The US is a cultural hegemon so it is often picked on. There are tons of idiotic peoole and cultural practices here in Spain. But the rest of the world isn’t really aware… I mean I don’t blame them. One cannot keep up with everything.
But believe me, stupidity and insular thinking is just as endemic here as it is in the States. It just annoys me when “enlightened” Americans habitually paint other Americans as somehow dumber than dumb people elsewhere.
America is leading the chart of the western world in terms of stupidity rn if you ask me and it’s definitely easy to be one of the enlighned over there (just don’t try to oppress others) but compared to other parts of the population I definitely prefer them!
I’m an American who has lived in Spain for the past 11 years. I’ve grown up in the States, worked in the States as a young person, still visit frequently, but my professional, personal, and cultural life has not been primarily there for some time.
I am telling you, both cultures have their dumb preoccupations, their misconceptions, and their morons.
The idea of “America is so bad, Americans are so dumb” is exactly the same ideology as American exceptionalism. It is just as wrong.
That’s not what I try to say, America is simply first rn and similar groups all over the western world adopt it because of that, it’s not a secret that the western world started to move to the right again in recent times and that leads to a lot of shit if you ask me which definitely isn’t limited to America but currently they are simply the first to do certain really bad tgings!
As I said, America is a cultural hegemony at the moment. It does export a lot of its culture, but far from all of it’s culture.
I think the direction the world is moving is a bit of a mixed bag. With LGBT stuff, it is moving far to the left very quickly. With things like workers rights it has stagnated or moved rightwards somewhat. It’s true that the Western world has seen the emergence of the alt-right in the past decade. But there is an alt-left or far left that has also been gaining in prominence. Generally just deviation from the political center in both directions.
Judiging from the culture war the alt-right started to adopt in europe and other global leader changes (E.g. India) in the past few years I highly disagree, there is more accaptance in the general population but over all there are more and more countries LGBTQ people aren’t welcome in or have to flee from and the pure hate appears even here in Austria and in our neighbor countries. Trump of all people put it very well, five years ago his audiance didn’t even know what trans is and now they get more excited about it than about tax cuts. I do agree that the world generally moves towards neo liberal ideas rouggly since the early 2000s and that workers right are at risk too, that’s just not a very new development, stuff like that simply gains visibility during a crisis.
Yeah, no. The Middle East, for example, is heading leftwards by leaps and bounds. It just seems slow from the standpoint of a single human lifetime. Remember, they were, with a few exceptions, warring desert bands on horses only a bit over 100 years ago. Not saying there aren’t exceptions (Iran, which, is sort of Middle-East-adjacent, would be an example).
The same trend is true all over the world. The thing is people get too emotional that they lose sight of secular trends for the ups and down of individual months and years. Just compare the culture now to 30 or 40 years ago. It very well might be a good strategy in getting what they want, it might even be necessary to keep cultural momentum going in the direction they want it to go, so, in that sense, it might be necessary. Seeing the truth is not necessarily a “good” or even advantageous thing.
Honest question: other than the number of people using Celsius, what benefits does Celsius bring over Fahrenheit?
Even the scientific community felt the need to hollow out the Celsius scale, leaving the numerical values of Celsius in tact but otherwise completely decoupling the scale from the properties of water when it created kelvin. It instead moved to measured values, like basically all other SI/metric units.
Celsius is there to describe water. Well, it’s used to describe a mostly pure form of water. Well, it’s used to describe a mostly pure form of water at around sea level. So, why does that make Celsius more relevant or useful for temperatures than Fahrenheit?
Frankly, it feels like Celsius is, to the rest of the world, what the Imperial system is to the US: a vestige of times past that has been supplanted by a better, measurement-based standard, but has yet to be abandoned because it is so entrenched in popular culture.
Celsius and Kelvin are identical, just shifted scales.
Fahrenheit has an equivalent which is rankine. It’s not that one is evidence based over the other, one is just absolute temperature and one shifted to be useful, essentially.
Respectfully, I don’t think you are completely correct.
While you are right that Kelvin is tied to absolute zero, it is also defined in such a way that a change in 1K corresponds to a change of thermal energy kT by 1.380649×10−23 J (the Boltzmann constant).
It is the difference in what 0K describes, along with the fact that a change in temperature equals a specific change in thermal energy (the measured value to which I previously referred), that separate it from Celsius. In Celsius, zero is the freezing point of (mostly pure) water (at sea level), and a change in temperature has no relationship to a specific/prescribed change in thermal energy.
Celsius is literally Kelvin + 273.15. They measure the same thing.
Fahrenheit is as Celsius is to rankine, which is also a measure of absolute temperature.
I’m not quite clear on where this is confusing you, Celsius is improper in many non relative equations yes but that’s due to the math not a fundamental difference in what is being measured.
Ah, I guess I misread (in my own research) or somehow missed that a degree change in Celsius was directly pegged the same degree change in Kelvin (shifted by 273.15 ) when the Kelvin scale was updated to be pegged to the Boltzmann constant. Thank you for helping me understand where my understanding was flawed!
I guess I still don’t understand the utility of Celsius, though. If it’s really just an alias, shifted by 273.15, for Kelvin, what utility does Celsius offer? Why not just use Kelvin?
Tradition, culture, etc make Celsius a useful tool. Human perception if temperatures is also not well correlated to Kelvin, where a change in 1 K is less than 0.5%, but to a person it certainly feels more substantial. By relating the scale we use daily to freezing and boiling of water, you at least capture both an okay human sensitivity, and important temperatures to us as humans.
Fahrenheit arguably goes a step further, defining a much narrower range for humans specifically, with some landmarks for water.
No system is objectively better, it’s all convention and arbitrary. We could define an absolute temperature scale which puts human temperatures at 1 blorp, 0 as absolute 0. Clearly the resolution is pretty low, you’d have to define the weather with decimals. Oh well, that’s fine. Annoying maybe, but valid.
The last level sucked so much though, all those RPG guys everywhere. I had to cheese the level by running around the outskirts and finding all of the RPG wielders before the convoy got going.
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