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3etyc8
|
how/why does the dark side of the moon sync up with the wizard of oz?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3etyc8/eli5_howwhy_does_the_dark_side_of_the_moon_sync/
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"Our brains are very good at finding patterns in things. The brain that can recognize and remember the pattern of rustling leaves that means 'tiger' tends to reproduce more.\n\nSo, given a set of things to look at/listen too, our brains will look for and find patterns. It's part of why we love looking at fire, or patterns of sunlight on the ocean.\n\nThe Dark Side of Oz is part of this phenomenon. We will pay attention to the parts where it does match, and not remember the bits where it doesn't. \n\nAdd in the fact that DSOTM is a very cinematic, diverse album that has an emotional 'flow' and progression, and it will tend to match up more with a movie that has these same qualities.",
"It's doesn't. Members of Pink Floyd's Band are fans of Wizard Of Oz. I read that they used audio clips from the movie for the Album. Some listeners heard these audio clips and tried finding the moments in the film and then claiming you can sync them up. ",
"was just discussing this with friends today. being the only one that had ever actually tried it, my suggestion was that it was overstated and underwhelming. "
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3t092h
|
because they have to drink more to feel the same effects, do bigger people face a higher risk of alcohol related problems than smaller people?
|
Like Cirrhosis, Chronic liver failure, addiction, etc...
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3t092h/eli5because_they_have_to_drink_more_to_feel_the/
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"The frequency in which alcohol is consumed would have to be considered. A drink a day, makes little to no difference but 10 or more may start to have some effect after a prolonged period of time. Overall, yes, to some extent. Because of (pre)existing conditions cause by weight or that may even cause the weight gain, it's hard to determine to what extent the alcohol is affecting them vs. lifestyle, genetics, etc. As far as I know, there isn't much information on this subject aside from a general medical opinion.",
"The \"effective dose\" of alcohol is much more dependant on tolerance as a result of frequent drinking than body weight. The effects of alcohol are a result of the blood concentration, and the metabolism of alcohol takes place at a more or less constant rate, regardless of a person's size. \n\nBody weight, therefore, does not represent an increased chance for alcohol related conditions. There might be some minor statistical variations, but they are far and away exceeded by lifestyle factors. "
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4puexp
|
how are free withdrawal atm machines profitable?
|
There's a lot of them so it must be making someone money
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4puexp/eli5_how_are_free_withdrawal_atm_machines/
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"The location (gas station/mall usually) pays for it, thus keeping you in the location and giving you a reason to go there in the first place.",
"When an ATM has free withdrawals, it's for one of two reasons:\n\nThe ATM is owned by the bank, and they offer free withdrawals to their customers at that ATM, or\nThe ATM is located in a retail location, and the fee is covered by the retailer in the hopes that some of the cash the machine has just dispensed will find its way into their cash register.",
"ATMs are actually less costly for banks than withdrawals from human tellers. Remember when all ATMs were free Pepperidge Farm Remembers. \n\nEdit\nPrior to 1988, there was no surcharging of cardholders by ATM owners in the U.S. In 1988 Valley Bank of Nevada began surcharging \"foreign cardholders\" (meaning holders of ATM cards not issued by Valley Bank) for withdrawals at Valley Bank ATMs located in/near Las Vegas casinos.[29] Eventually, various regional ATM Networks, and ultimately the national networks, Plus and Cirrus, permitted ATM surcharging.\n\nBefore 1996, foreign ATM fees averaged $1.01 USD nationally, according to a 2001 report from the US-based State Public Interest Research Group.[30]\n\nAs banks and third parties realized the profit potential, they raised the fees. "
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1wgvk7
|
in hinduism and buddhism where the dead get reincarnated, how do they account for population growth?
|
Was wondering about reincarnation and I came up with a question. I'd like to see if reddit can help me understand Hinduism and Buddhism better. Situation: example The population is 10 people, and one person gets horribly murdered but a women gives birth to triplets, then the one dead guy can only be one of those babies. But where do the other 2 souls come from? Please be neutral in your explanations.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wgvk7/eli5_in_hinduism_and_buddhism_where_the_dead_get/
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"From Jainism perspective (not entirely applicable to Hindusim n Buddhism): There are uncountable souls in this multi-verse who die and are born in every single moment. We are talking not only about human souls in this cycle of incarnation, but also about the souls of all living beings in this multi verse who are equally capable of reincarnation and nirvaana. The soul of the murdered person will re-incarnate as a non-human being anywhere in this multiverse (determined by its 'Pudhgal'/ Karmic matter on its soul) and those triplets will have souls that were in a non-human being in their previous incarnation.",
"Consider that reincarnation/rebirth is not just human - > human. In mainstream Indian Hinduism and Buddhism, humans can become other animals, and Jainism, along with some earlier Hindu texts, maintain that an excess of bad karma might lead to reincarnation as a rock or plant. According to the [Canadian Encyclopedia](_URL_1_), it is the tradition in some schools of thought that one might reach the level of a god after sufficient lives and cycles.\n\nWith that in mind, it seems plausible to claim that it would be impossible to count, say, the number of total living animals, and potentially also the number of souls trapped in rocks and plants, not to mention all the total number of supernatural beings, in order to confirm that the total soul population of the world had indeed increased.\n\nEDIT: Two points:\n\n1) Given that I've now answered this question a few times, I thought I'd just write what I've put below here.\n\n > Yes, being reborn as a rock or plant is something of a Karmic dead end. This is why it is not a common belief in mainstream Hinduism/Buddhism. If you can't act, you can't really move on the Karma scale. I can only speculate that those groups that still believe in reincarnation as a rock see it as a very severe punishment and after some period, perhaps when you have done your time, you get another shot at being a thing that can act again.\n\n2) Other people point out that Buddhism/Hinduism often involves the belief in invisible alternate realms which might well contain numerous souls we can't sense, which is a possible answer I neglected to point out. \n\nEDIT 2: four more points:\n\n1) **This is the internet. You don't know who I am. I sound knowledgeable, and I'd like to think I know enough about this topic to answer any questions you might have, but high karma (this is reddit karma I'm talking about) never equals any kind of real authority. This applies for the whole of Reddit and people would do better to remember it.** I'd have written something more considered and nuanced if I thought I was going to completely drown out the comments below by actual practicing Buddhists and Hindus.\n\n2) Buddhism and Hinduism are umbrella terms that cover a range of ideas and beliefs. Hinduism, translated, means something along the lines of 'the religions of India', and it subsumes an array of traditions, myths and practices, tied together by some central tenets, such as dharma and Karma. Therefore, your milage will vary. Buddhism is somewhat more unified, but there are still differences among groups.\n \n3) The concept of souls (in Hinduism, most Buddhists do not believe in souls *per se*, but it gets pretty [complicated if you read into it](_URL_0_)) and time are different to our western, Christianised ideas. Honestly, this whole question is somewhat missing the point, especially in the case of Buddhism. This kind of 'soul accountancy' doesn't get a lot of thought compared to how one can go about living a better life. It's like going into a church and asking people if God can make a rock bigger than he can lift.\n\n4) Read around the subject if you're interested. Read the other answers. They're as good as mine, if not better. And go to /r/Buddhism or /r/Hinduism for more information - their sidebars have great reading lists.\n\nEDIT 3: Obligatory thank you for the gold, kind stranger!",
"I believe they also consider the souls of animals, which can reincarnate as humans if they were 'well behaved' in their former life. ",
"They don't have to necessarily come from other people. You can reincarnate but not into a human. Imagine a human long before that died and did not reincarnate back into a human, but a bug or a farm animal. Then when that bug/animal died, their soul reincarnated into one of those 3 babies. The reincarnation of the soul is not limited to humans.",
"Not all rebirths happen where humans are able to detect them, basically. There are many realms in reality, and only the realm of humans and animals is directly observable by our senses. As such a changing population of humans doesn't mean there are more or fewer beings in existence. [Here's buddhit discussing this question.](_URL_0_)",
"Maybe souls come from an 'all-soul' that can be divided infinitely? Maybe souls exist outside of linear time and everything that has ever lived is actually one soul being reborn over and over, often living multiple instances in parallel? \nIt doesn't seem like there is much of a leap required, once you buy into the idea of rebirth. I quite like the concept. ",
"Reincarnation across planes of experience (which are sometimes explained as being \"other planets\" although it's not clear that they are conceived of as being literally physical world around actual stars in our universe.)\n\nAnd up from animals too, of course.\n\nSource: I'm former Hindu clergy.",
"When you die, you come back as someone else at any point in time. For instance you can be reborn in 1134AD as a small girl. Once you have died and reborn as every single person in history. You are equal in knowledge to God and can then move on to the next realm.",
"Energy can not be created nor destroyed. It only changes forms. Soul / Spirit is considered energy. Reincarnation is not always human to human. More offend than not it is human to animal. And animal to human. Human is only creature with chance to reach Nirvana. (Not to be confused with haven. An state of enlightenment) \n\nPerhaps your soul was that of an dinosaur that went extinct or lions and tigers that are near extinct. Perhaps you were an bacteria. But. it does not only apply to earth. Perhaps there is planet out there were billions have died due to meteor or war or something. where would those souls go?\n\nAlso. E = mc^2. We can not do so currently but Energy can turn into mass and mass can be turned into energy.... wait never mind. we can turn mass into energy. Some believe that living beings that are not animal may contain spirit (Trees/flowers). \n\nSeriously though. We are still discovering animals that exists on earth. Not just new animals but old animals that just remained well hidden. Who knows what the exact number of souls there were across span of Universe's birth. \n\nAnd then there is multiverse. Lets not even go there. Strangely. Most buddist belief / teaching goes hand in hand with science. They even teach you to question everything and observe... how weird is that for a religion? It has more scientific value than Scientology...\n",
"The entire concept is centred around the harmonious congregation of souls. Sure, inanimate objects and mosquitos are players, but the message remains that *all is one*. So, sentient beings aren't necessarily replicated in this ideology tit for tat, but are re-absorbed as part of the whole. The typical interpretation is that it is a business of equivalence. This is not true. It is best to understand the concept in the light of, for example... \"If you are great, you will become a tiger.\" and so \"If you are indeed great, you have avenged wrongs. Your foe will become a moth.\" Therein lies the law of equivalence.",
"Usually in Hinduism or Buddhism, you are only reborn a human if you have good karama, i.e. you were a good person in that lifetime. IF you had bad karma, you may be reborn as another animal until your karma was high enough to become human again. Also, they probably did not even consider something like population growth when the religions were created way back in the day.\n",
"Alan Watts said it best: \"As the ocean 'waves,' the universe 'peoples.'\" So, to say that when you die, you just cease to exist or are transported into another flesh-bag is largely irrelevant. Beings die and beings are born all across the universe all the time, that's just what the universe does. \n\nThe key here to understanding reincarnation is that \"I\" is *ALL* of these beings, just as you cannot separate individual bubbles that rise to the surface of a river and pop from the river itself. \n\nJust because your bubble pops, does not mean you stop being the river. \"You\" are just the universe experiencing itself through one perspective, and when your perspective is \"done,\" you (the universe) will experience it again in another way. ",
"Like other religions, Hinduism and Buddhism is not based on facts. And there are hundreds of different forms of Hinduism and Buddhism. This means you will get hundreds or even thousands of different answers to your question.\n\nI can give you an example:\n\n\"Your soul (atman) is like a river. It changes every time. The aim is to become a part of brahman or better: realizing that you are already a part of it. Brahman would be the ocean in this analogy. Of course the number of rivers, raindrops etc. can change. But they all come from the ocean and they all will be part of the ocean again.\"\n\nBut because there are about 1000 forms of Hinduism, about 999 will disagree with this.",
"I read a Buddhist take on reincarnation from a more scientific perspective that suddenly made great sense to me.\n\nConsidering mass cannot be created nor destroyed, reincarnation is simply the acceptance that once we are gone, everything that makes us will be redistributed to the universe to be reused. So, in my death, I may be incarnated with some of my atoms in a plant, others in a dog, some in the brick that makes the home for the family of that dog.\n\nReincarnation in this sense does not mean that I will come back entirely as another complete being.\n\nThen again, the other day I read something that said, \"What if the light we see at death is simply the opening at the end of the vaginal canal as we are rebirthed?\" Now that's an a fascinating thought!",
"Everybody did pretty good at explaining your question. Want to add that this is the reason that: \n\n1. **Burn the bodies after death** - The body is only a vessel and it is really the soul that counts. So, there is no assumption that the body is going to come back to life, and the body needs to be incinerated to merge back to the mother Earth. \n2. **Karma**: B/c soul is the one that counts and it carries from one life-form to another, it is important to accumulate good karma in your lifetime. If you gather enough good karma, you may receive eternal salvation and your soul can rest in peace (Moksha). \n3. **All lifeforms are pious**: Hinduism/Buddhism treat every living thing - animals/plants/bugs as pious, because everything has a body that is vessel and they are praying to the soul inside that animal/plant/bug/etc. \n\n\n**An interesting tidbit**: Every year, Hindu do a prayer for each of the deceased parents. During the prayer ritual, food is ceremoniously left outside the house to allow a crow to feed on it. The first crow that touches that food is assumed to be carrying the soul of the deceased person. And, everybody in the gathering prays to the crow for RIP and also good karma. I am not really sure why a crow was selected to be the bird of choice for this ritual.",
"One of the biggest misunderstandings when it comes to questions like these is applying material physics to something immaterial. For example, this questions seems to stem from thinking that a human can only be reborn from another human. As others have mentioned, there are a lot more possibilities.\n\nHere are some possibilities taught by eastern religions and some new age teachers:\n\n* Humans can incarnate after animals\n* Humans can incarnate from other dimensions, not of our universe (\"first timers\")\n* A soul can incarnate into multiple bodies at once to make its evolution faster (not necessarily in the same time periods)\n\nMany such teachings also state that there are an infinite number of worlds, and every being has free will as to where he wants to \"play\" next.",
"a candle does not lose its light when it shares its flame with another candle ",
"According to such Hinduistic thought, when a soul re-incarnates it occupies a baby while it is *in utero*. From there it grows, experiences life, and then dies where it returns to the Astral Plane. After about one million such lifetimes, it has accumulated enough experiences so that all Physical Karma (non-spiritual attachments to the physical world) is released.\n\nFrom there the soul begins a similar cycle shuttling between the Astral Plane and the Causal (Plane of Ideas) Plane. After disposing of Astral Karma, the soul transfers permanently to the Causal Plane.\n\nThe last stage, and the most seldom reached, is next. It is total Union with the Divine or once again becoming part of God.\n\n*If the Creation of the Universe was merely the \"Explosion\" of the Divine/God/\"Oversoul\", then all living souls (human and also extraterrestrials) were parts of the Divine. This implies that the Collapse of the Universe is merely the Rejoining of Souls into the original point source Divine/God/Oversoul.*",
"Not 100% on-topic, but an interesting enough read that I'm just gonna leave it here:\n\n**The Egg**\nby **Andy Weir**\n \nYou were on your way home when you died. \nIt was a car accident. Nothing particularly remarkable, but fatal nonetheless. You left behind a wife and two children. It was a painless death. The EMTs tried their best to save you, but to no avail. Your body was so utterly shattered you were better off, trust me.\nAnd that’s when you met me.\n\n“What… what happened?” You asked. “Where am I?” \n“You died,” I said, matter-of-factly. No point in mincing words. \n“There was a… a truck and it was skidding…” \n“Yup,” I said. \n“I… I died?” \n“Yup. But don’t feel bad about it. Everyone dies,” I said. \nYou looked around. There was nothingness. Just you and me. “What is this place?” You asked. “Is this the afterlife?” \n“More or less,” I said. \n“Are you god?” You asked. \n“Yup,” I replied. “I’m God.” \n“My kids… my wife,” you said. \n“What about them?” \n“Will they be all right?” \n“That’s what I like to see,” I said. “You just died and your main concern is for your family. That’s good stuff right there.” \nYou looked at me with fascination. To you, I didn’t look like God. I just looked like some man. Or possibly a woman. Some vague authority figure, maybe. More of a grammar school teacher than the almighty.\n“Don’t worry,” I said. “They’ll be fine. Your kids will remember you as perfect in every way. They didn’t have time to grow contempt for you. Your wife will cry on the outside, but will be secretly relieved. To be fair, your marriage was falling apart. If it’s any consolation, she’ll feel very guilty for feeling relieved.” \n“Oh,” you said. “So what happens now? Do I go to heaven or hell or something?” \n“Neither,” I said. “You’ll be reincarnated.” \n“Ah,” you said. “So the Hindus were right,” \n“All religions are right in their own way,” I said. “Walk with me.” \nYou followed along as we strode through the void. “Where are we going?” \n“Nowhere in particular,” I said. “It’s just nice to walk while we talk.” \n“So what’s the point, then?” You asked. “When I get reborn, I’ll just be a blank slate, right? A baby. So all my experiences and everything I did in this life won’t matter.” \n“Not so!” I said. “You have within you all the knowledge and experiences of all your past lives. You just don’t remember them right now.” \nI stopped walking and took you by the shoulders. “Your soul is more magnificent, beautiful, and gigantic than you can possibly imagine. A human mind can only contain a tiny fraction of what you are. It’s like sticking your finger in a glass of water to see if it’s hot or cold. You put a tiny part of yourself into the vessel, and when you bring it back out, you’ve gained all the experiences it had. \n“You’ve been in a human for the last 48 years, so you haven’t stretched out yet and felt the rest of your immense consciousness. If we hung out here for long enough, you’d start remembering everything. But there’s no point to doing that between each life.” \n“How many times have I been reincarnated, then?” \n“Oh lots. Lots and lots. An in to lots of different lives.” I said. “This time around, you’ll be a Chinese peasant girl in 540 AD.” \n“Wait, what?” You stammered. “You’re sending me back in time?” \n“Well, I guess technically. Time, as you know it, only exists in your universe. Things are different where I come from.” \n“Where you come from?” You said. \n“Oh sure,” I explained “I come from somewhere. Somewhere else. And there are others like me. I know you’ll want to know what it’s like there, but honestly you wouldn’t understand.” \n“Oh,” you said, a little let down. “But wait. If I get reincarnated to other places in time, I could have interacted with myself at some point.” \n“Sure. Happens all the time. And with both lives only aware of their own lifespan you don’t even know it’s happening.” \n“So what’s the point of it all?” \n“Seriously?” I asked. “Seriously? You’re asking me for the meaning of life? Isn’t that a little stereotypical?” \n“Well it’s a reasonable question,” you persisted. \nI looked you in the eye. “The meaning of life, the reason I made this whole universe, is for you to mature.” \n“You mean mankind? You want us to mature?” \n“No, just you. I made this whole universe for you. With each new life you grow and mature and become a larger and greater intellect.” \n“Just me? What about everyone else?” \n“There is no one else,” I said. “In this universe, there’s just you and me.” \nYou stared blankly at me. “But all the people on earth…” \n“All you. Different incarnations of you.” \n“Wait. I’m everyone!?” \n“Now you’re getting it,” I said, with a congratulatory slap on the back. \n“I’m every human being who ever lived?” \n“Or who will ever live, yes.” \n“I’m Abraham Lincoln?” \n“And you’re John Wilkes Booth, too,” I added. \n“I’m Hitler?” You said, appalled. \n“And you’re the millions he killed.” \n“I’m Jesus?” \n“And you’re everyone who followed him.” \nYou fell silent. \n“Every time you victimized someone,” I said, “you were victimizing yourself. Every act of kindness you’ve done, you’ve done to yourself. Every happy and sad moment ever experienced by any human was, or will be, experienced by you.” \nYou thought for a long time. \n“Why?” You asked me. “Why do all this?” \n“Because someday, you will become like me. Because that’s what you are. You’re one of my kind. You’re my child.” \n“Whoa,” you said, incredulous. “You mean I’m a god?” \n“No. Not yet. You’re a fetus. You’re still growing. Once you’ve lived every human life throughout all time, you will have grown enough to be born.” \n“So the whole universe,” you said, “it’s just…” \n“An egg.” I answered. “Now it’s time for you to move on to your next life.” \nAnd I sent you on your way.",
"I think /u/nwob said it best, and he is definitely correct on those accounts….That being said, you have to look at hinduism and buddhism in a slightly different way than you do western religions. Frankly, I could argue that they are not religions in the western sense…they are much more spiritual than literal compared to western religions. I tend to think of reincarnation to hindus as meaning more of the circle of life: our matter becomes the matter of the next cycle, and we can be anything including 'god' (again the concept of god is also not the same). The ultimate goal is not to be reincarnated (not even as god) but to achieve Moksha or Nirvana…i.e leave the cycle of Samsara (life/rebirth). -Source I'm a brahmin and have taken asian religion courses. ",
"i like to point out to everyone that i always thought it was really funny that the Buddhism and Taoism afterlife was sort of like a processing center where you take a number and await your reincarnation, where meanwhile, you just stay around and enjoy the \"facilities\".",
"Buddhist checking in:\n\nThere are 6 realms in Buddhist cosmology: The hells, Hungry Ghosts (like a shittier version of purgatory), Animals, Human, The Demi-Gods, and the Gods.\n\nThese are collectively known as Samsara, \n_URL_0_\n\nYou're karma will move you through these when you die. Oddly enough, it is considered most auspicious to be born a human, as it is your best opportunity to escape Samsara (enlightenment).\n\nSo, in answer - There are lots of bugs, and even more people in more 'metaphysical' places. The Buddha himself says the number is incalculable.\n\nEdit: I would like to point out that in Buddhism the term 'rebirth' tends to be preferable to reincarnation- as there isn't a *you* you that is 'incarnated', instead it's a non-self (Anatta). ",
"There's a lot of incomplete answers being given by people who's only contact with Buddhism seems to be from their college history class, I'd like to try and give an answer that is a little more in line with some of the actual teachings. First, it's important to understand that there are different schools of Buddhism which have different beliefs on reincarnation, and these schools can be very different from Hindi reincarnation. While people are correct in mentioning that reincarnation does not have to be human to human and often encompasses the entire spectrum of life, they ignore the fundamental essence of your question. Life grows and expands, shrink and contracts. There is a concept in buddhism called tahthata, in it's simplest form it means that all things are one suchness, in judeo-christian terms think of it as the holy spirit, the essence of God residing in all things. So the tahthata is one soul living all lives, experiencing it one at a time. And that as it dies it returns because that is the nature of energy, to never vanish but to change form.",
"Too many people ITT answering \"it's religion, so it isn't supposed to be logical.\" You'll note that OP didn't ask if it was true, just how it was explained in these religions/philosophies ",
"I think it goes along the lines of that when one is reincarnated, you don't just start off where you left off (time wise). Let's say you died today, when you are reincarnated you won't necessarily come back in 2014. It could be way back in the 1800's or even 2020. With that, it is perfectly possible that the other two souls from those triplets are still that same soul but from different points in that soul's time. ",
"There are many spiritual realms in some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism into which you can be reborn. There are heavenly realms, hellish realms, and all sorts of animals, demons, gods, and other worldly creatures that you may become. Ultimately, your goal is, instead of being reborn according to karma, to be united with a large truth and escape the cycle of birth, life and all the pleasures and trials that come with it, death, and rebirth. \n\nKeep in mind that there are many types of Buddhists and many many types of Hindus. ",
"When you take for granted that reincarnation is a thing, then you might come to the conclusion that there is in fact only one soul in the universe, that gets reincarnated into every (living) thing at any point in time and space. I dont know enough about Hinduism or Buddhism and I dont think they see it that way. However thats what I like to believe.",
"It's really nothing but an ingenious way to socially control a population, especially with the concept of karma. It is obvious that behaviors conducive to making civilization more facile result in more karma, thus a higher form of life (after death), while those which are 'bad' are punished and reincarnated as a rock or bug. \n\nHow convenient. In truth, it's nearly as dogmatic as the Abrahamic concept of hell, and how fear is used to control populations. ",
"Imagine you're making stuff up. There are no rules.",
"I love this question! I've had the chance to ask my 'guru' and this was his ego lashing ELI5 answer:\n\n\"you are a closed minded fool to think we are the only sentient species in this universe\".\n ",
"Cross universe pollination.",
"Try this.\n\n_URL_0_",
"As a Hindu who has given this some thought. Here's my take on this.\n\nThe basis of Hindu philosophy as I know it, are two concepts, \n* The Brahman (Objective truth, that what is ) \n* The Atman ( Subjective truth, that which is perceived or understood). \n\nAll people, dogs, cats ( and who knows, rocks ?) have an atman, which defines how they perceive the reality that is the Brahman. Now here is the interesting bit, (people who understood the Matrix should have no problem following :) ), the very fact that the Brahman exists predefines all possible views of it. i.e. All possible Atmans are already defined, by the existence of the Brahman. Leading to the common understanding that the Atman can neither be created nor destroyed.\n\nSince all Atmans already exist, it stands to reason that any Atman that a person has, somebody else has had before. \n\nSome confusion is caused by the common translation of Atman to Soul in English. The Atman is not personal. Based on the above, Sam's Atman is not personal to Sam, since the Atman exists even if Sam was never born. \n\nNow to your question, if you look at the Atman as a view of the truth and not a personal soul, the question does not arise. \n\nNote: This is my view of the world, there are many other views which are possible, which of these views is valid can only be decided when our Atman merges with the Brahman. (i.e) When what we perceive is what is . \nThat is Moksha, freedom from ignorance. \n",
"FWIW, there are many, many sects of Buddhism and not all recognize reincarnation The idea of reincarnation is a non-Buddhist idea that was grafted on later. In Zen, we practice that we do not know everything. We cannot answer this question, therefore it doesn't matter to us.\n\n",
"I think that reincarnation describes the process of the elements of our body decomposing into the soil and being reabsorbed by plants that in turn provide nutrients to animals that in turn provide nutrients to humans etc and the process goes on. It is the process by which all things become in the same, not necessarily that our consciousness is transferred to another person. \n\n....but I could be totally wrong",
"My Chinese history professor commented on this one time. He said that the reason why it doesn't make sense is because we assume that time moves forward, and that we only get reincarnated in the future, but if you take everyone who's ever lived through time, past, present, and future, pool it together, then we will have enough souls and bodies for it to work. I am not Hindu or Buddhist so idk if that's their belief or not, but it makes sense.",
"hello. long time lurker here. Before answering the OPs question I think it is important to point out that re-incarnation means different things to a Buddhist and a Hindu. \n\nHindus have a traditional meaning where the pure, permenant, soul moves from one vessel to another. Eventually merging back with God. here a vessel is something that can hold a consciousness. \n\nFor Buddhists reincarnation means the continuing of that karma \"you\" generated during that life, and crom past lives. The old analogy of a series of candles is a good one. if the first lighted candle starts the next, is it the same fire? Also a consciousness or soul from a Buddhist perspective is like a three legged stool. it needs all three legs to be supported, hence the trouble with conditioned states. Basically \"you\" are a conditioned being and are subject to the properties of those conditions. \n\nthat said the question is not dealt with in Buddhism. This is as Buddhisms goal is to break the cycle of samsara that conscious beings are subjected to.\n\n To a Buddhist this is the same question as asking where the soul resides or the originations of the universe. Not bad questions but are not considered helpful to the path of the middle way that leads ultimately to direct understanding and a non-conditioned state. basically an end to suffering. \n\nI hope this was helpful from the Buddhist perspective. I am sorry I could not directly answer the question. I have as yet no real direct experice with the law of karma and I do not believe the Buddha himself answered this question, and others like this. ",
"The decrease in the animal pop.",
"Hindu here.\n\nParaphrasing years of personal and class-based scriptural study, the divine in its true nature is regarded as infinite. That infinity as no form and is not bounded by time or space. It chooses to take the form of a human, a rock, a universe full of galaxies and dark matter, etc. for the experience of it, much like you or I would stop to kick a stone into a puddle as we pass by-- simply to see the ripples.\n\nSide note on kicking stones into puddles:\nThat puddle has no power over you because you exist independent of it. From your perspective that puddle is an inert thing, that is enlivened by your interaction with it.\nYou are the life force behind that puddle. However the creature swimming in that puddle is completely dependent on it. To that creature the stone entering the puddle causes a visceral reaction because it threatens both the creature and the puddle itself. To that creature the source of this event and the energy behind it is mysterious and unknowable.\n\nThe infinity described above is what \"each\" of us is made up of. We think we each separately exist because we have conditioned senses, e.g. I see you over there so you must not be me, I hear you make a noise I didn't make so you must not be me, etc.\n\nSo population growth as it's posed in this question seems like the mysterious expansion of a finite resource. From the infinite perspective, population growth is simply continual ~~division from~~ conditioning of an infinite source.\n\ntl;dr\n\n\"There is no remainder in the mathematics of infinity.\" -Nyogen Senzaki\n\n\"Even my conditioning has been conditioned.\" -William Douglas Street\n\nedit: grammar, clarity, steez",
"My understanding is that Buddha generally avoided answering metaphysical questions, as he thought they were pointless (see the Parable of the Arrow), and that one of those questions that came up frequently was what would happen to us when we die.",
"Well there's 3 conditions to consider. #1 Reincarnation isn't bound to being human. If someone has bad karma they can get reincarnated as a different animal. #2 Reincarnation isn't bound to linear time. You can be reincarnated as someone in the past, or future. #3 Reincarnation isn't bound to living things on the planet Earth.",
"i like to imagine time travel adds into it. in this way, there may be only one soul in the universe, getting passed around from everything to everyone. would also bring new meaning to karma, do bad things as every bad and good thing you do will eventually be done to you as you'll end up on every side of everything.",
"Btw Reddit Karma is not counted while determining whether your soul stays on Earth or gets freedom.",
"Theres an infinite number of souls.",
"As I understand it, our \"reality\" is just a tiny speck in the midst of a vast strangeness. There is a constant flow of souls coming and going. Some linger, some don't.",
"They can rationalize it in one or all of the following ways\n\n1. We are re-incarnated into higher and lower beings, not simply human - > human.\n\n2. The universe is bigger than the Earth. Humans - > aliens.\n\n3. Time is a delusion. We are all one consciousness experiencing itself subjectively.\n\n4. < drop acid and insert whatever theory comes to you through divination here > \n",
"For one thing, there are millions of other earthlike planets in the universe.",
"there are few radio stations but multiple radios.",
"The most common misconception here is that people keep asking about death with the notion that it is some kind of end. Rather \"death\" is more akin to the moment after sleep and before dreams; absolute nothing, void or the lack of stimuli to measure ones own being. To Hinduism which traditionally is actually called vedicism, this empty eternal moment which people can't remember due to the lack of stimuli is called Rigpa. Rigpa is empty infinite awareness and base consciousness. The \"void\" is like the empty cup... the emptiness of the cup is the space that holds infinity/whatever you desire. So I digress.. death is unconsciousness. Bodily death is illusion. There is no true \"one\" soul for a person. Just pure awareness that fades in and out in a cyclical constant. Thus a rock and a person can be one and the same with different levels of awareness not a soul* in the common sense. Both are part of a pool that can fill any form.\n\n\nHope that helps somebody. Its hard to truly translate vastly different ideas. Western gods are single beings whereas eastern gods are archetypal forces for instance.",
"A Haiku for you:\n\nNot all Buddhism \nBuys in to the concept of \nReincarnation ",
"Fun-fact: according to most Buddhist scripture reincarnation is a bad thing. One of the benefits of enlightenment is to end the cycle of death and rebirth. And while some forms of Buddhism believe in a sort of spirit world for those who are no longer trapped in the cycle of death and rebirth, the earliest forms, and many extant forms, believe the enlightened basically cease to exist in any form.",
"Every living creature has a soul, including flora. A human being can be reincarnated as a monkey, an ant, or even a protozoa. As regards the problem of accounting for population growth, growth in human population has come at the cost of, maybe more rapid decrease in other species' populations. So if anything, we might have a surplus of unassigned souls.\nSource: Born Hindu, read a bit of Buddhism.",
"What I'm stuck on is why that one person had to be horribly murdered. why couldn't you just make him die?",
"In general, these systems propose: There is not overall population growth in the entire universe, as the universe contains an infinite number of souls. The earth would just be one particular place in the universe, so there could be times when more human rebirths occur there.\n\nSo, someone who dies here in this universe might be reborn in another one and vice versa.\n\nFurther, rebirth is not just human > human rebirth. A bug might get reborn as a human in the next life (unlikely!), or a human might be reborn as a bug (more likely!).",
"Reincarnation does not mean that you literally are reborn as someone else. In order to understand this you first need to understand that \"you\" don't exist to begin with in buddhism. \"You\" are being reborn every moment.\n\nYou who is reading this is not the same person who originally made the post, just in exactly the same way that the flame of a candle is not the same, even though it appears to be fixed, but as a matter of fact it is a stream of hot energy. It's a process: flaming, so in that way every human be-ing, is a process.\n\nThat's what reincarnation means. I hope that helps.\n\nEDIT: IMPORTANT: ANYONE WHO CLAIMS THAT, IN BUDDHISM, THERE IS SUCH THING AS A SOUL/SELF/BEING/EGO/etc does not understand buddhism at all. Source: the Diamond Sutra.\n\nWhat people, especially in the West really need to learn about eastern cosmologies is that they are not meant to be read literally. They are metaphors for the human experience that cannot otherwise be stated in words.",
"Somewhere out in space an Alien civilization is dying out.",
"I do not know the answer to this, but is there any reason that you need to be reincarnated forward in time?",
"Some branches of Hinduism and Buddhism also believe that souls can be split after death, which might account for more than one person being born. ",
"Follow up question: does reincarnation follow in linear time? Can I only be reincarnated into the time the follows my current life's death?",
"Be a good rock, weather the weather, and in a few million years you can return to the circle as a lovely ditch weed.",
"If souls come back as trees and plants then I would have to assume that human population growth is directly contributed to by the fact that we are destroying forests and choking out plants with all of our asphalt and buildings and such. ",
"I think it would be foolish to consider that Earth is the only planet out there. ",
"i always thought it was simply because souls could come from any living thing, not only humans. there are billions more bugs than humans. plenty of souls to go around. ",
"I love religions. They hold so many answers, and yet leave so many questions. Questions that must not be answered, or cannot be answered. Questions that pull you into the event horizon as the information needed to assemble a conclusion is pulled apart into a black hole.",
"Lotta ants, buddy.",
"If a flame of one candle ignites a flame of another candle, is the fire of the first candle dimmed?\n\nIt is not a zero-sum relationship between our souls and our lives.",
"The thing I don't get with Karma is this: Who defines what counts as good or bad? \n\nIf Hitler kills a couple of thousand jews then he should be reincarnated as something horrible in my eyes but in his, he was doing the world a favour, he was doing good. ",
"There's no transmigration of souls in Buddhism because there's no Atman or soul to begin with. And unlike Hinduism, there really isn't some kind of 'oversoul' that pervades all entities or something like brahman, the ground of reality. There's only sunyata, or emptiness, which doesn't exist or suffer from a lack of existence. Existence and non-existence are just dualistic conceptions created by language.",
"i think my mom told me once you can only come back like 9 or something times and new people are being born all the time. and once someone has reached nirvana they dont come back(shes thailand buddhist... she might have said that to me to get me to stop asking questions and annoying her while she was cooking dinner)",
"Reincarnation is not limited to human life. The murdered guy, may not come back as a baby. The three babies that were born might be dogs that were kind or loyal or whatever it takes for dogs to get karma points.\n\nOverall, life goes on for everything, but how it goes on is determined by your acts in the current life.",
"There are different levels of the reincarnation cycle. Someone who was a horrible human might be reincarnated as a pig while an animal that was very loyal or saved someone or something might be reincarnated as a human. The levels depend on how sacred that animal is to that religion.",
"If you have lived a good and honest life you get to continue with your soul 100% intact. However, if you have lived a cruel and dishonest life your soul will split into two and you will have to live through two lives to repent.\n\n",
"Without going into an essay like other posts; Consider yourself as essentially stardust (carbon, etc.). If everything and everyone around you is also stardust then everything is actually one infinite (or non-dual 'thing') pretending to be many different individual 'things'. If you consider that truth then matters such as population growth can be as many or as few as God (ie, us, life or whatever you want to call it) wishes.",
"I feel like Buddhist reincarnation is very misunderstood.\n\nFrom my study, reincarnation has more to do with 'stream' (no death or life), just constant change. \"You\" are an idea, ideas are not \"real\": you are not real. Hence, you can not die and will always just be inhabiting a new form (reincarnating). ",
"STARGATES. There are plurality of worlds souls can come from. Each solar system has it's own heavens and hells also. From a physics perspective all the souls of the universe have always existed. No god created them.\n\nWhat's meant by \"God made me\" is like a gangster becomes \"a made man,\" through influence... There are a seemingly infinite countless number of souls in the universe, but the Buddhas are the only ones who know the exact number. The number is some scientifically annotated number from hell that goes on and on...\n\nI learned most of this stuff at the University of Northern Iowa Rod library in the book \"A Manual of Buddhism: In Its Modern Development (1860).\" This book blew me away because you can see how much science-fiction ripped-off ideas that missionaries got from Buddhist monks in the 19th-century. It is a mind-blowing book.\n\nIt tells about different species of gods and shape-shifter beings and how long of lives they live. It talks about the different hells for varying amounts of bad punishments and how many eons of kalpas you'll stay in them.\n\n\nMy personal conclusion from all of this is that all beings are meant to become a Buddha-couple. Therefore there is AN EVEN number of souls in the universe floating around, changing shape due to how they run their minds. It is people's beautiful destiny to pair-off with their soul-mate and be a buddha couple for eternity helping all other beings find their way to being a buddha couple in eternity.\n\nEventually all beings will be buddhas. Good and light will win out over shadow and evil. I also recommend Robert Thurman's (father of Uma no-shit) \"Tibetan Book of the Dead.\" Lotta questions answered there too and there's copies lying around in your local Barnes & Noble.\n\nBut be warned... The first week or so you start reading the book of the dead, you'll be really freaked out. Makes you fully confront your own mortality... ",
"According to the Hinduism that my parents practice, souls are not accounted for like this at all.\n\nA soul (*atman*) is considered to be merely a single piece of the Universal Spirit (*brahman*). In mainstream Hinduism, *brahman* is the only true deity; and its spirit resides in literally every piece of matter in the universe. Add on top of that the idea that *brahman* is considered to be limitless; in other words, there is not a finite number of souls that make up *brahman*. This means that new souls can be made from *brahman* an infinite number of times.\n\nAn important corollary to this idea is a pseudo-mathematical one: when you divide infinity into any number of pieces, each piece is still infinity. As a result, each *atman* is considered to be equivalently infinite to *brahman*. The core goal of Hindu practice is for human beings to learn this truth - the idea is that once you truly realize that you yourself are no different from anything else (every spirit is just as infinite as you), you've achieved enlightenment and freedom from the cycle of reincarnation.\n\nSo according to this strand of thought, your question is essentially meaningless - souls cannot be counted as separate entities since they are all considered to be infinite. Additionally, the incarnation of a \"new\" soul, human or otherwise, doesn't subtract from some finite reserve of souls somewhere; instead, the number of potential souls in the universe is infinite.",
"In Hinduism and Buddhism every living thing (plants,animals etc)can get reincarnated into any living form according to their karma.....so with that logic the population growth can be contributed by extinct species of plants and animals. ",
"I studied with the Dali Lama in Lehigh Valley PA several years ago and someone asked this exact question. His answer was \"We believe life is not limited to just this planet.\"\n\nNot related but interesting, some lady asked a question about how to forgive living with an abusive person with addictions. She went into great detail about the family situation, history, etc. When she concluded, he seemed to think for a long minute and answered \"I don't know\". 10 points for honesty and giving no fucks about the fact that everyone was expecting some kind of awesome wisdom.",
"In the Burmese tradition of Buddhism, typically a soul is part of the greater collective of souls. It's more like a fragment that has broken off from the infinite, only to return to the infinite to be reborn once again. However, during the time you exist here on Earth in whatever form, you are able to rack up, much like Reddit, good and bad Karma. The Karma is an indicator of your rebirth cycle and understanding it is easier if you put arbitrary numbers on it. 0 Karma is the baseline and you can go positive and negative. A life of earning positive Karma has merits in which you are reborn in a higher position and are able to get closer to enlightenment (not to be confused with becoming a Buddha, in which there is the consensus that there will ever only be one). Going the opposite direction however sends you to the Buddhist equivalent of hell. Your soul has become so impure on the time it has spent on Earth that the only way for it to be reborn is to be cleansed with hell fire before returning to the collective. Unlike Western traditions of hell however, you are not here for eternity. Rather you're here for a really really long time. \n\nYour question itself poses a problem though, and that is the assumption that rebirth occurs on a physical plane. It isn't something physical, so we can't give you a where. No one can pinpoint the infinity of souls, just as Christians cannot pinpoint the location of heaven. \n\nAs for population growth, more fragments of the infinite break off or are being recycled from different species. There is no barrier that doesn't allow a dog to be a human in rebirth because our essence comes from essentially the same thing. However I am a person because I had good Karma in my life, and the dog is a dog due to his Karma. \n\n\nHope that helps. ",
"There is a river of life. \nThe river is endless and forever filled and flowing.\nAs the river approaches the waterfall of temporary being, the water separates on the way down, droplets of water becoming separate individuals for a little while, then finally, when the droplets reach the bottom they return to the source.\n\nDo you understand?\n\n ",
"I'm not Hindu or Buddhist, but I did study Buddhism for a few years and meditated a lot in that time. I'm also a huge fan of Alan Watts and some other notable people. Like most people, you have reincarnation completely misunderstood. The whole being reborn thing is just a story, a metaphor, to get you to understand reality.\n\nYou see, everything enters into existence (birth) and leaves existence (death). Change broken down is birth and death. Things do not really die, only their form changes. For example when a water droplet evaporates, it simply changes form, but you could say the droplet died and the mist was born. \n\nIn Buddhism, everything is considered impermanent, everything is always changing, coming to life and dying, this is rebirth.\n\n\nKarma is just another word for cause and effect. For example, suppose a young child behaves badly (this is bad karma), not because of some mystical being up in the sky, but because if he behaves badly then people will react badly to him. If he hits a boy, he will get hit in return this is karma. Also, if he gets away with bad behaviour, suppose a drug dealer gets away with killing people, he will then develop new confidence in his bad behaviour, he will think if he can get away with it once, he can get away with it again, so he is more likely to repeat the bad behaviour (unless someone stops him, which is then karma biting him in the ass), but suppose he decides to do it again a few years later, and then that time he doesn't get away with it, and this time he gets killed because it was a high risk attempt. That's an example of delayed karma, which is just another word for cause and effect.\n\nAll Buddhism is, is trying to explain the nature of reality, before science existed, in a form of stories. \"Hell\" and \"Heaven\" are just metaphors for emotional states. Suppose you do something bad, and karma comes back, and something bad happens to you, let's say you're now hospitalized for a month because you decided to go drunk driving, that month will be filled with physical pain, and emotional pain. This is the equivalent of being born in \"Hell\". If you do something good, suppose you found a wallet and returned it to the owner, and he decides to give you the $200 that was in the wallet, and now you're ecstatic, this is like being born in Heaven. If you decided to keep the wallet and the $200 in it, you may feel guilty or like shit, this is like being born in a \"lesser realm\". It is our morals and perspective that affect our emotions, and our feelings is what makes reality \"real\", so when your negative emotions come into existence, it is like being born into another reality.\n\nWhen the Buddha stops \"karma\" when he becomes enlightened, he has achieved Nirvana, which means \"Without clinging\", \"without existence\", \"Without being reborn\", this is also another word for the emotional state \"equanimity\", he is neither negative, nor positive, he is in the complete middle, he is neither reborn in heaven nor hell. He is outside of Samsara (from heaven to hell). The reason is that our attachments affect our emotional states, when we don't get what we want we become upset, and when we get what we want we become excited, when we lose what we already have, our emotions crash again. One thing gained, is another thing lost. This is volatile and is the opposite of equanimity.\n\ntldr; cause and effect (karma) are what makes things come into and out of existence (rebirth)\n\nHope that makes sense. Cheers.",
"I always like to use the idea that as we kill and wipe out animals, thus we run out of other species to reincarnate into so to speak, so more humans appear. \n\nTo be honest I am of no religious persuasion, but I do believe in some kind of magical mystical higher power. ",
"New souls are born into the world all the time, usually in the peasant caste. Being born into a wealthy family means you have lived at least one life before this one, and you were a good person. ",
"All those ants that died had lots of good karma for doing nice ant-ly things. They're getting reincarnated as humans.\nSource: I'm a Hindu.",
"In Hinduism the individual soul or \"atman\" is considered to be an instance or subset of the eternal or universal soul \"the Brahman\". The individual soul is said to have been created from the Brahman and it is considered the journey of that soul to return to the Brahman through the karmic process or birth and rebirth. So at any given time there is an inexhaustible amount of \"souls\" present within the Brahman and as such there does not have to be an equality or decrease of the number of souls in the world. It is also important to note that the concept of individuality does not apply to one who attains \"enlightenment\" which is considered to be the point when an individual soul has rejoined the Brahman. Therefore, the conventional notion of one keeping his or her identity after death does not exist in Hinduism. I am a Hindu and this is the best I have understood it. Hope this helps answer your question. ",
"Short answer: God or Universal Force is infinitely expressing itself so there is no end to new souls showing up. Longer answer: Individual souls evolve upwards (generally) from lower lifeforms to higher ones with human as the top. Once a soul has evolved into a human body it has free will and self awareness which results in making bad or good decisions it's held accountable for. Too many bad decisions and bad karma can devolve back to an animal form, but not a freaking rock! Come on guys lol if you were playing 1st league football and played poorly you'd likely be sent to bench or get pushed down to 2nd league (soccer jive) not go back to middle school gym level soccer.",
"Surprised I haven't seen what I thought was the most straightforward explanation yet; hopefully I'm not posting too late to be noticed!\n\nProbably THE most important truth in Buddhist thought, is that while we tend to identify our self as a single, separate person in reality that is the author of your own thoughts and desires etc., Buddhist thought says that this idea we have of a \"self\" is not true, that it's actually an illusion. It doesn't really exist, there's no 'thing' inside our brains or souls that sees things as, \"this is me\" vs \"this is my environment\". So when they talk about rebirth, the question is framed differently because there isn't a \"soul\" or a being inside of a person, the way that non Buddhists think when you mention the concept of rebirth.\n\nWhat people are actually made up of are 5 aggregates called skandahs, which are essentially ways/processes in which a person interacts with the word. And all that exists are these 5 skandhas/processes, there is no \"soul\" underneath that these originate from, or exists as the \"author\" of these actions. (This is what people try to explore in yoga/mediation- interaction with the world without pushing the concept of a different self into the world. Like, taking in sensations and being present in the moment without pushing your own agenda).\n\nSo, reincarnation. Because there is no self and no ownership of a soul, all the skandhas that existed while you are alive, don't die with you. They still exist, and the ways in which this manifests differs on your interpretation of Buddhist thought. But it is definitely not a \"one human dies one human is born\" washing of the souls in a river type of thing.\n\n\n(I'm typing this from a Buddhist thought/philosophy perspective; there are many branches of Buddhist religion that might have different ideas, but I'm answering from what the teachings of the Buddha would be).",
"Because Chuck Norris says so. ",
"Hello.\n\nThere is a great bit of information lacking on another way to conceive of reincarnation. At least it is lacking in notoriety. There are many versions of Buddhism, and therefore different interpretations of what reincarnation is. The top post explains Janist and Hindu versions acceptably. However, Zen, Ch'an or Mahayana Buddhism has not been adequately explained. \n\nFor Zen buddhism, reincarnation is not that your *individual* soul or identity continues on with some separate vessel to house it. The best quote I can provide of from Thich Nhat Hahn's commentary on the Heart Sutra. He explains it as so : \"In a past life I was a cloud. This is not poetry; it is science.\"\n\nWhen I die, my soul (energy is a simple western way to think of it) moves from me to other things. I was once the sun and a tree and a grilled cheese sandwich... and a therefore a cow and yeast.. etc. \n\nWe are an interconnected piece of everything. We can account for as many 'souls' as there is energy... essentially. \n\nI hope this was helpful and informative. \nIt's my first reddit post too. :3\n\n ",
"Real ELI5 answer: They didn't; reincarnation was made up at a time when we didn't know anything about anything.",
"Long story short . Reincarnation is for the whole of Flora and Fauna. PLants and Animals will convert into Humans and vice versa. \n\nSource - I was a tiger.",
"Buddhists typically *don't* believe in 'reincarnation' which usually involves individual souls in continuous existence through successive incarnate lives, but in 'rebirth' in which there is no individual soul - indeed nothing passing from one life to another, but karmic continuity beyond death. In this case, while remembering past lives and so on is apparently possible, there is no reason that new karmic individuals can't arise.",
"buddhism does not believe in reincarnation. there is a fundamental teaching in buddhism called 'anatta' or, 'no-self'. it poses that there is no seperate existing entity called self. so what can be 'reincarnated? this is a question gotama buddha chose not to answer.\n\nin hinduism beetles etc. can graduate to being humans..the pool is deep.",
"Implying religion uses logic",
"Former Hindu here: According to the gurus my family followed, new souls are created all the time. \n\n(Otherwise we'd be in danger of running out/low as people become enlightened and their soul stops being reincarnated.)",
"I don't believe Hinduism ever specifically accounted for population growth because it wasn't really a concern. See Hinduism doesn't believe in a finite number of souls. \n \nThere's one little aspect of the karma road that kind of shows this isn't/wasn't a concern. See the goal in this karma road is to achieve Moksha. When you reach Moksha you leave the birth/death cycle. The system is already set up to expect souls leaving the reincarnation cycle so obviously there is an influx of souls from somewhere. You can chalk that up to the creator Brahma. \n \nSidenote: I don't actually believe any of this. This is just my understanding of it having been raised Hindu. \n \ntl;dr: god gives us more souls. ",
"Reincarnation is not just for humans. It accounts for every living thing. For example anything from humans, animals, insects to single cell organisms and bacteria. Now consider that there is life in outer space and that the universe is infinite. A population increase on a tiny planet is nothing with a universal mindset. ",
"Reincarnation does not equal reanimation. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soul#Buddhism",
"http://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.com/en/article/hinduism/#h3_jump_3"
],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/Buddhism/comments/19rwe6/how_can_separate_rebirth_make_sense_of_the_highly/"
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[],
[],
[],
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[
"http://www.buddhanet.net/e-learning/reincarnation.htm"
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|
3k24ua
|
how did people "google" before google existed?
|
For instance, if I don't understand something or want a quick explanation, I just google it. Before Google, did people really have to go to the library for every little explanation?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k24ua/eli5_how_did_people_google_before_google_existed/
|
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"Unless you owned a set of encyclopedias. Or just ask Dad and Grandpa. They knew/know everything.",
"We figured it out ourselves. Or owned reference books. And remembered things. It wasn't hard. ",
"Pretty much said \"fuck it...not learning that anytime soon\". Then we made stuff up on our own (instead of looking up the made up stuff). ",
"Fuck I feel old now. Thanks kid. BTW, Yes; we went to the library, had to look up encyclopaedias, history, science or geography books if we wanted to know anything or specifics. ",
"Anyone remember Hotbot?",
"Before google, there was altavista. Before the \"internet\" there was AOL, Prodigy, Compuserve & Delphi all of which you had forums to ask questions and online encyclopedias, etc. Before those online encyclopedias you had BBSs, which had FidoNET, RIME, etc which also connected to USENet, so kinda like Reddit is today. Before that you had Encarta, which came on CD. Then yep, before that you had book Encyclopedias, you also had almanacs where you could look stuff up. Almost every house had encyclopedias. Other than that, yeah, you had to go a library, where you could find a book, or ask a librarian. Even had newspapers and magazines on microfilm with indexes of topics. Or you could save your question to ask your teacher, grandparents or librarian.",
"Libraries. Encyclopedias (purchased from the grocery store). I remember Encyclopedia Britannica being a god-send when I was in high school because I was one of the few people with a computer at the time. \n\n\nSource: I'm old, but not *too* old. *sobs*",
"Well, during the time there was internet but before there was Google, Yahoo was considered an excellent search engine. There were others before that - read about it [here](_URL_0_).\n\nBefore there were computers, then yeah. You'd try looking it up with what books you had at home (hopefully encyclopedias) or you'd go to the library. \n\nMost of the time if a thought just crossed your mind, like \"how many episodes of MASH have there been,\" you would shrug and forget about it. It wasn't worth looking up. You wouldn't go to the library for every little thing, only the things that were really important.",
"Also, people just didn't know some things and then didn't care. Our relationship with information has changed a lot since the internet took over.\n\nBack then, it was also a lot easier to bullhit, as your friend wouldn't immediately pull out their phone and tell you how wrong you are.",
"Well before Google there was Yahoo and AskJeeves, we never said \"Yahoo it\" though just used the phrase \"search the internet or surf the internet for it\". There were others but as far as I remember Yahoo was the main one everyone used.\n\nPretty much everything you use today didn't exist in the mid-late 90's. I personally spent a huge amount of time on Usenet message boards, the Freenet project and various real-time chat rooms. There was no such thing as social networking, Myspace or Facebook and things were a lot less centralised. \n\nToday everyone knows to go to Facebook, or Google for something back then there was no \"go to X or Y\" and there was a lot more of one thing. Reddit feels quite a lot like the old internet with text only messages and many different subreddits (channels). Think of the internet itself being similar to Reddit is today, with each subreddit being a message board or website.\n\nPiracy wasn't looked down upon as there was no 'Youtube' or 'Spotify' so you often used sharing programs similar to BitTorrent (I personally used to use Usenet, then Morpheus and Kazaa) to download music libraries for listening to. Games were purchased in game stores on CD's. DRM (piracy protection) on games wasn't a thing.\n\nBefore that you used to have to 'dial in' to BBS message boards which were often local to your area.",
"Before computers the primary \"quick\" source of knowledge was the encylopedia. Most families would have a set, generally the Encylopedia Brittanica, but there were 1-2 other reputable ones as well. \n\nIf it wasn't in the encyclopedia you had to go to a library. If it wasn't in the library your only recourse was to go to the yellow pages, find an expert on the subject, and convince them to talk to you.\n\n",
"in every town there was a guy at the local bar who knew fucking everything and would tell you whether you asked him or not",
"Oh god. I'm only 32, and someone is already asking this question. So this is what aging truly feels like.\n\nYes. The library was a great resource, and a major pain in the ass compared to quick Googling. You had to use the card catalog, which is like manual paper Google. Then you had to use an esoteric system of numbers and letters that guided you to the right shelf. Then you had a book, which may or may not contain the correct information. Now you get to read a book -- hope it's in there, or you get to read another whole one hoping the information is in it. I used to carry home stacks of books to do a single report. I also read a lot more, which is a good thing honestly. No one reads a whole book to find out a fact anymore. They miss out on so much context.\n\nAnd it was useless for some tasks. Can't remember the name of that one song in that one commercial that one time? You're fucked, kid. Want to see a video demonstration of how to change your brake rotors? No one has the two minute video on VHS, trust me. Want to see pornography? Hope you like glossy paper magazines filled with airbrushed models and grainy low-definition magnetic tape showing images that look like something recorded with a 1960s era Soviet potato camera. Want an electronic copy of a book to read on your tablet? What's an electronic book? Isn't a tablet something made out of clay and used by the Sumerians?\n\nEncyclopedias were essential. At home, I had a set of World Book and Britannica. They were essential for getting homework done. And yes, plagiarism was a major thing if you knew a teacher wasn't going to check the brand of encyclopedia you used at home. \n\nIf you'd told me in 1995 that I'd eventually carry a tiny computer in my pocket with access to nearly all of humanity's collective knowledge, I'd think you were full of shit. And yet here it is, with higher resolution than anything I ever saw on a regular TV for the first half of my life and thinner than a cassette tape.",
"IIT: People in their late 20's and Early to mid 30's feeling way older than they should. \n\nMoving on....\n\nIf we're looking at the pre google era, or the time when IE was in competition with Netscape as a browser and was actually good, there were a tonne of other smaller search engines available, but one of the more prominent and reliable was Alta Vista. \n\nPrior to that, well if you were lucky you had a fairly recent set of Encyclopaedias at home, seriously these things cost a lot of money, took up an entire Shelf and came in separate volumes, but were always an essential starting point. \n\nNow if they weren't in the home, you went to your library, and grabbed their copy of the encyclopaedia to start with, then using the library's computers, or asking the librarian, you'd get a Dewey decimal code reference and book title for more in depth reading. \n\nEncyclopaedia's were like the opening paragraphs of Wikipedia. gave you a concise overview, but you couldn't do a whole assignment based on just those. You could find out what chess was for example, but to learn high level plays, or find more history around it you'd need to find the specialist books. \n\nNow if you were super lucky, circa 1995 if you bought a computer (which IIRC was about the time CD drives were coming into vogue) you'd get a copy of Microsoft Encarta when you got your PC. This was huge, as you had that entire bookshelf full of unwieldy Encyclopaedias in something that fit neatly in your hand. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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[],
[],
[],
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_search_engine"
],
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[]
] |
|
1mae7i
|
linux
|
Is Linux a specific OS? Or is it like Windows where it has XP, Vista, 7, 8. Are they Ubuntu or Mint? If it is Ubuntu and mint can you tell me the order of them. Thanks.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1mae7i/eli5_linux/
|
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"Linux itself is a kernel. A kernel is the key component to an operating system. It is in charge of telling the other parts of the OS what to do. Examples of Linux based systems include Debian, Ubuntu, and Mint. Sometimes people call these \"Linux distributions.\" When you see people say that they use Linux, they actually mean an OS based on it. Each OS based on Linux has its own versions, and they are maintained by different groups of people. Therefore, if Ubuntu has a version called Crazy Cat, and then updated to Ambitious Anteater, that would be similar to Windows updating from Vista to 7.\r\rThere are many other parts of an operating system, such as a window manager, which come together to make a complete system.\r\rWindows has a kernel as well, but it is different. That is why software written for Linux-based systems needs an interpreter to run on Windows, such as Cygwin. The opposite is also true - to run Windows software on Linux most people use software called WINE.",
"Great vid on Linux:\n\n_URL_0_",
"Your question has two answers... a technical one, as saintkrieg answered, and a colloquial one. The colloquial one is probably the most useful one.\n\nTechnically speaking: Linux is a kernel. As saintkrieg explained, the kernel is the smallest part of the operating system. It's the part that does very simple and low-level things like talking with your hard-drive, running and managing other programs to make sure they don't misbehave, and reading input from your mouse and keyboard.\n\nColloquially speaking: Generally, when people are talking about Linux, they are talking about an entire ecosystem of software that goes with it. In other words, in this colloquial usage, it's kind of arbitrary where you distinguish the actual operating system from the software that runs on it. I mean, is Firefox part of Windows, or is it just an application that you run on Windows? Colloquially, there is actually no answer to this: As a web-browser, it is pretty important program. However, Firefox runs on the Linux kernel, as well as the Windows kernel and the Mac OSX kernel. So, it's kind of arbitrary where we draw the line. Linux, thus, in this most common usage, refers to all the applications you run on top of the Linux kernel, a giant pool of open source software. This includes a \"Desktop Environment\", such as Unity or KDE, which gives you icons on your desktop and stylish X buttons on your windows, and applications to run on it, such as LibreOffice and Firefox.\n\nThe purpose of \"distributions of Linux\" is to select combinations from this big pool of open source software that all work well together. Ubuntu, Mint, or Fedora, for example, make certain choices about which Desktop Environment and applications to use. By running a distro like Ubuntu, you are promised that you will have good software out-of-the-box to run on your computer. For example, the people who make Ubuntu choose to include Unity for a Desktop Environment (this is what makes the bar of icons on the left of the screen, and the minimize and close buttons on your windows), Firefox for a web browser, and LibreOffice for an office suite.\n\nCould you have just the Linux kernel without all these extras, without a Desktop Environment and such applications? Technically, yes, but it'd be pretty useless. You wouldn't have any programs to run on the kernel, so you'd really have no way of using your computer.\n\n",
"Going to go for an (oversimplified) analogy that a 5 year old could understand.\n\nAs others here have said, Linux itself is what you call a \"kernel\", or the low-level software that interacts with the hardware on your computer itself.\n\nNow, think of the hardware of your computer (CPU and the like) as the engine of a car. The engine by itself is impressive and powerful, but essentially useless. You have to hook it up to something in order to get anything out of it. So think of Linux as being the transmission - it transforms the energy of the engine into something useful (moving around).\n\nAt this point, you have the groundwork of a vehicle - and in our analogy, a functional desktop computer - all set up. But an engine with a transmission connected to four wheels still isn't going to do you much good... you need to be able to sit in the thing and drive it. This is where the different distributions come into play. You can think of them as being like the body/frame of the car. When you get in and drive, you don't see the engine and transmission doing any work, you just turn the key and push the gas.\n\nBasically, and this is a stretch but to keep things simple, everyone who's using Linux has the same underlying components: hardware (an \"engine\" which differs from system to system) and something that makes this hardware accessible and useful (a \"transmission\" which is more or less the same for everyone, but there are exceptions^1 ). The interface (distro), which is there so humans can actually use it and see stuff happening on their screen (like a frame, you physically get in this and use the controls) is what makes the vast majority of the difference.\n\n--------------------------------------------\n\n^1 The Linux kernel is open source, so any group of people that makes their own distribution can modify it in any way that they want in order to get any number of desired effects."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVpbFMhOAwE"
],
[],
[]
] |
|
4mxv3z
|
why did film become a synonym for movies when photography also used film?
|
When someone says "I'm a filmmaker" or "let's watch a film," people automatically associate it with moving pictures even though photography was a medium that came before movies.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4mxv3z/eli5_why_did_film_become_a_synonym_for_movies/
|
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"It depends on the context, but I'll stick to your examples. People didn't view still photographs on photographic film. They needed to be printed on photographic paper. Slides are an exception, but they didn't get popular until later. \n\nMotion picture film is negative and printed onto another piece of film to make a positive for viewing via a projector. Many people view magnified motion picture film, but most people never view still photo negatives. \n\nThis is may not be the etymology, but it makes sense, and that's what your looking for. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
191eof
|
why do people care if google is tracking us?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/191eof/eli5_why_do_people_care_if_google_is_tracking_us/
|
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"If google turns evil, or some law happens that would require it to divulge private information, that would be not so great. There is some kinky stuff in everyone's search history and some stuff that could be interpreted as kinky if you tried hard enough.\n\nThere is also issue of commercials getting more and more in-your-face with personalised e-mails and pop-ups and whatnot.",
"Maybe I don't like it if google knows that I type \"Princess Pottypans\" into google about 20 times a day.\n\n(Don't google that you will probably see it as NSFL.)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
40m1u4
|
why do we weigh less a few hours after eating, even if we have not yet passed waste?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/40m1u4/eli5_why_do_we_weigh_less_a_few_hours_after/
|
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"Your body actually loses a significant amount of weight simply by breathing out. You breath in air with oxygen (O2), and breath out air with carbon dioxide (CO2). As you can see, for each CO2 molecule you breath out, you lose the weight of one carbon atom. As well, you breath out some water too. \n\n\nDoing very little, a human can probably burn 100 Calories an hour. If your \"few\" hours means say five hours, that's 500 Calories burnt. Sugar, specifically glucose, that your body burns has roughly 4 Calories per gram. So that's 125 g burnt. Carbon is about 40% the mass of glucose, so you are breathing out 50 g of carbon, or a tenth of a pound. As well, the other 60% of glucose's mass will turn into water. Some of which you will breath or sweat out. I'm not sure how to calculate how much water is actually lost, but if it's say the same as from carbon we are looking at about 100 g or 0.2 pounds lost simply by being alive and doing little every few hours, without going to the washroom. If you are active, that could be much more. ",
"/u/Dance-Of-Eternity has done a great job of explaining the ways that your body's weight is always changing.\n\nHowever, sometimes there is a much simpler reason: scales often really suck. A scale might read 2-3 pounds off because of cheap design and manufacturing. The interior gears and springs might be dirty, or not move smoothly, even in a brand new scale, causing measurements to be 'sticky'.\n\nIf your floor is uneven, or carpeted, it can unbalance the measurement, too. And of course, if your weight is not evenly distributed on the scale (are you leaning to the left or right, forward or backward), then your weight measurement will be inaccurate. You could weigh yourself a few times 5-10 minutes apart, and still get different measurements."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
10touo
|
what is the benefit to having a box-spring under your mattress as opposed to just having your mattress on the floor?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10touo/eli5_what_is_the_benefit_to_having_a_boxspring/
|
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"Air insulation. If you leave your matress on the floor, it will gather humidity and, eventually, mold will form.",
"When you plop down on the mattress, it's hard on the mattress springs and it makes the mattress wear out fast. The box spring is designed to absorb this sort of impact and protects the mattress springs.",
"Also- having a box spring makes the mattress work better.\n\nFor example right now i have a sheet of plywood under my mattress In the bed frame. because of it, the mattress cannot flex as much as it would normally and the result is that I am less comfortable on that mattress. ",
"It mainly makes an individual (usually male) reach adulthood. I called bullshit on this when I first heard it. But, last month I bought a box-spring and now I keep my checkbook in a little leather booklet and I've started fretting about picture frames.",
"In humid climates you may get mold under a mattress.\n\nIf you flip the mattress every so often, or stand it up on its side, then even in humid climates you shouldn't have a mold problem.\n\nI've been sleeping on just a mattress for the last 8 months or so, since my box-spring took up so much more room (it was a big wooden frame).\n\nSince then, I've actually gotten rid of my bed entirely an have been sleeping on folded blanks, similar to the feeling you would get from a traditional japanese futon.\n\nSadly there isn't any evidence that supports a soft or traditional bed being a good thing. There is evidence that \"rock-like\" surfaces can be good because they force the spine to align, helping your back. Additionally, you rest on your bones and joints instead of flesh. This is theorized to increase bone density. \n\nI know my bones, particularly hips and knees, hurt for the first few nights. Now they don't. \n\n---\n\nAt the end of the day, beds are expensive. Even more so if you insist on having a box-spring, matching covers etc. \n\nI like to examine the evidence for cultural norms like this, when you consider the amount of money some people lay down hoping for a better nights sleep. ",
"While not the core function of the box spring it also, in conjunction with the frame, put the mattress at near waist level which makes getting in and out easier.",
"It makes you sound like more a rock star when you're fucking.\n\nActually, it lets the mattress give a bit and is way more comfortable. I just moved from on the floor to on a box spring and it made a huge difference.",
"As someone who's used mattress only for the past 8 years (same mattress) ... nothing.\n\nThe only benefit I see from a frame & box-spring is elevation for people who would otherwise struggle to get off the floor. \n\nMy mattress has held up fine for 8 years. ",
"It's a good idea to raise the mattress off the floor. Not only with a box spring, but with a bedframe.\n\nHarder for bugs to climb into bed with you, harder for them to build a home if you vacuum under the bed."
]
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5ptrdc
|
what's the difference between triple a games and other types of games?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ptrdc/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_triple_a_games/
|
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"text": [
"A \"Triple A\" game is just a way of referring to big budget games produced by the big names in the industry. They have budgets of millions of dollars, hundreds of people working on them & massive marketing budgets.",
"It's not a purely technical definition - the definition will vary from person to person and from context.\n\nGenerally a triple A game is one that receives a large amount funding, normally from a major publisher, which is often visible in the number and quality of assets in the game. This doesn't necessarily mean the game is good (a major criticism of AAA games is that because they can't take risks with that much money on the line so they are cookie cutter games - identical sequel after sequel), just that the visual and audio components that is uses are pretty and plentiful.\n\nThink of AAA games like blockbuster movies. You can *see* the money spent on the screen in the form of big scenes, impressive CGI and lots of explosions.",
"Initially, it was used as a very positive indicator - \"triple-A\" meant it was as good as three times an \"A\" grade, used a comment of quality, as well as being related to a high marketing budget and development cost. As companies began to release certain games that were major hits - things like Halo, Assassin's Creed, etc, the term became a sort of general grab-term for games that were heavily publicized and advertised. It went from being a term given to games from outside sources to being given internally, advertising a game as their next \"triple-A\" title. Unfortunately, it's gotten something of a negative connotation more recently, as more and more games advertised as \"AAA\" are being much more disappointing - Assassin's Creed Unity, Watch_Dogs, etc."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
3kiozy
|
why don't people on a hijacked plane ever try to fight back for control?
|
I've always wondered why they never try to fight for their lives. If I knew their plan was to kamikaze into something, I personally would not care if they had guns, I would do anything I can to try to save us. So my question is why don't hostages fight back or are they not aware of what is happening?
Edit: Wow, I learned so much from this. I can see why some people wouldn't act and I never knew about the 4th plane, thanks for all the links/info!
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kiozy/eli5_why_dont_people_on_a_hijacked_plane_ever_try/
|
{
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2,
16,
2,
2,
8,
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"text": [
"I'm sure the hijackers have some kind of dangerous weapon, weather it would be a gun or a knife, you wouldn't want to try your luck.",
"Until 9/11, the hijackers' plan was never to kamikaze into something. They'd hijack the plane, force it to land somewhere quiet and hold the passengers hostage until their demands were met. If passengers cooperated, nothing was going to happen to them until the plane was on the ground. Save any heroics for if/when it looks like they're going to start killing passengers to put pressure on whoever they're negotiating with.\n\nWhen the [fourth plane](_URL_0_) was hijacked on 9/11 and passengers learned that the other planes had been crashed, they did indeed fight back. Although the plane still crashed, they stopped it reaching its target.",
"After the gunman on that French train was taken down recently NPR talked to a behavioral psychologist about this. Apparently the people who don't think and just do something are the only ones who act most of the time. Even a momentary second thought makes it really easy to talk yourself out of it",
"One thing to remember as well is if the type of firearm being used is enough to punch a hole through a planes shell it could compromise the entire plane structure.\n\nGranted if the end goal for the hijacker is the plane crashing you have nothing to lose, but it can be seen as a huge risk so I assume some people would be weary of shooting inside.\n\nAlso I am sure a lot of people do not have fire arms training, so even if you were to wrestle a gun from someone, what if the safety is on or you need to fiddle with something to actually get it to fire. Chances are the only people who would act would be the ones who have suitable fire arms experience/combat training.",
" > If I knew their plan was to kamikaze into something, I personally would not care if they had guns, I would do anything I can to try to save us\n\nYou can't know that until you find yourself in the situation.",
"There have been 14 hijacking incidents since 9/11 according to Wikipedia. Two were by pilots (so not really hijackings) most of the rest were obviously not serious, and four or five had passengers overpowering the hijack. \n\n14 is fuck all - one a year. Hijacking had a golden age in the seventies and eighties, but security, the fact you will be seriously in shit if caught, and the fact that the passengers will kick you to death means they don't happen much now. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_93"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
1lvhsg
|
how do you cut a wedding cake?
|
I'm watching this fancy baking show, and some of these cakes are friggin' huge. They're making tiers that are like, ten inches tall, and I just don't understand how people are supposed to eat that. Do they just cut each tier into smaller pieces (heightways), with some poor soul getting virtually no icing on their slice? Or are you supposed to just unhinge your jaw like a snake and get on with it?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lvhsg/eli5how_do_you_cut_a_wedding_cake/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cc35jef",
"cc36r3t"
],
"score": [
2,
3
],
"text": [
"sometimes you don't even eat the cake...if it's a really elaborate one that you do eat, there's usually one or two layers that are meant for eating and the rest is for show, although technically edible. usually those cakes are made with a special frosting call fondant that you can mold easily and it tastes like sugary shit, so eating them isn't always as nice as looking at them.",
"The couple only have to make the first cut, if they can afford a cake that fancy then presumably they also have servers to divide the cake.\n\nWhat the servers usually do after the couples make the first cut is take the cake apart and cut the biggest part first (so you can save the smaller part if there's leftovers). There are actually icing between the layers in addition to the outer layer of fondant (to hold the layers together), so every slice do get some icing on top."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
11haab
|
the club atmosphere
|
On the infrequent occasions where I have found myself in a dance-club setting, the notion of normalcy becomes extremely elastic in my thought process. I observe what I frankly interpret to be otherwise normal people behaving like animals. In any other circumstance, it would be really strange to see people behaving the way they do in a club, but instead the guy standing still just watching people becomes weird.
I'm not naive enough to believe that I understand this, so I'm trying to get it because I know that I don't. I know there's *something* different afoot in every patron's head (socially and psychologically) but I can't really figure out what it is; it's just like walking into another world for me.
What is really going on here? What is the prevailing mindset in these establishments? What mental crossover happens in someone between everyday life and entering a club? Why do people go to clubs? What is fun about clubs? What are you supposed to do in clubs? Why is it okay to do certain things that are taboo anywhere else? What is "grinding" and why do people want to do it? These are just a few questions I have, feel free to touch on anything else that is relevant.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11haab/eli5_the_club_atmosphere/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c6mgge3",
"c6mhb9s"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Taking off your shirt, painting your face and body in a bright primary color and yelling at the top of your lungs will get you thrown out of any church, restaurant, doctor's office or shopping mall.\n\nBut you'd fit right in at a football game.\n\nBehaviors and customs are contextualized. Things that are entirely accepted in one context are inappropriate in a different context.\n\nThis kind of thing doesn't normally give people trouble. I'm curious why you're struggling with it. Maybe there's more to this that you left out of your question.",
"By and large, people go to clubs for one or more of these four reasons:\n\n1) **To dance**. There seems to be something built into most humans, that we enjoy moving in time to music. The exact psychology behind this isn't fully understood, but for most people it feels good, and if we are dancing with others it makes us feel somehow bonded to them. This is why it's more satisfying to dance where there are lots of people. Some people don't like dancing, and this is ok.\n\n2) **To drink**. Clubs serve alcohol, which can help people to socialise and shed their inhibitions, and may be of particular benefit to those in categories (3) and (4) below. It explains why the behaviour in clubs can be a bit wilder than what you see elsewhere. Some people don't like drinking, and this is ok.\n\n3) **To meet people for sex**. Most adult humans enjoy sex, and a lot of them like having brief sexual encounters without getting into a relationship. A club is a good place to meet people for this purpose, with lots of people getting together and casting aside their inhibitions. Because of the way people show off their bodies and they way they can move when they dance, dancing with someone can be a good way of finding a sexual partner. Sometimes dancers might want to make the dancing itself sexual, and this is where grinding (rubbing your body against someone as you dance) comes in. *NB: Grinding should only be done if you're sure the other person wants you to. Otherwise it's sexual assault.* Some people don't like casual sex, and this is ok.\n\n4) **To go along with friends**. Some people aren't really interested in (1), (2) or (3), but they have friends who are, and they might go along with them out of politeness or to fit in with the group. These people might be a bit shy or haven't really explored their own feelings enough, and one day might learn to enjoy themselvs in a club, perhaps with a little help from (2). Other people might genuinely not like the clubbing experience, and might be better off politely declining or finding friends who have interests more in tune with their own. Either way, it is ok to be in category (4)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
fg0v1e
|
does it make sense to preheat water in electric kettle when using stove anyway?
|
I want to cook Broccoli in a pot. Is it more energy efficient to preheat water in an electric kettle and then pour it into the pot on the stove (the stove needs to heat up anyway to cook the broccoli).
EDIT: The question is not either kettle or pot. The kettle is definitely more energy and time efficient. The question is: a) FIRST water in the kettle and then continue in the pot VS b) only in the pot.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fg0v1e/eli5_does_it_make_sense_to_preheat_water_in/
|
{
"a_id": [
"fk1rmli"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"Most places, a natural gas stove is cheaper than electricity to produce the same amount of heat.\n\nA stove because of its open nature is going to be less efficient energywise. Some of the fire will just heat the surrounding air and not the pot."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
1140r3
|
european soccer
|
its gotta be the most confusing set up i've ever come across.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1140r3/eli5_european_soccer/
|
{
"a_id": [
"c6j4yz5"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"If you're talking about club soccer, not national teams, each country has its own league system, with a top division, and a varying number of lower divisions. The bottom teams in each division get \"relegated\" to the next lower division at the end of the season, and the top teams get \"promoted\" to the next highest division. Technically, a local amateur team can work their way up to the \"majors\" if they keep winning season after season. Winning the top league is obviously a big deal.\n\nThere are also leagues where clubs from across Europe play. The Champions League is the best one - the top teams from each country from the previous season play in it (in addition to their country's league), and it runs an entire year. Each country is allotted a number of teams for the Champions League depending on how good they are, so England, Germany, and Spain each get to send four, a few more send three, and the rest send one or two. Winning the Champions League is a *really big* deal. There's also the Europa League, which is for the next-best teams in each country who didn't make the Champions League. \n\nIt's a little bit like college basketball in the US. There are countries instead of conferences, and winning your country is important, but everyone wants to go to the big dance, and the better countries get more bids (and winning the NIT/Europa League is cool, but not as good). Except instead of happening at the end of the season, it happens the following season."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
24cqjg
|
what "resoultion" are our eyes?
|
With all these new high tech upgrades in graphical capabilities, systems are now being able to render video games in incredible quality... how far off is a 4k tv to what we see or even the increasing number of polygons our new technology can hold.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24cqjg/eli5_what_resoultion_are_our_eyes/
|
{
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"ch5u1mw",
"ch5udeo",
"ch5vp30",
"ch5zk61"
],
"score": [
13,
4,
3,
2
],
"text": [
"[Vsauce video on this exact topic](_URL_0_)",
"By watching the Vsauce video linked in the previous comment, you need a picture of 576megapixel filling your whole sight (regardless of distance) for it to be continuously indistinguishable of reality. If your able to track the focal point of your eye, and adapt the picture according to it, you only need a 8megapixel image.",
"I think mine are 480p at best. Damn astigmatism.",
"Each pixel in our eyes is a single receptor cell. So, since there are about 576 million receptors sending data to the brain, the eye's resolution can be up to 576 Megapixels."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4I5Q3UXkGd0"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
3aeeo9
|
why do patients at their end-of-life- stage suddenly become better before dying?
|
cross-post from: _URL_0_
I have read articles and heard from friends & relatives that their family members who are suffering from terminal illness suddenly becoming better (examples: such as able to eat more, remembering people around them) and passing on/away shortly
What triggers this sudden "recovery"?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3aeeo9/eli5why_do_patients_at_their_endoflife_stage/
|
{
"a_id": [
"csbuyn5",
"csby17k",
"csbzg62",
"csc2mg9"
],
"score": [
9,
12,
24,
11
],
"text": [
"It is something called '' agony or agony phase '' at medicine _URL_0_",
"Ive seen this too working in the medical field. We always called it \"The Rally\". No where near a specific medical description, but we always thought it was the body's one last push to get better, or to make the person feel better. It happens a lot working in a Skilled Nursing Facility with patients in therapy.\n\nEdit: After some Google searching, it appears that the phenomena is basically a surge in energy from resting so much. (Something with brain swelling) After the energy is used up, death is usuallt a day or two behind it.",
"I don't actually know, but I have a guess. A lot of what makes you feel terrible when you're sick is your immune system fighting the problem. And sometimes that fight kills the sick person or does permanent damage, like a fever that gets out of control. Perhaps the feeling better for a bit at the end is because the immune system has given up for whatever reason (it ran out of energy, some critical part of it got destroyed, etc.). So maybe it's not a sign of health (vanquishing the enemy) but instead a sign of having lost the last battle. ",
"We often observed patients getting better after getting to the point all medications were stopped. My theory (or educated guess) is that we often saw these patients on 10+ medications at the same time. Something for pain, something for depression, something for blood pressure, etc etc. All of these medications had side effects, and cumulatively they made the patient feel \"like death\". We would stop the medication for various reasons, and they would be significantly better for some time, until their disease caught up with them. "
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/todayilearned/comments/3adxso/til_indianapolis_has_a_volunteer_program_called/"
] |
[
[
"http://www.slideshare.net/onyemekeihiaoscar/forensic-medical-theory-of-death"
],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
42ii6y
|
the war in darfur
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42ii6y/eli5_the_war_in_darfur/
|
{
"a_id": [
"czax64p"
],
"score": [
7
],
"text": [
"There are two major anti-government groups in Darfur: Sudan Liberation Movement (SLM) and Justice and Equality Movement (JEM).\n\nSudan is over 95% Muslim and their law is based on Sharia Law. The SLM and JEM formed because they thought non-Muslim people in Darfur were being oppressed. In response, the government began ethnic cleansing of non-Arabs in the region that has resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilians killed and millions displaced.\n\nThere was a temporary ceasefire in 2010 with peace talks that possibly aimed to Darfur being semi-independent, but then the Sudanese government began attacks again."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
8gtbxj
|
why is it so difficult to tell your brain to stop being nervous about something that in reality isn’t worth being nervous about?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8gtbxj/eli5_why_is_it_so_difficult_to_tell_your_brain_to/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dyeg40x",
"dyepomm"
],
"score": [
8,
3
],
"text": [
"Fear/panic/nervousness is extremely useful evolutionarily speaking (is that even a word?).\n\nFear gives you adrenaline, it boosts your body both mentally and physically. This is extremely useful if, say, you are face to face with a tiger or other threatening scenarios.\n\nSo when your brain perceives a threat, it is hard-wired, through millions of years of evolution, to give this \"fear response\". It is so deeply rooted in your brain that saying \"hey, chill, it's just an oral presentation\" will not have any effect. ",
"the amygdala. It sends out a fear response based off things you've been afraid of before, this is behind ocd and a lot of social anxiety. The trick is to teach it through action, not through words. So someone who has ocd for example should just stop doing the obsessive actions (as difficult as that may be) and shoulder through the fear because if you can do the thing (or not do) calmly, you train your amygdala not to be afraid in that situation.\n\nYou'd be surprised at how quickly it adapts to changes. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
2q0jxf
|
why do i get stomach aches doing physical activity immediately after eating? what difference does waiting a fre minutes really make?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2q0jxf/eli5_why_do_i_get_stomach_aches_doing_physical/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cn1pw6q",
"cn1q1tz"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"It has to do with blood flow! When you have just eaten, your body is working hard to digest the food that has just entered your stomach, so a lot of your blood is surrounding the GI track. That means there is less blood in other areas of the body to do work. When you exercise after eating, the blood leaves the stomach area to support the muscles that are moving, leaving undigested food sitting heavily in your stomach rather than allowing the stomach to continue churning and digesting. ",
"Not 100% sure so I hope someone will back me up, but I think the story goes like this: Digestion is hard, it takes a lot muscle movements and chemical reactions to break down food. This is why many people get tired after a large meal. However, when you go to do a lot of exercise, especially aerobic exercise, the body decides that this exercise is probably more important than all this digestion (think evolutionarily, e.x. Running from a predator) and so it stops digesting. The food just sits there and eventually makes you feel unwell. Furthermore, if you do enough exercise, the body tries to get rid of the food, so you don't need to do any digestion, and you throw up. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
4x3iy7
|
why do we find attractive people or people we crush on intimidating despite them not being a threat?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4x3iy7/eli5_why_do_we_find_attractive_people_or_people/
|
{
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8,
2,
2
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"text": [
"Because they are a threat to you sexually. They are either potentially going to out compete you for sexual partners, or they are in a position to potentially reject your advances. ",
"Because there is the emotional risk of the other person not returning the feelings. It puts you in a vulnerable place. Also the other person may find some fault with you (personality or physical or financial etc) which also puts you in a vuneraable place. It is really just about your self esteem and the fear of rejection.",
"While the other answers are also viable, I think (don't know, just think) it also has to do with the fact that if we find someone attractive, they have a certain power over us. While they probably wouldn't realize it, they figuratively have our hearts in their hands.\n\nSure, this isn't like having your life in someone else's hands, but for those of us that have gone through heartbreak before (unscientifically at about 99.9%), we know the hurt and anguish that can come from someone crushing the feelings, sometimes without mercy.",
"Because we are still wired from when we lived in tribes a long time ago. At that time, there weren't a lot of options for a partner in the tribe that weren't related to you. Therefore if you approached the best looking partner of the opposite sex, and they rejected you, word could get around and you may never procreate. Who wants someone else's rejects. \n \nThis has no impact on modern social interactions, but we still have those instincts.",
"Back in tribal times, the attractive females pretty much always had a mate or protector. If you \"approached\" her for mating and her mate / protector was insulted by it, he/ they could break your skull. As only successful pairing had children the traits were passed down, the more cautious survived, ect. \nOn another hand tribes were fairly small generally 80-200 individuals max, assume roughly half were female so to make it easy 100 females, 20 were to old / younge, 60% were already mates, of the 20 or so left say half of those were attractive to you that leaves 10, they usually pair off in small groups of 2-5. Go for the most attractive and fail or get spurned by one in the group, and no mate for you. So they posed both a social and a very real physical threat.\nAgain only the successful mates and produced offspring over many hundreds of generations, and there you go.\n\nFor females, physical attractiveness pulls a back seat when looking for a mate. Looking more for social prowess and the ability to pull resources and maintain stability being more attractive in the long run. \nFemales get the burden of carrying a child that saps their body's for long periods of time, and for a good portion being unable to procure sustenance , they relied on friends , family and a mate. ( imagine a woman in late stage gestation(pregnancy) hunting food or pulling carrots). With out that support they faced the very very real possibility of starving to death. So women tend to jealously guard their sources of resources. ( the cattiness women seam to hold for others they perceive as better than them in some way). So if a female decided to mate with the wrong male, there was a chance his mate would drive her from the \"pack\" , or possibly even kill her. Or if she chose the wrong male and he couldn't provide, or \"planted the field\" and then left. She maybe doomed. \n\nWhile many of these are no longer factors in today's society, we do still have the appendix from when we are primarily plant eaters and webbed fingers from when we were fish. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
2bjg3d
|
why does it seem like men crave sex way more than women do? are women just less interested in sex or..?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bjg3d/eli5_why_does_it_seem_like_men_crave_sex_way_more/
|
{
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"text": [
"Craving it and having it are two different things. Women have to deal with more social and personal issues. Women have to be responsible for birth control (it's not how it should be, but that's how it is), they have to be responsible (especially when they're young) of appearing too loose (something men don't deal with). Or when dealing with people whom they don't really know, will they be safe around that person?\n\nIt also depends on the age ranges you're talking about.\n\nSo if you're young, it will seem that men crave it more, but it switches up as time goes on.",
"You could look at it from an evolutionary stand point. Men who have and crave sex are more likely to pass on their genes to the next generation with little cost to themselves. On the other hand when a woman has sex and gets pregnant they need to divert a lot of time and resources towards getting to the point of child birth. Therefore its evolutionary more advantageous for a woman to wait and have sex with the right guy that will support her and has good genes. \n\nAn example from another species could be the water bug where the male must carry the eggs from the female on its back till they hatch so they are generally seen to be more selective when it comes to sex. ",
"1. we are acculturated to be this way. If you dropped a dude into a room with a bunch of horny women who act \"like men do\", he'd learn to manage being pursued, learn to create boundaries, learn to leverage the power that came from being sexually desired and learn to be \"disinterested\". I believe that the pursuer and pursuee roles are learned and acculturated by both sexes.\n\n2. there are many, many, many sexual dynamics within _relationships_ that are reverse. It's just as common for a women to not get it enough as a man...in a relationship (where the overall social dynamics of men and women are less significant than the relationship and interpersonal dynamics).\n\n3. Men and women to hit their horniest at very different ages. Wait till you're a guy dating in your thirties...you'll be running for cover and feigning headaches.",
"To quote 5 of my female colleagues \"yea, no I'm pretty much always ready to go\". "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
4d3q93
|
why does every single album seem to have a deluxe edition? why not release that as the main album?
|
Some have remixes, most have additional songs, and these songs can occasionally be better than the main album's content. So why this delayed release of all the material? What's the point in the deluxe version?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4d3q93/eli5_why_does_every_single_album_seem_to_have_a/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d1ngtrm"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"They could release it all as a single album.\n\nOr they could release the single album for most fans and casual fans, and the higher priced deluxe album for the hardcore fans\n\nThose hardcore fans are willing to pay more for an album, especially if it includes more.\n\nSo you release two different albums because there are two groups of customers buying your albums, who are willing to pay different prices. Regular fans pay normal prices, but not higher prices, hardcore fans are willing to pay those higher prices for a deluxe \"bigger\" album. Your goal is to make as much money as possible, so it certainly makes sense to release two different versions, one for each group of customers"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
1sd4gz
|
how do pagers work?
|
They predated cellular network and worked up to 40 miles from a signal point in the 1950s for doctors in NYC. That's all I understand from the wiki.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sd4gz/eli5_how_do_pagers_work/
|
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"The wiki page links to a [popular science article on the invention, and it's pretty well written.](_URL_0_)\n\nEvidently, it was just a one-way radio receiver. The beeper doesn't need to send out any signals. It's no more complicated than an ordinary transistor radio. But without a tuner dial, so it was locked to one station. That station was operated by the company running the pager service. It ran a continuous string of code numbers, each representing a doctor who had a message waiting. If a doctor heard his code number, he called in on a telephone and go the message.",
"They were essentially a simplified version of cell phones with rx only capabilities. A broadcast tower would send a message and you would receive it. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://books.google.com/books?id=ZyEDAAAAMBAJ&pg=PA104&dq=popular+science+1950+can+our+jets+support&hl=en&ei=4n2-TJmUBNnhnQfCvvGJDg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CD8Q6AEwBA#v=onepage&q&f=true"
],
[]
] |
|
1xuwz3
|
the difference between neanderthals and cro-magnons?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xuwz3/eli5_the_difference_between_neanderthals_and/
|
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"Neanderthals were an early cousin of ours. They were short, stocky and had broad faces and a basic language and knowledge of tools. \n\nCro Magnons were early modern humans, and eventually outcompeted/lead to the extinction of Neanderthals around 33,000 years ago.\n\nOur most recent common ancestor with Neanderthals is Homo heidelbergensis; they believe Cro Magnons and Neanderthals diverged from H. heidelbergensis about 350,000-400,000 years ago. It's common for people of North African, Middle Eastern and European ancestry to have a bit of \"neanderthal\" DNA (1-3%) though, as Cro Magnons and Neanderthals often mated."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
8zpefo
|
why do most countries have a capital district that is not a part of any state/province/etc., whereas in some countries like canada, that is not the case?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8zpefo/eli5_why_do_most_countries_have_a_capital/
|
{
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"text": [
"The US is about the only country that does this. Virtually all other nations just have a normal city as their Capital. Though it is common for a capital city to have special laws not common outside of it. \n\nAs for why the US chose to do this? It is because they did not want to grant any extra power or privilege to a Single State by having them control the Capital and therefore control travel to it and commerce in it. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
94t6hh
|
why do hands swell up at higher elevation?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/94t6hh/eli5_why_do_hands_swell_up_at_higher_elevation/
|
{
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"text": [
"The blood in your body gets de-pressurized as there is less air pressure. It’s the same way that a bag of chips will pop if taken into high elevation fast enough. The reason it only shows in your hands and feet is because they are more bony and blood-filled then the rest of the body. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
3bisrf
|
how does my coffee magically spill all over my microwave plate?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3bisrf/eli5_how_does_my_coffee_magically_spill_all_over/
|
{
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"csmhhgq"
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"text": [
"You're boiling/superheating your coffee and its boiling over - if you were to throw some sugar into it in this state I bet you'll get a bunch of bubbles and/or it would bubble over again. The superheated liquid finds nucleation points in the grains of sugar - similar to how the CO2 comes out of diet coke when you throw menthos into it.\n\nI find in my microwave, 1:20-1:25 at 100% power is exactly right. Until that one day I use either a slightly smaller mug or don't fill it to the usual level, and I get it all over my microwave as well.\n\nTry setting yours to 1:20."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
a02wvg
|
how does slingshotting work in racing? (nascar, etc)
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a02wvg/eli5_how_does_slingshotting_work_in_racing_nascar/
|
{
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"text": [
"When you closely follow a car at high speed it blocks much of the air from hitting the front of your car. This lower drag means you use less power to maintain the same speed. When you do go to full power you gain a few mph above the car in front, pull out from behind them, and use those few extra mph they didn't have available to pass them. ",
"The leading car punches a hole in the air. The following car has encounters less airflow over the car, this means less resistance, therefore it can go faster, it builds up a little speed and is able to briefly go faster than the leading car, so it moves out and passes the leading car - all the time its actually slowing down, as it isn't sheltered by the other car and therefore suffering the air resistance that the other car is.\n\nNote that whilst the loss of airflow can be an advantage for the following car, in terms of raw speed its also a disadvantage - that missing airflow means that the car is also losing *downforce* - downforce is generated by the air flowing over the car and pushing it in to the track. Enormous amounts of grip can be generated by downforce, which racing cars rely on to go through corners at high speed. The loss of downforce means they can't go as fast through corners, unlike the leading car that has the usual amount of downforce and therefore can corner at high speed. In this situation the following car is often said to be \"in the dirty air\".\n\nThe ideal situation is for a racing car is to have downforce whilst cornering but none on the straights - the downforce isn't needed here and removing it will allow the car to go faster.\n\nThe \"dirty air\" problem is very prevalent in Formula One, these cars are massively dependent on the downforce generated by the aerodynamics on the car. This means that when one car follows another it can be very difficult to pass because the following car cannot corner as fast as the leading car, as a result by the time the cars on on the straight the following car is too far back to be able to pass. Over the years the engineers have come up with many ways to negate downforce when not needed - most of them are outlawed. \n\nHowever some years ago F1 implemented the DRS system. DRS stands for drag reduction system, what the system does is to use an actuator to change the rear wing angle of attack, this has the effect of reducing the downforce, thus letting the car go faster. The system can only be deployed when the car is following another at less than 1.2 seconds and when on a specific straight (sometimes in two straights). The idea is that a car, having got close gets a helping hand on the straight to make up for dropped speed in corners when following the other car."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
3dwo1q
|
why don't we look like we're getting bald when we see a lot of hair in the shower drain?
|
title says all
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dwo1q/eli5_why_dont_we_look_like_were_getting_bald_when/
|
{
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"text": [
"Because you lose hair naturally, without going bald. Hair regulates it's length by falling out after a set amount of time. There are lots of hairs on your head, so there's always one that's ready to fall out and start over. ",
"Individual hairs don't live that long. They fall out naturally, and new ones grow. People also have times when they shed more, just not to the extent dogs and other animals do. As I recall, women lose more hair at a particular phase of their cycle.\n\nYou only go bald if the hair that falls out isn't replaced by new hair."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
5cemjx
|
why can't a fusion reactor have a catastrophic meltdown?
|
I've read a lot of stuff about why fusion is better than fission (more plentiful and easily accessed fuel, no radioactive waste, etc...) and one thing that always comes up is that fusion reactors can't turn into a Chernobyl-type disaster. Definitely a good thing but everywhere I read just lists this like it's a common knowledge fact and I haven't found a good explanation of why this is the case.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5cemjx/eli5_why_cant_a_fusion_reactor_have_a/
|
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"A fusion reactor is built around a plasma containment chamber. Plasma is very hot, but not very dense. Most of the technology around a fusion reactor is in compressing the plasma down until it's hot and dense enough to get useful energy out of.\n\nIf a fusion reactor fails, that plasma is no longer contained in the small magnetic bubble and it rapidly expands. If you've ever had a can of compressed air that you held open for too long and it got cold it's the same concept, just on a much larger and much faster scale.\n\nThe plasma disperses, quickly dissipates its heat into the surrounding area, then returns to a normal temperature.\n\nYou wouldn't want to be right next to it (like, inside the containment building), but beyond that there wouldn't be enough energy or radiation to make a noticeable difference.",
"A fusion reactor generally works by maintaining a super-hot plasma. When you shut off whatever is maintaining that plasma, it dissipates and the reactions stop.\n\nA fusion reaction requires a lot of energy input to force atoms that a usually stable to do something they wouldn't normally do. \n\nA fission reaction does not require energy input to maintain. The atoms are unstable and the reaction is self-sustaining. Leaving it alone after starting the reaction would allow it to continue, not stop it.\n\nThat said, modern fission reactors designs have fail-safes to ensure that meltdowns can't happen. Chernobyl is essentially impossible now.",
"The fuel in a fission reactor is like a stadium full of soccer hooligans, dangerous and volatile. We want the hooligans to fight because that's how we get the energy. But we don't want them to fight *too* much so we station security guards so things don't get out of hand. If the guards are gone the fight will rage on destroying the stadium and will spill out into the streets causing untold damage.\n\nThe fuel in a fusion reactor is like a room full of socially awkward teens at a school dance. We want them to dance together to get energy. Left on their own they will avoid each other. To get them to dance we have to set the right conditions. We have to lock the doors to the gym, turn up the music and keep pushing them onto the dance floor. If we don't keep pushing them to dance or if the doors open, they'll just leave quietly and go home.",
"Because a fusion reactor is like trying to get a fire going on a soaked raft in the middle of the Atlantic during a hurricane. If even the slightest thing goes wrong it stops burning.\n\nTo fuse elements together you need a truly ridiculously hot gas. Temperatures in excess of 100 million degrees (celcius, fahrenheit doesn't really matter with such huge numbers) aren't uncommon. Obviously no normal material can withstand such ridiculous temperatures, so the plasma is contained by magnetic fields. If those fields fail the gas expands, hits the walls, instantly cools down and stops fusing.\n\nIn addition, a fusion reactor never contains more than a few grams of fusion fuel. So even if the magnetic containment fails it won't do much. It'll evaporate a bit of the wall and that's about it. A fission reactor can have a meltdown because it contains enough fuel for several years of operation.\n\nReally, the worst that can go wrong with a fusion reactor is that there's a tritium leak (hydrogen isotope and a proposed fuel) and it burns with oxygen to create some radioactive water. In that case you need to evacuate the plant for a few days until the tritium decays. That's all.",
"Think of Chernobyl like heating up a pot of gasoline on a stove. When something goes wrong it does so catastrophically. When it's on fire it keeps being on fire. Fusion reaction, in comparison, is like boiling a pot of water. The moment you take it off the stove the reaction fizzles out.\n\nThe reactor Chernobyl used was self-sustaining. The hotter it ran the hotter it ran, and when the inhibitors weren't working it slagged itself. That is because the goal of fission is to get a chain reaction going. A neutron splits an uranium atom which produces two more neutrons which can split two more uranium atoms and so forth. When this reaction goes awry it releases too much energy for the chamber to contain.\n\nFusion, in comparison, requires the reactor to maintain extremely high temperature in a very small area. In the event of a catastrophic failure the system simply shuts down when the environment can no longer support fusion.\n\nAdditionally, if someone did manage to blow up a fusion plant it wouldn't release dangerously radioactive material like a fission plant would.",
"well, we don't have working commercial reactor to really say for sure but all you have to do is turn off the containment magnets and the reaction stops. Although doing so would probably destroy the reactor. It's also easy enough to shut the plasma heating sources off. \n \nIn the worst case scenario of an explosion of some sort, the materials used are completely different than fission reactors and don't pose the same kind of threat. \n \n\nthe fundamental difference is that in a fusion reactor, the reaction requires constant input of external heat. Whereas a fission reactor generates it's own which needs to be controlled. \n \nAbout the worst thing that could happen, would be if you had a commercial reactor generating power and the cooling system failed and no one noticed. It would damage or destroy your reactor but it would be more like driving your car with no coolant, eventually you'll just grind to a stop.",
"Simply put, fusion works by forcing atoms closer to each other. If containment breaks, the material rapidly cools. If we use tritium for the reaction, there is so little of it in the world, that it won't have a wide impact. If deuterium, it is not radioactive."
]
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4ufban
|
how did humanity survive millennia of smoking and drinking during pregnancy if they are bad for fetuses?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ufban/eli5_how_did_humanity_survive_millennia_of/
|
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"Because they're not deadly for fetuses. They contribute to certain birth defects but they aren't a direct cause in all cases",
"Smoking may not be as old as you think. It was around, but it wasn't something everybody did. Certain cultures incorporated smoking into their rituals. The idea that smoking was something people would just *do* for the hell of it didn't become popular in Europe until after the Americas were 'discovered'.\n\n > If drinking and smoking was considered safe for millennia\n\nSafety, in the sense you are using it, is another relatively recent idea.\n\n150 years ago people didn't know about *germs*. They had ideas about what was or was not *healthy* - usually wrong ideas, like bloodletting and miasma theory and 'humours', but they were at least thinking about it - but aside from things like \"it's not safe to eat poisonous mushrooms\", they weren't thinking of things in terms of safety.\n\nWe only figured out what genes do in the late 1800s. And less than a hundred years ago, miscarriages and stillbirths were often the *norm*... they still are, in some places. We've only known about *sperm* for 400 years or so, and until we had good microscopes we thought each one contained a tiny human that, once 'planted' in a woman, would grow to baby size. We didn't have an understanding of how the mother's health or genes affected the fetus until the last century or so.\n\nThere were just too many dots not yet connected between those things and the idea that what a pregnant woman ate or was otherwise exposed to could possibly harm the fetus. It wasn't something people thought about, because they didn't have a framework or context to think about it.",
"Up until the 20th century, one in five children died in infancy, more in some decades and centuries. The infant mortality rate is something we've been fighting for a long time.\n\nFamilies adapted to this by having 5+ kids, with the expectation that one or two won't make it to adulthood. You see in places on earth where we haven't yet solved infant mortality that this style of family is still prominent, but as we solve infant mortality you see smaller families within a generation, such as in Bangladesh, where the average children per woman is down to just 2.4.\n\nFor us as modern people, it's unacceptable to us if something like smoking or disease kills even 1% of the population, but demographically speaking we can survive with half of all children dying. That's how we used to do it, but it's getting better now.",
"Smoking by women is a relatively new cultural phenomenon; traditionally, smoking was relegated to men. It was only in the mid-twentieth century that women started smoking in significant numbers, and cigarette companies have had to do some pretty heavy-duty marketing to make that happen.\n\nAlso, heavy drinking by women is also a relatively new cultural phenomenon. While women did drink in the past, they typically drank pretty moderately. The kind of binge-drinking that damages fetuses is a twentieth-century phenomenon. ",
"Tobacco is a new world plant, so it was only a problem for Native Americans until 500 years ago.\n\nAnd in general, the answer is that they survived by having a fuckton of babies. Rates of survival for infants and children have skyrocketed in the last hundred years or so. Until the 19th century, death was constant. You had like 12 children because, most likely, a fair number of them wouldn't make it to adulthood. They would die to SIDS, smallpox, polio, the measles, or a hundred other diseases.\n\nThat's kind of the reason there was such a sudden population spike. As soon as we started getting a handle on the biggest killers, a lot more children started surviving to adulthood, and it wasn't for a few generations that the reproductive rate lowered to match.",
"People in the past didn't have scientific explanations for things that happened around them, but they certainly were still very aware. I'm sure that people noticed that women who smoke/drank or did risky things during pregnancy would have deformed children. So it doesn't take a giant mental leap to realize that a woman should stay away from dangerous things during her pregnancy. But child mortality rates were also much higher in the past too, that may suggest something.",
"Look up the flynn effect. Average IQs are skyrocketing. People used to do so much damage to their children's brains. Enough so to damage the average IQ of entire generations. ",
"They really didn't smoke and drink that much.\n\nTobacco is a new world plant, meaning it wasn't introduced to Europe until the mid-1500s.\n\nAside from that, Alcohol that was drunk in the Old World usually wasn't that strong.\n\nIt was mostly brewed in an attempt to have a decent tasting, clean source of hydration in urban areas where water sources were more likely to be contaminated. This means that they likely didn't have 30 proof wines and ales, they had 10 proof or 7 proof drinks.\n\nThis means that expectant mothers weren't downing the same strength liquor that we drink today.\n\nBut there no doubt were a lot of deaths and deformities caused by FAS, but just weren't recorded. These children died young, or were \"simple\" and didn't do anything worth recording.",
"A tangent, but — Even in the US, tobacco smoking didn't really take off in the general population until the early 20th century, when the combination of machine-rolled cigarettes and mass-market advertising created major brands like Camel and Lucky Strike.\n\nBefore that, the more popular form of tobacco was chewing tobacco.\n\nAnd peak tobacco in the US was the post-WWII era, from the mid-'40s to the mid-'60s.\n\nSource: _URL_0_",
"Smoking wasn't common for women until well into the 20th century. Neither was daily drinking of hard alcohol.",
"If people smoked and drank enough to endanger humanity, I think we'd notice it. More than half of the population of women would have to be smoking and/or drinking heavily during pregnancy for it to affect our survival as a whole. Thankfully it's not like that.",
"Because it doesn't usually kill unborn babies outright. Rather, it can cause damage that does not prevent the baby from being born, but may prevent it from developing as fully or being as healthy as it would have been otherwise.\n\nAlso, this is a bit of a misleading question. You could also ask how people got jobs down without OSHA, how people survived driving before drunk-driving laws existed, how we survive a world filled with leaded gas and lead paint, how we survived unregulated smoking, and many similar things. The fact is that all those things are harmful, but none of them are *universally* harmful, and many of them are not *immediately* harmful. As long as enough people survive, humanity continues. But for *some* people, it doesn't.\n\nBy the way, 'drinking' has not always been as it is now. For most of human history, we've only had access to conventionally fermented spirits (beer and wine, mostly). Distillation was known to some extent to some ancient peoples, but not widely done before about the 12th Century. So *hard* liquor is quite a recent discovery for our species, dating to well after the dawn of civilisation. We are evolved, most of us, to tolerate the physical effects of fermented spirits, which occur naturally (rotten fruit, etc.). But we are *not* evolved to deal with *hard* liquor, and that's been a problem ever since it was developed.\n",
"I think you may be associating any use of alcohol or smoking with a poor outcome in the fetus. Not all women who use those substances will give birth to children with birth defects. In fact, low amounts of alcohol in pregnancy has been found off and on to be safe. It is the use of large quantities that causes issues. The majority of the human population uses alcohol in moderation so most children born to mothers who drank wouldn't have birth defects. In fact, the connection wasn't made until the 70s and was only done so with alcoholic mothers. ",
"It was a big belief that everyone should have tons of kids for God's kingdom on Earth to proliferate. Disease was rampant and without known cause or cure already, so women having stillborn infants was not a surprise, nor was it thoroughly investigated. A lot of stigmas were placed on a pregnant mother in certain centuries. Sometimes, women were not to wear certain clothes or be very physical or jump. Then again, some decades, Coca-Cola contained cocaine, and everyone drank it. So no one pointed fingers at smoking and drinking overall for killing little James. They just had more babies until the mother's old age (30) could be blamed. We only have a few kids at a time nowadays because of population control (not needing more people on the Earth) and because of birth control methods being more effective. *Note: I am not a specialist in the area, and this has a very Western perspective."
]
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[],
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||
1ff0sy
|
why did ships in the age of sail not employ more bow/stern "chaser" guns?
|
Considering that much time might be spent chasing (or fleeing) enemy ships, rather than being side by side and exchanging broadsides, why didn't ship designers put more effort into placing guns that could fire forwards or backwards rather than just sideways?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ff0sy/eli5_why_did_ships_in_the_age_of_sail_not_employ/
|
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"This is conjecture but I'm guessing it's because they couldn't reliably fit more than 2 cannons on the front and back of ships without greatly sacrificing the speed and maneuverability of the ship.\n\nYou might have better luck in /r/AskHistorians ",
"Deck space. Guns required a carriage as well as a port-- when they fired, they would kick back HARD. They also required a crew of several human beings, who also needed space to move around.\n\nIt wasn't that big of a deal to turn broadside, that's where the armor was, and there was a lot more real estate to mount guns along the flanks.\n\nEdit: also, in the bow there is really nowhere to carve out a gunport, so you're stuck with only the space available on top (unless the ship has a significant forecastle, which messes with speed). The stern, being generally square, had more options, but it was also the weakest-armored portion of the ship, and when a ball did penetrate, it was likely to rake the length of the ship, causing maximum casualties. Not a place you generally want people shooting at.\n",
"It seems like it'd be more difficult to hit a ship that was directly in line as well. The size of the target would be very small if chasing / fleeing compared to shooting from the side.",
"Chasers *were* used. [Wiki link](_URL_0_).\n\nI believe that if the stern chasers were temporary, they tended to be fired out of the stern windows.",
"I was under the impression that this role could be partially filled using swivel guns.",
"If these sorts of questions interest you (and they are indeed pretty fascinating) I'd strongly recommend you read the Horatio Hornblower books. You'll learn all sorts of things about ship combat in the age of sail.",
"Γ = I α is the equation for torque (which is the equivalent of force but in a twisting manner.)\n\nI is the measure of how closely/ widely the distribution of the mass is on the object. And α is angular acceleration. \n\nNow my educated guess as to why they didn't apply a bow/stern guns is that it would push a huge junk of the weight outwards and therefore increase I. That would make it so that there would be more torque required to achieve the same angular acceleration. \n\n\n**ELI5:** It would be harder to turn since the weight it more outward. Think of a shopping cart, if you put something heavy in the front it's really hard to turn, but in the back (near the pivot point) it's much easier.",
"The Korean hero Yi Sun Shin used [\"Turtle Boats\"](_URL_0_) that would shoot through the mouth of a dragon head at the bow. [He was a true Bad Ass.](_URL_1_)"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chase_gun"
],
[],
[],
[],
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtle_ship",
"http://www.badassoftheweek.com/admiralyi.html"
]
] |
|
7ohn0u
|
why do bad cramps leave the muscle sore for a while afterwards?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7ohn0u/eli5_why_do_bad_cramps_leave_the_muscle_sore_for/
|
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"text": [
"Muscle cramping is caused by a process in your body that usually started because of a lack of oxygen to that particular muscle. \nWhen no oxygen is present, the cells try to milk as much energy as it can to keep the muscle going. The product of this process is called lactic acid, and this burns your muscle until it is reabsorbed into your body when there is enough oxygen to supply energy to your muscle.\nFor example, when you’re running, if you’re not breathing enough, or simply working too hard to keep up with your oxygen intake, that is what causes your sides to cramp up, as lactic acid is released to try and keep that muscle working. To stop the burning, the best thing to do is to slow down (not stop) and focus on breathing. Then the acid will reabsorb. It can leave your muscle sore afterwards. \nI can’t say the same for those random cramps you get for seemingly no reason though"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
7n7xgw
|
why marinating something for a longer period of time allow it to be more flavorful
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7n7xgw/eli5_why_marinating_something_for_a_longer_period/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ds0wo0g",
"drzqlld"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"A marinade consists of two essential components: an acid and seasonings. The acid, typically something like lemon juice or vinegar, breaks down the meat fibers making it more tender and allowing it to better absorb the seasonings. Most marinades also have a medium such as olive oil to carry the acid and seasonings, but that doesn't impact its basic function to tenderize and season the meat.",
"Not necessarily true. \n\nBeef/porkcan be marinated for 8-24 hours. Poultry about 20’minutes unless you brine which is 24 hours. \n\nAlso it’s not about adding flavor, it’s about tenderizing the meat or adding juiciness is brining. You add flavor seasonings on top of that which get absorbed into the meat with the salts. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
3q80rv
|
why are there convenience fees attached to online payments/credit cards/atms, etc.? do they really cost the business money, or are they trying to rip you off?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3q80rv/eli5_why_are_there_convenience_fees_attached_to/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cwcvn6y",
"cwcvrxv"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Both options could be true depending on the circumstance. It does cost a business a small fee to use a credit card, they may pass all, some, or none of that on to the customer. They may even charge the customer more for the use of a credit card, though understand this is much less common to charge more, its rare, they usually just pass on a certain charge or flat percentage.",
"They do actually cost the businesses money. Every time you swipe your credit card, a couple percent of the money you pay goes to the credit card company and not the merchant. The exact amount varies depending on what the merchant negotiated with the card processor, but you can see the base pricing for providers like [Stripe](_URL_0_) and [Square](_URL_1_) that a lot of small businesses use. Businesses that don't charge an extra fee have just built it in to their prices already.\n\nNow if they're charging you an $8 convenience fee on a $30 charge, that's just them ripping you off because they know people will pay anyway."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"https://stripe.com/us/pricing",
"https://squareup.com/pos"
]
] |
||
2qedp6
|
what's with all the fedora trolls on youtube?
|
I can't even tell if they're extracting the urine or not, there's so many of them. The same goes for all the "extreme feminists."
Can someone explain the history behind it? Is there a small minority that actually fit the stereotype or is it completely fabricated?
I'm confuzzled to say the least.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2qedp6/eli5_whats_with_all_the_fedora_trolls_on_youtube/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cn5dmjc"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"They are doing it because it gets them a lot of attention. They are just trolls, although their dedication and persistence is impressive.\n\nThere is a plugin called \"Hide Fedora\" that hides them. I personally prefer them to normal YouTube comments."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
51yyet
|
how does this circuit work?
|
[This](_URL_0_)
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/51yyet/eli5_how_does_this_circuit_work/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d7g04fg"
],
"score": [
4
],
"text": [
"I'm still in high school, but I will try and explain it from what I understand so far about electronics.\n\nThe CA3130 is what's called an 'op amp' or 'operational amplifier', its basically a chip that has hundreds of transistors connected up so that it has a gain of around 100,000 or more. This means that it can detect very small changes in voltage on pin 3. (pin 2 I believe is known as a reference, and because its connected to its output pin 6, it just increases the gain to the maximum value)\n\nThe BC548 is unnecessary in the circuit really, its just another transistor put onto the end. They're usually used to amplify current for output components that require a lot of current, but an LED usually wont need one, and also an op amp should be able to drive a single LED just fine.\n\nRadio waves/Microwaves are what a phone uses to transmit its data, you may remember the large antennas on car/house radios? They work because when a radio wave/microwave hits the antenna, it induces a very small voltage in the wire (because that's effectively what the metal antenna is doing) which a radio amplifies and then converts into music.\n\nWhat I think is happening here is that the very wires that make up the circuit, the legs of the components and the metal tracks in the breadboard ( on the left hand side) are picking up the signals like all wires do. This circuit is just massively increasing the current and so the very small voltage change is amplified enough to drive the LED.\n\nDisclaimer: I don't actually have a degree in electronics"
]
}
|
[] |
[
"https://youtu.be/xW-hXU7MWnM"
] |
[
[]
] |
|
2bneta
|
why so many super hero movies all at once it seems?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bneta/eli5_why_so_many_super_hero_movies_all_at_once_it/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cj718b1",
"cj74rqy"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"The proliferation of commodity Visual Effects",
"Due to the amount of money they are making. Spiderman led the way by becoming the largest grossing movie of all time (when released). The popularity and large takings continued with movies such as x-men and then Wolverine. Marvel was then bought by Disney who have since decided to milk this cow dry. To their credit however they are producing some high quality calcium. \n\nI haven't mentioned any DC movies even though they are also a large contributing factor for the increase in overall comic movies as they saw the popularity of Marvel and decided to throw their hat in the ring. \nQuick side note, I tip my hat to Blade which led the way for all of the comic movies to follow due its overall success."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
1zifzb
|
how do rams not getting concussions/internal bleeding/brain damage from all that vicious headbutting?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1zifzb/eli5_how_do_rams_not_getting_concussionsinternal/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cftybye",
"cftylp8"
],
"score": [
2,
4
],
"text": [
"I would assume because anatomically their skulls are much thicker and their brains are much smaller. Other than if they have a different type of fluid around their brain to stop it from hitting the sides of the skull so hard I don't know.\n\nHope that helped!",
"Evolution! All the rams (and other head butting species) individuals who's heads cracked during battle likely died, therefore produced less offspring, if any. The harder one's head is, the more likely to survive and succeed in such brutal territorial displays, and the more likely they are to reproduce, passing on the harder, more durable skull. This selective pressure for durable skulls accumulated over time into the forms of rams today. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
2jghua
|
how celebrities, with their closely guarded contact info, contact each other.
|
Is there some sort of confidential celebrity directory? How does Oprah know for sure that she is being contacted by Tom cruise? How would a new celebrity be added to this circle?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jghua/eli5_how_celebrities_with_their_closely_guarded/
|
{
"a_id": [
"clbhcqi",
"clbhfw3",
"clbhh7d",
"clbhilu",
"clbhkub",
"clbushe"
],
"score": [
3,
8,
3,
3,
2,
2
],
"text": [
"They meet each other and exchange phone numbers... They know the numbers are correct because they personally exchange them. ",
"Assuming they didn't give it to each other in person, they can go through a third party, like two agents talking to each other, or a mutual celebrity friend.",
"they often tend to work and meet in the same circles",
"The exact same reason how you know its your friend calling you and not some stranger. ",
"I hear most of them have two phones, two e-mails and so on. One for business purposes and one for private purposes.\n\nAnd I suppose there is a \"code\", that ones contact information is confidential. ",
"Agents and representatives. Each celebrity has a specific contact (manager) that keeps them in touch with other celebrities and jobs. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
2aeqh1
|
how a rape is verified?
|
When a rape is commited how a rape is verified and what medical tests are done which help to identify the rapist. Moreover what in the case where a male is raped. Isn't a females words enough to accuse him? If not how males can be protected from being falsely being accused of rape?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2aeqh1/eli5_how_a_rape_is_verified/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ciubeo3",
"ciudkr8",
"ciuhohm",
"ciuhrxx"
],
"score": [
4,
2,
4,
6
],
"text": [
"If a test is done soon after the rape, vaginal or anal trauma can easily be detected.",
"The verbal accusation is enough to bring an investigation. The investigation would depend on forensic evidence (usually taken at a medical exam, including DNA samples from semen or skin, pictures showing there was trauma) and other eye witnesses. If the man has an alibi, it is less likely to be successfully prosecuted. The case will likely only go to court if there's a reasonable thought that they can prove it.",
"This is where it important for the victim to not bathe and see a doctor ASAP. Any hair, skin, semen (if attacker was male), vaginal secretions( if the attacker was female), and/or fingerprints (yes they can get fingerprints off the human body if you go soon enough) can be collected as evidence. It should also be noted that if the attacker is known that information should also be given to the police ASAP as blood, skin, vaginal fluid (if victim was female), semen (if victim was male) or hair can still be present on the attacker, and they can get a warrant (needed to get the samples in most cases) to build a solid case.\n\nIf these steps are not followed it is much harder to get a conviction without a confession or witnesses. The victim can show signs of genital tearing if forceful penetration did occur. There may also be signs of bruising or a struggle that can be used as well, but these are circumstantial evidences, although it is a good source of evidence, and are not as convincing in court as direct evidence.\n\nTo protect males from false rape charges get consent documented (writing or video) and never have sex with anyone that is drunk (even if you are as well). It is absurd that those steps have to be taken, but if you don't trust the other party (which begs the question of why you are having intercourse with them to begin with) it needs to be as much of a safety measure as a condom.",
"[False accusations of rape are rare,](_URL_0_) estimated at 2%, the same rate as false accusations for other crimes.\n\nSo it's not really a problem, at least not the kind of problem that unprosecuted rape is. Basically, don't worry about it, if you don't want to be accused of rape, don't rape anyone and you'll be ok."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_accusation_of_rape"
]
] |
|
2s05fu
|
what does it feel like to be shot with a gun?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2s05fu/eli5_what_does_it_feel_like_to_be_shot_with_a_gun/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cnkvwd7",
"cnkwnks",
"cnl7lvy"
],
"score": [
3,
4,
3
],
"text": [
"Hasn't happened to me but I would imagine it's a mix of being hit with a hammer and stabbed(with something hot) at the same time ",
"Friend of mine described it as feeling like fire was going through the area that he got shot. ",
"DISCLAIMER: Not my personal experience, but someone I know.\n\nA little about him.\nHe was a member of some security team of VIP's in dangerous areas, he thought he heard a .50 mounted gun after a bullet went through his cover and he made a run for a armored jeep to help cover the guy that they were protecting, he didn't remember why he didn't call in the driver for a ARMORED car to move in on his specific location, so he ended up eating a few, mostly to his body armor. 2 to the left leg, and 1 shattered bullet to his collar bone area-ish. Right above the armor, he didn't remember anything but the pain. He lost a lot of mobility as one of the bullets took out a large portion of his thigh. \nThe adrenaline kept him from blacking out for a really long time. Eventually he lost enough blood to black out though. But it wasn't far from a American base of sorts and they made him transportable to a actual hospital. He was nearly 30 IIRC when he got shot up, and when he told me the story he looked to be 50-60 range, so a old guy. \n\nHis description:\nLike getting his with a sledge hammer, but having it shatter into millions of different small pieces, all molten hot, and covered in salt, not the hot burning, but the extreme intense burning the body produces. Then when you try to brush it off, you get a million Volts of electricity trough your body, that simply stay inside your body, and every brush is another million volts. You can't breath, and it hurts to even try, like a sledge hammer hitting your chest with ever attempt while a different jolt of electricity coming from the center of your body slowly crawls across your body, all while the eyes get dark, and you feel a yank on your body armor strap and the feeling of being pulled and with every inch of movement it feels like you're being pulled apart, and when you think it's over, another yank comes and you get torn apart again. It felt like I was in hell after a while and though I died already, it was dark, the intense pain originating from every wound and from every breath while being torn apart. The worst part was being raised into the armored jeep, it was raised and plate mounted, barely any room inside, every bump on the road convinced me I was in hell, it felt like billions of ledge hammers hit my every inch of the body. Eventually you accept it that its your eternity, until you wake up. You never forget the pain, ever. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
1kcdap
|
why does the postal service sometimes take absurd routes?
|
I bought something on Amazon from Brooklyn NY (I live in Stamford CT). Why Did my package go from Brooklyn to Philadelphia?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kcdap/eli5why_does_the_postal_service_sometimes_take/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cbnia8j",
"cbnibyd"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"I'm no package man but I'd wager a guess that the postal service does it to save money.\n\nSo say that a ton of orders have been placed on the route through Philadelphia, and none through the quickest route to you.\n\nOtherwise they'd have to send two trucks out. I guess that they make their decisions based upon where the package is currently located, and all the packages to be delivered between your home and the location of that package.",
"Packages aren't usually put on a truck directly from the origin to the destination. Shippers have hubs that handle the bulk of their shipments, and packages will usually go from the origin, to the hub serving the origin, to the hub serving the destination (perhaps via other hubs), to the destination. In this case, I would guess that Philadelphia contains the hub serving both Brooklyn and Stamford."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
30cxs7
|
what is the nation of oman? what special branch of islam do they have?
|
And how come I often never hear about it even with the stuff going on in Yemen?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30cxs7/eli5_what_is_the_nation_of_oman_what_special/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cpr9pio"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Reddit's resident Omani here, \n \nOman isn't Sunni or Shiite, and have strong diplomatic relations with Iran, Saudi Arabia, and the West while keeping it's foreign policy neutral. It even acted as a middle man between Iran and the US a few years ago when those Americans were detained in Iran for alleged espionage. \n \nThis Article explains it's uniqueness among the Arab countries and why it does not partake in the sectarian violence it's neighbors keep entangling themselves in. \n_URL_0_ \n \nWhat special branch of Islam do they have? \nShort answer, no special branch. We all live and coexist together peacefully. \nThe philosophy of Oman is based on principles of religious tolerance and the avoidance of conflict and violence. Other religious views or models of interpretation must be respected. Prayers in the mosques throughout the country are conducted with Sunnis and Shiites side by side with Ibadhis. Sunnis and Shiites have always lived in harmony and accord with the Ibadhis, who have been and continue to be the majority in Oman."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.fairobserver.com/region/middle_east_north_africa/saudi-arabia-and-oman-have-different-experiences-with-extremism-20157/"
]
] |
|
2ekuno
|
why does our face, especially the nose and forehead get oily but other body parts like your knees don't?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ekuno/eli5_why_does_our_face_especially_the_nose_and/
|
{
"a_id": [
"ck0l1d6",
"ck0ur7o"
],
"score": [
88,
4
],
"text": [
"Our faces are very porous- little holes from where hair used to be. While cells on our face stopped making hair (at least some of them), some of those oils are still being made; the oil isn't soaked up- and there is a lot more being made compared to our knees.\n \n\nAlso the sun stimulates production of these oils. \n\nOn a cellular level: differences in how the cells are 'wired' - what their job is. ",
"Oil producing glands (aka sebaceous glands) are found almost everywhere on the body. However, they are way, waaaay more numerous on your face and scalp. Therefore your face is going to get more oily than the rest of your body."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
1sh4ga
|
why do i think animated women like rapunzel are "beautiful," even though their eyes are gigantic?
|
Rapunzel from Tangled doesn't really look human. Her eyes are ridiculously oversized. Surely if I saw a woman in real life who looked like that, with eyes the size of baseballs, I would be horrified, right? So why is it different in a cartoon?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sh4ga/eli5_why_do_i_think_animated_women_like_rapunzel/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cdxittx",
"cdxj62r"
],
"score": [
3,
9
],
"text": [
"Good question. It does seem like she'd be hideous but I've seen her and she's clearly attractive. I don't know why this is but I googled \"what makes a woman attractive\" and found this:\n\n\n > The ideal face of an attractive woman, according to experiments with men, has high cheek bones, big eyes and a thin jaw.\n\n\nMaybe animators exaggerate these features to give characters a cartoony look but our minds still recognize those features, even in their exaggerated forms, and identify them as \"attractive\"? There are probably some features that can be exaggerated and still be attractive and others that cannot. I can imagine a cartoon woman with large breasts or a large butt that men would think is sexy, but I can't see the same thing with a really large nose or ears. \n\n\nMaybe those features where we think \"big=good\" can be made overly big and still seem attractive? Eyes would fit that category.\n\n\nAll this is only my speculation. Someone else may actually know the science behind it.",
"Cartoon characters are stylized - they're not intended to be human so much as exaggerations of humans. This allows them to fall on the far side of the [Uncanny Valley](_URL_1_) where we react positively even to traits that would be scary in an otherwise normal human. \n\nStarting from an entirely non-human thing like a realistic drawing of a rabbit, humans react more positively to it the more human traits we give it, up to a point. Front facing eyes like humans have, long paws that lay flat like feet, a 2-legged gait... all these things help us process [Bugs Bunny](_URL_0_) as a thing that is nearly human and we find that endearing. But there comes a point where more humanity becomes creepy - 3D animations of realistic humans [can become distant and subtly *wrong*](_URL_2_) as our brains start thinking of them as humans with human traits taken away. An otherwise realistic Rapunzel with the same huge eyes would fall more into this category. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bugs_Bunny",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley",
"https://gccchildlit.wikispaces.com/file/view/ThePolarExpress03F1024.jpg/239748613/ThePolarExpress03F1024.jpg"
]
] |
|
4uh0ud
|
why does hearing loss over your life have to be permanent?
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4uh0ud/eli5_why_does_hearing_loss_over_your_life_have_to/
|
{
"a_id": [
"d5potgv"
],
"score": [
55
],
"text": [
"Basically in your ear you have this structure called a cochlea. Imagine it looks a bit like a snail shell/spiral. \n\nThroughout the inside of your cochlea, you have thousands of hairs that stand upright. When noise hits these hairs, they vibrate and the vibrations get translated into sound that you hear. \n\nDifferent hairs in different areas of the cochlea are responsible for the different types and/or pitches that you hear. \nWhen the hairs get damaged, they flatten and are thus incapable of transforming the energy to sound! \n\nUnfortunately from the age of 20 and above these hairs all start to flatten hence why we get periodically deafer as we get older! \n\nCochlear implants work by mimicking the function of these hairs. A wire gets spiralled through the inside of your cochlea and is attached via electromagnet to an external receiver. This then transforms the noises to sound electrically making you able to hear! "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
3mu4lu
|
what would the ramifications be if the usa and russia becoming close allies over night?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mu4lu/eli5_what_would_the_ramifications_be_if_the_usa/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cvi40bx"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"Well. China would be pretty pissed off. And the economic prosperity enjoyed by the US-China frenemies situation may shift. Also, oil prices would raise significantly (the Saudis, US allies, would decrease production, per US request). This would devastate China's economy and put Russia on a much more prosperous path with trade in Europe and Asia. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
1xcs5h
|
why do people take sports/sports rivalries so seriously?
|
I enjoy watching sport but I do not understand the tribal mentality that comes with it, or the effect that it has on people's emotions.
(This question has been posed to ELI5 in a similar form but was not explained adequately.)
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1xcs5h/eli5_why_do_people_take_sportssports_rivalries_so/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cfa5v16",
"cfa6peh"
],
"score": [
3,
2
],
"text": [
"Personally, I think, that sports rivalries between countries is taken so seriously because these were countries that were once at war. And now instead of battles we have tournaments where we see who is the most fit based on sport.",
"Tribal mentality is exactly what it is, in my opinion. I think supporting a team, a set of colours and a logo is a part of human nature, as sociable creatures that have been living together, in clans and tribes as hunter-gatherers for hundreds of thousands of years, it's sort of engrained into our brains to be competitive with something you have allegiance to. I think this is amplified when it's representing your home country, state, town etc."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
34ioqi
|
comic book universes / timelines
|
One thing which has always confused me as a non-comic-reader is how comic book universes (e.g. Marvel and DC) operate.
Is the narrative actually cohesive within a particular universe? Do all of the things that happen on a timeline actually take into account all of the previous events which have happened in that universe across all of the different comics? Or is it more of a sitcom-style thing where every story arc starts from the basic view of the universe and then evolves it from there?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/34ioqi/eli5_comic_book_universes_timelines/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cqv0cy0",
"cqv0rt8"
],
"score": [
8,
2
],
"text": [
"DC has had a number of complete reboots, which basically mean everything before a certain point is rendered null and void. Marvel instead occasionally retcons things from the past, by pretending they didn't happen (though I imagine a lot of these also happen because the writer for each comic line is different and changes every year)\n\nEach main series under Marvel takes place under the same Universe. The same applies to DC. There are some stories that are in alternative universes (Like the \"Ultimate\" universe) but the majority are supposed to take place in the same timeline. But again. All different writers, who often may get something different, even if they do coordinate what they're going to do for the year.\n\nEdit: Very often, you'll see two comic issues in the same week, that talk about the same events. Very often, they decide to have larger events, that, if you want to fully understand, you have to buy 10 straight issues of 5+ different series. Otherwise, a certain series, like say \"The Amazing Spider-man\" only really centers around Spider-man, but will often reference events that happened in say, \"The Avengers\".",
"Marvel and DC both have their separate universes that very rarely collide, but each rarely have continuity lasting more than a couple of decades.\n\nSince both labels have been in existence since the 20's or 30's, some of the superheroes that have been around the longest yet still remain popular (think Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Captain America) will be \"rebooted;\" that is, their previous storyline will end and a new one will begin *that potentially has little or nothing to do with the previous*. That said, this is why it's very hard to just start reading comics like Iron Man or the Flash, because any place that sells these stories will likely have many different reincarnations or reboots available for purchase, resulting in confusion for everyone involved.\n\nIf it still seems a little too complicated, think of it this way: In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the first incarnation of Spiderman was played by Toby MacGuire. He was in three Spiderman films, and then after that Spiderman was rebooted and is now played by Andrew Garfield. Garfield's version of Spiderman has absolutely nothing to do with MacGuire's, but is still Spiderman. Does that clear it up a bit?"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
cc5ibd
|
how is the gold standard a fiat currency, and how does gold standard currency go through inflation?
|
I started studying monetary history and theory. And one thing that came up was that even the Gold Standard is a Fiat currency.
Also that even with the Gold Standard under the British rule and in America, it also went through an inflation. But how if its backed by gold, a physical good?
can somebody explain this to me in simple terms so I can understand. pretty confusing to learn this but I dont understand how this work
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cc5ibd/eli5_how_is_the_gold_standard_a_fiat_currency_and/
|
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"The economy is growing and has a constant need for more money to support that economic growth. The amount of gold also isn't constant - its increasing every year. \n\nTo maintain 0% inflation you need to have exactly the same amount of gold entering the system as you need money to support economic growth. If too much gold enters the system, then the money supply increases quicker than the demand for money and you get inflation. If too little gold enters the system, then the opposite is true and you get deflation.\n\nThat's why the gold standard doesn't work. There was a brief period of US history in the late 1800's and early 1900's during which the gold supply increased every year by enough to support a healthy money supply in the US and to a much lesser extent England. Starting in the 1920's, and continuing to the present, that has not been the case and the gold supply doesn't increase anywhere near quickly enough to support a healthy money supply.\n\nThe world temporarily solved this problem by having every country except the US dump the gold standard between 1910 and 1930. For the US, it was able to also \"solve\" this problem by decreasing the amount of gold that each dollar was worth in 1933, in addition to seizing all privately held gold. This only worked until the early 40's, and in 1944 the world agreed to go on a fake gold standard. \n\nThis fake gold standard worked by making gold officially worth $35 per ounce, but private ownership of gold was illegal. Every government just agreed that they would never actually convert currency to gold with one another and could also print currency independently of gold reserves, within limits set by the IMF. \n\nEven that didn't work forever and every country was forced to officially abandon any pretense of the gold standard in the late 60's.",
"The gold standard can be thought of as a fiat currency because, like a normal fiat currency, gold only has value because we say it does. Gold has no more intrinsic value than aluminum (under Napoleon, aluminum was more valuable than gold)",
"Fiat means \"decree\", \"order\". Even a gold backed currency has no value in itself, the paper notes are only valuable because a bank or sovereign *decrees* that it has value. In a gold backed currency the decree is on the form of \"this piece of paper can be exchanged for a set amount of gold\", which isn't that much different from the decree in other fiat currencies: \"this piece of paper can be used to pay taxes and fines\". \n\nGold backed currencies can change in value (inflate or deflate) because gold can change in value. Gold, like any commodity, changes in value based on how much of it there is and how badly people want it. If a large gold deposit is discovered, the value goes down. If a new use for gold is invented, the value goes up. And so on."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
98jtus
|
how does the alarm for a passenger not wearing their seatbelt in a car not go off when you have a large amount of weight sitting in the passenger seat?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/98jtus/eli5_how_does_the_alarm_for_a_passenger_not/
|
{
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"The car doesn't know unless you have some new model of car which I haven't heard of. It's just that there aren't many objects you put in the passenger seat which weigh nearly as much as a human. ",
"I don't know what you're talking about, I have an older model car (2007) but the alarm goes off I put too many groceries in my passenger seat",
"There's a switch in the seat that gets turned on when something heavy enough is sitting there. \n\nI don't know the exact weight that triggers it, but I suspect it's in the 40-50lbs range as I had this happen just a week ago bringing home a 40lbs bag of dog food."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
2lubqv
|
why is anticipation better than the real thing?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lubqv/eli5_why_is_anticipation_better_than_the_real/
|
{
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"I think its that the actual event can never live up to the potential of what you believed it could be",
"Because you can plan the real thing and prepare yourself to it. You can imagine all the possible scenarios and get ready for each one of them. If you face that real thing you speak of without any preparation, you may not react the best way.\n\nLet's suppose you have a job interview. You have the possibility to ask a friend of yours who also works in the same company for questions the interviewer may ask. At home, you'll mentally answer to those questions, anticipating the interview. That way, when you're asked about it, you'll answer right away, and you'll impress your interviewer. That wouldn't be possible (or it would be more difficult) to do if you went to the interview with no anticipation.\n\nHope this is clear enough.",
"It's likely you can think of countless near-impossible outcomes, good or bad, which are too strange and exciting to be true. a bunch of biochemical reactions in your body tells you that \"damn this shit's gonna be intense\" while you're thinking all those possibilities up... but in real life it's just BAM! take it or leave it."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
4erysl
|
why are you not supposed to use a laser pointer to play with dogs?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4erysl/eli5_why_are_you_not_supposed_to_use_a_laser/
|
{
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"d22rnrf",
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"text": [
"They get frustrated and upset when they can't actually catch it. Cats seem not to care, I guess they just enjoy the chase, but for a dog never having the pay off of 'catching their prey' can be upsetting.",
"While dogs are smart, they don't understand that the red dot on the ground isn't a real thing/creature. Since they can never actually catch it, it is though to cause them depression, anxiety, or frustration when they fail over and over and over.\n\nCats on the other had have short attention spans and even in the wild are known to \"play\" with their prey. They aren't as worried about actually catching it and are just interested in the chase.",
"Dogs are have a highly developed chase instinct. They hunt by having better endurance than they prey, so they chase them to exhaustion. To make this effective, part of their instinct is being very persistent in their chase, and very reluctant to give up on it.\n\nWhen they repeatedly chase but cannot catch something, it results in anxiety and can lead to obsessive behaviors.\n\nFor example, my brother once used to play with his dog using a laser. She got to the point where she would spend much of the day chasing after all kinds of light or shadow, especially the sunlight reflected off of the tags on her collar. When he figure out what was going on, he had to remove that sort of stimulus from her for a few weeks until she got better."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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||
e6hagj
|
why do sounds outside of the human range of hearing not damage our ears? when a speaker plays an 18 khz tone at a loud volume level it hurts to listen to, however, if you change the pitch to say 30 khz it’s as if nothing was being played. why is this?
|
I know the air is still vibrating with the same power as before, but for some reason the pressure on the ear goes away.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e6hagj/eli5_why_do_sounds_outside_of_the_human_range_of/
|
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"text": [
"AFAIK this only is the case with ultrasound frequencies. High power, low frequency waves (eg shock waves from an explosion) can still damage your ears, even rupturing your eardrums.\n\nAs to why ultrasound doesn’t cause harm: the frequency is too high for our eardrums to react to: they won’t move together with the wave, and because they don’t move nothing in the ear is affected.",
"The reason sustained loud noises damage hearing over time is due to how your ear responds to loud noises.\n\nWhen you're at a rock concert and there's loud sound constantly bombarding your ear drums, your ears respond by filling the inner ear with fluid to dampen the effects of the soundwaves. This is why after you leave the concert everything is still muffled, as the fluid takes time to receed.\n\nIn the short term this isn't a big problem, but if you subject your ears to this fluid by being in the presence of loud noises all the time, that fluid starts to actually damage the inner ear bones, making them soft and spongy and less able to react to sounds crisply and clearly.\n\nIf the audio playing is too high a frequency for your ear to react to (meaning there's no vibration of the ear drum to interact with the inner ear bones) then your ear doesn't react by introducing this fluid for protection. \n\nVery loud LOW frequency waves cause damage a little differently, in the form of powerful concussion waves, the force of which can literally puncture or tear the eardrum itself. This damage is quick and doesn't require prolonged exposure (think of the shockwave from an explosion, or a sonic boom from a passing jet nearby). But in this case, were the eardrum to be repaired/replaced, the inner ear would likely function as normal without much hearing loss.\n\nNOTE: I'm not an ear doctor, but I've overheard many conversations from my ear doctor sister-in-law, so feel free to correct anything I might have gotten wrong.\n\nEDIT: I accidentally duplicated duplicated a word",
"Ultimately the translation of sound waves to electrical signals in your (inner) ear is done by tiny hair cells. Hearing loss is often caused by breaking these cells, which don't regrow. \n\nThese hair cells are connected to the *basilar membrane*, which is a stiff structure that resonates with the sound waves coming into your ear. The basilar membrane has different properties at different point along its length (e.g. differences in width and stiffness) that make those parts sensitive to different frequencies of sound. So on one end the basilar membrane resonates with low-frequency sounds and on the other end it resonates with high-frequency sounds. The vibrations of the basilar membrane are propagated to the hair cells, and so your brain can tell what frequencies are in a sound by which hair cells are sending electrical signals.\n\nThe basilar membrane is only senstive to a certain range of frequencies. Outside of this range, it doesn't resonate, and so we can't hear those frequencies because they aren't moving any hair cells. And because they aren't moving any hair cells, they also cannot damage them. \n\nThis is only one type of hearing damage though, and there are others. For instance, a loud sound can rupture your ear drums, even if it's outside your hearing range, as this just requires enough air pressure."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
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|
401s96
|
how can radical calorie restriction extend your lifespan while anorexia kills you?
|
Like the title says - there seems to be pretty solid evidence, at least in rodents and primates, that radical calorie restriction can extend lifespan. On the other hand, extremely solid evidence that anorexia increases mortality. Is anorexia just eating even *less* than radical calorie restriction? Please ELI5.
**EDIT**: The kind of restriction I am discussing goes well beyond maintaining a healthy weight. "Radical calorie restriction" is very different than just not eating too much where it makes you overweight or obese. We are talking eating 1200-1300 calories per day.
See, e.g.: _URL_0_
So far /u/OnlineCitizen has the only answer that correctly addresses the question.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/401s96/eli5_how_can_radical_calorie_restriction_extend/
|
{
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"cyqqpdr",
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"text": [
"Calorie restriction in order to maintain a healthy weight is healthy. Anorexia is not that.",
"First anorexia is basically a psychological condition leading to physical malnutrition where individuals are scared of gaining weight and wanting to be as thin as possible. This results in individuals sometimes avoiding specific foods, exercising too much etc. In the end they can be entirely missing essential foods in their diet needed for proper living resulting in various illnesses.\n\nIf I'm relating this correctly with the below linked study, calorie restriction has been shown to decrease the \"mitochondrial free radical generation at complex I and lowers oxidative damage to mitochondrial DNA in the rat heart\" Basically by reducing the caloric intake (% of food intake) of these rats was shown to decrease their aging rate of these rats through lessening the rate of \"mitochondrial oxygen radical generation\" \n\nHow is this different from anorexia? \n\nWell in the study I link below they state that the rats were given 60% less of a standard rodent diet, where as an anorexic does not simply eat 60% less then a normal calorie intake, but rather avoids specific foods (that may be necessary), significantly avoids eating, over exercises, force vomits and so on, which can cause plenty of health problems.\n\n[Caloric restriction decreases mitochondrial free radical generation at complex I and lowers oxidative damage to mitochondrial DNA in the rat heart](_URL_0_)\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[
"http://www.dallasobserver.com/restaurants/stay-hungry-live-longer-the-science-behind-the-calorie-restriction-diet-6408472"
] |
[
[],
[
"http://www.fasebj.org/content/early/2001/07/02/fj.00-0764fje.full.pdf"
]
] |
|
1w0djp
|
why aren't the united states' news services reporting on the events in kiev, ukraine?
|
There's almost nothing about it on CNN, CNBC or Fox News but it is headline news on Reuters and other European news services. As an American I am feeling very disconcerted by the lack of coverage about what seems like very important news. Thanks in advance.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1w0djp/eli5_why_arent_the_united_states_news_services/
|
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"text": [
"Us news is garbage tbh \n\nThe best news channels in are usually foreign when it comes to dealing with world events",
"I was thinking the same thing today. All I saw was that crap bout Justin Biebers dui",
"If it doesn't directly impact the US, they don't report on it.",
"They don't want us to feel like we're not alone and get any ideas. They make money off the status quo.",
"I saw them reporting on the event yesterday ... They obviously don't spend all their time on it because it doesn't directly effect the average US citizen but it was covered for a brief period of time",
"Honestly, one of the best news sites in America.\n_URL_0_",
"They covered it on PBS Newshour."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://america.aljazeera.com/"
],
[]
] |
|
3s8nr7
|
what does money represent?
|
Before money people would trade and barter resources, such as gold or cows, or whatever represented some form of mutually understood value for both parties. Now that has been abstracted into currency, which provides a standard unit of value for trading and/or bartering which effectively represents resources/effort expended.
My question is, what does currency represent in the context of a nation? For instance, what does all of Australia or America or Japan's money actually represent? And when it fluctuates in relative value, what does it fluctuate in relative value to?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s8nr7/eli5_what_does_money_represent/
|
{
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"text": [
" > And when it fluctuates in relative value, what does it fluctuate in relative value to?\n\nitself and eachother. You pretty much have the concept in your main post, but the world uses something called fiat money right now. It only has value because we imagine it has value, it isnt really rooted in anything. ",
"Nothing, currency fluctuates based on each other. We never would've originally accepted such a thing, so they originally had it all backed by gold in fort Knox. Then they started playing with the ratios to make all money run on the US dollar, but that didn't work bc of the reserve requirement. The reserve requirement means that a bank only needs a certain amount of money to lend out more. Meaning that if you put a dollar in your bank account, the bank then creates 10 dollars to lend to someone else in a mortgage. (side point: You lose more money to inflation by putting money in a savings account than the interest got by it) Because both the US government, the foreign governments and the local banks all did this, there was really very little gold backing people's money; at some point the system had to fail and Nixon took us off the gold standard and made all currency into fiat currency. \n\nSorry if that was disjointed but I'm on mobile. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
1m0mzb
|
how did the member states of the soviet union come to be a part of it?
|
So the Soviet Union was comprised of a bunch of member states like the Baltic states, the "Stans," Ukraine, Belarus, etc. How did these states become a part of the Soviet Union? Did the USSR take them over by force and absolve them or did they join voluntarily for economic opportunities similar to the EU?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m0mzb/how_did_the_member_states_of_the_soviet_union/
|
{
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"text": [
"Guy from Hungary here. We were part of the Eastern bloc (but not the USSR) between 1947 and 1990. There were two reasons of that: 1) the huge occupying Soviet army in Hungary 2) the dirty elections of 1947 where many non-Communist politicians were imprisoned and intimated, and there were thousands of fraudulent votes for the Commies.\n\nRegarding the USSR, the shortest answer is, though, that each of the 15 member states became members in a different way.\n\nSome states (like the Baltic states) were absorbed by force. The Soviet army marched in, and the countries became parts of the USSR.\n\nOther countries like Kazakhstan for example were part of the Russian Empire before the Soviet Revolution of 1917. After the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia, they tried to become independent, however the Bolsheviks wanted to keep the country as theirs. \n\nOther countries, like the Ukraine had an even more complicated history. I'm not absolutely sure, you can read about it a lot on Wiki, but basically, they were part of the Russian Empire, then after the Revolution they wanted some autonomy which they didn't get. So they were pissed off, there was some kinda war between the Ukrainian part and the Bolsheviks, there were two separate Ukraine for a period etc etc. So after a sort of civil war they became part of the USSR.\n\nAs you can see, the Bolshevik methods were a bit harsher than that of the EU burocrats :)\n\nSo that is it. What JimmyBuffalo wrote isn't true, these happened before WWII. After the World War there were no new member states. The last three was the annexation of the Baltic states which was in 1940. \n\nEDIT: typos.",
"Ukrainian here.\n\nWhen shit started, Ukrainians decided that this is the right opportunity to become independend and proclaimed a new state in Kiev. Same was done in Lviv, so at start there was two separated Ukrains, one fighting against Poland, and other against Russia.\n\nUkraine was in bad position, because it became a battlefield for Red army (Communists), White army (Tzar and old regime), Anarchists and lots of local bands, Ukrainian army and Poland. \n\nUkraine allied with Germany so Germany will help in war against Red army and Ukraine will supply food for western front of WWI.\n\nFor some time it was peace, but Germany collapsed because of it's own revolutions and leaved Ukraine. New wars began. Ukraine allied with Poland and managed to hold Kiev for some time, but lost.\n\nRed army used Machno to destroy White army and then took over Ukraine.\n\nUkraine lost mostly because there was a lot of fighting between leaders about desired future and lacks of leadership.\n\nI described it from nationalists point of view, but there were a lot of people who desired communism, because it really is a good idea and promised a better life. And Red propaganda was perfect. Even De-Jure there were 3 Ukrains, Western (Lviv), Center (Kiev) and Soviet (Kharkiv).\n\nIt was a bloody hell, everyone against everyone, brother on brother, everyone fought for better life he thought."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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|
fay9en
|
what would happen if i actually ate uranium/ something small with an extremely high amount of calories?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fay9en/eli5_what_would_happen_if_i_actually_ate_uranium/
|
{
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"text": [
"You shit out an undigested piece of Uranium the next day.\n\nUranium can release an unearthly amount of energy during chain-reaction nuclear fission, but your stomach is not a nuclear bomb detonator.\n\nYour system is designed to harvest energy from plant and animal tissues only."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
59sl88
|
random flashes of light when my eyes are closed at night after going to bed.
|
About once every month or two, I'll see a really bright flash of light for the briefest of moments while trying to fall asleep.
Is this psychological, or am I seeing a cosmic particle interact with something in my eye (muon, neutrino, etc)?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/59sl88/eli5_random_flashes_of_light_when_my_eyes_are/
|
{
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"text": [
"In my experience, it's psychological, usually stress. Are you under much stress?",
"Do you see floaters? Not an expert but if you do, you may want to see an ophthalmologist. May be onset of retinal detachment. Be safe. ",
"You might want to get that checked out with an Opthalmologist. Seeing bright flashes of light inside your eyes is usually due to the retinal cells getting stimulated by movement or traction. Not keen on scare mongering, but in rare situations it can be a precursor to retinal detachment.",
"Maybe your light is faulty? I had a light that flashed sometimes even after it was turned off",
"Cosmic rays and neutrinos do in fact travel right through your eyes at all times. When neutrinos pass through water, there's a slim chance that they interact with it and give off a brief flash of blueish-white light. ",
"do you often hear a bang or a shock at the same time, because it sounds like it might be caused by 'exploding head syndrome'. A harmless condition which occurs when people are trying to fall asleep",
"Check out Wikipedias \"exploding head syndrome\". Its a real article, im just too drunknto link. Ita basically what youvr described. Inhave it too"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
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[],
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|
187hpx
|
what are voids in space, and how is it that (if so) there's nothing in them?
|
As the title asks, could you explain to me what voids in terms of astrophysics are, and how it's possible (if it is the case) that there's nothing in them, not even dark matter? What does this mean in terms of the universe on a whole?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/187hpx/eli5_what_are_voids_in_space_and_how_is_it_that/
|
{
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"c8cayke"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"Voids are much, much bigger than galaxies.\n\nGalaxies tend to clump together into gravitationally-bound structures called *groups* or *clusters* (depending on how many galaxies are involved). A collection of nearby clusters is called a *supercluster*, and a formation of superclusters is called a *filament*. The name comes from the fact that it looks like a piece of string: galactic filaments are really, really long but not particularly wide.\n\nVoids are the enormous (mostly) empty spaces between filaments, and they exist because the early universe wasn't perfectly uniform. There's a bunch of high-end science-y stuff that comes along with this, but I'm out of practice.\n\nAt any rate, here's a really cool [video](_URL_0_) to help you visualize it."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74IsySs3RGU"
]
] |
|
6c14wz
|
the money sorting machine inside of atm's
|
How does it differentiate bills? And for that matter how can it read a check and denote the value on the check?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c14wz/eli5_the_money_sorting_machine_inside_of_atms/
|
{
"a_id": [
"dhr4zpb"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"US Centric post:\n\nThey have an optical scanner like a camera that looks at the bills and also probably looks for the anti counterfeiting stripe on bills. That covers the ones where you can just stick in the bills. If you use an envelope there is obviously no local checking and an employee would double check (they double check anyhow).\n\nChecks defiantly use OCR to pick up the values (since they are typically written out and spelled out).\n\nSource: worked bank it and knew a lot of people that did this stuff."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
4ejb9q
|
the controversy about big pharma
|
I admit that I am not informed on this topic. I always hear people talking about the "evils of big pharma" and usually it is from people I am inclined to agree with. Can anyone explain to me what Pharma companies do that is morally questionable?
Also, a bit of a follow-up question: if big pharma's medications are too expensive, doesn't health insurance just cover it all?
Thanks!
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ejb9q/eli5_the_controversy_about_big_pharma/
|
{
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"text": [
"It's a for profit business and economics don't really work well with health stuff. Supply and demand rapidly breaks down when the \n\"demand\" is to not die. So it's very easy to become very exploitative. If someone can say \"you gotta buy this or you die\" you basically can make that person pay any amount they have and there is rarely competition because lots of things don't have dozens of competing cures or companies fighting over price. Many drugs are monopolies with an audience that has no choice on if they want to buy the drug. ",
"The market for medicine isn't like the market for most other goods. Medicine has what economists call extremely inelastic demand. Basically, no matter what the price is, people will still buy their medicine, because they'll die without it. It's not like, say bananas, where if the price gets too high people will say \"$10 for a banana? I'll eat apples instead.\"\n\nPharmaceutical companies take advantage of this to charge sick people through the nose. People get upset about this. \n\nAlso, insurance might not cover some medications. The insurance companies will often say that a different drug is an acceptable substitute (when it's not). Not everyone even has insurance. Some people slipped through the cracks with Obamacare and still don't have insurance. Some people have insurance with really high deductibles, so insurance doesn't necessarily prevent people from having to go bankrupt when they get sick. \n\nAlso, some of the people who are raving about \"the evils of big pharma\" are conspiracy theorists who believe that big pharma is covering up a cure for cancer because chemotherapy is profitable or spreading diseases so they can profit from curing them. Those people are, well, conspiracy theorists, and should not be listened to. "
]
}
|
[] |
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[
[],
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7t62iz
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why is the price on small retail purchases usually fixed (groceries, etc.), but on large retail purchases (cars, houses) it's negotiable?
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explainlikeimfive
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https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7t62iz/eli5_why_is_the_price_on_small_retail_purchases/
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"negotiating groceries would be time consuming and is not worth the time.\n\ncars and houses... its part of the culture, so it persists. there are extenuating factors to the transaction (urgency and higher or lower than expected demand) that may benefit both parties to adjust their price to make a particular deal work.",
"Major purchases (though I'm not sure if a house counts as \"retail\") are big deals for the players involved. The car dealership doesn't sell nearly as many cars as the supermarket does loaves of bread. The dealership has a strong interest in getting you to commit to buying a car (it may only sell a handful of cars a day, and losing your business could be a significant fraction of that day's business). Taking a hit on the profit margin is worth *having* a profit margin that day. A supermarket, on the other hand, may sell hundreds of loaves of bread a day, and thousands of items. The \"threat\" of \"give me a better price on this car, or I'll go elsewhere\" is stronger than \"give me a quarter off this bread or I'll go elsewhere\". It's worth having an employee devote a significant amount of time to get you to buy the car, but it's literally not worth paying an employee for the time to let you talk down the price of bread. Plus, on commodity items like groceries, the profit margin is already razor-thin, and they're already giving you close to the best price possible.",
"In some countries you can dicker over the price of anything. I work in retail and every now and again people do actually try to ask for a lower price on certain things.\n\nCars and houses have much bigger price tags so much more room to negotiate a better deal.. plus it may be a private sale - person to person, rather than person to business. ",
"Because it isn't worth anybody's time to haggle over small retail purchases! What would you expect to save on a can of black beans or a Gap t-shirt by haggling at the register? And how much longer would every errand take if some little old lady is negotiating pennies off every one of her 50 items? Instead, things like sales, promo codes and coupons are used to adjust demand, account for price sensitivity. \n\nCars and houses are big ticket items, which are often one-off goods. That house is different from any other house, so the value can only be estimated. Cars, too, are often not 100% exact even if that just means color combination on same trim level. And with used cars, it's even more likely there isn't another exactly like it for sale nearby right now.",
"I believe it has to do with larger chains (like grocery stores or Best Buy) setting standardized prices. These places are built to sell large volume, not sit around and negotiate prices. They buy their stock at a certain price and sell it at a set mark-up.\n\nIf you go to a farmer's market you could probably negotiate buying food from them there, especially if you buy in bulk. If you buy a TV or car or toaster off Craigslist you'll probably negotiate a price.",
"Because the object in question matters. For the most part small retail and food items are uniform and identical. Our culture does not like bartering because it takes time. To adject those prices there are sales and coupons.\n\nLarger purchases like houses and cars are much less cookie cutter. Unless it is a brand new car, it has wear, tear, it has features, how many miles, what all has been checked. In genneral, no two cars are identical. Houses even more so, and what is valuable to one person can be an inconvenience to another. Plus with both, time is a significant factor to the seller and the buyer. Not so much with a potato or a shirt.\n",
"All prices are negotiable, and at the same time anyone can decide to buy anything for a listed price without negotiation.\n\nThere's nothing stopping you from going into a grocery store and attempting to negotiate a lower price. Just like how you could walk into a car dealership and pay exactly what's on the sticker.\n\nA lot of retail stores specifically do allow for easy \"negotation\" in the form of price-matching. You get to the register and ask them to lower their price to what you'd pay elsewhere. But even if the store doesn't have a clear policy, you could still bring over their competitor's flyer and ask for the better price.",
"It's partially cultural and partially interest-based.\n\nIn some places, bartering is very common, even within sub-cultures it may be very common. I've haggled over the cost of a hot dog w/ a street vendor because $3 is freaking absurd. However, we generally just accept the costs of things at retailers for two big reasons\n\n1) We don't have the time \n\n2) The people you negotiate with have next to 0 authority to give you a different price.\n\n\nWhen you buy a car or a house you're talking about a bigger range of money, you're negotiating with people who have the authority to give you a better deal, and (I think this is the most important part) there's an incentive for the person selling it to you to close the deal.\n\n\nWhen you go in to buy a car or a house the person selling gets a portion of the price you buy it for. This is called commission and is often a big proportion if not nearly all of the money a salesman will get each month. If I'm selling you a car, especially if we've had it on the lot for a while, for example, the price is negotiable because it's losing more and more value every day it sits. That's a spot on the lot we can't put a newer nicer car on. That's a spot that we have to maintain. That's a car we have to upkeep. That's a car that's depreciating more and more every day.\n\n\nIt's in everybody's interest to get this money pit off the lot. I'll take it as low as $100 over invoice, the price WE pay for it, if it's really that much of a pain because we WANT to get rid of it. \n\n\nGroceries, clothing, stuff like that moves regularly enough to not be as big of an investment/detriment to the store. Clothing stores do one way haggling in the form of mark downs. The premise is the same, though: we can't sell this quickly enough at this price and it's better to take less profit to sell it so that we can replace it with better stuff and move on. \n**EDIT** I didn't mention the second point that I had: retailers don't give their employees much ability to give you a better price so you need a higher level manager to make that decision and they don't have time for your crap because if you won't buy it somebody else probably will. The case is not the same with common cars, for example. A 2017 F150 might sit on the lot for a while but spaghetti probably won't sit too long.\n\nYou'll notice that, especially for cars, the amount you can haggle over depends on the demand. Selling a brand new Lamborghini isn't going to have as much wiggle room as a used Mazda.",
"Let's say you have two products: one that costs $2 and another that costs $20,000. Let's just pretend that the profit margin on these good is 100%, so you can produce these goods for $1 and $10,000 respectively.\n\nIf you get a 20% discount on both goods, a higher percentage of people will buy more of the 20k good than they would for the $2 one. This is usually the case for any product; as the overall price of the good increases, the reaction to the price change (either up or down) also increases.\n\nTherefore, you can do the math and find that expensive products (like horses and cars) will sell more (and likely quicker) when a perceived discount from negotiation is available.",
"It is not worth the effort. The consumer would rather pay more and the store would rather lose a sale than have to spend ten minutes negotiating on every frozen burrito.\n\nWith bigger items, that investment in time is worth it to both parties.",
"The term you're looking for is [\"opportunity cost.\"](_URL_0_) The value of the time you give up and effort spent haggling over a low priced item is greater than what you would save by negotiating, so there isn't much incentive to negotiate. \n\nOn the other hand, you can save enough money on large ticket items like cars and houses, so negotiating is still common there. The opportunity cost in time and effort of negotiating is lower than the value you expect to gain by doing so, so you still do it.\n\nThat's not the entire story for everything everywhere, but it's a big part of it and opportunity cost is an important concept to understand. Another part of the picture, at least in some cases, is that sellers have an advantage in negotiations: They probably have more experience, but more importantly, they have more information that the buyer has. This is called [\"asymmetric information,\"](_URL_1_) and the person with more information has a distinct advantage in negotiations. By setting a fixed price, stores are sending the signal \"we're not trying to screw you over by out negotiating you.\" This has some other benefits, you might not get the lowest price you could get if you are a good negotiator, but you'll certainly get a better price than if you negotiate poorly. In fact, you'll probably get pretty close to the best price you could get if you negotiated well. This is because competitors can see each others' prices and if one is pricing higher than they need to the others can undercut them and get your business. ",
"I feel like people are over thinking this. It comes mostly down to commission vs non commission sales. The amount of time it would take to negotiate the costs of all your groceries with an hourly employee would cost the company more than the profit they make off of you so you can gtfo. If you go to a farmers market they are more willing ro negotiate because they get payed based off of profits dispite it still being food. Also culture plays a big roll go to india and try buying something without negotiating. You will look like a fool.",
"Time is money and it takes time to negotiate. If you’re buying a $5000 kitchen renovation, you can probably negotiate. If you’re buying groceries, you pay the sticker price or leave. Additionally, a seller may negotiate when they have a large profit margin to work with. For example, sketchy street vendors in NYC will gladly negotiate with you because they’re trying to sell 5 cent Made In China glasses and necklaces for $40. It’s a strange mix of social norms and economics.",
"Well, as to cars, the new car dealership industry can work a little strangely. \nVery often the car manufacturers don't actually give their dealers a very good price on the vehicles. So the profit the dealerships get from selling a car can be very minor, like not enough to stay in business minor. The dealership's profit comes in the form of bonuses they get from the manufacturer for selling a certain number of vehicles. \nMaking a months target sales numbers or not can mean the difference between being in the black or the red. \nSo naturally they are inclined to negotiate price, because it's the *sale* it's self that's more important then the price (depending on how successful/busy the dealership is).",
"When setting the asking price on a house the seller is basically guessing what it's worth based on similar property prices. They may get it slightly wrong, or the market might shift in the time it's on the market, so you make an offer based on what you think it's worth. A property might be snapped up at the asking price if it's set too low, or sell for more than expected if put to auction. \nSimilar case with second hand cars. New cars, if it's a popular model with limited stock you may get no discount, but if it's a slow mover the dealer just wants to move it on, the discount you got is the equivalent of the grocery store putting an item on sale. ",
"There is a mechanism for negotiating on loaves of bread, it's called coupons. The store says \"if you're willing to do the work to clip these things, we'll give you a better price.\"",
"Thanks all, for the very fine explanations!",
"One reason not already mentioned for why house prices are more changeable is the immediacy of the need. Ppl need to buy groceries regularly. Sometimes we can wait for them to go on sale, or buy a different brand but ultimately, we need to eat and so we don't have a lot of power in negotiating a better price. But most of us don't need a house or car that instant. We can take our time. We can buy used or keep renting or share a car between spouses or take the bus.",
"Everything is negotiable if both parties are willing. Small things get a \"fixed\" price because the seller is not willing to negotiate.",
"The short answer is \"transaction costs\" related to time. Time is valuable. Its not worth negotiating for 5 minutes on a $2 loaf of bread for either the seller or the buyer, because you mitigate only a small financial cost but incur a much bigger time cost. However, spending an hour to haggle on a car or many hours haggling on the cost of a house is worth it for both buyer and seller.\n\nIn less developed societies who spend a large portion of their income on food, you still see haggling over small items for this very reason: because its worth spending a little extra time to save a significant chunk of money.",
"I mean you **can** attempt to negotiate the price of your bananas, but you might actually drive the minimum wage clerk to hang himself right there at his register using a phone cord.\n\nSomething like a house or a car that's one large transaction you make very infrequently, it makes a lot more sense to have an actual person **paid a commission** based on how much they get you to pay actively negotiate for your business.\n\nNot to mention with Cars/Homes the negotiation phase is built into the sticker price.",
"because the margin for the company to profit on small products is very small. they need to sell at a very precise price. \n\nLarge expensive products have a larger window in which everybody can profit. It's in everybody's best interest to be more flexible to make the big sales take place \n",
"30 year car guy here.\n\nThere are two principal reasons that will always exist which make a vehicle purchase inevitably involve haggling. Neither of these reasons is analogous to supermarkets selling loaves of bread.\n\nFirst reason: The self fulfilling prophecy, human beings. It is not possible to market vehicles and simply insist that the price is inflexible. People sneer, laugh, are rude, aggressive, insulting and otherwise disrespectful if you tell them that the advertised price is in fact, THE lowest you can go. Many people have a pre conceived notion that people who sell vehicles are sub human scum, and they are allowed to treat you very poorly. Anyway, sorry for the rant, where was I...? Oh yes, people insist on haggling, as \"*that's just what you do*\", and so it goes.\n\nSecond reason: Trades in. Many times people are trading their old vehicle in, and as the price of it is X, the whole transaction becomes about *difference*. Ie, the difference to be paid between the car being purchased and the car being traded in.\n\nPlease excuse the pain, the car salesman stereotype is a tired old cliche. I have met more, genuine, big hearted, sincere people in this profession who would give you the shirt off their back than you could imagine.\n\nSide note: Car guys think of teachers as the worst to deal with. Penny pinching misery arses who never crack a smile and are wound up tight as a 3 dollar watch. They're hard fucking work.\n\nAMA",
"Small, frequent purchases are most often set by supply and demand. They're literal commodities and fungible goods, so the market sets a fixed price. The larger purchases have a significant portion of subjective value usually. One buyer might pay more than another for a variety of reasons, and sellers have to accommodate that.",
"It takes too much time to to negotiate the price of everything at the checkout in wallmart and they have a lot of other customers to get to. This is one reason why they set a fixed price for everyone to abide by. Also they would have to pay a lot of money in order to train all their employees to negotiate price. At a car dealership you are focused on buying one item and the salesman has a good deal of time to talk to you personally about the car. Also the profit margin is much higher on a car so there is more “wiggle room” so to speak. This margin also allows them to put more training into their employees to make sure that they are making good deals. ",
"There are two factors:\n\n* The value of a person's time\n\n* The (ir)regularity of the value\n\n**Value of Time**\n\nA supermarket isn't going to let cashiers waste time haggling over groceries -- you have many people buying many things regularly. It's cheaper to just set a hard price, and let customers who demand to haggle go elsewhere (as though they had anywhere else to go).\n\nA real estate agent or car salesmen sells much fewer items, and can dedicate much more time per-sale to things like price negotiations. For example, groceries are **100% negotiable** if you're buying them in bulk from the manufacturer. Wal-Mart, Target, etc do it all the time. Why? One negotation for a huge purchase.\n\n**Value Regularity**\n\nPurchasing a can of peas is going to be basically the same purchase to everyone in the store. Sure, the prices changes over time, and some people like peas more than others, but it's the same basic thing. Are you going to be able to sell peas for $0.88 per can to someone if you just sold them to the previous person for $0.67, and they heard the whole thing? Probably not. Taken to the limit, someone would eventually set up a crowd-sourced website showing the negotiated prices for these goods, and everyone would just start low-balling. It really doesn't make as much sense for the supermarket to haggle.\n\nOn the other hand, real estate is very irregular. Location, size, rooms, amenities, school districts, financial matters...every house sale is unique. People are rarely going to get the same price for two different houses, so the seller is able to get away with offering a higher than realistic initial price, and the buyer likewise is able to get away with offering less. There is no hard \"standard\" price. Cars are similar.",
"Because the cost of negotiation outweighs the benefit of it. Say you save a dollar from bargaining in the market but spend 1 hour doing so, it is far less valuable than minimum wage that you can make doing something else.",
"This is a cultural thing. In Mexico most prices for everything are negotiable. Only when the shop is more influenced by foreign business models do you start to see fixed prices. ",
"The prices for smaller items are just as much negotiable as for large items. The legal interpretation is that a price tag is an offer to sell an item at a certain price, but the buyer may make a counter-offer at a different (usually lower) price. The custom in the US, most of Europe, and many other places is to not haggle over small things. This does not hold true everwhere, however. See the Wikipedia article: _URL_0_",
"The highest post is right but you can negotiate prices on just about anything. I know you can on cable. You can on credit card interest. If the person owns the business, you can negotiate the product or service. My FIL loves to negotiate on nearly every purchase. I don’t like to. I just pay what they ask. Another thing, many stores will price match. That’s another way of negotiation. ",
"It all comes down to risk. It’s much riskier to build larger items: I.e., it takes longer, more money (I.e. cost), more resources, etc.\n\nBecause of this, retailers’ margins are often larger. Savy consumers of such items know this, and they try to exploit it, so retailers jack the price up only to bring it back down.\n\nMany retailers have tried to dispense with the games, but consumers are always weary of being ripped off, so they never trust retailers.",
"If someone was buying enough stuff, when I worked at Best Buy 15 years ago, they could ask for just about anything small for free. The idea being: a $20 movie meant shit compared to the $4000 entertainment system+installation - and we often ran deals that included movies/media anyhow. \n\nTry it some time if you're going in to buy a normal priced large package. If the retail associate balks, then you know they're probably new. \n\nAdditionally, there's coupons for just about everything at a grocery store if you look hard enough. That's your haggling and \"I came to THIS store to buy THIS item\" ticket.",
"That's very much an industrialized nation thing. Haggling still common on everyday purchases in other cultures. Several interests align in industrialized cultures to erase this. The value of these goods has dropped and the price of labor, such as cashiers, involved selling them has risen. Thus its no longer valuable to waste your time and the cashiers time getting the price you will pay out. They fix the price based on statistical maximal profit. They have no interest in finding a sale for every customer, Their interest is in moving you through using as little of their labor as possible.\n\nCars and houses are still very valuable. Thus its worth your time to haggle for the lowest price they will sell at and in their interest to try to up-sell you and try to figure out how to sell you a car.",
"Part of it, I would think, is simply supply and demand. We need food to survive. For example people buy bread, or milk, or eggs everyday. There's no way grocery stores could negotiate every item with every customer. So what do they do? They put it in sale. We may not be able to negotiate for prices, but we can definitely price shop and combine the savings with coupons. If you feel like you've saved money shopping at that store, you'll go back again. And if a load of bread doesn't get sold, there's no substantial loss of revenue for the company.\n\nCars on the other hand, aren't necessarily a necessity. We certainly don't buy them on a regular basis. The loss of a car sale if a significantly larger hit to a company than a loaf of bread. As a result, the car companies want to negotiate so that you feel like your getting a deal, like your getting the better end of a bargain. If you buy a car, and walk away feeling like you've saved a significant amount of money, you're more likely to visit that dealership again.\n\nSales and coupons vs negotiating all come down to the same thing. Make the customer believe that they are getting a great deal to ensure repeat business. ",
"With new cars in particular, dealers have to meet monthly quotas to get bonuses from the manufacturers. The bonuses can be a huge part of their income so they will sometimes sell cars at a loss when they are desperate to make their quota. Especially if the car has been sitting on the lot for a long time. Note, you can haggle at a lot of retailers, even big chains. Managers can often give you maybe a 10% discount in more expensive items just to make you happy. ",
"Most answers here are strategic (from the seller's point of view), here's a general economic perspective. \n\nNo one know what a house is worth. There's no exact, direct, corollary. Furthermore, that house is worth different amounts to different people. The same applies to the seller. Motivations differ. But no one's reason to sell is better or \"truer\" than another. \n\nWhen a sale is negotiated and executed that becomes the de facto price of that house. In fact, that's what \"price\" means: bearable value on market. This is why house prices will fluctuate on a local, regional, and national level in differing amounts of correlation.\n\nThe same is true of cars. And comic books. And even of loaves of bread. But, as the price decreases and number of transactions increases, a consensus is formed and prices stabilize over time.\n\nIt would take a lot of effort to change the price of bread because the consensus price is well established and it's higher than average cost of production. Someone who suddenly charges $20 for a loaf of bread will experience LESS incomes due to that price, not more. \n\nThe same is not necessarily true of houses. If houses become rare, it a particular style becomes fashionable, individual transactions can significantly adjust the established market value of a house. \n\nYou can quiz yourself on this: \"how do I know this one specific can of soda isn't worth $500?\" Because you can easily, and without labor, find a cheaper can of soda. \n\n",
"Low volume, high profit margin.\nIt's not worth a company's time to haggle couple cents off a bag of chips.",
"Competition. Regular inexpensive things you can get anywhere and might be every week. How often do you buy a car? The answer to that is why they fight so much to get you to buy from them. You're not coming back next week for another. ",
"Everything is negotiable. \n\nHowever, in small-priced retail, you have to go through several layers of employees before you reach someone you can actually haggle with. \n\nAt a car dealer, the dealership almost always owns the car you are trying to purchase, so your first contact is in direct contact with the person who will actually say yes or no. \n\nHowever, I recommend that if you are in the US, and you try to negotiate at a restaurant, tip based on the menu price. Also, you might be able to successfully negotiate at that restaurant once or twice, but the owner/manager may decide that you aren't worth their time and ban you. That's their right.\n\nI do occasionally haggle, but for the most part I don't at big stores. I just want it to be clear that it's not against any rules or laws to negotiate.",
"We all agreed to pay the set amount because no one wants to negotiate all day. If we know we're ALL getting the same deal we all agree to not negotiate and the day goes by smoother ",
"The real answer to your question is that they're not fixed, you literally just aren't bartering for lower prices. Societal norms dictate that, though. But could a manager cut you a break on a price? Absolutely. Did it myself as a store manager. When you've got to make a quota and it's the end of the month? Deals can be made.",
"Small purchases generally have slim profit margins, so there is no room for negotiations. They are sold for a low price and make profits by large volume of sales. Somewhat unrelated, having to negotiate on small purchases is a total pain. Having been to markets around the world and bartered for the price of relatively small good is exhausting. ",
"It's cultural.\n\nIn many countries it's perfectly normal to negotiate on the price of most things. In western culture we decided that it's easier/more time efficient to shop around than negotiate. Unfortunately that only works in a highly competitive market. ",
"If I had to stand in the grocery checkout line any longer than I already do because someone in front of me was negotiating a three cent discount on each of their vegetables, I’d go bonkers.",
"Not an economist, but it's not that hard to figure that haggling for smaller, more frequent purchases would be pretty dreadful.",
"The more you sell of an item the better you understand it's market value. We know precisely the value of a loaf of bread, if you don't buy it at listed price we know someone else will. If you don't buy a house at listed value we don't know if another person will be willing to either\n",
"/u/bazmonkey already covered this from the perspective of the business selling products. I'm going to cover things from the perspective of the *customer* buying the products.\n\nIn order for someone to bother haggling over prices, three things have to happen:\n\n###1) They have to know that Haggling is even an option.\n\nIf a Customer doesn't know they can Haggle, they won't. The vast majority of retailers in America do not allow you to negotiate on prices to begin with, for the reasons our good Monkey already covered. The only places where you can negotiate on small purchases (that I can think of) are Farmers Markets, Flea Markets, and Garage Sales. Otherwise, the price is set. Take it or leave it. That conditions us to not *expect* to negotiate.\n\n###2) They have to stand to save a significant amount of money.\n\nIn order for an American to *do something*, we have to believe that it's worth the effort and time it takes to do it. If negotiating the price of a can of beans down $0.10 takes me ten minutes and a decent effort for those ten minutes... then it's not really worth it. I could be getting more out of my time elsewhere.\n\nIf you're dealing with a House or a Car... then you're saving thousands by negotiating. That makes negotiating *worth my time*, and worth the time of most Americans.\n\n###3) The Customer needs to not have something better/else to do with their time.\n\nYes, this is closely related to the above.\n\nMost Americans run on fairly tight schedules. This means that we generally don't have long to get things done before we need to be somewhere else... even if it's just getting home to go to bed. Haggling, as I said above, takes time. Time is at a *premium* for most people.\n\nIf all three come together... then Americans will haggle. However, that hardly ***ever*** comes together.",
"The number of minutes needed to engage in a negotiation is mostly fixed. Say five minutes. Divide the cost of paying the person by the number of minutes involved. At minimum wage, that's about $0.60 per negotiation. \n\nFor a $3.00 loaf of bread, that's 20% of the price. For a car, it rounds to 0%. It isn't cost effective to negotiate on small items. This is true for both the buyer and the seller. ",
"The simplest answer is that the seller has a *much* smaller margin to work with on smaller items, meaning it wouldn't take much for them to move from an acceptable profit level to a loss. On large items the potential margin (profit) is much larger, so there's more wiggle room to make a deal.",
"There are lots of explanations for why we don't haggle over small purchases, but no explanations for why we *do* negotiate the price of large purchases.\n\nThe answer is that the seller would like to sell every item for exactly the most amount of money that the buyer will pay, while the buyer would like to purchase the item for exactly the least amount of money that a seller will let it go for. \n\nFor example, I sell widgets. When you come into my shop, I offer you a widget for $800 and you buy it. That's good, but you actually would have paid $1000 if I had offered that price. I just left $200 on the table. That's bad. \n\nOn the other hand, you come to my widget shop. I offer you a widget for $800 and you buy it. That's good, you're happy with your new widget. But I would have been willing to sell the widget for $600 if that's all the money you had in your pocket. You overpaid by $200. That's bad. \n\nA negotiation is the seller's attempt to discover the highest price the buyer will pay, and the buyer's attempt to discover the lowest price that the seller will sell for. Usually, you meet somewhere in the middle. \n\nFor large purchases like cars and houses, the thousands of dollars that each party might gain or lose makes a negotiation - even if it takes an afternoon or multiple days - a sensible practice. For small purchases like groceries, the one dollar that you could possibly save on a steak by haggling for five minutes just isn't worth the time of either party. ",
"For the most part, and generally speaking the price on the item at the grocery, clothing, car dealership, or other store, is just an invitation to make an offer and not an offer waiting for acceptance, which is why you can try to negotiate and the grocery can accept or reject your offer for a lower price.\nSometimes the price advertised can actually be an offer. For example if the car dealership put out an add that said they were selling a 2018 Lamborghini to the first person who came in their front door wearing a chicken costume on July 1st 2017, for $100. And you showed up first in the costume and with $100 you would get the car.\n\n(See: _URL_0_)\n\nGenerally, advertisements are not offers but invitations to treat, so the person advertising is not compelled to sell. In Partridge v Crittenden [1968] 1 WLR 1204, a defendant who was charged with \"offering for sale protected birds\"—bramblefinch cocks and hens that he had advertised for sale in a newspaper—was not offering to sell them. Lord Parker CJ said it did not make business sense for advertisements to be offers, as the person making the advertisement may find himself in a situation where he would be contractually obliged to sell more goods than he actually owned.\n\nIn certain circumstances called unilateral contracts, an advertisement can be an offer; as in Carlill v Carbolic Smoke Ball Company [1893] 1 QB 256, where it was held that the defendants, who advertised that they would pay £100 to anyone who sniffed a smoke ball in the prescribed manner and yet caught influenza, were contractually obliged to pay £100 to whomever accepted it by performing the required acts.",
"You spend some amount of time haggling. Time is always worth some value as you can spend it accruing wealth. When you haggle over small goods, even if you succeed in a 99% off deal in your favor, the absolute value of the 99% off may be worth far less than the time you spent haggling. With large ticket items, even a 1% discount from a day haggling may be worth 100ks in absolute value. Unless your time is extraordinarily valuable (i.e. every second you are accruing thousands of units of currency) its most likely worth your time to try and haggle for a lower price on these large items.\n\nKeep in mind that in many poorer cultures, haggling is still normal for something as basic as food staples. In an Indian market, you can watch poor people haggle over a few cups of grain trying to reduce the price of that grain a few rupees, because their time is not very valuable relative to the price of the food. Conversely in the 1% culture, people may simply decide to pay the advertised rate for even a very large good like a house or boat because the time spent trying to negotiate a better deal is unlikely to be worth the money saved.",
"Room to move in gross profit. If an orange costs 49 cents and sells for a dollar there isn’t much room to move. And the store knows how much they paid for it. When you sell a house it’s given an appraised value. It’s assumptive. But also, when you ask 200,000 for a house andnthe seller wants 250,000–there’s a little more room to move around ",
"In short, there is no reason you cannot negotiate the purchase of anything. You'll probably get turned down, but the listed prices are known as an invitation to treat, and when you go to the counter, you are implicitly offering to buy them for the stated price. Silence is taken as a \"can I purchase these at the stated price?\" but you can just as much ask for a different price. Its just not worth the time and effort, and there is not enough margin for small items, so they'll likely turn you down. ",
"How long would a grocery trip take if you had to negotiate the exact price of every piece of fruit and can of beans and box of cereal.\n\nCongrats, you negotiated the price down by 20¢, but it took 4 hours.",
"It's not worth the time to negotiate because there is so little margin on the less expensive items.",
"I've read it's just traditional. People expect to be able to negotiate a lower price, so the prices are actually higher anyways, and it works.\n\nI read an article about a car dealership that advertises this fact and sold cars at noon negotiable prices that didn't have that markup. People would price compare other dealership but only see that they talked the dealership $5,000 off the sticker despite it being $3,000 more then if they bought it at the no negotiating dealership. ",
"Authorization. \n\nSmall sales are usually handled by retail staff with no control over the price.\n\nLarge sales are usually handled by sales personnels who are authorised to make concessions.\n\nThere are many exceptions, go to any flea market where the sales person is the owner and you can haggle over a penny as much as you want.\n\nGo to those fixed price car dealers, e.g. Tesla, and the prices are non-negotiable as per their policy.\n\nAs for why companies has different policies, it is a combination of factors: profit per sales, sales volume, sales channel, corporate image, historical reasons, legal obligations, industry regulations etc. ",
"It's much easier to establish the value of something in Mass production. One box of Staples has a clearly definable cost that will be very similar to the one next to it. Maybe there's an error in this one, and it has one fewer or more staple than the box next to it, odds are neither side is willing to take the time to negotiate. Though, often, you can haggle in retail over damaged or very hard to sell clearance merchandise.\n\nA used car, on the other hand, is much harder to define. You know what some of the wear and tear is, but you know you don't know all of it. Two cars may have 100,000 miles on them, but if one was properly maintained while gathering them, it will have a very different value than one which had only two oil changes. So, while there is a blue book value, it is much less set in stone.\n\nFurther, because these purchases are less frequent, there's emotional factors. If I want to sell my house quickly, I'm willing to bring the price down. If im not in a rush, you probably won't have much luck negotiating with me. In a car lot, it's the real estate that's valuable. If I know this car will sell at sticker price quickly, I won't sell to you at less just to get it off the lot. If, however, a car has been sitting on the lot for months, I know that I could have sold 3-4 more cost effective vehicles using that space in that time, so there's value in selling it even if it's at a loss.",
"It's also to do with the elasticity of the good. Elasticity is basically how much % change there is for the quantity demanded when the price of a good is change by a certain percentage. Therefore when the price of bread goes up by let's say 10c people are going to change their buying habits because the good is inelastic meaning that the price change hasn't affected the quantity demanded. Big ticket items though, when a car price is reduced by let's say 1000 dollars, the quantity demanded has now risen because it is a lot cheaper and is seen as more worthwhile at the given price as opposed to before.",
"Negotiation takes time -- > which is labor -- > which is dollars. \n\nCost of negotiation can't be leveraged by small price tag items. Cost of negotiation can by leveraged by high price tag items",
"It is profit maximizing to use price discrimination is the short economic answer. Now it’s time for the long economic answer.\n\nHaggling has always been a part of purchasing since the dawn of transactions. The purpose of it is to get people with a higher desire for the product to pay more than people with a lower desire for the product. However, haggling takes time and energy to perform. It also relies on the next person buying the product to not know the price the last person got the product for, otherwise they will just demand they get it for the same price as the last guy. For example if you go to the grocery store and grab an apple you can just ask the guy next to you what’s the cheapest he’s gotten an apple for. In the Internet age, these lists would be put up on the internet and tell you the cheapest prices for anything you could buy. Thus haggling loses any profit benefit it had and now costs additional time and energy. Think of how much longer lines would be at grocery stores if everyone had to haggle every single item they wanted to buy. In high transaction environments it becomes cost effective to fix the price and just skip all the haggling, because haggling would result in customers getting the fixed price anyways but cost more time and resources. \n\nThis is only a partial answer though. Price is determined by two things, what the seller is willing to accept for a good and what the buyer is willing to pay. As we just discussed it is relatively fast to determine a fixed price in a grocery store because there is such a large transaction volume everyday. Houses on the other hand are an extremely slow and sparse good. They can sit unsold for months or years. Additionally, the last time an individual house was bought and sold might be five or twenty years apart so it is extremely difficult to know the last price it sold for, and even if known wouldn’t be relevant anymore due to inflation, different economy, and different housing market. This allows for haggling to come back into the picture. So in a market with few buyers, few sellers, and few products price is completely undetermined and unknown. Negotiation becomes the only way to sell the product. \n\nFor example: If you list a house for $300,000 and over a year two people are interested, one offers $140,000 and the other offers $160,000 you have a choice. You can either accept the offer, counter offer, or pass. You decide to pass, and the next year receive one offer for $150,000. You pass again and receive another offer of $130,000. It becomes obvious that your house is only worth half of what you are trying to sell it for. You can either choose to accept a significantly lower price or wait until someone will buy it closer to the price you are trying to sell it for. Conversely, you list a house for $300,000 instead you receive ten offers in a week. People start raising their offers to give $450,000+. It becomes obvious that you under-priced your house.\n\ntl;dr Negotiation is a way for the seller to obtain the highest price offered for their product, and fixed prices are way for a seller to save time and resources when the highest price offered for their product is known. ",
"Profit margins are bigger for \"big ticket items\". If your margins are bigger, you can negotiate as it is better to make the sale rather than holding firm on a higher price. (Sell the house = money > no sale = no money)\nAlso, it's not even worth the time to a manager to pay the cashier to negotiate a sale of a bubble gum purchase. (Sell the pack of gum = what ever, get back to work 'or' no sale = what ever, get back to work)",
"People just want to haggle and feel like they won... I've tried pricing cars at a minimum I could make while maintaining some semblance of profit and trying to work on volume and all it did was either A) make people think there was something wrong with the car, or B) still lowball me even though I had the cheapest listing in 400 miles. \n\nSource: I own a little used car dealership.",
"I think it's about transaction costs. When you buy a retail $4.00 loaf of bread, it costs you virtually no more than the $4.00\n\nWith bargaining there's also a transaction cost called a \"bargaining cost\", the cost of coming to an agreement and like a game of chicken sometimes bargains can't be struck and nothing gets sold and everyone loses. \n\nSo bargaining is efficient when transactions are few (bargaining costs add up for every transaction). A consumer gets a boat for less than the most they'd be willing to pay because it's bargained down. Likewise the producer gets a surplus because he's selling at a price that's higher than the least he'd be willing to sell for because he's bargained up as well. Pretty efficient. People in bargaining situations pay less than their maximum price, consumer and producer end up with a surplus: what they where willing to pay being lower than what they actually paid. \n\nSo when transactions are few, bargaining is extremely efficient for all. But when there's lots of transactions, if it weren't for retail prices, bargaining cost would make it extremely inefficient to buy that $4.00 loaf of bread. If you bargained and couldn't arrange a deal, you might get no bread at all. Switch to retail, the transactions are numerous and the costs of each is tiny\n\nIt also gets into price discrimination. Some people would only pay a little for a product and some would pay more. And we want to weed out whose who. Price discrimination comes out naturally through bargaining (but remember they also pay bargaining costs). Retail handle it through coupons, sales, discounts for certain demographics, Sams club membership, grocery store bonus points, all that shit.\n\nThat's why bargaining is a much bigger thing at car lots and you don't see many car coupons. That's why nobody bargains at the supermarket but they do bring their coupons. \n\nI think I got that right. \n",
"I want to know why some products have a price printed on the label. Gum and green tea with ginsing come to mind",
"Old dealership trick, mark up the price 10-15% higher than you actually want for it, then \"let\" the customer negotiate you down to the original lower price or maybe a little bit above the original price. You get the price you wanted or more, the customer gets to feel like they got a good deal when in reality they got played. House negotiations can be for any number of reasons, maybe they need to sell the house fast and so selling it is more important than getting a few extra thousand dollars, maybe they're borrowing a trick from the dealership to con their buyer, maybe they get two competitive buyers who then have to bid on the property so the price goes up past the asking price. ",
"I would imagine because large retail purchases are much more susceptible to the supply/demand market forces than small retail purchases are. I mean, Imagine how many more gallon jugs of milk are sold per day than houses are sold per day? And because of the higher dollar amount and permanence of such purchases, people working on a commission basis rather than minimum wage would be much more willing to take a slight discount on a large purchase than a guy who's selling said gallon of milk for a set wage on the hour.\n\nBut, that's simply my drunk opinion on the matter. I may or may not be close to the mark on this one, but I'll check the upvotes tomorrow.",
"My aunt has this knack of negotiating at many stores that have fixed prices. I once watched her buy a refrigerator at Lowe’s. When the employee told her the price she said no, and proceeded to haggle the guy down to almost half the price. This was a new in the box fridge; it wasn’t like she got the floor model for less, She does this all the time- she’s either got big balls or is very convincing. ",
"Can you imagine how long it would take to buy your groceries?\nCan you imagine minimum wage clerks at walmart giving a damn about how much you paid for the damn eggs???",
"Actually it negotiable on groceries too find products close to expiration and ask manager for a deal.",
"Because it's not worth your time or the merchants' time to haggle over the price of a loaf of bread or a tube of toothpaste.",
"Look up discriminatory pricing. It sounds nefarious but it’s how companies can sell enough of their product to cover costs. But to do it, the have to sell the same product to different customers at different prices. ",
"Car prices aren't really negotiable. They inflate the \"real\" price and let you talk them down to a lower price. It makes you feel like you're getting a good deal.\n\nHouses are negotiable because they are liabilities that people are trying to get rid of, and/or want to make money off sooner than later. Since there's those pressures, they will likely take a smaller deal since they're still probably better off than not selling. This depends on whether the supply of house is stronger or weaker than the demand for houses, too. If it's a seller's market, you can forget about negotiating a house price. It's just that the house market is currently a buyer's market again.\n\nSmall purchases are not negotiable because the profit margin on the item is so low, the seller can't afford to take a loss.\n\nIt's all about the margin. If the margin is big, the seller can live with shaving some off the margin; if the margin is small, not so much.",
"How are they supposed to pay for the staff needed to spend time negotiating prices with people. buy my bread! no... maybe.. for 3 cents!",
"The top rated comment is correct but long. The short answer is profit margin. A retailer/seller is more apt to negotiate a price if there's more meat on the bone. Simple as that. ",
"I doubt that someone will go to the store and buy milk, bread, and eggs, and will spend hours trying to negotiate the price to save a few pennies. Surely most people’s time is worth more than the pennies you’ll save over that hassle. \n\nHouse or cars though? I’ll definitely spend hours negotiating its price if it’ll save me several thousand dollars. ",
"It depends, on how big the seller is. If it's a big corporation, then not only do they not care about one particular customer and trying to make the sale with that one, since they have millions of others, but also you'd have little negotiating power.\n\nIn the \"souks\" of Marrakech and elsewhere you'd be able to haggle down the price of even small purchases, so it's not only about the price.\n\nMost people would however not waste time haggling over a few dollars, although you could in the right context if you really wanted to. But who has time for that?\n\nMany people will, however, try to negotiate the price of cars and houses because they have the power to do so, as there aren't that many buyers, and the amount involved makes it worthwhile for both the seller and the buyer to haggle the price up / down.",
"Your find everything may be negotiable, it's just how much your time (and the time of the seller) is worth. If you put as much effort in negotiating a 5% reduction in that chocolate bar as you did a house you could save a couple of pence, but is it worth it? You may also find the seller is unwilling to negotiate such low value stuff, they make their money on selling lots of small value items, they may not have time to negotiate or they may not want to gain the reputation as someone to haggle with to avoid having to haggle with everyone.",
"*Technically* those small purchases *are* negotiable. A price listed on an item is an offer, and you can choose to accept, decline, or modify that offer. However, the reason why people don't typically do this for supermarkets or the like is because of the *volume* of sales. Think about it: What is the profit margin on a 100 dollar bill of groceries for the market? How many of these types of sales are there per day? And how much time does it take to make a negotiation? Because the profits are small, the volume is large, and the time is lengthy, almost all small item retailers take the quick and easy response to your modification of an offer: \"No.\" However, that is not always the case, go to Chinatown NY: You are almost expected to try to negotiate (No matter how many times they shout \"No bargain\" at you).",
"I live in NYC. Here people always try to haggle. It's because of the large immigrant population. I just say no. ",
"Negotiating price takes a lot of effort by both the buyer and seller - in order to \"win\" they both must do a lot of research on what the \"going rate\" should be vs. competition .... and if prices aren't posted anywhere else, that makes it even more work ... \n\nFor small items, it's just not worth that much work for anyone involved.",
"Small retail purchases aren't fixed. You very rarely see a \"suggested retail price\" on things anymore so the store can charge whatever they want and then discount it on sale for whatever amount or even 'claim' it to be on sale when it actually isn't. I've managed grocery stores and the price tags are constantly changing.",
"Profit and number of customers served.\n\nThe grocery store is not even making a dollar on that loaf of bread, after all the costs are factored in. They also serve thousands of customers a day. There is not much room to negotiate on price and there is also not enough staff to give every customer at a grocery store personalized service and time to negotiate.\n\nMeanwhile buying a car, the dealership is making tens of thousands of dollars, and since they only sell a few cars a day they have enough staff to give personal service to everyone. Lots of room to move on price, and lots of time to negotiate.",
"For small items - time and efficiency. For large things we can assume that there are far less buyers. I suppose auto companies hire middlemen to be responsible for all the financial intricacies because they want someone on the tip of their infrastructure to be able to handle situations on the fly to accommodate for consumer interest. +-3k isn't going to hurt the sales model. But in theory, it should broaden their targeted audience and that boost in consumer pool outweighs a flat sales model with fewer people and no middlemen. Another reason is that when you spend that much money you kind of want someone experienced to guide you based on your interests -- which also builds consumer loyalty/relations.",
"cars and houses... its part of the culture, so it persists. there are extenuating factors to the transaction (urgency and higher or lower than expected demand) that may benefit both parties to adjust their price to make a particular deal work.\n\n",
"You can absolutely negotiate small retail purchases! People just don’t, and most shops are owned by large corporations who don’t permit it.\n\nWhen you’re buying a car or a house you are generally dealing with a much smaller company, either an individual represented by a realtor or a car dealership franchise. These smaller companies can take a little more control over their business and have the freedom to barter\n\nIn many cultures it’s common for small retailers to haggle and barter. Large corporations like Wal Mart, Target etc stand to benefit significantly from their customers being afraid to haggle, as it means they can set a fixed price and have automated pricing and checkout software etc, so they actively work to prevent and discourage it.",
"There are a lot of reasons but my yeas in sales I think a major one is volume of that the salesman deals with. The smaller the price and greater volume you need to set a price that is the sweet spot of supply and demand, and for bigger lower volume sales like houses where a sells person maybe sells a dozen a month, they need to try to maximize profit for commission to be worth their time.",
"Its pretty simple, the profit margins on cars and houses are much larger, thus allowing for greater variation when it comes to closing a deal.\n\nAlso, with a large retailer you have many many products and haggling for 10% off on every product is going to make the place dysfunctional as there are many customers and a large line. While at a car dealership there are perhaps a few people there and the sales guys have time for that. ",
"The gain/hassle ratio of large purchase haggling is much better for the seller.\n\nIt's not worth the extra sales you'd get from people going back and forth between different super markets trying to save a few quid. Every week. All the extra staff.\n\nWhen you can just have a set price and need far less staff.\n\nHowever, you do need someone to spend the time with the home/car buyer as it's a purchase they put much more thought into.",
"Multiple reasons:\n\n1) It's not worth the time considering the sheer quantity of small retail items being sold every minute\n\n2) it's quite a lot of paperwork in most bureaucratic economies to change the prices because of sales tax etc\n\n3) when customers are able to negotiate prices, you need salespeople that know how to calculate a price that still keeps the business profitable. Those aren't cheap enough to be basically any cashier in any store at any time. \n\n4) The car dealer has a way higher interest in getting you as maybe one of three buyers that day than the supermarket manager has in getting you as one in thousands that day. Want to negotiate your can of beans? Tough luck, try it elsewhere.",
"Seems like a case relating to the economics of price makers and price takers. \n\nIf a market is a ‘perfectly competitive’ one all the firms selling there sell at a price that is made by the demand of the customers. As there are so many perfect substitutes, different loaves of bread makers but all are almost exactly the same (homogeneous goods), undercutting occurs to capture the whole market. People will buy the cheapest product that has the same utility(satisfaction). This happens constantly until they’re charging a price equal to marginal costs, which is the lowest price they can go to essentially. This means there is nowhere else to drop the price to unless they make losses.\n\nThe car salesmen is a price maker because, but not in a traditional monopoly sense, so I’ll skip that. \nBasically they make their price up based on their costs and what they want to make as supernormal profits here. Although two dealers could be selling the same car, there is a lot of differentiation between the dealers, such as how far the customer lives from the dealer, colour, mileage etc. This lets them charge a higher price as there isn’t such a high competition aspect that eats away at supernormal profits. They have some leeway to charge prices on a 3rd degree price discrimination( I think it’s 3rd correct me peeps) level, this means they know the demand of each customer and what they’re willing to pay, which any haggling case do and can charge a price relative to this. \n\nNot the best eli5, but I think it captures some good points ",
"Volume and markup/margin (amount charged on top of cost price)\n\nIf a store sells lots and lots (high volume) it's margin on each item is usually very small. This is for a number of reasons but usually because the cost to produce each item is very low (fora variety of reasons)and since the supply is high, the cost is low. \nLots cost and low margin mean no room to move because margin could be fractions of dollars, specials and volumes are very highly calculated and tracked and profitability is hard to maintain.\n\nLow volume, high cost items often have large margin to start with (for theopposite reasons aove) and often tha asking price is higher than the acceptable price. There are other factors, if volume has been lower than usual even some sales are better than none at all. This is because cash flow in an ongoing businessis extremely improtant. Need to pay for staff and premises and stock. Sometimes the guarantee of breaking even is way better than the chance of profit.",
"Generally the smaller the goods and more commonly available they are, the prices are already negotiated many many times over to the point where they become competitive. Therefore the price on small retail purchases do not change too much unless the supply changes or the demand changes.\n\nFor larger things, the margins are higher so they can negotiate around a bit to a lower price point and still make a profit. This is why houses and cars are often negotiated. Also because they are uncommon or rare in some situations depending on the market.\n\nEssentially the negotiation for groceries have already been done at multiple levels involving the farms, the supermarkets, the state or federal level, taxes and subsidies included, logistics factored in, season, and supply vs demand. What you see at the supermarket has is a price that the supermarket can either make a profit off of or attract people to shop there and make up the loss by selling other products at a profit.\n\nEverything is being negotiated at all times unless a price ceiling or floor or fixed price is implemented due to emergencies or for other major reasons. ",
"Although they aren't technically negotiable, in a way they are. A grocery store across the street will have different prices on various items. Yoi negotiate by shopping around and using coupons and sales.",
"Wiggle room aka profit margin. Percentage of profit margin wise, do you really want to haggle over a few pennies when buying a piece of cheese?",
"Depends on where you live, in Asia food, fruits, clothes, and more are negotiable, everything is",
"Actually, everything is negotiable, it’s just that you don’t want to spend the time and emotional energy for small stuff.",
"It's all to do with profit margin. Groceries low; those others are high.\nMore wiggle room\nHope that helps",
"I'm surprised I cannot find an answer pertaining to profit margins so here's mine.\n\nEvery retailer makes a percentage of profit on goods they sell, called a profit margin. Depending on the item in question, the margin can be really small (1-5% for groceries, for example) or quite large (~50% for mattresses, for example).\n\nFrom the seller's point of view there is no point in lowering an already low margin of profit in order to make a sale. However, in the case of large margins, or even small to medium margins that represent larger amounts of money (cars, houses, etc.), the seller can afford to lose a few percentage points in order to sell.",
"Volume sales, selling a ton of items for cheap to make a profit, heck some car companies have started doing this too. \nTheir is a hard rock bottom price on a car. You just need to figure it out. This only applies to brand new cars. Used cars are where dealers make the most profit now. \n\n50 cent profit on a bottle of soda doesn't seem like much, but a big store is gonna be selling a hundred a day.\n\nWhile a dealership might only be making 200 bucks on a 3 series bwm, but they are selling about 5 a day.\n\nBusiness only need to make enough money to stay in operation month to month. Sure the buildings cost a few million dollars, but they don't have to pay that up front, they got a loan for it with a low interest rate. Or with none from the local government who really wanted that business in town. Which makes it even easier for a business to reach a profit.",
"As a former long time best buy employee I can tell you that prices on items are in fact negotiable. I was at my highest position a \"Best buy for business manager\" and I would often (with higher manager approval) negotiate prices on items that would make or break a deal assuring repeat business with business clients. And this sometimes went on with high dollar and low dollar items. There's even a \"tab\" in the inventory system that allows you to look up the sale price of the item vs the \"at cost\" value of the item. Which shows you how much \"wiggle room\" you have in negotiation on cost to still be able to make the company a profit. \n\nOn a fun little side note regarding the at cost price vs retail price: employees would even play a game around tax time and Black Friday as well, to see who could buy the most stuff spending the least amount of money (because the employee discount on specific items was AMAZINGLY GOOD because it used to be the AT COST price and in later years At Cost plus 5%). So basically we would have all our stuff rung up then apply the employee discount and see who had the biggest difference in retail vs price paid. A lot of times much of the Black Friday \"add on items\" stuff was sold below cost which made the game interesting. The only thing that kinda threw the game off was the low quality stuff that was manufactured and sold specifically for Black Friday. (I know I'm telling alot of people that Santas not real and the tooth fairy is your mom with this one, but that $200 50\" TV you get at Black Friday is only sold on Black Friday and is made of cheap parts specifically to be sold at that price for that specific sale.)",
"Pretty simple answer, but primarily because larger retail purchases don't sell as much and the difference between 150,000 and 125,000 is not as severe in the grand scheme of things as the difference between 1.80 and 1.95 when you're selling only 1 of the 150,000 thing and potentially hundreds of the 1.95 thing.",
"They aren’t if you buy with a One Simple Price dealer like the one I work for in South Texas. We haven’t negotiated on price or anything else since 1995. We sell our inventory like any retailer sells their products. All applicable discounts and rebates are given right up front. And we shop our competition regularly, so our prices are highly competitive.",
"There's a larger profit margin to work with. Cost on a soda for the retailer might be .89, but they sell the soda for 1.29. Cost on a used car at a dealership may be 4,500 but they might sell it for 7,500. The customer wants to bring the price down to 7,000, so the dealership decides whether or not they can make it work for the customer. We also have to consider that the cost of large investments like cars and houses also include repairs and maintenance. If the service bill for the same car was 1,200 dollars, that means the 4,500 dollar car is now a 5,700 dollar car. Now the car needs to be touched up by the paint guy. Add another $600 to the bill. We now have a $6,300 dollar car. So the dealer decides whether or not the customer's asking price is reasonable to the deal."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/OpportunityCost.html",
"http://theconversation.com/economic-theories-that-have-changed-us-asymmetric-information-42120"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bargaining"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invitation_to_treat"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
jzalf
|
- hadoop and mapreduce
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jzalf/eli5_hadoop_and_mapreduce/
|
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"text": [
"ELY5: Painting the fence yourself is too much work. So you gather an army of friends, give them each a paint brush and some paint, tell them each which section of fence to paint. Many hands make light work.\n\nMapReduce: You have too much data to process on just one computer. The solution is distribute the data and processing across many computers then run an app to make each computer process their portion of the data.\n\nMap: So you split the data into chunks, distribute the chunks across many computers along with a little program that tells each computer how to process a chunk of data. \n\nReduce: You gather up the processed results from each computer and consolidate it into a result set.\n\nHadoop: A popular Java-based MapReduce management system. You write Java code explaining how to process a chunk of data, Hadoop takes cares of managing the distribution of data and farming out the work to your army of worker nodes.\n",
"Imagine you have a massive data set and you need to know how many times datum X appears in it. This thing is several TB long and it's unsorted, so it will take a long time before you can find what you're looking for using just your computer... What to do?\n\nMapReduce is a software approach for cutting problems like this one into smaller problems, *mapping* each sub-problem to a different processor (usually different machines on a network) and then *reducing* each intermediate answer to the single final answer you're looking for. Not all problems can be distributed out to separate solvers, but for the ones that can be, you can gain a speedup of several orders of magnitude when compared to the classic, single-processor approach most of us are used to.\n\nGoing back to your problem, let's say you have 200 idle processors at your disposal. So in the mapping step, you cut the input data set into 200 pieces and send each piece out to a different machine. Each computer will now go through its respective chunk of data, count how many times datum X appears, and output its sub-count to a designated reducer, which adds all the counts together. The reduce step can have several reducers, all of which eventually send their answers to a single reducer that outputs the final answer you're looking for.\n\nThe most common use of MapReduce is probably querying huge data sets - map the input to different machines and have each one search its (much smaller) subset for whatever key you're looking for and then reduce all outputs to a list of appearances of your key in the input as a whole.\n\nAs for Hadoop, it's just a FOSS implementation of MapReduce in Java (a python-flavored version is also available, if I'm not mistaken). There are a bunch of excellent MapReduce/Hadoop tutorials online. Start [here](_URL_0_).",
"ELY5: Painting the fence yourself is too much work. So you gather an army of friends, give them each a paint brush and some paint, tell them each which section of fence to paint. Many hands make light work.\n\nMapReduce: You have too much data to process on just one computer. The solution is distribute the data and processing across many computers then run an app to make each computer process their portion of the data.\n\nMap: So you split the data into chunks, distribute the chunks across many computers along with a little program that tells each computer how to process a chunk of data. \n\nReduce: You gather up the processed results from each computer and consolidate it into a result set.\n\nHadoop: A popular Java-based MapReduce management system. You write Java code explaining how to process a chunk of data, Hadoop takes cares of managing the distribution of data and farming out the work to your army of worker nodes.\n",
"Imagine you have a massive data set and you need to know how many times datum X appears in it. This thing is several TB long and it's unsorted, so it will take a long time before you can find what you're looking for using just your computer... What to do?\n\nMapReduce is a software approach for cutting problems like this one into smaller problems, *mapping* each sub-problem to a different processor (usually different machines on a network) and then *reducing* each intermediate answer to the single final answer you're looking for. Not all problems can be distributed out to separate solvers, but for the ones that can be, you can gain a speedup of several orders of magnitude when compared to the classic, single-processor approach most of us are used to.\n\nGoing back to your problem, let's say you have 200 idle processors at your disposal. So in the mapping step, you cut the input data set into 200 pieces and send each piece out to a different machine. Each computer will now go through its respective chunk of data, count how many times datum X appears, and output its sub-count to a designated reducer, which adds all the counts together. The reduce step can have several reducers, all of which eventually send their answers to a single reducer that outputs the final answer you're looking for.\n\nThe most common use of MapReduce is probably querying huge data sets - map the input to different machines and have each one search its (much smaller) subset for whatever key you're looking for and then reduce all outputs to a list of appearances of your key in the input as a whole.\n\nAs for Hadoop, it's just a FOSS implementation of MapReduce in Java (a python-flavored version is also available, if I'm not mistaken). There are a bunch of excellent MapReduce/Hadoop tutorials online. Start [here](_URL_0_)."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[
"http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/current/mapred_tutorial.html"
],
[],
[
"http://hadoop.apache.org/common/docs/current/mapred_tutorial.html"
]
] |
||
cjq536
|
how can we tell what a meteorite is composed of? without having previously explored it.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cjq536/eli5_how_can_we_tell_what_a_meteorite_is_composed/
|
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"text": [
"Imagine there is a mountain, and you go around collecting a thousand different Rock samples from different parts of the mountain. All of those rocks samples vary a little bit, but all of them are more than 90% granite. At that point, provided your sampling was done well, you can reasonably conclude that the surface of the mountain is mostly granite.\n\nLikewise, meteorites fall to Earth all the time. Scientists have collected thousands upon thousands of them. And all of them fall within a fairly narrow range of composition, so we can reasonably can say that most meteors should fall within that range of composition. We cannot say with 100% certainty that there are not weird meteors composed of different things, but they are certainly in the minority.\n\nAnd a little note on your terminology: a meteorite by definition has already fallen to Earth, so we can analyze it. You should probably be talkin about meteors instead.",
"When different elements burn they let off different light patterns. We can look at the patterns of light from an object and determine what it is made of. For more details look up spectral analysis.",
"Part of this is actually done by analyzing the light that the meteorite reflects back. You've probably heard before that different objects reflect some wavelengths of light and absorb others, and that's how we can see colours. At a more detailed level, you can analyze exactly which wavelengths were absorbed using a machine called a spectrometer. Using that data, we then look at what materials we know on Earth could produce the same absorption pattern, and that tells us what materials the meteorite is made of."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
4bzeoe
|
what is cluster computing and how does it differ from traditional computing? what applications is it useful for, or used in? thanks
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4bzeoe/eli5_what_is_cluster_computing_and_how_does_it/
|
{
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"text": [
"Cluster computing is the concept of taking a piece of computing work and breaking it up into much smaller segments, and assigning each segment to a different computer, so the work can be completed much more quickly.\n\nSo, let's say you have to find a needle in a haystack, and the haystack is as big as your house. Obviously this would take one person a very long time, even if they were really, really good at searching for needles and really, really fast at doing it.\n\nOne way to speed up the work would be to divide the haystack into, say, 500 very small piles of hay, and having five hundred people help, each one only has to examine a small pile. \n\nThis is a simple analogy but that's pretty much how it works. Certain types of computational work can easily be divided into chunks like this, and the work spread out across hundreds or thousands of computers. Many hands make light work.\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
3x48no
|
how is it legal for congress to attach riders to bills that absolutely have to pass? isn't this cheating the system?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3x48no/eli5_how_is_it_legal_for_congress_to_attach/
|
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"text": [
"Well, no, that *is* the system. I mean, they aren't breaking any of the rules of Congress. It may be not how things were intended to work, but it's how the rules are, so it's legal.\n\nThere's no rule of Congress or part of the Constitution that prohibits this.",
"There's no such thing in Congress as a bill that \"absolutely has to pass\". Congress votes on everything, and can vote down anything. It's pretty common practice to attach controversial bills into non-controversial bills (like a standard budget reauthorization), but that sort of thing is hard to ban because there's no neutral third party that can say \"these things aren't related enough so they have to be kept separately\". It's hard to create an organization that can do such a thing without them being able to use that power to block any bill they disagree with.",
"It is a problem, but how could you prevent it? If you set up a rule that bills and resolutions must tackle only one topic, who would decide what that topic is? Who would enforce the rule, and how would we keep them from overriding the democratic process?\n\nCongress is set up so that a strong majority of representatives must approve a bill. In theory, that should mean that they only pass good, sensible bills.\n\nIn theory. ;)",
"It's legal because there's no law against it.\n\nAnd guess who would have to pass a law to make it illegal? That's right; Congress.\n\nUnfortunately for us, the founding fathers never imagined we'd get such a corrupt and retarded group of people running Congress, and so they never thought to make it illegal from the beginning. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
1gfjba
|
why does it take iphone apps so long to cross over to android?
|
For instance, I know both Instagram and Vine took several months to be released in the Google Play Store. Do they have to re-write code or do they just hate Android users?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gfjba/eli5_why_does_it_take_iphone_apps_so_long_to/
|
{
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"text": [
"The iOS app market is more lucrative, so it's not unusual for apps to be written for it first. Yes, more coding is necessary to bring the same app to Android.",
"They have to rewrite it, of course they don't \"hate\" anyone. Among many other problems they have to be written in a different programming language."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
30ilta
|
are the daily recommended values on food labels ideal figures or maximum allowances?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/30ilta/eli5_are_the_daily_recommended_values_on_food/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cpss1gl"
],
"score": [
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"text": [
"Neither. They're simply an accepted amount that serves as a reference point."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
2lgsjp
|
why didn't net neutrality or blanket surveillance issues play a bigger part in mid term elections this year?
|
I dont really have a lot of issues I care about. But these are my biggest. I feel like a lot of other people care about it a lot, but it was never brought up in a serious manner. Why? Do voters not care about it?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lgsjp/eli5why_didnt_net_neutrality_or_blanket/
|
{
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"With only a handful of exceptions, there are no major-party candidates on the national scene who give more than lip service to keeping net neutrality or who stand opposed to the NSA's wide-net surveillance tactics. There's nothing much to debate, when the Democrats and Republicans don't disagree.",
"Cynical explanation: Those issues are somewhat immune to our shallow, buzzword-oriented, attention-span-of-a-ferret-on-a-triple-espresso political climate. Thus, they can't be used to whip up the lizard-brain prejudices of the electorate and drive them to support a candidate (or not). \n\nNot-quite-so-cynical: They're complex issues that many people don't understand, and that don't lend themselves well to campaign slogans, speeches or ads.",
"What did your representative and senator have to say when you asked them about these issues?"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
3tqxhf
|
why is james dean so popular recently?
|
He's been mentioned in multiple songs lately, and I don't understand the obsession. He died really young, a long time ago, and he doesn't seem that much more attractive than other movie stars.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3tqxhf/eli5_why_is_james_dean_so_popular_recently/
|
{
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"text": [
"1. He died.\nThis coming from a big fan.\n\n2. He played a gay cowboy in the 50s which was a BIG BIG deal back then.\n\n3. He's hot\n\n4. He died young at the peak of his career.\n\n5. 1950s was when pop culture exploded and movie stars became hearthrobs so he was one of the first.\n\n6. His movies were very representative of their time. People obsess over River Phoenix. The same thing would have happened had Molly Ringwald died after the breakfast club or 16 candles.",
"In the same context, I'm gonna piggy back this, and say multiple songs have come out referencing michelle pfieffer, and she hasn't exactly been her young dreamy self for a couple decades.... Why the spike? "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
2a00dz
|
why can you sometimes still feel the surge of the tides when you close your eyes after a day of swimming at the beach?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a00dz/eli5_why_can_you_sometimes_still_feel_the_surge/
|
{
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"text": [
"During the day as you were swimming, your brain was slowly learning to acclimate itself to the swells and began to anticipate the repetitive forces. So your brain starts to make pre-adjustments for those expected forces, with regard to your balance, muscles, etc...\n\nOnce you get out of the water for the day, you are no longer subject to those repetitive forces, but your brain is still anticipating them, and still adjusting for them even though you're no longer in that environment.\n\n",
"I have the same thing when I get off a cruise. But it lasts about two days."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
omh2t
|
dividend payments on stocks
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/omh2t/eli5_dividend_payments_on_stocks/
|
{
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],
"text": [
"Corporations pay a percentage of their profits to shareholders. These are called dividend payments.",
"The explanations so far are very good. Important to mention why dividends. First of all there are theories that having cash lying around with the management of a company is not a good thing, as sometimes management will not do what is best with this money (i.e. the most profitable) rather, they´ll do fancy things such as buy jets or country club memberships. So as a shareholders you should demand any free cash flow from management (the cash remaining after all profitable investments have been undertaken). However, cash is also a cheap source of financing, cheaper than debt or raising shares (see the pecking order theory). So for some companies, especially where it is hard to see what is they´re exactly doing, it could be worthwhile to hold on to cash. \n\nFinally, there are two ways to give back money to shareholders and dividens is one. The other is share buybacks, if you do this at fair prices at least (which of all people management should know). Because taxes on dividends is higher than capital gains taxes more and more companies are giving back cash in the form of share repurchasement plans.\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
3nnuwr
|
how is a companies stock price calculated?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3nnuwr/eli5_how_is_a_companies_stock_price_calculated/
|
{
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"text": [
"The stock price is what someone is currently offering to buy the stock for. When someone offers to sell the stock at that price or lower, trade occurs."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
20d363
|
why are males, ages 15-25, typically the target audience for most movies, games, and tv shows?
|
I've heard that it's because they generally spend more money on buying movies and games. But then again, they probably spend more money on movies and game BECAUSE they're marketed to more than any other demographic.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20d363/eli5_why_are_males_ages_1525_typically_the_target/
|
{
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],
"text": [
"They're not, that's a fallacy. For games, perhaps. For television, not at all -- the 19-34 demographic is deemed most important.",
"I think for games at least you're way off, I'm 32 and I've been playing video games since I was 5, and I know I'll be playing them until I die. People like 20 years older than me mostly think video games are childish, but 10 years play them too. So I'd say at least for video games it's 15-40. Especially considering a 15 year old can't afford a $600 gaming system but the older ones can.\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
3naj9n
|
why do so many people seem surprised that pope francis opposes legal equality for lgbt people?
|
I don't think he's ever kept it a secret.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3naj9n/eli5why_do_so_many_people_seem_surprised_that/
|
{
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"text": [
"Pope Francis has been pretty tolerant and accepting of things that other popes have not supported. I guess people expected his tolerance to have no limits or something (or at least they though he'd be cool with LGBT).",
"He's been incredibly liberal as far as Pope's go.\n\nHe's said that condoms are OK to prevent disease. He's said that being Atheist is OK as long as you are a good person. He's even said that gay people aren't inherently hellbound.\n\nThis is why people were surprised that he so openly denounced LGBT rights."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
9p6bvl
|
what happens to our eyes if we go into a pitch black room?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9p6bvl/eli5_what_happens_to_our_eyes_if_we_go_into_a/
|
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"text": [
"Basically, your brain doesn't like the absence of stimulation so it makes things up to fill the void.",
"Your brain essentially has auto gain control for most of your senses. If a sense is receiving unusually little input, the gain is turned up and you get more noise with it. Same thing with hearing.",
"In the absence of stimulation, your brain turns up the sensitivity, trying to get any information at all out of the environment. This means that any minor amount of light can set off one of the receptors in your eye and cause your brain to think that you saw something. ",
"As others have said, the brain tends to fill in missing stimulation with synthetic ones, but the eyes also have the somewhat unique property that the photoreceptors inside can rarely be triggered by heat instead of light (especially the red cones, since they're closer to infrared on the light spectrum). Since our own bodies naturally produce heat, even if our brain didn't create stimuli, we still couldn't see perfect darkness.",
"With your eyes open your brain is still \"receiving a signal\" basically a black equivalent of a televisions static. The brain receives a signal of pitch plack nothingness and amplifies it. Your imagination has some part in it too because you may see xolirs or patterns of where your mind is attempting to compensate for receiving a lot of nothing. ",
"kinda relevant but pirates would wear eye patches so that when they went under the ship (where it was pitch black), they would flip up their eye patch. that eye was used to the dark so it was like night vision. try it. sit in a lit room and cover your eye like an eye patch- no light. shut all the lights off and you'll find that you can see so much better out of one eye compared to the next. TIL ",
"There's a study floating around somewhere where they blindfolded a group of people for four days and recorded anything they 'saw'.\nSupposedly the majority of them experienced hallucinations of various degrees, from flashes of light and colour, to full blown landscapes and faces. \nIt was quite interesting, I'd love to give it a go, just as soon as I find somebody willing to keep me alive for four days.",
"This could be cosmic rays entering the atmosphere and passing through your eyes. Astronauts mention similar things happening to them frequently because they are beyond the protection of our atmosphere. You can read more here: _URL_0_",
"Grad student studying the retina here!\n\nIn your eyes, you have rods and cones that take different light signals and turn them into electrical signals. At very low light levels, you undergo something called “dark adaptation” in which your cones (in daylight) take a nice break and your rods take over. This usually takes about 20 minutes, and it’s why dark rooms become visible at night after some time!\n\nYour rods are really good at finding tiny amounts of light—they can literally count 1-2 photons (bits of light) per sec to incredible precision. At those low light levels, however, you become really sensitive (like increasing the gain on a camera). \n\nI’m not too sure where those dots originate from—signals from rods go through a bunch of neurons to the LGN and on to different processing areas of the brain. Studying this stuff is hard, since each section can do its own thing. But my guess is that your photoreceptors trying to catch every little bit of light they can, and there’s some signals popping up that are being overamplified. Those are then turned into pretty obvious visual dots!",
"Was this at the Mattress Factory? My partner and I saw a very similar exhibit there a few years back! It was wonderful :)",
"We just learned about this in my neuroscience class, so lemme give it a go\n\nIn the back of your eye are little pirates with telescopes that are constantly telling the captain in the brain what they see. There are two types: one pirate that looks for dark, and one that looks for light. When a pirate looks directly at the thing they look for (dark for the dark pirate, light for the light pirate) they yell down to the captain a bunch. \"LIGHT! LIGHT! LIGHT!\" \"DARK! DARK! DARK!\"\n\nWhen there's light or dark that the pirates are supposed to be looking at but aren't, they get discouraged and yell more slowly, even if they're already looking at their target. So a light pirate looking at overwhelming light that covers everything will call \"light... Light... Light...\" And same for the dark pirate.\n\nPirates are never NOT calling down to the captain. Even when they can't see a target they know is there and are at their MOST discouraged, the scout pirates always call down to their captain a little. So a Dark pirate looking straight at a light but missing all the dark behind him will still call \"......dark...(sniffle)...dark...(sob)......dark...\"\n\nYour brain, the captain, uses how often the pirates are calling to him, and which pirates are yelling, to figure out where stuff is.\n\nAs for your question, it may be that in the dark your dark pirates are still calling, just slowly, since they can't watch all of that dark at the same time. Likewise, your light pirates are sad that they don't have any light to report to the captain, but they feel pretty ok because they know they at least there's no light to miss, and they still call onc in a while. Your brain has to make sense of what your pirates say, and how fast, so the hallucinations are probably just little mistakes and assumptions it makes when the pirates are inconsistent. The captain has really weird navigation methods though, so we aren't really sure how he processes all that pirate yelling and sea shanties.\n",
"Was this in Pittsburgh? That museum is awesome!",
"Your eyes detect light using a molecule that’s a little like a coiled spring in a wind-up watch. It wants to change shape, but the interior of the watch holds it in place. Whenever light hits this spring, it gets more energy and is able to break through the watch parts that hold it in place. \n\nNormally, these molecules don’t change shape at your body temperature, but the energy of heat is in a distribution; just because a sample is at body temperature doesn’t mean that every molecule in your eye is at body temperature. Sometimes, the shape-changing molecules have enough heat energy to change shape without a photon, and your brain interprets that as light. ",
" > I went to an art installation a few years ago that was all about light and how it can be deceiving. And one room was a completely black room where you were asked to sit in a chair and stare into the void basically. And as I and my sister sat there, it was like tiny specks of color would show up in the corners of our vision, sorta like the eye floater things people can get. What was that all about?"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmic_ray_visual_phenomena"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
41y5n9
|
how does hollywood hedge bets against a big star dying in the middle of a multi-movie series? for example, what happens if mark hamill dies before the next star wars movie films?
|
Some of the bigger franchises are billion-dollar-per-movie juggernauts - I've often wondered if there is some kind of contingency planning.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/41y5n9/eli5_how_does_hollywood_hedge_bets_against_a_big/
|
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"They replace him. It sucks, and people notice, but it happens. Remember the original Dumbledore? Although he was made up so heavily that it went over alright.",
"To begin with, insurance policies. \n\nFor \"dying between films in a series\" I doubt that their are very good polices, but for each individual film this is a huge deal. \n\nOne of the big factors that killed Lindsay Lohan's career is that studios take out an insurance policy for the amount of a film's budget on the lives of their big stars. If you're spending $15 million to make a movie, and your star dies half-way through, then you're screwed. So you take a $15 million insurance policy on your star, and the contract the star signs has requirements that they be safe during filming to help make the insurance policies affordable. \n\nShe eventually reached a point where no insurance company would underwrite her films, and just like that her career was pretty much over. ",
"Insurance, lots of insurance. When Lindsay Lohan or Charlie Sheen were out of control, one of the biggest hurdle they faced in getting new jobs was the rising cost of insuring them. Insurance that they won't quit in the middle of the show due to injury, arrest, death, temper tantrum, and so on. \n\nFor example: _URL_0_",
"There is insurance just for that. But ultimately, all you can do is either replace the actor with a brother/sister/lookalike, insert a CG character or kill them off and dramatically change the story. It sucks, but it happens on occasion and no one truly plans for it to happen. ",
"I think the best example is Paul Walker. Utilize the footage you have, and then write around it, use CGI, and depending on the story, write out the character if needed. \n\nIf Mark did pass before the next Star Wars movie, I am guessing the movie would begin after the meeting on the island and Luke's off-screen death would be explained somehow, moving the movie forward. ",
"The Harry Potter movies recast Dumbledore when the original actor died between chamber of secrets and prisoner of Azkaban. \n\n\nFast and furious they were fortunate enough that Paul Walker had a brother who looked a lot like him and could finish the movie. \n\n\nImaginarium of doctor Parnassus (Heath Ledgers last movie) might not have been a HUGE movie, but it gained some attention after Johnny Depp, Jude Law, and Colin Farrell choose to finish the movie in his stead.\n\n\nRealistically theres no guarantee and they make do. If it's a relatively small or less important part they might write them out if they can get away with that (as will be done with Paul Walker's character in fast and furious going forward). If they can't get away with it they recast the character. In your example (Mark Hamill dying before they finish the new star wars movies) it's hard to say what they will do. Episode 7 ended in such a way that he obviously has a fairly integral part in the next movie if not the rest of the series as a whole. They could recast it, but being such a well known character that might not be so easy for them to do. ",
"its like what happened to the huger games, they used a whole lot of upfuckery with CGI and unused footage for philip "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[
"http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2013/01/14/169367312/how-do-movie-producers-insure-lindsay-lohan-and-other-troubled-stars"
],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
bqp32b
|
what was einstein’s meaning of time when he says time is only an illusion.
|
“The distinction between the past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bqp32b/eli5_what_was_einsteins_meaning_of_time_when_he/
|
{
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"text": [
"Time is a dimension of spacetime. We move through it at what we perceive as a constant rate of one second per second. This perception isn't reality, at least in more extreme and curved parts of the Universe. The illusion is persistent because our experience is just with one tiny planet around one ordinary star.",
"absolute time is an illusion, the notion that time flows the same for everyone under every condition.\n\nIf you put precise clocks into orbit around Earth, then collect them a few years later, they are desynced. that is not fault of the clock, but a wierd consequence of gravity.\n\nFast objects have clocks that tick slower. You can send one of your twins on a fast rocket, have him return, and he will be younger than you...",
"Imagine you are watching a movie. You take a pause in the middle of the movie. You have the option of rewinding and re-watching something that happened earlier, or you can skip ahead and watch the ending. Humans like to imagine time as being similar to a river, or a roll of film. We imagine things that happened in the past as if they still exist. The 'past' is a place we could travel to if we could only get the DeLorean to 88 miles per hour.\n\nThis is not how the universe really works. There is no past. There is no future. Those are not places that exist. There is only the present. Even after things change, it is still the present. Even after many years, when we are all old and gray, we are still in the present, although the arrangement of things has changed around a bit. \n\nOne of the big discoveries to come out of Einstein's work is that time is relative. We don't experience it the same way, and a person near a large gravitational object or travelling at near light-speed will experience time very differently. \n\nSo let's say we took a trip to the supermassive black hole in 'Interstellar,' where time moved slower. We return to Earth and find 20 years have passed. Does that mean we somehow skipped into the future? No. We were always living in the present and it was the same present as everyone else. It's just that our rate of change was different so our *perception* of time is skewed."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
37pswt
|
when i am falling asleep why do i sometimes feel abnormally large or impossibly tiny?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37pswt/eli5_when_i_am_falling_asleep_why_do_i_sometimes/
|
{
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"crotvup",
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"text": [
"Some people have this all the time - it's called [Alice in Wonderland Syndrome](_URL_0_). And, according to that Wikipedia article, *\"AIWS is also a common experience at sleep onset.\"*\n\n",
"I very rarely have mild instances of this, but it happened all the time when I was young (I am 25 now). I used to \"wake up\" as I was falling asleep and feel disproportionately large or small compared to the room - I didn't handle it well. My parents used to call it \"Night Terrors\", as it would keep me up and I would usually start crying because I didn't understand.\n\nIn recent years it has become more and more rare, and has almost stopped altogether at this point. A few years ago, I discovered that it is a clinical illness called (believe it or not) [Alice in Wonderland Syndrome](_URL_0_) (see StakeMeOutTonight's comment).\n\nOut of curiously, how old are you/how old were you when it last happened?",
"Holy fuck! I 100% thought i was the only one, i thought i was crazy and never wanted to tell someone about it. Op and others, along with the feeling bigger or smaller than usual thing do you ever feel like you are talking/thinking to fast or slow?",
"Man that is so cool! Other people get this too! I started experiencing this when I was about 7 or 8, and still get it very rarely to this day at age 25. I've never found it to be unpleasant or disturbing, though I knew it was not exactly a normal sensation. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome"
],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_in_Wonderland_syndrome"
],
[],
[]
] |
||
32iw2l
|
why do coffee cup lids (starbucks dutch bros) have a recycle logo meaning please recycle but recycle bins say no coffee cup lids?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/32iw2l/eli5_why_do_coffee_cup_lids_starbucks_dutch_bros/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cqbmtsw"
],
"score": [
28
],
"text": [
"The number in the recycling logo refers to the process that that particular material needs to go through to be recycled. \n\nNot all recycling plants have the means to recycle all kinds of materials. "
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
2x6igs
|
how do water coolers work?
|
It's magical, how do water coolers take a gallon of water and can instantly dispense a cold or hot version of it so quickly?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2x6igs/eli5how_do_water_coolers_work/
|
{
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"coxbwok"
],
"score": [
11
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"text": [
"Long story short, it doesn't happen as quickly as you think. There are reservoirs that hold water apart from the bottle where they are temperature controlled. \n\nAlso, you will notice that if you dispense a large amount of water, you will end up depleting the reservoir. This results in water that is room temp."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
7v4nfe
|
why is it so painful to rub salt on a open wound?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7v4nfe/eli5_why_is_it_so_painful_to_rub_salt_on_a_open/
|
{
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"text": [
"Salt pulls water out of cells, and with an open wound the salt can get in a lot deeper, where there's more activity in the body (blood, nerves, other tissues). That's a lot to pull out of a small area, so it hurts more than just the wound, or salt on undamaged skin.",
"Neurons operate by maintaining a resting equilibrium with a high K+ gradient inside the cell and a high Na+ gradient outside the cell. Stimulation causes the Na+ pores to open and Na+ ions rush into the cell, creating the electrical potential to rise from about -60mV to +30mV. These numbers are variable but think of an electrical circuit using diodes. The voltage has to rise above a threshold for a signal to be passed. When the threshold is met, a signal is sent through the nervous system. Now, adding a lot more Na+ ions to the mix increases the potential outside of the cell membrane. This is equivalent to dramatically ramping up the peak voltage of a signal and zapping your circuit. However, instead of frying the component and killing the circuit, you create a short circuit that overloads a component downstream, your brain.",
"Why does it hurt when we squeeze lemon on it then ?",
"Salt is sodium chloride. Your nerve cells communicate partially using sodium. When a bunch of sodium rushes into a nerve cell, it \"fires\".\n\nThe salt that gets into the wound dissolves (splits into individual sodium and chloride), and because there's so much of it, the sodium rushes into nearby nerve cells, overloading them and causing them to fire. \n\nThere are some nerve cells that are specialized to detect pain. Since the nerves that detect pain are constantly sending signals to the brain because they're overloaded with sodium, your brain interprets the constant signal as constant pain.",
"What about rubbing alcohol on a wound then?"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
||
1qq1dx
|
how does dirt get into the gutters on my house?
|
I was cleaning my gutters today and there was an inch of dirt in there. How does it get in there? There's no trees around it and I don't know how birds, ants, etc could move that much dirt 20 feet in the air.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1qq1dx/eli5_how_does_dirt_get_into_the_gutters_on_my/
|
{
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3
],
"text": [
"Dust in the air is a major contributor.",
"Dust blows up with the wind and settles on your roof. Rain washes the dust into the gutters which collect a ton of it, where the dust becomes dirt.",
"Dust, wind, and composting.",
"Thanks for the answers. Seems obvious and I feel stupid now.",
"Don't forget pollen and decomposing leaves, etc."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[],
[],
[],
[]
] |
|
18nka1
|
how/why does flatulence exist?
|
This isn't usually something they teach in health classes in school, but I feel like if they included it, more teenage boys would pay attention.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18nka1/eli5_howwhy_does_flatulence_exist/
|
{
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"c8gd4be"
],
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2
],
"text": [
"Digestion is the process of chemically changing the things you eat to convert them into things your body can use. This process involves taking the parts of what you eat your body can use — the actual individual molecules, I mean — and leaving the rest behind. Some of what gets left behind is solid matter, some is liquid, and some is gaseous. The expulsion of this gaseous waste through the anus is called flatulence.\n\nSo basically, it's no different from urinating or defecating. Urination is the expulsion of liquid waste from your body, defecation is the expulsion of solid waste, and flatulence is the expulsion of gaseous waste."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
6z6k5r
|
how does the irs calculate the income threshold in each tax bracket?
|
Like in 2017, the 10% threshold for single is $9,325, but $9,275 in 2016.
And how are the separate categories (Married Filing Jointly, Head-of-Household...) tabulated?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6z6k5r/eli5_how_does_the_irs_calculate_the_income/
|
{
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"dmswxqh"
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"text": [
"Congress determined the original tax brackets when it decided what rates of income tax to impose, and then directed the IRS to adjust them for inflation. (That's why they're not nice, round numbers.)\n\nThe head-of-household filing status gives a tax cut to unmarried people with dependents, and the married-filing-jointly filing status recognizes that married people usually have shared finances. (It's a tax cut if the family is on a single income, but generally not if they are both working.) The married-filing-separately status does not qualify for many tax benefits, to avoid separate filers from colluding to structure their income in a way that would abuse the tax system."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
10gdat
|
why is it that when you look at a dim light through a crack you can't see it?
|
Let me explain cause after writing that I thought I sounded like a crazy man o.0..
Say I'm in my bed and my door is closed but the light in the hall is on so its dimly coming through the cracks, when I look at the cracks its pitch black but when I focus on the wall near the cracks I can see the light.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/10gdat/why_is_it_that_when_you_look_at_a_dim_light/
|
{
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"c6d8ue6"
],
"score": [
5
],
"text": [
"Here's my answer to the same question that was asked yesterday over in /r/AskScience/ ([link](_URL_0_))\n\n*****\n\nThere are two types of light-detecting cells in your retina: rods and cones (so named for their respective shapes):\n\n* Cones are very good at color discrimination, but aren't to terribly sensitive, and so respond best in well-lit conditions. \n\n* Rods can't distinguish colors, but they're very sensitive in low-light situations. This sensitivity is due to a molecule called rhodopsin (also known as \"visual purple), which becomes photobleached when it triggers the rod by being exposed to light, and takes time to be reverted to a usable state. This is why it takes so long for your eyes to \"adjust\" to dim conditions: rhodopsin is no longer being constantly bombarded by light, and is slowly being reverted to a useful state.\n\nSo with that out of the way, the last important fact is that the fovea of your retina (your \"center of vision\") is replete with cones for nice, color-rich vision. However, the tradeoff is that it has very few rods. Your peripheral vision, though, has tons of rods, but very few cones. So you can detect extremely low levels of light in your peripheral peripheral that you just don't have the rod density in your central vision to see."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/10e4fi/in_the_dark_of_my_room_at_night_out_of_the_corner/"
]
] |
|
azuy7e
|
how is it that things such as centrifugal force are obviously real and can be felt in normal everyday life, but yet isn’t classified as a real force in physics?
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/azuy7e/eli5_how_is_it_that_things_such_as_centrifugal/
|
{
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"eia96pu",
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3
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"text": [
"To be considered a force, there has to be something applying said force. Think of being in a car going fast around a turn. You feel yourself being pushed outward towards the door, and attribute that to a centrifugal force. The thing is, there isn't a force actively pushing you outward. Your momentum from the car initially going forward would have just carried you in a straight line continuously forever, but you were acted upon by another force (the car door pushing back on you.) You already had the forward motion while driving straight, which then was an \"outward\" motion with respect to the car after it started to turn. ",
"It has everything to do with the reference frame of an observer. Calling something a \"fictitious force\" is actually a misnomer: the proper term is \"inertial force,\" which means that the observer is in an accelerating reference frame. The force is called \"fictitious\" because, in a stationary rest frame, the force doesn't act on the observer, as opposed to, say, gravity, which will act on you whether or not you're standing still or accelerating.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nConsider a situation in which you're on a ship that's moving at a constant speed; it's not accelerating. If you drop a rock from the top of the mast to the deck, the rock is going to fall in a straight line and land right next to the mast. This is a stationary reference frame. Now, assume that the ship is accelerating. If you drop the rock from the mast, the rock is going to land some distance away from the mast. In order to figure out where the rock will land, you can pretend that the ship is still in a stationary frame. From the rock's point of view (its reference frame), it \"feels\" a force pulling it into a curved trajectory. But a stationary observer doesn't feel the force acting on the rock, so the force is \"fictitious.\"\n\n & #x200B;\n\nNow consider a rock being spun around on a string. From the rock's reference frame, it feels a force pulling it outwards: the centrifugal, inertial force, which acts away from the center. While the rock is being spun, it's in an accelerating reference frame. But say you let go of the string. The centrifugal force is called fictitious because the rock doesn't continue moving around in a circle: it's going to fly off tangentially, in a straight line. While the rock was being spun, the centrifugal force was indeed pulling it in a circle, but it becomes fictitious once the angular acceleration is no longer being applied. \n\n\nHope this helps!"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
5wcgq5
|
do people with eyes that point in different directions have wide angle vision?
|
[deleted]
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5wcgq5/eli5_do_people_with_eyes_that_point_in_different/
|
{
"a_id": [
"de935uf"
],
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3
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"text": [
"Technically yes, but it's uselessly blurry, because their eyes are pointing in different directions..."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
9nlosd
|
why do our bodies crave high calorie foods for energy (such as sweets), but not equally crave foods high in essential nutrients (such as leafy greens)?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9nlosd/eli5_why_do_our_bodies_crave_high_calorie_foods/
|
{
"a_id": [
"e7n6dtf",
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],
"score": [
5,
2
],
"text": [
"Our distant ancestors typically had more than enough access to things like leafy greens, while high-energy foods were a scarce treasure to be actively sought and eaten when possible.",
"Leafy greens are literally everywhere. They grow on the ground.\n\nSugar, and fat is much less common for a hunter gather human. You need to hunt and kill an animal to get fat and there's only a few sources of sugar available to that kind of human.\n\nSo our ancestors needed motivation to find those nutrients wheres the things available in greens were easy to find so no motivation required."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
abzmb1
|
do we accumulate or flush the plastics we eat?
|
Tiny plastic slivers on top of water gallon jugs... Microplastics in our seafood, etc.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/abzmb1/eli5_do_we_accumulate_or_flush_the_plastics_we_eat/
|
{
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],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"Your body can't really break down plastic with much success, so it is likely to pass through you."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
|
2w3x37
|
why is it so hard for scientists to discover whether or not vaping is bad for your health?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2w3x37/eli5_why_is_it_so_hard_for_scientists_to_discover/
|
{
"a_id": [
"concmqi",
"cond8n3"
],
"score": [
7,
2
],
"text": [
"A lot of things are not initially bad enough for your health to detect. It might take years for it to become obvious. So even if we are not detecting anything now, we cannot say that conclusively proves it is okay for your health. That is one problem.\n\nAdditionally, it is hard to isolate any health problems that might appear to vaping. Correlation =/= causation. Assuming we are seeing health effects, how can we be certain they are really due to vaping and not due to any of the hundred other factors. To rule out all those other factors, we'd need a lot more research which, again, takes a lot of time and money. \n",
"Because when you try and run properly-controlled experiments by isolating people in cages and varying only the variable under test in their environment, people tend to get a mite peeved, they're all like \"human rights this\" and \"Nazi doctor that.\"\n\nIf you want to useful data by studying subjects in the wild, you need much more time for uncontrolled variables to average out. Vaping hasn't been around that long.\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
||
2j8lbu
|
why are pianos never actually in tune?
|
I transcribe classes at a university for deaf/hard of hearing students. I transcribed a senior level music theory class, and the professor was explaining how the piano can never be truly in tune for a keys, but can be close. Apparently you can't tune the piano to octaves and 5ths? My mind was blown, but I still don't understand how it works.
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2j8lbu/eli5_why_are_pianos_never_actually_in_tune/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cl9d6uu",
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"cl9fnxu",
"cl9g2wd",
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"cl9hcok",
"cl9ick5",
"cl9y6cq"
],
"score": [
73,
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"text": [
"It is kinda mind-blowing when you dig into it. Our modern ears have grown accustomed to the 'sparkly' [fast beating](_URL_4_) quality of 'slightly out of tune' Equal Temperament tuning. In the old days every Key had a certain 'flavor' to them that we've lost with the utilitarian/cross-key choice.\n\nLong story short: modern/western/equal tuning is a compromise to allow a piano to play in every key. This is because using 'just tuning' (keeping notes most pleasantly/mathematically related to their neighbors) going up a scale in a key will eventually result in a [comma pump](_URL_0_) that starts to drift sharp.\n\nThe 'idea' in [Equal Temperament](_URL_5_) (used on modern pianos) was to chop up the octave into 12 equal parts. When you do so, you almost imperceptibly miss every [Just Tuned](_URL_1_) note (notes that are tuned in the most harmonically pleasant way).\n\nSo one ends up slightly 'out of tune' note to note in a way that lets you play more easily key to key. \n\nImagine avoiding a leap year by tacking on a few seconds every day. This would mean that clocks would have to be a bit weird to 'equalize' over the day so we don't have to have Feb 29th every four years.\n\nOr you can look at a [Color analogy](_URL_3_) that [whycantwe](_URL_2_) prompted.",
"To add to the previous explanation: \n\nImagine having a coloring book, and you have crayons to color. Equal tempered instruments such as the piano are like having a box of 12 colors, and just tuned instruments are like having a box of infinite colors. You have all the same colors in both boxes, more or less, but with equal tempered you have the choice of Red, Red sharp, and Red flat instead of Red < infinity > . \n\nWith just tuning you get to color each chord *exactly* how you'd like (add more orange or pink to the red) for the desired harmonics, but with equal tempered you get the choice of whats available. \n",
"Wait a minute, music theory for the deaf?",
"Basically, musical intervals sound nice to us because the ratio of the two frequencies of the notes that make them up are nice, simple fractions. An octave is a 2:1 ratio, a fifth is a 3:2 ratio, a fourth is 4:3, etc. The problem with Equal Temperament tuning is that it splits the octave into 12 equal sections, so none of those nice ratios quite line up apart from the octave itself. The reason we do use it for pianos is that those intervals have the same amount of error no matter what key you're playing in. Otherwise, you end up tuning your piano to one scale perfectly, but by doing so all the other scales' intervals are completely out of tune. It works for violins and other orchestral strings because they don't have frets or anything to fix the intervals so violinists, etc will naturally adjust their fretting hand to compensate so that they play exactly in tune with each other all the time. Pianos just have to compromise, hence Equal Temperament.",
"In a 12 note modern scale the frequency of the Nth note is 2^N/12 times the zeroth note.\n\nThe interval of a perfect fifth consists of 7 steps of the scale, and so is 2^7/12 = 1.498 times higher in frequency. This puts it slightly out of tune with the 1.5 multiple your ear expects.",
"[I was just writing an Essay on this, click here for the draft copy](_URL_0_).\n____\n\nShortened ELI5 version: \n\nIf the piano was truly in tune it would be formed of 'just perfect 5ths'. A 'just 5th' is when the ratio of their frequencies in hertz is exactly 3/2. \nIf we divide an octave in 1200 cents, we can work out the interval of a 5th with this equation:\n\n1200 x (log(3/2) / log(2)) = 701.995 cents. \n\nThe problem is that the to get the keys on the piano, you stack lots of 5ths on top of each other until you get back to where you started (remember the cycle of 5ths?) Because of the extra 1.995 cents, you actually overshoot, so you get a 5th that is too small by 23.5 cents (this sounds really bad!).\n____\n\nNowadays we use 'Equal temperament', which distributes this error equally over all the notes. We just say \"let's take a 5th to be exactly 700 cents\" and this means all the intervals on the piano are exactly the same, hence '*equal* temperament\". \nThe downside is that the ratio for a 5th isn't 3/2 anymore, it is: \n2^(7/12) = 1.498\n\nThat is why your piano isn't technically in tune, but in actual fact, it is far too small to notice unless you know what you are looking for.",
"Intervals are tuned in ratios of whole numbers- the closer you get to that ratio the more in tune it sounds, but you can often get \"close enough\".\n\nPerfect Octaves are 2:1 (if you have two notes where one has double the frequency of the other, then those notes will be perfect octaves of each other)\n\nPerfect Fifths are 3:2\n\nPerfect Fourths are 4:3\n\n___\n\nYou might notice that those actually fit together perfectly. A perfect 4th (4:3) plus a perfect 5th (3:2) actually gives you a perfect octave (3/2)*(4/3)=(2/1). No matter how many times your compound those intevals, intonation stays perfect.\n\nUnfotunately, when you reach outside those perfect ratios, things begin to fall apart.\n ___\nMajor Seconds are 9:8 or 10:9\n\nMinor Thirds are 6:5, 19:16, or 32:27\n\nMajor Thirds are 5:4\n\nSix major seconds don't give you a perfect 2:1 octave, they give you 2.027...:1 \n\nFour minor thirds don't give you a perfect 2:1 octave either\n\nThree major thirds gives you 1.95...:1\n___\n\nSo if you want to represent a scale with only 12 notes in your chromatic scale, you need to cheat. If you were to make C:E, E:G#, and G#:C all major thirds, then you won't have a perfect octave with C:C. \n\nSo instead we have equal temperament. Each note is 2^(1/12) ~ 1.059 then frequency of the previous note - i.e. each note is ~6% higher in frequency. This makes all the notes really close to their ideal ratios and keeps everything coherent\n",
"Others have explained this pretty well, but I wanted to try my hand at it, just because.\n\n\"Perfect\" tuning is based on the ratio between notes. A perfect octave has a ratio of 2:1, meaning a perfect octave higher than the note A (440Hz) would be 880Hz, and a perfect octave lower would be 220Hz. Thinking of sound as a waveform, this means that for every two cycles of one note, the other completes one cycle. A good analogy here for a \"cycle\" would be the number of times that a string on a guitar vibrates.\n\nNow, to \"perfectly\" tune the other notes, we want to make the other intervals also match up with simple ratios. For example, a perfect fifth has a ratio of 3:2. So using our 440Hz again, the perfect fifth would be 660Hz. the ratios used to create the twelve notes are 1:1, 16:15, 9:8, 6:5, 5:4, 4:3, 7:5, 3:2, 8:5, 5:3, 16:9, 15:8, and then the octave at 2:1.\n\n\"Equal temperance\" (aka \"modern\" or \"western\" tuning) doesn't use these simple ratios, but instead every pair of adjacent notes has an *identical* frequency ratio. So the ratio between the first two notes is the same as the ratio between the second and third note, the ratio between the second and third note is identical to the ratio between the third and fourth note, etc.\n\nKnowing this, let's make a chart of the frequencies for each note based on A being 440Hz. Each frequency in the left column will be 2^(1/2) times the frequency in the column above it (identical frequency ratios), whereas the frequencies in the right column will be determined by multiplying the initial row's frequency by the simple ratios I mentioned earlier.\n\nNote | Frequency in Equal Temperance (Hz) | Frequency in Just Intonation (Hz)\n---|---|----\nA | 440 | 440\nA# | 466.16372 | 469.333333\nB | 493.88328 | 495\nC | 523.25108 | 528\nC# | 554.36524 | 550\nD | 587.3296 | 586.666667\nD# | 622.25416 | 616\nE | 659.25508 | 660\nF | 698.45644 | 704\nF# | 739.98892 | 733.333333\nG | 783.99068 | 782.222222\nG# | 830.60956 | 825\nA | 880 | 880\n\nAgain, every pair of adjacent notes in the left column has an identical frequency ratio, whereas in the right column, frequency ratios are based on small whole numbers. The frequencies on the right will sound more harmonious with each other, but only when played in the key of A. Why? Well, let's see what happens when we make the same table, only starting this time with C:\n\nNote | Frequency in Equal Temperance (Hz) | Frequency in Just Intonation (Hz)\n---|---|----\nC | 523.25108 | 528\nC# | 554.36524 | 563.2\nD | 587.3296 | 594\nD# | 622.25416 | 633.6\nE | 659.25508 | 660\nF | 698.45644 | 704\nF# | 739.98892 | 739.2\nG | 783.99068 | 792\nG# | 830.60956 | 844.8\nA | 880 | 880\nA# | 932.32744 | 938.666667\nB | 987.766427 | 990\nC | 1046.50216 | 1056\n\nNotice that the frequencies in the left column are the same, but the frequencies in the right column are different!\n\n"
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntonic_comma#Comma_pump",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Just_intonation",
"http://www.reddit.com/user/whycantwe",
"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2j8lbu/eli5_why_are_pianos_never_actually_in_tune/cl9fez0",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VRlp-OH0OEA&t=4m35s",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equal_temperament"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"https://www.dropbox.com/s/dgbgl7uzl19sgfz/The%20Science%20of%20Music.pdf?dl=0"
],
[],
[]
] |
|
3g0jlc
|
why do we not put a chip in/on people's body to detect the chemicals released when we are about to have a heart attack or seizures or stuff like that?
|
Isn't that what a dog does? Why cant we have a little computer chip do it and then call 911 or something?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3g0jlc/eli5_why_do_we_not_put_a_chip_inon_peoples_body/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cttnjz1",
"ctto5rr"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"Good idea... I just think someone actually needs to do it. I bet there are a few companies that have already looked into it.",
"They are working on sensors like this, especially for diabetics to monitor blood sugar. The technology just isn't there yet."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[],
[]
] |
|
ebwlmt
|
why does it sound like traditional chinese music when i play all the black keys on a piano one by one?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ebwlmt/eli5_why_does_it_sound_like_traditional_chinese/
|
{
"a_id": [
"fb7n1tx"
],
"score": [
40
],
"text": [
"The black keys on the piano form what is known as the \"pentatonic scale,\" a five-note scale (as opposed to the seven-note scales, e.g. C major, formed when you play the white keys). The pentatonic scale grew in popularity in East Asia sometime around the 7th century BC, slightly earlier than the Pythagorean scale was gaining popularity in Greece and greater Europe.\n\nIt soon became the basis of much of the music of China and Pacific Asia. Around the 6th century AD, the seven-note scale was introduced to China via India, and the millennium following that saw Chinese music grow more complex, incorporating more notes beyond the pentatonic scale. However, the heavy use of the pentatonic scale remained prominent.\n\nTo a Western ear, a focus on the pentatonic scale sounds foreign and exotic, since Western music traditions don't focus on it very often. Thus, when popular media of the 20th century wanted to make use of music to denote an Eastern theme, it used the pentatonic scale, cementing its sound as the sound of \"Chinese music\" in popular culture, despite the fact that true Chinese music often uses far more notes."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
||
3ox3pe
|
why do our bodies react so violently to bad injuries?
|
I'm not just talking about horrible pain. I'll elaborate.
Today, I dislocated my knee. Besides the pain, I felt queasy and dizzy, my vision blurred and brightened, and color acted weird. When I popped it back in, these went away almost immediately.
I would think the body wouldn't handicap me beyond my injury. So why does that happen?
|
explainlikeimfive
|
https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3ox3pe/eli5_why_do_our_bodies_react_so_violently_to_bad/
|
{
"a_id": [
"cw186ps"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"Think of it this way, if you get a scratch it stings a little and you know not to stick your hand in a rose bush. Effective because you feel pain you know to avoid it.\n\nNow you ride your bike and fall onto sharp rocks and get sliced up all over your body and are in total agony. Well your body doesn't decide to mitigate the response of each individual scratch because a lot have happened (actually it kinda does, but when it is very severe it is going to suck no matter what). Now you have the equivalent of 1000 rose bush scratches all at once... and each of those send out the same pain signal (in forms of nerve transmissions, which then release various hormones like cortisol and adrenaline). So now you are getting a much heavier dose of pain response that for small stuff is helpful, but now overloads your brain and causes a bunch of other stuff like you described.\n\nYou ever see the I Love Lucy episode where they are working on a chocolate factory line? Everything starts off fine when there are only a few chocolates coming through... but then when there are so many chocolates (signals) arriving so fast, things start to fall apart and becomes too much to really handle."
]
}
|
[] |
[] |
[
[]
] |
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