2023 has been the hardest and worst year of my life, followed by 2022. 2020 and 2021 were some of my best years ever. It's hard to handle that whiplash and I really regret not seeing the hard times ahead back then with the inevitable economic crisis on the horizon.
These dumbasses are handed such an easy path to getting a majority and they're going to squander it on these stupid conservative culture war takes. I really hope Canadians see soon that if they feel let down by the liberals, the conservatives are only going to be a shittier version of the worst aspects of the liberals. We should be looking to the NDP or green parties for real change.
I am not a taxidermist (IANAT?), but if I had to guess dead animals look nothing like their living counterparts when given a few days to decay. Taxidermists probably do a ton of work reconstructing things like their faces and that requires knowing what the original face looked like for the model to be accurate. In the works of fiction where I've encountered taxidermy it tends to be treated as something of a morbid art.
Wish I could go back and get all those lesbian A's.
I got a 19 😭 Maybe I can pay a million dollars for another try...
Yeah. Like saying you believe that companies beyond a certain size should be legally required to seek a vote from their employees before implementing certain types of changes is a real policy to argue about. Call it democratizing business or whatever you want. And then that's an actual concrete issue we can argue about. Or if you believe in the government buying out businesses beyond a certain size, that's a specific conversation we can have and we can discuss the hypothetical implementation of that. Call it business seizure or whatever. Just saying "I believe in socialism" doesn't dig enough into the details of how you perceive socialism or how you would implement it. And frankly, I think it hurts the socialists or communists or whoever is trying to persuade the current culture away from what we have more than anybody else. Ideas grow when you make real, concrete proposals. These exceedingly large scale labels usually end up killing a conversation rather than feeding it. Someone gets mad at a label and then everything shuts down on that sticking point.
I think the way we argue over labels hurts us. If I use heavy regulation and government aid to limit the abuses in a capitalist system, at what point does the label change to "socialism"? I think we do ourselves a disservice to create these strict conceptions of systems like capitalism, socialism, or communism. Then when one fails we get to say "well that wasn't true x". And the labels allow people to boogeyman an idea. And worst of all, we eliminate the possibility to take good lessons from multiple different systems and incorporate them into our system. I think we would be better served promoting policies on a case by case basis instead of using these huge words. And to be clear, I'm a bit of a hypocrite here. I've been mostly telling people I'm a "social democrat" or that I support "capitalism with heavy regulations". But even those words can get picked apart and don't really capture nuance. My main point is that I think this thread is a perfect encapsulation of how these arguments stop us from getting behind good policies when we bicker about the definitions of words that mean different things to different people.
Honestly, I think the way we argue over labels hurts us. If I use heavy regulation and government aid to limit the abuses in a capitalist system, at what point does the label change to "socialism"? I think we do ourselves a disservice to create these strict conceptions of systems like capitalism, socialism, or communism. Then when one fails we get to say "well that wasn't true x". And the labels allow people to boogeyman an idea. And worst of all, we eliminate the possibility to take good lessons from multiple different systems and incorporate them into our system. I think we would be better served promoting policies on a case by case basis instead of using these huge words. And to be clear, I'm a bit of a hypocrite here. I've been mostly telling people I'm a "social democrat" or that I support "capitalism with heavy regulations". But even those words can get picked apart and don't really capture nuance. My main point is that I think this thread is a perfect encapsulation of how these arguments stop us from getting behind good policies when we bicker about the definitions of words that mean different things to different people.
I think that's to keep it consistent with the normal Lemmy UI, which also has blue upvotes and red downvotes.
I mean - boiling is boiling, right? Do you ever really need to measure whether your water is boiling in daily life? I would concede that it's useful to know more easily when water will freeze when it comes to the weather. It's really the higher end of the Celsius scale that I'm critical of. Fahrenheit could share Celsius's 0 and my criticism would be more toothless. Though Fahrenheit's logic around 0 is that anything below 0 weather-wise is exceedingly rare and momentous in northern climates. I think that makes sense as an argument. Negatives in Celsius are common (at least in North America), but a negative in Fahrenheit is mouth gaping dreadful levels of cold. That's at least as intuitive to me as having 0 be freezing. Since 0 implies the bottom of the temperature scale.
People round to the nearest degree in the US. But that's kind of my point. It's more awkward to throw in fractional temperatures and the fact that you do shows that Celsius isn't properly expanded enough. In Canada people in my anecdotal experience actually haven't been rounding to the nearest half degree, just the nearest degree thereby making the scale feel less granular.
Not to knock - everyone invariably likes what they're used to better. I usually get a lot of pushback from people for this opinion. But that's my point - I concede that even with my familiarity in miles and pounds that kilometres and kilograms are better systems of measurement. The wonder of the metric system is the simple ratios in multiples of 10. But temperature is a realm where that advantage doesn't exist. And on an objective level, I think Fahrenheit has a better argument for function.
It's wild how close the Amazon river basin comes to the west coast of the continent without draining into the ocean on that side.