It’s a real quote, from the 80s, published in a networking textbook.

It’s amusing, but it’s always been a serious and occasionally practical observation.

But I guess non-action and bootlicking while we wait for our thoroughly bribed politicians to do nothing is better.

Nation-wide action, of course, is best. Something like the green new deal or even a market-based solution like cap-and-trade or a carbon tax.

On a local level, though, there’s a lot of action that can be done.

Nation-wide, the biggest category of carbon emissions is transportation, at 28% of all emissions. Over half of all transportation-related emissions are from cars and trucks.

The amount people drive is closely tied to local urban design, which comes down largely to local zoning regulations and infrastructure design. Those are primarily impacted by the people who show up at town meetings and vote.

Advocate for walkable, mixed-use zoning, improved bike infrastructure, etc. Most people aren’t “drivers”, “cyclists” or “public transit riders”, they’re people who want to get from point A to point B as easily as possible and will take whatever is best.

The problem with gas stations isn’t their LCD screens.

A large number of gas stations are franchises. Breaking the LCD screens hurts the local franchise owner, not whichever fossil fuel company they’re working with.

More to the point, breaking LCD screens accomplishes absolutely nothing. Most people don’t drive because they love driving, they drive because of zoning, sprawl and a lack of reasonable alternatives. If you get rid of fossil fuel infrastructure without fixing the underlying car dependency, they’ll be stuck at home.

Efficiency in economics has a particular technical definition.

Pareto efficiency or Pareto optimality is a situation where no action or allocation is available that makes one individual better off without making another worse off

Free markets are great at producing outcomes that are efficient in a particular technical sense, but not especially equitable.

There’s assorted companies that sell parasitic wasps as pest control.

Spalding sells theirs as “fly predators”; they basically look like tiny gnats but lay their eggs in fly pupa. They work great.

There’s a huge number of different species of wasp, which vary greatly in size. The smallest wasps are the smallest known insects; they’re literally smaller than a millimeter. With many of them, you wouldn’t know they were wasps if you didn’t have a microscope.

In addition to pollinating, many wasps either eat or parasitize other insects. Yellowjackets will hunt horse flies, and there’s assorted wasps that are sold to farmers to control various pests…

How does that in any way address the question of if the law is xenophobic or not?

So it isn’t xenophobic, since the local majority religion is also under rules of “no religious symbols wearing”.

However, does the local majority religion mandate wearing a religious symbol?

Wearing a cross doesn’t seem akin in significance to wearing a turban or a kippah. From what I understand, it’s more of just a Christian fashion statement than a deep part of the religion.

So yes, this seems quite xenophobic to do something that’s a mild annoyance at worst for the dominant religion and a major issue for minority religions.

The American spelling matches the American pronunciation, and it was one of the original variations of the word. Americans didn’t pick it out of nowhere.

That’s more akin to saying “it’s spelled aubergine, not eggplant, you stupid Americans”.

Quay is one of those words like bowline or boatswain that’s commonly mispronounced because people see it in writing without hearing it said. Bowline “properly” rhymes with pin, and boatswain sounds like bosun.

A similar thing happened to solder in Britain, where it originally had a silent l as a nod to its Latin etymology, but some people started pronouncing it.

Uniform rules don’t always affect everyone uniformly. It’s really not hard to create uniform laws that disproportionately target a particular group.

For example, North Dakota passed a law that required Voter ID with a residential street address on it. However, many Native Americans living on tribal land in the state didn’t have a residential street address.. Most people in the state who lived in a house that didn’t have an address lived on a reservation. The law was clearly racist and specifically designed to depress the Native American vote for partisan gain, yet used the same rules for everyone to do so.

I guess you could argue some religious garb is heavily tied to cultural identity

More importantly, some is tied to religious identity.

For example, regardless of your culture, if you converted to orthodox Judaism you’d be obligated to wear a kippah if you’re male.

How exactly do you hide sideburns?

If they wear a hat to put them under, it’d probably be interpreted as a religious head covering and they’d be sent home anyways.

Christians are just less of an arse when it comes to those symbols.

That’s like saying that Christians are less of an arse when it comes to religious dietary rules. It’s just not a part of their religion in the same way that not proselytizing is a part of Judaism.

Honestly, as someone who grew up in the US, Christian proselytizers are orders of magnitude worse than the modern orthodox kid in school who wore a kippah.

The people this affects the most aren’t the people using religion as a cudgel.

Which isn’t to say that e.g. orthodox Jews and Muslims don’t wield religion as a cudgel when they have the opportunity - just look at East Ramapo NY or Israel. But they don’t have any kind of broad institutional power in the US or France.

In the US, the big problem is dominionist Christianity, and there’s no religious requirement for them to wear something in particular.

A law that requires everyone to eat bacon would apply to everyone equally, but it’s still antisemitic and islamophobic.

Catholics carry their cross around their necks but can easily tuck inside their clothes. Jewish men can fold and keep their head cover in a pocket (do women have any equivalent?).

Are catholics religiously obligated to wear crosses at all times? Reform and conservative Jews only wear kippot while praying, but orthodox Jews wear them all the time and consider it to be an obligation to wear one all the time.

Do you also require orthodox Jewish and Muslim children to eat pork and shellfish in school lunches, and appreciate how flexible catholic parents are about letting their kids violate the kosher or halal rules?

Fahrenheit has a fairly sensible 0 - just as Celsius is the temp of ice water, Fahrenheit is the temp of salty ice water.

The US doesn’t use imperial, it uses US customary.

There’s no US customary Roman mile, ell or skeine, for example.

Chains and links are basically standard surveyors chains. They’re distinct units in their own right in the sense that a metric chain or metric link is. Should your metric chart have a metric chain on it? What about light years or parsecs?

Hands are used in measuring horses, and that’s basically it. They’re used in commonwealth countries, the US and South Africa.

I dunno, capitalist social democracies seem quite nice compared to socialist counties.