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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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I put my coat over him and placed my hands on his cold skin. I said whatever little prayers I know from the liturgy in Spanish - “lord have mercy” and “the father, the son, and the Holy Spirit”. I played the Lord’s Prayer in Spanish on my phone and I lay next to him, covering us both with my coat to warm his body with mine. I reverted to praying in English since my Spanish is so limited.

Uh... pardon me if I'm mistaken, but this is where my bullshit radar started sounding.

When you mention temperatures are you talking F? So, less than -12 C?

According to my weather app, the current "feels like" temperature (in the afternoon in the Midwest US) is -20 degrees Celsius. And it's not going to get much warmer for at least a week and a half.

Why the hell is everyone telling me this? I don't doubt that the US can get very cold. I'm just asking what unit of measurement is used. Most of the world uses celsius. In a story where the temperature is highly relevant it would be best to specify the unit.

Americans are going to use Fahrenheit, that's just the way of the world. It's probably a better measurement system in many ways but I will never bother to learn it.

You can make whatever argument you want for metric, but F is objectively superior to C in daily life. There's no 'metric' advantage to C, you don't multiple or divide temperatures real world use cases. Both are effectively arbitrary.

However with Farenheit, 0-100 is basically, human habitable range. 0 is dangerously cold, 100 is dangerously hot. With Farenheit, 1-100 are basically every day weathers around the globe and in every day life describing your freezer up to your body temperature. Meanwhile 40-99 C are nearly useless.

The only time these numbers are really relevant in daily life is internal temperature of meats, but it's nearly arbitrary numbers with either measure, so C brings nothing to the table here.

Finally, Farenheit is over twice as precise as C, and right around human noticability. You can distinguish 1 degree F, but not really 1/10th degree Celsius, making F a more useful and intuitive unit.

However with Farenheit, 0-100 is basically, human habitable range. 0 is dangerously cold, 100 is dangerously hot. With Farenheit, 1-100 are basically every day weathers around the globe and in every day life describing your freezer up to your body temperature. Meanwhile 40-99 C are nearly useless.

You do not use 100 points of precision to tell the weather.

Like the other guy said, everybody just recognises like 3 to 5 ranges of temperature for the weather. Very cold, cold, light jacket, t shirt, very hot.

Do you think you need a much wider range of numbers to work this out? You don't, and in practice nobody does. They just snap-lock certain ranges to be relevant.

Celsius is definitely intuitive and a metric system more broadly works better on the whole.

You’re conflating two separate points. When setting a thermostat you can tell the difference between 66 and 67. It’s a good increment of noticable but slight. Celsius degrees are too far apart and tenths are too small.

Separately, 0-100 is roughly human haitable weather

On the metric point, there’s nothing more “metric” about Celsius. It doesn’t math any differently. It’s just set to a different reference point, which is less human centric

Celsius degrees are too far apart and tenths are too small.

There is no way you can start with "objectively better" and end up with this lol. You're talking about a half degree of difference. My aircon works in denominations of .5. If you have a preference for 18.5 degrees, there's no limitation on this if you use Celsius.

Parsimony is objectively better. Fewer significant figures for the relevant precision.

We can get into philosophy of good and what not, but this is a silly gotcha. I’m making a point about an objective feature and describing why I think it’s better

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