A person can be rich in many ways. A coral reef is rich in biodiversity etc.

The rich refers to the group of people who are financially rich to an obscene extent.

Mostly it’s just people discussing whether flour should be measured by mass or volume. Jokes about using some mcburgers per football field -esque satirical units, some joke about using moles instead. Some comment about a funny misspelling in the meme. Nobody is flying into an incoherent rage.

I think you’re taking the trollface in the meme a bit too literally. It’s annoying and unnecessary, and can cause mistakes that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise. Ahem, the Mars Climate Orbiter is a good example of a particularly costly one.

Nobody is flying into an incoherent rage. It’s merely annoying having to accommodate the outdated quirks of one country. You having to do the opposite is quite reasonable on the other hand, because you’re not accommodating the conventions of one country, but those of the rest of the world.

Fair point. Rephrase: largest English speaking country by internet footprint, global influence or some similar measure.

Thank you for the correction kind sir. My deepest apologies sir. English isn’t my native language. Would you perhaps care to elaborate on the claim made in your previous comment, so that this here conversation may have some substance beyond mere grammar.

Oh I understand it pretty well. I just take no pride in that. If I don’t remember something I can always look it up. Doesn’t mean it’s not impractical nonsense.

Bear in mind that there are multiple countries where English is the largest language and metric is used, and that English is the modern lingua franca. It just so happens that the largest english speaking country has some weird ways to measure things. As such those weird measurements and associated conversions are often forced on anyone who wants to look for a recipe in English, be that their native language or not.

I’m sorry but who are you referring to? I’m sure there’s idiots in every country, but that is quite an outlandish generalization to make if we’re still talking about entire continents.

Oh no. I just want to be rid of the imperial system. I would have no issue with it if it wasn’t a part of my life. Unfortunately I work in a field where imperial units are used world wide (apart from China and Russia for historical reasons). Because of this, I use some of those units myself every day at work. I understand some of them but take no pride in it. The only reason that the imperial system is still used so much is purely by convention. It is inferior to the metric system in every aspect. I do not feel superior to people who use imperial units because as stated above, I am one of them. People who I feel superior to are the ones who delude themselves into thinking that this somehow isn’t purely because of convention. I dislike them because they are forced upon me by international conventions. OP appears to dislike them because recipes written in English force those units into their life.

There is no pride in understanding a nonsensical system of measurements.

Empathize with stupidity and you’re halfway to thinking like an idiot

• Iain M. Banks

Undeniable DPRK W

I agree with your first paragraph, but not your edit. People just get attached to their comments. Nobody wants to see their (at least in their opinion) meticulously thought out debunk slamdunk of a comment ending up hidden or deleted. Even more so if making said comment took time and research for sources etc.

Private weather station?

It’s pretty much impossible to make reliable forecasts based on the data of a singular weather station. The initial data comes in from a variety of sources including satellites, radars, surface observation stations (weather stations) and upper air soundings around the globe. All of the above are maintained by public sector organizations who collaborate and share the data because the weather is an inescapably global thing. During WW2 the Germans actually set foot in Canada to set up a weather station in an attempt to spread the coverage of their observation network.

Nowadays all that data is used as inputs for numerical weather prediction models, running on supercomputers in the basements of meteorological institutes and agencies. Big global ones like ECMWF and GFS are used pretty much by all meteorologists around the world, who look at those and other smaller, more local models. They compare the different forecasts and critically evaluate the probabilities of different outcomes. They apply their own judgement selecting the most credible raw forecast and then edit that if needed. All in all, it’s a very global effort.

At least where myself and @Kusimulkku@lemm.ee are from, meteorologists at the public broadcasting company (where that title is a requirement for getting the job) collaborate closely with their colleagues at the national meteorological institute. Their job is to comprehend the situation as presented by the institute, decide which bits of it are important, and then boil that down into a smooth and easy to understand presentation.

If a weather reporter isn’t an actual meteorologist, then there is an actual meteorologist behind the scenes who made the presentation for the reporter to present.

Nah anarchists also fall within the “capitalism is working as intended and must be destroyed” camp. They just have different ways of doing it.

It’s nukes. An environmental catastrophe doesn’t happen at those timescales :D

Our societies aren’t the only things dying.

This was me on friday except that instead of moss there were fantastic snowbanks sculpted into exquisite shapes by wind.

Usually when there’s a headline, yes. But 545 million miles is almost six times the distance from the Earth to the Sun. That is a very large distance even in this context.

It is interesting. For myself I can say that the familiar UI prompted me to take the screenshot because everyone knows that repetition equals funny.

Sorry for the late reply. I admit I haven’t read the book and thus can’t comment on it, but the movie is a great commentary on fascism, because it surprises us by making us notice that “Wait a second, I’m rooting for the fascists. How did that happen?!”. The visual messaging is pretty clear with the giant eagles, Hugo Boss leather uniforms and overall militarlism and xenophobia, but it goes much deeper than that.

Everyone gets free healthcare and education, as long as you’re part of ‘us’ instead of ‘them’. We’re used to the fascism where ‘us’ is some ethnic or religious group of humans and ‘them’ is some different group of humans. In starship troopers however, the fascism gets to fly under the radar by making the entirety of humanity the in-group. The aliens don’t need to be dehumanized because they’re quite clearly not human. Yet they feel fear and are only reacting to the spread of humans into their neighbourhood, while humans are outright shouting for genocide. “The only good bug is a dead bug!”

Wisecrack made a good breakdown of this a while back.