with Fahrenheit. If you are in construction everything is in feet and inches for the most part but distances are in meters and kilometers. In Ontario I’ve noticed stores using grams and kilograms as the primary for weights but yet prices in fliers are per lb quite often. I haven’t the foggiest idea what anything is in Fahrenheit unless it’s oven temps where the opposite is true. We do baking measurements in teaspoons and cups though I personally move to metric (easier to calculate) when doing conversions. Imperial measurements (feet and inches) are the devil…I hate fractions. Metric measurements (mm, cm, m) are much better for measurements. Just a strange mix of both.
I blame our close proximity to the US for the hybrid weirdness.
Also don’t forget most people measure heights in feet and inches and not cm!
Strangely, I think it’s the weebs who are switching over to metric on the height front. Since Japan measures height on metric, anyone who gets deep enough that they care about character and/or seiyuu height are eventually gonna find it easier to convert their own height into cm and memorize that, then to continuously convert all of their heights into ft’in”. Particularly the moment they realize that their metric height is on their ID (if they’ve updated it since their growth spurt)
I am also Canadian and I have never heard an older person use Fahrenheit. My grandparents and all their friends use Celsius.
Oh man, the bonding between these two is so fun to watch 🙂 I think, between this comic and Fire Emblem: Three Houses, my favorite part of an ensemble cast is when the writer can pair up disparate characters and have them bounce off each-other in a way that surprises you with how much they have in common.
Metric paper sizes make a hell of a lot more sense than “Letter”, “Legal”, “8×10”, “Tabloid”…
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=pUF5esTscZI
Huh. Jason’s hot today.
I choose to leave these feelings unresolved.
Hello, Danny.
This will end in tears and maybe a hospital visit. Daisy and Ruth should not have gone anyplace with a bar. Not the sexy birthday we were promised. DYW.
Sad but true. Plus, Jennifer will blame Daisy for this.
We have Tons. Not pansy ‘tonnes’. Real tons. Long AND short.
Get back soon Daisy. I don’t like where this is going.
Every country has their downsides and shameful history, no doubt about that.
But when the only way to stop school shootings was to do at-home learning, that’s when you know we’re forked.
Man I have a feeling i know where this is going but i just want these two to be friends. Remove the alcohol and this seems like something very good for both of them
Hey, leave our Fahrenheit alone! What’s next, I suppose you’ll be wanting us to use metric TIME!?
But consider how convenient decidays and only 10 timezones worldwide would be.
3 countries, here. Planning on a fourth, soon.
She’s drunk 🙁
Uhhh trying again
I will stand by Fahrenheit as a better temperature scale than Celsius if for no other reason than the smaller degrees make it more precise. The Celsius people just prattle on and on about how “convenient” it is because of simple base 10 counting but that is SO arbitrary, in fact it only works at sea level, since “freezing at 0, boiling at 100” for water can easily change depending on local air pressure.
I mean, yeah it changes but not enough for me to think of it as a reason for concern. It’s not like the weather is ever stable enough for precision to mean much (particularly at zero), but being able to tell if it’s gonna be cold or not at a glance just by checking if there’s a – before the number is a feature I really appreciate.
That and I only have to remember what each 10s feels like over 7 levels (30 to -40), whereas in farenheit the same range would be 14 levels (90 to -40). Might mean less further south where cold doesn’t play as much a role in the climate.
Everyone should just use the Potrzebie System.
Yea, but WE don’t have a monarchy!
Really, how many people of succeeding generations of the same families achieve political power?
At what level?
Only a handful of Presidents related over the centuries. Two Bushes, John and John Quincy Adams, the Harrisons. Zachary Taylor and James Madison were distantly related, as were the two Roosevelts.
At lower levels there are more examples of course, but it’s still a small minority of politicians at any level.
I think Robo means lower down the scale – the name that springs to mind when I hear “US political dynasty” is Kennedy. Of course, this is in great part a reflection of the most-definitely-not-limited-to-the-US phenomenon “people with money have much easier access to the halls of power”.
That’s certainly true, but even lower down the scale, there are still far more people with no dynastic connections than with them. They stand out because they’re rare.
Even with that shortlist, that’s what? A fifth of them? Decent chunk.
I spent several years living outside of the US courtesy of Uncle Sam, mostly in Canada and North Africa, and there are a few things about the US that need fixing, like health care, and extrajudicial executions (lynching for those in the back), but there is a lot that the US shares in needing to fix, like automobile-centric infrastructure.
I can’t speak to North Africa, but compared to other developed countries, the US is *particularly* car-centric. There’s a lot of room between the average postwar US on one end or Tokyo and Amsterdam on the other.
The best answer to that is a robust public transit system, that most credible estimates say would pay for itself four times over in economic growth, by allowing people who can’t afford a car to get to workplaces farther away.
Unfortunately, billionares like the Koch brothers are deeply invested in most aspects of the self-owned automobile economy (highways, gas stations, etc), and deliberately crush most initiatives to build such mass transit systems that they cannot themselves profit from.
There are valid reasons for a lot of the hatred directed at 1%ers; many of them are quite content to run the entire country into the ground just to squeeze a little more blood out of everyone else’s stones.
I’m happy to hate on the plutocrats when they deserve but they’re not the big problem, for once. The problem with public transit in most of the (sub)urban US is that the population density is too low for economical service, and often you also have tons of cul-de-sac layouts that make an efficient system design difficult. And this goes back to zoning codes, vigorously defended by the ordinary American homeowner. (Those codes also drive much of the US housing crisis.) When you require single-family houses on 1/4 acre lots, and all businesses to be surrounded by seas of parking, you can’t really have good transit, let alone transit that’s tempting relative to driving.
Also note that the goal isn’t a 100% transit life as an alternative to a 100% car life. The non-car life centers around walking or bicycling for many needs, with transit extending accessible range (especially to get to work.) And again, that human-scale walkability has been outlawed by zoning laws, at the behest of the American homeowner and driver.
Jason: WHAT?
Ruth: Did we just become best friends?
Jason: YEP!
Just loved your avatar.
So, in a vacuum, I don’t think Celsius or Fahrenheit are better than the other. All the pleading about Fahrenheit being intuitive is probably just down to familiarity; OTOH Celsius doesn’t have the advantages that metric units of length, mass, volume, etc. do. And for Real Science you need an absolute scale like Kelvin.
OTOH again, 96% of the world’s population uses Celsius and other metric units, so this American who likes to travel has put effort into trying to be bilingual in measurements.
Kind of like non-American’s have to be “unit-of-measure bilingual” to watch 80% of all TV and Movies produced in English?
You’ll live. 😉
I dunno, many non-Americans I know in the US have refused to learn “your stupid units”, so I question how ‘bilingual’ viewers are. Besides, how often do units come up in media?
I dunno if celsius based thermostats do half degrees but if not then one advantage of fahrenheit is that each degree is equal to half a degree of celsius. Is there any advantage to celsius other than being a bit more intuitive in situations where you’re thinking about freezing or boiling water?
Why are you asking me, when I said “I don’t think Celsius or Fahrenheit are better than the other.”?
There’s nothing really wrong with it, I just like to clown it. 😛
Oooh, this made this Canadian’s day! 😀
(What can I say, we’re not always nice.)
Dave could just continue this conversation for the next two weeks of update strips. There’s enough material for it. 😛
I note Americans don’t seem to mind the metric system when it comes to the Olympics
Man have I gotten in some arguments over the convivence of Imperial system.
Everyone’s got an argument over how much more ‘normal’ whatever they grew up with was, it becomes ingrained and ‘default’ to them. But trying to imagine beyond that takes some critical thinking.
And critically:
Metric is based off of water.
Imperial is based off of humans.
Metric is far, FAR better for scientific or other ‘official’ measurements.
Imperial is better for general human relativity.
10° difference in Celsius at a time jumps from “A freezing winter night” to “Chilly” to “Hot, bordering on uncomfortably hot.” At a point 10 degrees jumps from “A summer day” to “fatal heat.”
10° difference in Fahrenheit jumps between freezing and cold, cold and chilly, chilly and temperate, temperate and warm, etc etc etc.
Or just going 0-100…
0 in C is “it’s really cold,” vs 100 is “you’re VERY dead.”
0 in F is “it’s REALLY cold,” vs 100 is “it’s REALLY hot.”
50lbs is the weight of an average child. 100 the weight of an average teenager. 150 is smack in the middle of a healthy weight of an average heighted adult.
A cup is a small drink. A pint is a large drink. Quart, Half Gallon, and Gallon are small, medium, and large ‘container of liquids’ larger than you’d generally consider drinking in a sitting.
The only one I’d say generally doesn’t matter is ‘distance’… except any time I’ve heard someone’s height listed officially in metric they do it in cm. Centimeters? No decimeters with cm in change, no “He’s about 18dm tall”, no, he’s “180cm tall.” I’m all for meters and kilometers over yards and miles, but why measure humans in freaking centimeters!?
If you’re ‘used to’ metric and it’s casual to you, great. More power to you. You never have to translate between when jumping from scientific to ‘human’.
But Imperial really is more ‘human relative’ in nearly all cases. Based on humanities general ‘base 10’ numbering, or scaling things 1-100, it’s where we fit.
Somehow 96% of the human race gets by with metric.
Jason: “You’re so beautiful when you hate
the worldAmericans.”A) I wish our money WAS more colorful. Throw in some more Blue, Teal, Creamsickle Orange, Lemon Yellow, and Salmon! And maybe it should include more landmarks instead of people. (Grand Canyon, Devil’s Tower, Old Faithful, Gateway Arch, Half Dome, Hoover Dam, The Everglades, Empire State Building, Arches National Park, etc.)
B) I use Kelvin personally. 293 K is my favorite temp.
A) also, different sizes so to be friendlier to people with impaired vision
I think I saw it on Tumblr, but someone had reimagined/redesigned the US currency. I think the bills were in different sizes, with smaller denominations being the smallest, and they had interesting information on each one, like the bill of rights, or when slavery was abolished/women could vote/poc could vote. It looked cool!
Oh, here it is:
http://blog.iso50.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/dollar_redesigned.jpeg
It was the winner for a contest to redesign the US dollar, the 2010 Richard Smith’s Dollar ReDe$ign Project, by Dowling Duncan.
This is a pretty good mirror of my Pathfinder group when it comes around to discussing the US vs the rest of the world
haha, they have good grounds to be friends
I will concede that the metric system, as a whole, is superior to the US system
But I will defend Fahrenheit till my dying breath! It is clearly the better temperature scale for non-scientific purposes (ie. Everyday life)
To be fair, part of why a lot of us don’t leave the country is we can barely afford to live, let alone travel.
Also, the country itself is almost as big as all of Europe, don’t need a passport to see a different culture, just hop in a car and drive a couple of states over
I mean I live here and I saw nothing wrong with what they said haha Granted there is some room to argue but this is America. When you encounter someone that doesn’t want to see our countries flaws after a while you get tired of arguing and just let them carry on. I wish we were on the metric system, I think it’s ridiculous that we are not.