Osama bin Laden also didn’t kill anybody personally on 9/11, and the attack killed only 2,977 victims, which is almost certainly a lower body count than UnitedHealthcare under Brian Thompson’s leadership. Yet the US military personnel who violated Pakistan’s sovereignty and murdered him are heroes?

What odd moral standards!

“Freezing temperatures” mean “freezing temperatures,” though, and numbers are pretty irrelevant. American schoolkids learn that it’s around 32°F and 0°C, and we easily remember it, but the weather forecasters still say “frost warning,” or “freezing rain,” rather than “it’s going to be 32°F tomorrow,” because there are so many confounding variables. Even the temperature of the phase transition is kind of squishy, since pure water freezes at 0°C at STP (except when it gets super-cooled). And if we’re talking about the fundamental importance of water, then I might argue that 4°C is the important temperature, because it’s temperature at which water reaches its maximum density.

Anyway, not to say that Fahrenheit is great, or anything, just that Celsius is similarly arbitrary, and we lack a compelling reason to switch. (Even though virtually every thermometer I’ve ever seen in the U.S. has both scales on it.)

*French influence. Most of the prominent differences between American and British English (such as -er/-re and -or/-our) occurred because the British preserved (or changed spellings to add) French influence.

Can confirm. Never saw the episode, still know the gag.

If we don’t change our lifestyle, new companies would spring up to replace them. But yeah, that’s my point, no matter how it happens, our lifestyle has to change if we want a sustainable society. Production and consumption are two sides of the same coin.

It’s kind of like asking whether the vital piece of a table is the tabletop or the legs, when you don’t have a functional table without either one. We don’t have a functional market system without supply and demand.

In a weird way, blaming the corporations is philosophically aligned with supply-side dogma, where the corporations (“job creators”) have an intrinsic motivation to produce. As if they just churn stuff out all day long, because that’s what they do when the government doesn’t get in their way, and it’s the duty of people to consume so the output doesn’t all just pile up in some great heap outside the factory.

There’s a reason some call that “voodoo economics.” Whatever their influence today, all corporations producing things evolved in a symbiotic relationship with consumer demand. We could guillotine all of the CEOs, and revoke every corporate charter, but it’d do jack for the environment, unless unless we also all change our lifestyle.

Blaming the corporations makes as much sense as them blaming us. It’s time to move past who’s to blame, and instead start fixing things.