I think they're trying to figure out who you're hanging around that look down on others drinking water. I've only ever heard people recommending to drink more water.
Who decided that's how downvoting should be used? There is no official rulebook (especially on the fediverse), and etiquette is decided as a group, but there isn't clear consensus on this.
The technical function of the downvote is to push the comment down far enough that people won't see it. And so people will continue to use it as a way to communicate that they do not approve of the comment. And telling people to stop downvoting comments they don't like is trying to enforce a rule they never agreed to.
When I lived in England, I felt like I was going to freeze if it got colder than 17°C, usually had the heat set to 19°C. During the summer, probably around 22-24°C.
I now live in Phoenix, AZ, and set it at about 65°F in winter and 74°F in summer.
I get your point is to have a neutral 3rd party help oversee the elections, but having the UN do it would be one of the fastest ways to spark a civil war. A lot of Trump supporters very much believe the UN is one of the key players trying to bring the new world order.
For actually displaying dates to others, I agree that spelling out the month is absolutely preferred. But if space is limited, you're somewhat required to pick a very shortened format, and the US version is dumb, even if that's what you should use when displaying in that locale.
But for working with dates on computers, year-month-day works great, because it's still human readable, is naturally sortable, and makes it easier for serialization.
The first one is conventionally never year-day-month, and if anyone ever sent me a date of 2023-17-08, I would respond with, "What the hell?! Are you being evil on purpose?"
I was just thinking about this more, and what if Google decides to implement this on Google maps? Am I going to have to put a message up saying something like, "sorry, you can't view our outage map unless you use a browser that supports web integrity"?
Because you're right, convincing the higher ups to let me switch to OpenStreetMap is probably going to be a losing battle.