> the common interpretation of winter which is December -> March in the Northern Hemisphere
As I hope you are learning, in very many places in the northern hemisphere, perhaps including most of Europe, that is not what people mean by 'winter'.
The only reason discourse has degenerated is because you made it about the meanings of words. Everyone else on this thread is having a pretty productive conversation.
Lolol, you're the best example I've seen of "hacker news guy meets ambiguities in real language usage, can't handle it".
> I feel like you're not getting hung up enough on the definition of a definition. This might or might not be true, just how like if I feel that April is cold, it doesn't make it winter.
Meet interpersonal linguistic negotiation. Since in most Northern places most people feel cold roughly between November and March, no your one personal experience doesn't matter. Just like 'tall' is a perfectly useful word, even though it doesn't have a precise meaning in terms of number of millimetres.
Are you American? I'm British but lived in the USA for several years, and I think there's a cultural difference here. Americans attach precise boundaries to the seasons, whereas in Europe 'Winter' means something more like the part of the year that's normally cold.
The emissions impact of WFH is far from clear actually. In many cases lots of people staying home running their domestic heating and cooking etc systems consumes more energy than them using the big efficient industrial ones at the office, enough to outweigh transport emissions. (Especially since the industrial ones are still running in many cases, because people still come in a few days a week.)
It's not that I disagree with you exactly, but as someone who teaches at a UK university (much less prestigious than Oxford or UCL)... I used to complain a lot about how much money we were sending to Microsoft and Blackboard etc, but then someone pointed to me that the main non-outsourced piece of software we use (the main student records/teaching info system) is borderline unusuable. Horribly slow, lots of 90s errors like commas in course names breaking things, doesn't work on a tablet, etc etc. At least the Microsoft stuff works.
As I hope you are learning, in very many places in the northern hemisphere, perhaps including most of Europe, that is not what people mean by 'winter'.