Did you mean to write the reverse? i.e the ratio of the surface area to volume decreases the larger you make a container.

I'd like to know more about this. Do you have a reference?

Agreed - rights that are guaranteed by prohibiting certain actions, i.e. you have a right to $FOO, meaning that $BAR is prohibited.

Compare with:

> They conceptualize rights "negatively", as things the state shouldn't take away from you.

The formulation seems a little different: you have a right to $FOO, meaning that $BAR is allowed ("the state shouldn't take [$BAR] away from you").

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_and_positive_rights

So, the government/state has guaranteed a negative right to life, i.e. citizens are prohibited from actions that deprive someone's right to life, and in order to enforce this prohibition, citizens are deprived of their right to arbitrarily commit violence to each other, while the government/state has a monopoly.

Where does our right to arbitrarily commit violence come from? Is it just a "natural right"?

[1] "loudest" in the sense that they made sure that other students knew where they came from.

Comparing it to where I have lived I think for heat and humidity, it is milder than central Texas / comparable to Rhode Island

Just comparing heat, it is milder than summer in the Central Valley/SoCal. SoCal heatwaves are oppressive.

Air quality in Minneapolis goes down when there are fires in the West, but it is obviously worse for us folks in the West.

I am relying on a rather common and uninformed understanding of Buddhism here, so I may be way off base.

EDIT: I had to look it up, but I guess European culture has contained some sort of belief in reincarnation (Plato's Republic, Book X / Myth of Er). I don't suppose this belief has much traction anymore, despite the strong influence of Plato (or Greek philosophy in general) on Christianity.

My experience mirrors what is described in the article, but only with people from Europe. Non-native English speakers from Europe look down on Americans, in a sort of "gate-keeping" manner where Europeans "own" the language. They have a better grasp of the "precise and elaborate formal English" and do not hesitate to correct Americans and tell them they don't understand grammar and are uneducated. (I'm inclined to agree with them.)

My experience speaking with non-native speakers from Asia, India, and Central & South America has been different. Maybe we are more willing to accept that there is a language barrier, but no one "owns" it.

And, like the article says, trying to use a culturally relevant idiom is a futile task.

Exactly, it's figurative language. My point is that when we read in scripture that

> Moses asked God what his name was, God replies something like "I am who am".

the notion of Moses asking God may also be figurative.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant [2] - https://www.sae.org/news/2018/04/toyota-unveils-more-new-gas...

Obviously we are a "democracy" (we vote) and a "republic" (for most of history and the rest of the world, this means we don't have a monarch. The US is the exception, where we take it to mean that we have a representative democracy a la Fed. #10.)

Let's say the popular vote (i.e. the mad crowd) votes 45% party X and 55% party Y, but party X get 55% of the representative seats and party Y gets 45%. Why is this fair? Why shouldn't party Y get more seats? Why can't the members of party Y act as a "damping factor" (instead of a "counterweight") to the demands of their own voters?