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

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

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

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

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

If only metric time had caught on too…

A Theory of Justice by John Rawles

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

Some other good ones are Semafor and 404Media

NPR, BBC, and RTÉ primarily. Subscribed through RSS

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

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

As other have said, housing, at least in the US, has always been seen as an investment, and investments are supposed to appreciate in value. It is difficult to sell to political bases that one of two things must then be true: 1) People who bought houses 20+ years ago will have to lose equity on the house which they potentially were relying on for some amount of retirement, or 2) The government will have to step in and fill the gap (a la systems similar to agricultural subsidies). Neither of those things would you be able to sell to a wide enough base that they could be acted on.

In the end, this was caused by two things. On a practical level, prices continued climbing while wages stagnated over the past 40 years. On a more philosophical level, I personally don’t think that necessities such as housing should be commodified.

This also brings up the fact that single family homes, the predominant home type in the US, are not good from an environmental standpoint or an urban planning standpoint. It would be better to convert into duplexes and such. In the end, I agree that buying a home is way too much, but in the long run it may be good that the market is pushing more people towards lower impact forms of housing

I would check out Semafor as well

Malt vinegar or brown sauce

• Accidental Tech Podcast: Three dudes talking about tech and (mostly) Apple
• The Allusionist: podcast about language and linguistics
• The Bruenigs: Matt & Liz Bruenig talk about random stuff
• Cortex: podcast about productivity by Myke Hurley & CGP Grey
• Factually: Interviews with interesting people hosted by Adam Connover
• Hello Internet (Dead): two dudes talking, GGP Grey & Brady Haran (Numberphile)
• Intentionally Blank: Random conversations with Brandon Sanderson & Dan Wells
• No Such Thing As a Fish: Intersting and odd facts by the team behind the British TV show QI
• Puck Soup: Ice Hockey News and information
• Stuff You Should Know: Funny podcast about all kinds of stuff
• The Tennis Podcast: podcast about tennis
• Ungeniused: brief episodes about interesting Wikipedia pages
• The Unmade Podcast: mostly random stuff, but about pitching ideas for other podcasts
• Wait Wait…Don’t Tell Me: the NPR News quiz

I feel that way whenever I finish a reread of Wheel of Time or the Broken Earth trilogy that makes me have to avoid the genre for a bit afterwards

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

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

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

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

This is interesting. I’ve been wanting to sign up for something like this, Incogni, or DeleteMe for a while, but haven’t done any research yet

Link for people who, like me, spent 10 minutes trying to get links other than Barnes & Noble and publishing houses: https://hardcover.app

I also recommend StoryGraph for this same purpose

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

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

While it is true that most early astronauts were aviators, specifically test pilots, it’s also important to consider that it was the case then as it is now that the US Navy operates more planes and has more pilots than the US Air Force. Just percentage wise, that would edge towards more Navy pilots who use the naval terminology in their ranks (the Mercury 7 were 4 Navy pilots, 2 Air Force, and 1 Marine I think, though I could be wrong). I would assume that the culture would skew even more Naval as space flight progresses as early spaceflight was a couple of guys in a tin can to larger scale craft.

Another weird quirk too is that common military rank terms like “captain” and “lieutenant” don’t line up between the Navy and the others (at least in the US). So the OG Star Trek guys would be Colonel Kirk and Captain Uhura under Air Force terminology, and that just sounds weird