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The Earth began to cool…
The autotrophs began to drool…
The American education system taught us metric and was quite clear that’s the standard. I’m pretty sure it’s the only unit we used. It’s also the standard within our government, as I’m sure you’ve heard plenty of times in threads like this.
The thing that entrenches Imperial units in our culture is the familiarity from us steeping in it in everyday usage. And we are exposed to both there, too. It’s not about being stupid. It’s just about inertia, and that’s at least in part because the two systems do have their little trade-offs.
This always appears to come up from people who most likely are at least familiar with multiple languages. Why not just standardize on English? Did your education system just fail you? Was that too many words for you? (Obviously not. All intended rhetorically.)
I know US culture is struggling with a current of anti-intellectualism, but if you indulge in reducing nuanced topics to “America stupid”, you’re just watering the weeds in your own garden.
Maybe an important point in all this is you don’t have to hide your intentions or even agree. While the idea is to get them to think safely without putting up a defensive perimeter, you can still be genuine about your point of view. How that happens might be circumstantial, but, for example, you can probably always safely say something like, “I’m not saying I agree, but I was curious about your point of view.” Of course, every discussion (and how we navigate it) is going to be different.
#8 next to Ash is… James Brown?




Zipper is solid in a situation where an entire lane merges into another. There are different situations where it doesn’t make sense. I’m a big believer in zippering where it works, but then there’s the 6-lane highway where one exit lane is backing up into the through lanes. Then someone blows past that line in the other through lanes and cuts into the very front of the line. I’m sure some of those people are saying “zipper!” as they do it, but if everyone conventionalized a zipper point at the end of an exit lane, we would impede the through lanes, too. The point of the zipper is to smooth traffic flow and use the full capacity of the roadway; applying it broadly to highway lanes mixed with through traffic is antithetical.