You know, it’s not always, but apple does sell things that are price-competitive with similarly performing competing products.

Some iterations of the Mac Mini have been hard to beat with a tiny PC with similar performance.

The M1 MacBooks had some surprisingly cheap options for the relatively premium laptops they were.

Samsung’s Ultra phones tend to cost more or less the same as the Apple Pro Max phones.

The main difference is sometimes just that Apple doesn’t make low-end or low-mid-range, or sometimes not even anything below “relatively high-end”, products in a particular category.

To be honest I just look at the state of the world and laugh like I’m watching a sad comedy.

And I avoid thinking about how I’m in it and I have basically zero power over it.

I vote for whomever is the least bad candidate and try not to think about it too much the rest of the time.

I think that would be a history/etymology lesson going all the way back to Latin. I haven’t studied Latin, but I think there used to be a lot more grammatical genders, but they were gradually merged into one another in languages with a Latin heritage.

Why the neutral gender got merged into masculine and not feminine is a good question. Maybe it was just because they were the most similar.

The very same happens in French. The use of recently popular gender-neutral structures like “étudiant.e.s” is strongly discouraged in formal writing. The older “étudiant(e)s” less so but still not recommended.

What’s recommended is to either say “étudiants et étudiantes” or just use the masculine form as a group for both masculine and feminine forms, as has been the standard forever, and almost no one bats an eye at.

It’s not TERF, it’s not misogynistic, it’s just to make texts easier to read. It takes more time and effort to read a text full of those extra period/parenthesis characters, for very very little gain.

People wanting to write a text where they consider the sacrifice in readability worth it for the extra emphasis on gender inclusion still can; the police won’t show up. It’s just not standard grammar.

As a Canadian, yes, yes it is.

I’ve never really understood it. My Mom asks me to check her pool’s temperature. “24 degrees”

And she’s confused! “I have no idea what that means! Tell me in normal pool temperature”

But if I told her the outside temperature in Fahrenheit she’d be utterly confused, as would I. Only thing I know about Fahrenheit is that 30 is cold and 100 is very hot.

The pool thing is completely crazy.

I can understand the oven thing though. It’s so hot that it might as well have nothing to do with other everyday temperatures. So if you get ovens and recipes from the United States, I can see why it wouldn’t really be a problem. It’s treated as basically just a power level.

Still I wish we all switched to Celsius. It just feels useful to me to know how far you are from the boiling point of water, for instance.

Want more craziness?

• Construction materials, imperial.
• People’s weights, pounds, although most people understand kilos, they’ll just internally think you’re being a hipster if you make them convert in their head.
• People’s heights, generally feet. They’re hard to convert back and forth to cm, so people are often confused when I use cm. Though on government ID it’s cm.
• Short distances? Mostly imperial, especially with older people, but sometimes metric.
• Long distances? Hours by car. If you press it, people will use kilometers, but hours are absolutely the casual unit of distance.
• Weight of things? Usually metric, but a pound of butter is a pound of butter.
• Volumes? Metric, or metric-ified imperial units, like metric cups (250 ml), tablespoons (15 ml) and teaspoons (5 ml). Ounces only used for alcoholic drinks AFAIK. No one I know understands wtf a “15 ounce drink” means, even though restaurant chains sometimes use the measurement on their menus.
• In Quebec in particular, pint and gallon have been completely denatured from volume units to container types. A pint is a small container, usually a carton, containing 1 or 2 liters. Usually only used for milk. Can also be a 1-litre plastic bag of milk. (Used to be a popular Canadian staple; now cartons are the more popular thing.) A gallon is a jug or jerrycan. People are aware they’re supposed to be volume units but you rarely see them used as such.

Huh. So I can blame the British for influencing Canada to be fucked up.

Frickin’ temperatures. Fahrenheit for ovens and pools and Celsius for the rest. Why.