Tried to dig around a bit, it seems a number the military doesn't keep very good or active track of. Seems to trend in the single percentages though.
skuzz
As much as I like the metric system, temperature in the world is the one place where I prefer Fahrenheit. Having to care about decimal points on a thermostat just seems like trying too hard. "Oh honey, could you turn the thermostat down to 21.1C?"
You know that 100 is hot as balls. You know 0 is cold AF. 0C is 32F. That's not really that cold, I'm shoveling snow in a t-shirt. 0F is really that cold. It is almost more akin to a percent of comfort scale than a measurement of temperature.
It is an interesting thought experiment though, as anyone using a given measurement scale gets used to it over time. I've been doing dual for a while to better intuit fuzzy translations in my head without having to run a formula every time.
Just an opinion of course, and not trying to have some flagrant discussion. I'd gladly switch to Celsius if we ever finally left Freedom Units. Thus far, the only places you see it in the US is in science, medical, and pop companies selling 16.9fl oz (just shy of 500ml) beverages instead of 20, so they can milk their bubble sugar water for all the profits.
Are there recommended news subs that aren't hosted on .world?
In the context of basic communications, market share really shouldn't. Phone calls are a standard, SMS is a standard, MMS is a standard. RCS should equally be a standard, along with IMS video calling that has been in the 3GPP spec since Rel99 (that's 1999). Flip phones in the early aughts could do video calls (in Europe) way before FaceTime was a twinkle in Steve Jobs' eye. Every phone right now could do out of box voice call/video call/text/picture messaging regardless of platform, if the cellular standard bodies would grow a pair.
Problem is, companies like Apple and Google became huge, unregulated, and monocultured.
How we humans allowed something as basic as communication to be put behind walled gardens is just a failure of humanity.
There is no technical reason. The carriers/cellular industry gave up on their efforts to push RCS and let Google own it all for the most part, and with it, everyone lost openness.
It's also why Samsung Messages is on a slow burn EOL. The Samsung/Google partnership had Google encourage Samsung to drop their RCS support and just push Google's app, after Google decided to sunset the openness of the messaging API. Third-party SMS apps will all slowly die. Probably also partly why Signal dropped SMS support. It was around the same time.
Android's weird changes are nothing but badness, and will likely get worse. Hopefully the open OS community can start focusing more energy behind alternative mobile OSes that aren't dependent on a corporation.
Somehow, I don't think it's a competition.
They're all in the 2+/-.2 C range, and increasing in frequency.
What's different about the flyover states is they are flat, are running out of water, and all the increased tornadic/hail activity is just going to make them no-mans-land over the next half century, outside of the temperature issues. (And not trying to compete either, it's just weird.)
The amount of larger hail popping out of these storms is crazy too. Homes will need stronger roofs and windows, there will be more risk to aircraft as well with how rapid they seem to be popping off these days. (Secondary issues will be developing as well since the US is slashing weather prediction budget, which is reducing available data.)
Links on what damage to expect, a plane a few years ago that ended up damaged from a hail storm over New Mexico, double-sucks too, the airplane's weather radar is in the nosecone, so they lose their ability to see what they're flying through in that case:
Almost! Who knew??
Non-sarcasm: Sad thing is, with almost everything this administration says, apply a 1984-esque filter to it. So crap like the "rapists, murderers, and thugs" rhetoric spewed would translate into something like, "workers, families, and refugees". Likewise, the rhetoric is often projection as well.
A full unraveling thusly would be: The administration is actually the rapists, murderers, and thugs, and they are targeting workers, families, and refugees with the Constitutional, Federal, State, and Local crimes they are committing.
Need to build an AI news filter tasked to parse all news articles on these topics so the real words are always used when they say anything. Shoot, probably a find/replace browser plugin could do it, although using an LLM would make it more dynamic.
bu-bu-but, think about how much more WHITE it will be!?!?!?! We'll finally be great! Again! (heavy /s)
At this point, do we do anything right?
I recall this meme from a year or so back with a different joke attached.
American governmental culture fetishizes over the military as a concept in general, while calling out other nations that fetishize over their militaries as bad. Singing the national anthem about bombs bursting at sporting events like that's something to be happy or proud about. The tour of "hey it's military week, everyone dress in fatigue-adjacent colors and some random service members get paraded about" that happens every year. Rich politicians saying poignant words on solemn days thanking service members for their service, to then be whisked away by their security patrol and fleet of bulletproof vehicles to go back to their caviar swimming pools, never having had to even consider, really consider, killing a person, or losing a limb, friend's blood spattered across your face.
America is built on advertising. Unique thoughts need not apply. You're told what to buy, where to buy it, who to hate, who to love, where to live. You're never given any programs to back any of that up. Abortion is bad because it kills children, yet after those children are born, they can just die homeless with no medical care. We are to love our troops while treating them like detritus. We support them with a parade after a mission, then they're on their own. If they die on an "important" mission, well, they're heroes. That term alone, hero. America uses the word hero when we don't want to feel bad that someone volunteered their life for something we were too cowardly to do ourselves.
9/11 first responders, as another example, that Jon Stewart spent a good chunk of his life trying to make the government honor their own deal, and even now, the government is still trying to undo it. People who, of the ones that lived, are already going to have shorter more complicated lives. We don't even have the decency to let this handful of humans live as comfortable (not lavish, without pain) as they can, given what they tried to do to save so many people while buildings and airplanes are crashing down around them. We currently hate the immigrants that pick our food, clean our businesses, lose limbs in meat packing plants, so we can enjoy a $5 hunk of beef at the supermarket, while their children build our cars, so much so that we are willing to violate the Constitution to "get rid" of them in the most cruel way we can think of.
If we even actually followed through on caring about soldiers. If the VA was a temple of success, and veterans actually received proper treatment, care, housing, instead of being abandoned to die in the streets. If the government did one actual thing to back up their claims, instead of market spin. That'd still be a disappointment because we'd be a military-state, but at least it would be truthful, and people would join just the military for the promise of a good life. Instead, it is just a flimsy sham from every direction, trading souls for caviar swimming pools for the few.
About the only thing we are truly consistently good at in the USA is hate, and it has been that way for a long time.