private panopticon
That's the only thing George Orwell got wrong: he envisioned surveillance conducted by the state - i.e. a communist dictatorship, but what we end up with today is surveillance conducted by late-stage capitalist monopolies in cahoots with the state - i.e. a fascist dictatorship.
Either way, it's a dictatorship.
you don’t have the right to make us
Apparently they just take the left.
I don't think the surveillance capitalists are asking for your opinion...
Gee, I feel so much better now...
And even there, they don't get no sunshine. the beach and the sunny islands in the background are reserved for the Epstein class. The salaried workers can stay in the cave.
This caption is incorrect: they're not asking you for money, they're just taking it.
That's just the name of US customary units: they're usually called standard. Just like the old British customary units were called imperial when there hasn't been a British empire for quite a few decades.
Yet somehow Celsius seems to speak to everybody outside the United States just fine.
Norms may be dumb but they make everybody's lives easier when everybody follows them.
As for temperature specifically, there's nothing inherently better in Celsius or Fahrenheit. It's just a choice. The only unit that is superior to all of them is the Kelvin because it has a true zero, but it's not commonly used in everyday settings.
Which units are best doesn't matter: the point is, nobody else uses standard units anymore, apart from a couple oddball countries, and only one of them - North Korea - isn't trying to extricate itself from it.
Everybody else tries to be a part of the world's technical and scientific communities by speaking the same language, but of course America has to be different. Because of course it does... And it's tiring if you ask me.
Americans have compatibility issues with the rest of the world, and it's not getting any better - in more ways than this one.
I find it fascinating that in today's world, private companies are allowed to decide how long they want to keep the entire populace under surveillance, just like that, without any laws or any judge involved, without the entire thing instantly turning into a giant scandal or people rioting in the street over it.
As a gen-Xer who has known a world where privacy actually meant something people deeply cared about, the world we live in today is frighteningly dystopian.