SE US got feral Carolina dog populations.

I’d argue that this is closer to “don’t put tomatoes in a fruit salad” rather than the Pluto thing.

There’s no colloquial definition of planet that would include Pluto and exclude the potentially hundreds of things like Pluto in our solar system save for “what I learned in school.” Pluto got planetary status because humanity saw it. It lost it because we found out more about it, it’s neighbors, and planets in general. Because no other definition really makes sense the scientific one prevails.

There are multiple colloquial definitions of continents and fruits/vegetables that make sense that are at odds with any scientific understanding therefore the scientific one doesn’t prevail.

Generally I like colloquial terms to stay colloquial and scientific terms to stay scientific.

That’s all well and good for terms that originate from and remain in science–there’s probably never going to be a conflicting term for “adenosine triphosphate” for instance, but for terms that originated elsewhere first and science had to adopt that’s not gonna happen. My previous comment was to your assertion that continent is a scientific term, when in reality it’s use predates the establishment of geology as a formal discipline by hundreds of years. To claim therefore that it is a scientific term and that you want it to stay that way is predicated on an untrue foundation.

There’s really no way to stop the masses from picking up and misusing scientific jargon, and whereas science is the means through which humanity learns more about the world, continued scientific progress will inevitably lead to more new terms that leak from science into a common parlance. When talking to scientists you just gotta mean the scientific thing; when talking to others you just gotta mean the other thing.

It’s also not just science, BTW. Every field has specialty language that conflicts. If you’re not a programmer you may not know what a string is. If you’re not in IT, you may not know the difference between a CPU and a monitor. That’s fine. That’s just how language works, and that’s what let’s us communicate with each other.

I don’t think I’m supposed to be calling it the Middle East without seeming like an imperialist

Then call it what people in the region call it themselves.

I don’t want to call it West Asia because I don’t like Europe being a continent, so I’m kinda stuck.

Not stuck at all. A unified continent wouldn’t be called “Asia.” The region called “Asia” (which itself is ambiguously defined) would still be called “Asia” (and still be ambiguously defined) and thus “West Asia” would be the region on the west side of “Asia” which would decidedly not be Europe.

The fact of the matter is that what we call ourselves and others is all political and a great deal of it is imperialism. We need terms to refer to areas and groups so people know what we’re talking about. If those groups aren’t like us there’s a great many terms we can use which just end up being dog whistles.

Is there any big difference in referring to “The Middle East and North Africa” vs “The Arab speaking world?” No, not really. Would people understand what you’re talking about either way? Yeah, probably. Would people understand what you mean by “West Asia?” So long as they aren’t being imperialist pedants, yes.

Continents are social conventions, not strictly scientific. If it was purely scientific you’d either end up with 4 (if going by “big contiguous land mass”), 7 (if going by “major tectonic plates” thereby putting Hawaii and bits of California on one continent), or almost 20 (if going by “any tectonic plates”) (or 6 or 5 depending on how else you want to slice the pie).

There are scientific interpretations of “continent,” but with everything in science there’s ongoing refinement to determine reality and thus a consensus on the exact classification of a landmass as a continent is not uniformly shared.

The existence of a scientific term does not preclude the existence of colloquial or political usage with a different definition, and to prescribe a single definition (and a minority one at that) as the single source of truth is myopic.

I don’t understand the added value here

Hmmmm, well, you see …

the U.S. would “instantly win the war” if it ever decided to switch off its technology [(Referring in part to Microsoft Teams)]

That is the added value–you have a backup. Okay, it’s bad? and now you have time to refine before you are forced to figure something out.

You have a global day and you have local euphemisms. “Evening” just becomes “the dark after lunch” instead of “the dark after noon.” That’s a trivial linguistic adjustment to make to ensure that the thing we actually care about syncing up for convenience is synched up for convenience.

Edit: we already have such euphemisms and ambiguities in English:

• tomorrow: the day I wake up next
• night: the dark before I sleep (saving “morning” generally for after you wake and not a strict time like 00:00)
• next (as in “weekend”): 2 weekends from now
• biweekly/bimonthly: once every other OR twice every

Honestly we should just move to a timezoneless universal time. Places in one part of the world could open at 8:00 and close at 18:00 and somewhere on the other side of the world would open from 20:00 to 6:00. No zone change in travel or scheduling meetings would simplify communications and logistics, and you can also ditch this asinine “saving” concept as you’ll have decoupled when the sun rises from an arbitrary number.

Nothing screams readiness like depleting your own reserves faster!

Due to severe weather

Damn, seems they gone and pissed off god, I guess.

Difficult decision

Yeah, I bet. It’s just so difficult to cancel a show once everyone but one guy on your roster has dropped/been dropped.

“In June 2026, Politico cited a ‘senior administration official … granted anonymity’ said the odds of a preliminary deal to end the conflict with Iran were between 80 and 85 percent,” the letter said.

That’s it, the whole “threat” thing is predicated on that quote. It’s a claim Trump makes every fucking week, but somehow when his own VP claims it it’s a national security threat. Deeply unserious.

Tbh, he’s just correct.

As a progressive American, do you think he’s wrong?

Al-Qaeda has killed around 3000 people from '93 to 2010 with the majority of those from 9/11.

In the subsequent “war on terror” alone the US killed 2 orders of magnitude more people.

Kinda seems he’s 100% right in saying “Pound for pound as far as the number of deaths, yes. … We have caused tremendous terror all around the world.”

Postmaster General David Steiner … has expressed frustration over a lack of help from the White House and Congress in addressing the mail service’s long-running financial woes

Yeah, Dude, that’s by design. They want to show that the public sector doesn’t work so they can license the constitutionally mandated service (which isn’t supposed to make a profit) to their for-profit, private sector buddies. Your whole job was to enable that shit.

For all it’s faults, this is the primary reason SCOTUS justices were given lifetime appointments.

Alito wrote in his dissent that the Postal Service “has broad authority to regulate the mail” and likely does have the power to enforce Trump’s restrictions.

Trash and the $3 steel wire with some curled up paper on the end.

Okay?

The Surface duo was released a month prior to the chargers announcement. The charger gets its name from the fact that it can charge 2 devices, which is a fundamentally different gimmick than the naming scheme of this phone. The charger also exists in a different product category than either phone.

The fact remains there are now 2 companies who have released specifically folding phones named duo in a relatively recent time frame. There are other phones with the duo monicker hinting at things like dual cameras or sim cards, but at the end of the day, I was expecting Apple to hold true to their persona of being unique and special in having to rename even the most basic things that I was surprised they settled on exactly the same name one of their competitors had used for the same product category.

The existence of other things named duo doesn’t invalidate that there are now 2 folding phones named the same thing from different companies.

His reputation has been built on game shows. The charity porn was for seed money for the game shows.

This guy’s floated the idea of running for president in the future.

Our timeline is truly railed.