To be fair, the dramatic nosedive in quality of GoT happened when they ran out of source material and had to wing it.

3-body problem is a finished trilogy, so it could all have the quality of the first seasons of GoT.

That sounds a bit more like a nightclub.

I’d never want to live next to a nightclub, but living next to a tavern or pub would be fine.

Saturnalia trees are probably a myth.

The first references we have to Christmas trees are in 16th century Germany. They probably didn’t come directly from any pagan traditions seeing as Germany had been Christian for multiple centuries at that point.

The statistic that “Just 100 companies responsible for 71% of global emissions” is better understood as “Just 100 companies responsible for selling 71% of global fossil fuels”. It’s fundamentally saying that there’s a few large coal, oil and gas companies worldwide selling us most of the supply.

If you want those companies to stop polluting, that amounts to those companies not selling fossil fuels.

Which is honestly the goal, but the only way to do that is to replace the demand for fossil fuels. Cutting the US off from fossil fuels would kill a ton of people if you didn’t first make an energy grid 100% powered by renewables, got people to buy electric cars, cold climate heat pumps, etc.

Bullshit.

The investments of just 125 billionaires emit 393 million tonnes of CO2e each year – the equivalent of France – at an individual annual average that is a million times higher than someone in the bottom 90 percent of humanity.

That is to say, if you multiply the emissions of the gasoline sold by ExxonMobil by whatever percentage of ExxonMobile that’s in Bill Gate’s portfolio, you get an absolutely ridiculous emissions number.

But that seems to assume that if it weren’t for those dastardly billionaires investing in oil companies, we’d all be living in 10-minute cities with incredible subways connected by high speed rail, powered entirely by renewables, and heated by geothermal heat pumps. And I honestly don’t beleive that.

Merriam Webster is a descriptive dictionary. They don’t tell you how words “should” be used, they say how words are used.

Using literally as an intensifier goes back literal centuries. The earliest written citation we’ve found of that usage goes back to 1769. It can be found everywhere from Dickens to Brontë.

It’s also hardly the first word to go on a similar path towards becoming an intensifier. Very originally meant “genuine”, really meant “in fact”, absolutely meant “completely”, etc.

But who complains about sentences like “I was really bored to death”, or “I was absolutely rooted to the ground”? Does saying “it’s very cold” just mean “it is a genuine fact that it is cold”?

Literally still means what it means. You can’t use literally to mean “yellow”, for example. People aren’t generally confused when they come across the word.

There’s a pretty good Wikipedia article on it

As mentioned, it’s the Jordan River to the Mediterranean. It’s been used by Palestians since at least the mid 60s in a number of different chants, e.g. “from the river to the sea Palestine will be free/Arab/Islamic” (technically, the latter two are “from the water to the water” because otherwise the Arabic doesn’t rhyme).

Hamas’s charter says

Hamas rejects any alternative to the full and complete liberation of Palestine, from the river to the sea

While Netanyahu’s far-right Likud party’s 1977 manifesto says

between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty

It’s historically been somewhat controversial, with Zionists typically saying that it calls for the destruction of the state of Israel and/or the expulsion of Jews from the area. CNN fired a political commentator for saying it ~5 years back, and it’s regulated as hate speech in some places in Europe. Most pro Palestinian activists think that’s ridiculous, but it’s worth being aware of.