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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   32050 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 19, 2026

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As a side note, it seems pretty clear to me that Fahrenheit is a much better scale for discussing weather since (1) 0-100 roughly covers temperatures your typical person experiences, including the occasional extreme; and (2) there's no real need to convert to other units like there might be among inches, feet, yards, and miles.

We're so not going back to this topic. It's purely a status quo preference. Which is a perfectly cromulent reason, but there's no need to insist that F is intrinsically better than C.

We're so not going back to this topic.

I'm not sure I understand you here. Is this sarcasm?

It's purely a status quo preference.

I would have to disagree with this. F really does appear to be better for discussing air temperature, for reasons mentioned by me and others.

I would have to disagree with this. F really does appear to be better for discussing air temperature, for reasons mentioned by me and others.

If this was the case, I would expect to see a nontrivial amount of people used to C, trying out F for a while as a result of travel, and saying "wow, this really is better".

What we seem to be seeing instead is everyone who grew up in a C regime preferring C, and everyone who grew up in an F regime preferring F, which seems to point to status quo preference.

If this was the case, I would expect to see a nontrivial amount of people used to C, trying out F for a while as a result of travel, and saying "wow, this really is better".

To an extent I agree with this. There is a little bit of a confound because the choice between F and C will be perceived as a choice regarding America in general. For example, I can imagine a typical liberal American college student spending a year in Europe and then crowing about Metric units as a kind of virtue-signalling. That being said, yes, I would expect that a non-trivial amount of Europeans, Middle-Easterners, Africans, etc. who spend a couple years in the US would admit, at least privately, that the F scale is better.

What we seem to be seeing instead

Where is this coming from? Is there a subreddit for foreign ex-pats living in the US?

To be fair, I tried out F as a Brit for fun / as a private in-joke post Brexit and I did like it and I still use it for weather, though I wouldn't use it scientifically.

It is quite obnoxious to be using a different unit than the locals. A better test might be how long it takes the average person to develop an intuition for the alternative unit. Such that they no longer have to explicitly or mentally calculate.

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