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8jm445 | can some explain how poop is so effective as fertilizer? i don't understand how the waste can still be rich in nutrients, the digestion system had one job which is to absorb the nutrients. are our bodies that bad at it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8jm445/eli5_can_some_explain_how_poop_is_so_effective_as/ | {
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"The body excretes a lot of stuff that it either can't use or that it already absorbed enough of. \n\nYou only need so much nitrogen, phosphorous, and potassium (main fertilizer components), so your body excretes the rest. Some of the stuff your body excretes would be toxic if it didn't get pushed out.\n\nAs far as efficiency goes, your digestion and excretory systems are incredibly efficient. How many other machines go 70, 80, 90 years with minimal maintenance?\n\nAside from that, excrement is not just food, but dead cells. And the nutrients you ate helped build new cells as the old ones are replaced. And then of course, feces is largely dead bacteria that fed on the food in your gut. And as they fed, they broke down that food, created compounds your body could absorb, and some it could not.",
"Depending on what animal it comes from determines it's usefulness. Cow manure is high in nitrogen and organic carbon for example. All of them are high in nitrogen, which is one of the waste products but plants require it for making chlorophyll.\n\nAlso, most manure is aged so it is further broken down into other useful nutrients for plants.",
"There's a TED talk where a guy describes how nutrition enters and leaves the body. Most of what you poop is fiber and dead bacteria. The bacteria are beneficial because they eat a lot of what we can't digest and derive nutrition from, and themselves shit out something nutritious to us.\n\nIf it passes through your intestinal wall, typically the only way back out is through your kidneys, your bile duct, or by breathing. Your body doesn't dump spent cellular waste back out your intestines. Your liver recovers iron from dead blood cells, and throws the protein matrix that surrounded it down the bile duct. This is the hem- in hemoglobin. At this stage, they're called bile pigments. Bile aids in the absorption of fats and other bits, but the bile pigments are garbage - the bile duct was just a convenient shoot to dump trash for the liver, since it was already there and otherwise heading out...\n\nBile pigments are why your shit's brown. If you ever have severe diarrhea, where your intestinal tract is cleared out entirely, or if you had a problem with your bile duct, your shit would be white, bleached by your stomach acids. I was really sick once, freaky for about a day, once everything started working again. They believe your appendix serves as a store of gut bacteria for situations like these, so the population in your gut can be restored quickly.\n\nMost body waste from your cells gets screened through your kidneys. Your fat, as it's burned up, and the different types of sugars that are cell food, you exhale that as carbon dioxide. When you lose weight, you don't shit or piss it out, your exhale it. All of it. Cool, eh?\n\nAnyway, what makes poop (and urine) a good fertilizer are the nitrates and nitrites. Ever seen really green and thriving patches of grass in your yard? Do you have a dog? It's not about where the shit is, but where it was...\n\nYour body doesn't need nitrates or nitrites, and nitrites are actually bad for you. They're a cellular waste product. It's in your urine, produced by your own body, but how does it get in your poop? Remember all that gut bacteria I mentioned? Not *everything* they produce is good for us, but their waste is typically harmless to us, too.\n\nEDIT: So you've been fertilized, from inside your gut.\n\nWhat I forgot to mention is why poop is a good fertilizer. Plants want nitrogen. Most of your compost made from your food scraps are 100% useless to plants directly. What the plants will consume are the nitrogen molecules made from the bacteria that turned your food scraps into compost in the first place. And then the rest of the waste in your compost becomes insect food, whom excrete - you guessed it, nitrogen molecules from their digestion tract and cellular activity.",
"Different organisms don't need the same nutrients. Humans need mostly fat, carbs, protein. Plants need mostly nitrogen.",
"Your body needs nutrients. But food is a mixture of things you need, and things you don't. \nIt gets rid of things it doesn't want by pooping.\n\nPlants need DIFFERENT nutrients from people. \nSome of those are things you pooped out because your body doesn't want them"
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16jw90 | what substance is used in a lethal injection and how does it move through the body? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16jw90/what_substance_is_used_in_a_lethal_injection_and/ | {
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"Well it depends on the country but in US it goes like this: \n\n1. **Sodium thiopental** or **pentobarbital**: ultra-short action anesthetic agent capable of rendering the prisoner unconscious in a few seconds.\n2. **Pancuronium bromide**: muscle relaxant, causes complete, fast and sustained paralysis of the skeletal striated muscles, including the diaphragm and the rest of the respiratory muscles; this would eventually cause death by asphyxiation.\n3. **Potassium chloride**: stops the heart, and thus causes death by cardiac arrest."
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78db69 | are the waves that we see and the waves that we hear the same wave at different frequencies? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/78db69/eli5_are_the_waves_that_we_see_and_the_waves_that/ | {
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"No. We see electromagnetic waves, which are pairs of transverse (up and down) waves at right angles to each other and are transmitted by photons. They vary in wavelength from thousands of kilometres (10^(6) metres) down to picometres (10^(-11) metres; smaller than atoms) with visible light being in the nanometre range.\n\nWe hear mechanical waves, which are compression (back and forth) waves and are transmitted by atoms or molecules bumping into each other. They vary in wavelength from a few metres to a few millimetres.\n\nWholly coincidentally, the range of light with a wavelength of a few metres down to a few millimetres is mostly used for radio communications."
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20rn1w | if people dislike the us government because they think it's corrupt and taxes are too high, they why haven't people tried to start a revolution? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20rn1w/eli5_if_people_dislike_the_us_government_because/ | {
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"Most of the people who believe the US is headed in a bad way still believe in the power of the people and the Constitution to help them fix it.\n\nRevolution is what happens when you've *completely exhausted* all of your other options."
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629jt1 | what information, explicitly, can now be sold by isps? it looks like the new law was replacing rules that had not yet gone into affect, so how is this any different than how the internet was 4 years ago? could our data have been sold then before the rules that were voted on in oct 2016? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/629jt1/eli5_what_information_explicitly_can_now_be_sold/ | {
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"Your data has been being sold by Google, your web browser, etc for years. Google makes money by compiling tens of thousands of users browsing trends and data into one big anonymous package (for example: they don't care what michiruwater is looking up, they care what 18-21 year olds are looking up between 3-6PM). Your ISP thinks it's very unfair that Google gets to make money but the ISP does not. Now the ISP can do the same thing that Google does. That's all that happened."
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4snr8n | how can a schizophrenic see and hear things that aren't there? what is the human mind going through at those moments? | Edit: Complimentary "This blew up!" edit. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4snr8n/eli5_how_can_a_schizophrenic_see_and_hear_things/ | {
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"Very ELI5, because schizophrenia and other diseases like it are poorly understood and complicated:\n\nYou know when you dream, you're hearing and seeing things that aren't real? Or you're imaging a future conversation, including what the other person's saying? Or you're daydreaming about something else and you've zoned out and really aren't paying attention to the real world? The brain's capable of a lot of \"theoretical\" thinking, that's part of how imagination and creativity work.\n\nNow, imagine your brain is doing that, just a little bit, while you're awake and you can't tell the difference between the two.",
"The way you experience is less like a camera and microphone, and more like what a theoretical physicist does. Your brain generates imagery and sound for you, based on what it assumes is most likely going on. Then, it tests that theory using eyes and ears and adjusts the bits that don't fit - that's why you can sometimes hear or see things that aren't there when it's dark or you're scared. The schizophrenic brain has a bit too much of a particular transmitter active, and is effectively more creative than it should be. ",
"All the other answers are good answers, I just want to add that it's all about the brain chemistry. Just like when a \"normal\" person ingests mind altering substances they experience strange thing because chemicals in the brain. The person with schizophrenia has the altered brain chemistry without ingesting anything extra. \n\nI'm a counselor so I don't deal with major mental illnesses like schizophrenia, that's all about the medications honestly, but I have studied the brain enough to know it is an awesome thing that I really can't fully comprehend. ",
"Another way of thinking about it. Have you ever been 100% sure of something, like so sure you don't even question it, and then your friend explains to you how you're wrong? \n\nOr a memory that you were 100% sure about and then you see a picture proving you were wrong. \n\nJust because we are 100% sure of something (that man standing over there), doesn't always mean it's true",
"Your eyes and ears take in light and sound, but signals in your nervous system are what \"send images\" to your brain. As long as those signals are firing, you'll see or hear something. Or feel, taste, anything.",
"Psychologist here. Like others have pointed out, it's about brain biology.\n\nVery ELI5: When our eyes see something they activate an area of the brain which tells us we see something. In SOME TYPES (!!!!!) of schizophrenia, these brain areas activate themselves without the eyes saying so.\n\nI'd like to emphasise that there are many types of schizophrenia so not everyone experiences any hallucinations and in some areas it's confused with split personality disorder, which not every patient has. In fact it's extraordinarily rare!",
"This may not get to the bottom of your question, but here goes.\n\nAll throughout our lives, our brains are collecting a library of information. There is a *lot* of analysis going on behind the scenes before you become consciously aware of anything you're experiencing. There's a dedicated part of your brain for remembering what a pen is, what it looks like, what it feels like, that decides when you're holding a pen that there's a pretty good chance that's a pen, and then tells \"you\" (your conscious mind) that you're holding a pen.\n\nAnd our brains are, at any moment, flooded with information. They're just doing their best to figure out what's happening and boil it down to the essentials, using everything they've experienced and stored in the past, so that new stuff can be referenced and recognized and prioritized. You've got your raw sensory regions of the brain, regions of the brain where sensory memories/info is stored, then places in the brain where you become conscious of sensory info once it's been organized.\n\nYou might be able to imagine that when one part of this system acts up, you're going to have problems.\n\nWhat's going on with hallucinations is that the conscious mind and the sensory parts of the brain aren't communicating normally. The hearing parts of the brain are pulling up memories and signals and noises without warning, and other parts of the brain don't realize that the ears haven't picked it up, so it'll try to make sense of it for the conscious mind. The conscious mind might be able to deduce for themselves that the things they're hearing can't possibly be real (a voice from a microphone telling them they're special, for example), but it can be very easy to be fooled, because in many ways our consciousness is just at the mercy of what the rest of the brain has put together. We can't definitively tell if something is real, or if our brain is just telling us it's real.\n\n**tl;dr:** Hallucinations are when certain parts of the brain involved with sensory information get over-stimulated (or sometimes your brain's sensory filter isn't working very well), and tell the rest of the brain that you are sensing something, and the rest of the brain has no way of knowing this isn't true, so it informs your conscious mind that you are hearing/seeing things that aren't there. ",
"A better question might be how are you so sure you're seeing and hearing what you're seeing and hearing.",
"You can remember some sounds and images, right? You can imagine something as well. You also probably had intrusive thoughts and images at least once, some of them were unpleasant.\n\nNow, super ELI5, because it's scientifically inaccurate. Imagine millions of neurones that are connected with each other via water droplets to pass electric signals. This water is dopamine. Schizophrenic's brain is flooded (very high dopamine) and it causes short circuits in it. So, lots of different zones become randomly interconnected and brain has to interpret all that memory, sound and imagery noise. It results in hallucinations.",
"To expand slightly, because it'll help you in your dealings with 'mad' people - the responses (which are what seem mad) to stimuli (the rest of us can't experience) are generally completely rational (in the context of those experiences). \n\nFor instance, if the radio news presenter keeps calling you a slut and a slag and a whore, and wrapping the radio in tinfoil stops him from doing that, well it's the sensible thing to do. You would too. \n\nSo if you see someone acting \"mad\", don't be scared, they're just reacting to stimuli normally, but the stimuli are distorted on the way in.",
"Maybe not what you were looking for, but to understand the experience better, try this...\n\nYou'll need 3 friends, and two large book or sheets of card board or something.\n\nSit with one friend facing you, and the other two sitting on opposite sides of you, now using the cardboard, or books or binders, have them cover their faces and whisper things into your ears, what ever they want to say. Let them swear, make threats, sing softly, whisper compliments, tell jokes, what ever, so long as the friend direct across from you can't see their faces or lips to hear or \"see\" what they are saying.\n\nNow try to have a conversation with the person across from you, like you normally would, talk sports or games or school. See how well you can concentrate and see how weird you'll feel and look while having a normal conversation, one person is telling you jokes and the other is saying he's going to kill you and your family and friends.\n\nThat's what it's like to people with these sort of mental issues, and they don't have the luxury of having others see them and can't simply ignore them.\n\nIt's an uphill fight the whole way to get the voices to go away and they have to learn how to reduce or ignore them and still try to act \"normal\".",
"Color and sound are not ever there anyway. Color and sound exist nowhere in the universe except in a brain that creates them. They are wave forms of energy that hit our sensitive membranes, translated into electrical impulses in our nerves and translated again by our brains into a \"sound\" or \"color\".\n\nThe human mind might be able to listen to an old library of memories of earlier receptions, perhaps in error.",
"I've been diagnosed with schizophrenia, PTSD and Bipolar. I probably don't have all 3, and my diagnosis changes as time goes on and depends on the person I'm seeing. But I can give some insight about psychosis.\n\nPsychotic episodes are pretty misunderstood. People think it means you're full of rage and want to kill people. That might be true. But it's not what it means. It's simply having difficulty knowing what's real. Sometimes people are Psychotic because they're schizophrenic, sometimes it's other things. That's why my diagnosis has been tough.\n\nBut there's no doubt I have Psychotic episodes. In fact, I've been in one for nearly 3 years. Because I literally have no idea whether anything is real. I've literally put 100s of hours into staring at a tree trying to figure out whether it's real. And I still have no idea. You know how people like to say, \"Everyone on Reddit is a bot except you.\" Yeah well, that shit fucks with my head. Extrapolate that to everything in life and you have my every day.\n\nAt least now I'm at a point where I don't really care. Because it doesn't matter. I may be hallucinating all this, but even if it's a hallucination, it's still my life experience. Even if it's all made up. It also means I created everything which is pretty impressive. \n\nAs far as what's going on in the brain. Imagine your brain like a computer. It has circuits, places to store memory, places to compute information, drives that handle outside information, software that interprets that information, and your monitor is your conscious experience of life. What you \"see\" in real life would be what comes out of the monitor and speakers.\n\nFor the most part, the brain is flexible. It's like having multiple hard drives, and if one dies out, you could have software that directs all new information to the other hard drives, taking over the work.\n\nThat flexibility is a great strength, but also a HUGE liability. Because sometimes the flexibility happens in the circuitry. And when information coming from the wifi drivers get blocked, then replaced by information coming from the hard drive, your monitor now isn't displaying a streaming video, it's displaying something you downloaded. And there's no reason to tell the difference other than, \"Wait... I can't stream this movie now. That doesn't make any sense.\"\n\nThis \"crossed circuitry\" can happen because of genes or environment depending on the type of schizophrenia. This is a great TedTalk about the type that's based on environment, not genes. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nSo basically, imagine your brain is a computer. There's a part that receives the information you get from your 5 senses, a part that processes it, a part that conceptualizes it, etc.... With Psychotic episodes, that gets blocked or \"overruled\" by another part. But since you are conscious (since your monitor and the computer is on), something has to get displayed. Maybe you get the blue screen of death? Maybe you get something stored somewhere. But you have to experience SOMETHING. What usually happens is the imagination fills in. And SOMETHING is motivating the imagination (memories, emotions, creativity, etc...).\n\nNow, what is the mind going through? It depends. When I'm trying to figure out if the tree is real, there's not too much going on. I'm just staring at a tree trying to find a reason to believe it's real. And I have yet to find it.\n\nOther times, it's all kinds of stuff. Sometimes it's perception. I often have MC Esher type experiences. Where people across the street don't look far away, they look really close but also really small. Sometimes I'll be walking down a set of stairs but it will look like I'm walking up. Sometimes the world will be expanding all at the same relative rate, so 5 feet is still 5 feet but now it's bigger. These are just really fucking confusing and freaked me out at first. But I do a lot of meditation and being aware of them was really key. Being able to say, \"I'm pretty damn sure something weird is going on, people usually aren't 2 inches tall.\" was key.\n\nHowever, there are moments when that's just not possible. For instance, I might see someone walk into a bar. Go into the bar to talk to them, then they're not in there. For me, they were totally real. They looked real. They seemed real. And there was no reason to doubt it until I walked in and they weren't there.\n\nI also spent hours talking to people who likely weren't there. At the very least, I thought multiple people were the same person but couldn't tell them apart. But I have no idea. Because the information coming in through my eyes was being blocked and replaced by information coming from my imagination, which was being driven by another part of me.\n\nSo, in those moments there's probably 2 main things going on. There's the hallucination that seems totally normal. And there's the thing in background trying to get healed, that's blocking sensory information, which is coming to the surface via the imagination.\n\nThe \"trying to get healed\" part probably depends on the type of schizophrenia. When it comes from genetics it's probably more the case that their genes caused the mis-wiring of circuits. Whereas the environment based types will have a part trying to get healed.",
"Not schizo but multiple frontal head wound er visits. I see floaters, and gold flakes that spark. It just a false input. I know its fake. Its just a broken part in brain or eye. You just get used to it. Do not stand up fast or smoke weed if you have this it makes it worse, significantly for me.\nWorthless pointless story but trying to help.",
"I am not schizo, but I once had a 30 minute auditory hallucination. I have no idea why. I heard an orchestra playing a rich, complex melody with a flute solo (I played flute in school). It was about the same volume that a person would speak. I knew it wasn't real because my kids (I think they were around the ages of 3 and 5.) couldn't hear it and I was home with just the 2 of them and it was the same volume no matter where I went. I finally went and lay down and enjoyed the bizarreness of it until it went away.",
"Our brains are constantly recognising patterns.\n\nSo for a picture, the way I imagine it does it is by starting with a small image let's say 4x4 pixels. The closest image chooses the next level. 8x8, 16x16 etc until the correct match is found or no match is found.\n\nI think hallucinations are happen when the wrong thing is recognised somewhere in the process.\n\nThe problem is, that the brain will continue to get the wrong result and it cannot self diagnose itself as wrong.\n\n",
"Brains talk to themselves all the time, connecting things around us with things remembered or imagined. Usually the brain marks thoughts from itself so you don't notice them. People with schizophrenia hear their brain talking to itself because the thoughts aren't marked as calls coming from inside the house. The brain interprets its own chattering as voices from outside, and they hear it constantly. Any time something happens, your brain keeps working on it for a while after, imagine if you could hear that. Any time you see something out of the corner of your eye your brain imagines to itself that there's something about to move past you or attack you. People with schizophrenia might actually see the monster that their brain imagined to itself might have been there. See a flash of light? It's reflected from the mirror on the car that just passed you, but you brain thinks it's an alien ship about to abduct you so that's what you see. Of course it's real, you can see it."
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3s08c4 | does the bacon have carcinogenic properties, or do the free radicals made from burning the bacon cause cancer? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s08c4/eli5_does_the_bacon_have_carcinogenic_properties/ | {
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"Also, chiming in here with the really big reason that bacon is so terrible for you. Raw bacon is not just meat and fat: Bacon is a cured meat, and as such contains nitrates and nitrites in it to preserve it for longer. Those nitrates and especially the nitrites are the larger cause of cancer from bacon"
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2pyhlo | what is the function of armpit hair? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pyhlo/eli5_what_is_the_function_of_armpit_hair/ | {
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"The hairs act as mini rollers, reducing chafing. Examble B, see the crotch. ",
"I'll try to add to the discussion by re-posting my answer to \"why do we have ass hole hair\" . . . \n\nThere are a whole lot of issues in play here, but let’s focus on just a pair: the difference between trends or preferences and actual selection pressures, and the ability of animals and us to cheat those pressures.\n\nBecause hairy butts are pretty pervasive throughout the seven billion-strong pool of human genes, and because there isn't any distinct pressure against hairy butts, they’re never going away, barring some horrific world dictator’s anti-asshair regime.\n\nYet interestingly, even given a global hatred for wiry derrieres, they won’t go away because those so endowed can still fake smooth bottoms. Being able to cheat the system, to avoid selection pressure by shaving your butt, works in the same way people haven’t evolved to have natural face makeup. Even if a certain makeup look was the only look considered desirable, the world’s population won’t evolve towards that look because even those who don’t have those genes can still fake it.\n\nIt’s the reason fake boobs work. There’s no major ‘only natural boobs’ lobby; a large number of dudes and dudettes simply like big boobs and don’t care a lick whether or not a woman’s (or man’s) giant rack is cheating or not. This type of cheating and scamming is massively popular throughout the animal world, and there is a wealth of social animal behavior research studying just how populations police against those cheats.\n\nBut in the very end, that type of policing, or self-regulation, doesn't really affect butt hair. I mean, as you’re deep in the throes of passion with someone you love or simply want to get frisky with, are you really going to say “Wait! Is that some ass stubble? Are you an ass shaver?” and kick them out of your bed? Hell no. Just as most people don’t find beards, red hair, brown eyes or differing heights an impediment to getting busy, rump fuzz isn't preventing any pregnancies. And that’s why, year after year, ass hair abides."
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2vnb5f | what is the marketing strategy with putting ads everywhere? will there ever be an end? | Sorry if this is oddly worded. I don't know anything about marketing strategy. This is how I understand things, if I'm wrong, can you please ELI5?
From my perspective as someone just living in the world, it looks like the goal of marketing is to get as many people to see their ad as possible in the hope of converting those people into customers. To do this, companies place ads everywhere.
From the limited time I've been alive and aware of ads, it feels like ads are becoming increasingly more intrusive as companies keep pushing to find ways to get me to see their ad. Ads are now showing up in more places and more frequently. (There was a post a little while back on the front page about Smart TVs showing ads during people's movies)
Is this trend real or am I imagining it? If it is real and ads are becoming more intrusive, is there an end game? Will I eventually be forced to see advertisements every waking moment of my life?
Will I one day have to pay extortion money so I don't have to suffer other people's ads?
Do marketers ever think they'll reach a saturation plateau where people get ad fatigue and ads stop being effecting? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vnb5f/eli5_what_is_the_marketing_strategy_with_putting/ | {
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"You're not imagining things, we see an average of 3000 ads per day in the US. Why is this?\n\nPeople have shown over the last several decades that they will not pay for digital media like movies, TV shows, music, etc... The internet has allowed people to have access to essentially free, unlimited media. This comes from both legitimate sources like YouTube, Hulu, or Netflix, and from illegitimate sources like torrents or Putlocker.\n\nThis creates a problem. This media isn't cheap to create, but the owners of the media can't stop people from getting it for free. Take Game of Thrones for example. It cost HBO $6,000,000 a episode to produce that show.\n\nHow are businesses supposed to continue to produce quality media while still giving it to consumers for free. The answer,for better or worse, is to couple the media with ads.\n\nThe consumer gets their media for free, while the production company gets pad for their work. Its a win win situation, so the trend will continue unabated.",
"I work in marketing, and I have no idea to what degree (if any) that means I am more aware of advertising and marketing, but it is basically everywhere all the time as it is. It pays for basically everything. Your TV show, the websites you like (Audible has an ad on the homepage of this very site right now). I'm a fan of the Patriots, who are an enormously profitable company in their own right, and they play at a stadium named after a shaving products company. Their stadium itself is an advertisement. \n\nMarketers are always looking for new opportunities to create awareness of their products. I agree the pre-loaded ad on TVs seems a little bit much, but I don't think you should find it surprising. The day your toaster can tell you the weather in your area and what's trending in the news is the day your toaster will have a Pop Tart ad streaming to it.\n\nFatigue is real, but something that can be dealt with. I work in direct marketing, which basically means we've identified our target market and we know how to get messages to them - think mail, email, over the phone. People opt out *constantly.* And we constantly refill the hopper. It's the nature of the business.\n\nAdditionally, regarding fatigue, it is a mistake in logic to assume all advertising is a two step process. Very few ads have the strategy of SEE THIS AD BY THIS THING NOW. The vast majority of advertising is so that when you DO find yourself in a purchase decision you think of my company that fills that need. So of course thousands and thousands of businesses playing the long game will compound the proliferation of advertising. And this isn't to say that BUY THIS NOW doesn't also exist at the same time. So of course advertising is incredibly pervasive.\n\nI don't think marketing and advertising will plateau, no. The mediums may change. Not as many people are getting promotional snail mail anymore...but there's Twitter ads. Maybe people don't have home phones as much...but apps can run banner ads.\n\nAs long as there's an audience marketers will find a way to remind it they could go for a cold, refreshing Budweiser. "
]
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[],
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|
54zqdk | does grunting when exerting force give you more power? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/54zqdk/eli5_does_grunting_when_exerting_force_give_you/ | {
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"text": [
"In martial arts we do that hiya thing and it's proven to work. It helps you focus on whatever you're putting strength into, and the muscle contraction from yelling or grunting helps you use other muscles that you're using.",
"The sharp exhalation of air from the lungs accompanied by grunting sounds and the contraction of the muscles in the core provide you with the ability to exert a greater amount of force. \n\nSource: I take the meanest dumps. "
]
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[],
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||
3f23c9 | cecil the lion and why the dentist is in trouble | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f23c9/eli5cecil_the_lion_and_why_the_dentist_is_in/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"An American dentist was involved in luring a famous lion out of a nature preserve so he could semi-legally kill it. \n\nIt is possible he was not aware any of this and believed he was legally hunting the animal.\n\nIt was also possible the whole thing was his idea, and he specifically targeted the lion because it was famous.\n\nGiving his history of illegal hunting, many people are finding it hard to believe he was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. \n\nBeyond that, people are question the morality of this kind of big game hunting. Especially hunting so large an animal with a bow, where it spend over 3 days suffering before it was finally killed."
]
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[]
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||
3f7105 | why are empty glass bottles harder to break than full bottles? | Was throwing a couple empty bottles around earlier today, and noticed that it took a lot more force to break than a full bottle did, why is this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f7105/eli5_why_are_empty_glass_bottles_harder_to_break/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"1. Full bottles contain more weight, so at the same speed they hit with more force.\n2. Energy waves transmit much more strongly through water than through air -- the force of the impact will be carried all around the bottle quite effectively.",
"Water is almost incompressible, so when you hit the side of the bottle, the force from the hit can't dissipate and is directly transferred through the bottle, So the energy does the only logical thing, it breaks things.\n\nWhen the bottle is empty, it's filled with air (duh).Being a gas, air is easily compressible. You hit the side of the bottle and the hit makes the bottle and the air inside/around it vibrate, using up the energy, and there's not enough energy to break the bottle."
]
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2tewot | why do highways and subways need tolls and fairs? why can't they exist on selling ads, like websites? | Think of the NY subway system. They're increasing the fair AGAIN. It now costs $116 a month to ride the subway. Millions of people ride it every single day.
Just like millions of people visit popular websites every day. Most online news sites are free and make millions of dollars in revenue from ads on their webpages.
The subway has SOME ads. Highways have some billboards. But not a lot.
Why aren't there simply billboards all over the place, and ads all over the subway system (every waking inch of it) in order to increase revenue, just like websites? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tewot/eli5_why_do_highways_and_subways_need_tolls_and/ | {
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"text": [
"To put simply, infrastructure costs and up keeping requires a huge amount of money. Which cannot be covered by advertisements .",
"Websites don't cost billions of dollars to build and maintain. ",
"Not trying to be that guy, but I believe you pay a \"fare\" rather than a fair.\n\nRegarding the billboards: Tehknerd put it best. Infrastructure costs are incredibly expensive. Additionally, toll money is actually worth less real dollars each year due to inflation. This is why people have proposed a gas tax tied to inflation and/or a VMT (vehicle miles travelled) tax, even though those ideas repel most taxpayers"
]
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|
2r83j2 | why am i, a lesbian, attracted to boobs? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2r83j2/eli5_why_am_i_a_lesbian_attracted_to_boobs/ | {
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"text": [
"The human fetus starts out as a female \"template\" so to speak and differentiates into a male through hormonal cues to develop. The response to sexual cues depends on how the brain develops, and as a lesbian it seems that your body and brain didn't follow the same path; you have the female physical characteristics but some of the male sexual cue responses.\n\nAs for why males like breasts, they are indicators of the ability to rear healthy children and so are beneficial to survival (those males which preferred healthy looking females tended to have more successful genes). There isn't really much evolutionary pressure on lesbians in particular as they don't reproduce."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
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||
3b6z76 | how do we know dinosaurs existed? pretend i have no previous knowledge of them. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b6z76/eli5_how_do_we_know_dinosaurs_existed_pretend_i/ | {
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"text": [
"We've found their fossilized skeletons. Check your local natural history museum. Where do you think [this](_URL_0_) came from in Chicago's Field Museum?",
"We have found fossil evidence of them. Preserved impressions and casts of partial and even complete skeletons, eggs, tissues, footprints.",
"Imagine you are out and you find a fossilized bone. Your first guess might be that it came from a cow or something else big. You check the bone against all the living things we know about and you decide that it's a new thing. \n\nNow you have two other guesses:\n \n * That it's just some animal you haven't found yet but still lives today. \n\n * Someone is trying to trick you and made a fake. \n\nLater you go back to the place where you found the first bone and dig. You find that almost all of these weird bones are deep under ground. Geologists who know about layers of rock say that the bones are found in rock made 10s of millions of years ago but in in rock found 1 million years ago. It doesn't make sense to say that they are from some hidden animal. \n\nIt's still possible that someone is tricking you. \n\nBut then your friend on the other side of the world found strange bones that are also very old. All over the world there are thousands and thousands of these old bones of related animals found that are millions and millions of years old. You can actually put together family trees for a lot of them reaching back hundreds of millions of years ago. \n\nIt would have to be the largest and most dedicated hoax of all time. Who would bother hiding thousands of bones in thousands of sights around the world, deep embedded in rocks, just to trick you?\n\nThe easiest idea that explains the bones is that there were a family of animals we call dinosaurs that lived a long time ago. What else could explain the fossilized bones?"
]
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"http://www.aaskolnick.com/fieldmuseum/sue/trex77k.jpg"
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fe2ej0 | breathing changes your weight? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fe2ej0/eli5_breathing_changes_your_weight/ | {
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"fjlbmg2"
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"text": [
"It's extremely unlikely that you are using a scale accurate enough to register the difference in mess of a lungful of air. They're probably just regular slight fluctuations on the scale."
]
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||
1lhrkj | why is broadcast news so blue (not sad, literally the color blue)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lhrkj/eli5_why_is_broadcast_news_so_blue_not_sad/ | {
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"text": [
"Liberal media bias",
"Because skin tones tend to pop off a cooler background.\n\nLighting 101: warm up front, cool in the back."
]
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[],
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] |
||
cvkass | how our brains, smaller than a chicken breast, not only quietly stores trillions of bytes of information, but, usually, is able to access a piece of information instantly. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cvkass/eli5_how_our_brains_smaller_than_a_chicken_breast/ | {
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"First: Unless you have a massive chicken, our brains are much larger, both by volume and weight.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nBut onto the question, the brains of all animals have developed a very complex set of neuropathways. Not only does one neuron store a bit of information, but neurons connected together will store other bits of information. These neurons will fire in sequence and simultaneously to make you remember something, or to \"know\" it. How these neurons are activated in the sequence determines what you remember.\n\n & #x200B;\n\nThe human brain contains over 100,000,000,000,000 neural connections that can all work in sequence and independently.",
"You know, that we still know so little about the actual function of the brain that not only can we not explain it, because we do not know but I doubt even if we did know, it could be brought to the 5 year old level effectively.\n\nOur brains are amazing, what we did think we understood just 20 years ago, has been flipped upside dhwn with recent discoveries."
]
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3iwrss | how can tensions between the usa and russia be so high, yet the latter still allow the former to use their rockets for iss missions? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3iwrss/eli5_how_can_tensions_between_the_usa_and_russia/ | {
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"Even going back to the Soviet days there has been a lot of cooperation between us the the Russians/Soviets in non-military scientific ventures. Scientists don't care about nationality, they care about peer-review and accurate data. Unless a shooting war broke out, and the governments directly halted cooperation between the two nations' scientific communities, the scientists of our nations will continue to cooperate on projects and research. They just don't care about the politics. ",
"Well in a word: Money. We pay the Russians a ton of money to launch our people into space. \n\nBut beyond that, our space programs have been pretty cooperative for a long time, and as we go out to other planets, all those missions will be internationally funded. You don't pull out of the international space faring community now, it would be dumb.",
"Different departments of government. Picture it like this. Your high school and your rival's high school hated each other...Well at least the jocks and cheerleaders did..(politicians)\n\nThe geeks would rather help each other do something awesome than destroy the other's school.",
"In addition to the other comments here, the ISS cannot function without both the U.S. and Russia participating. The U.S. and Russian segments are interdependent. Russia has talked about separating their modules after 2024 (the current scheduled end of ISS operations) and using them as the basis for a new Russian station, but they are no where near being able to do that yet. Furthermore, Russia's space budget has been cut significantly in the last year or two, owing to the downturn in the Russian economy, and may face further cuts in the future. If the two countries ceased cooperation on ISS, their human spaceflight programs - significant sources of pride in both nations - would come to a halt (there would be no place to go).\n\nDespite the tension between Russia and the West, there are powerful incentives for both to keep cooperating in space. ",
"Remember back when Russia put short range missiles on Cuba for a possible nuclear attack against US?\n\nThat's what we call \"high tension\".\n\nCurrently there are no tensions.",
"The same reason two wrestlers can kick each others asses and talk about how much they hate each other, and then go have dinner together. They're putting on a show to take attention off their own scandals and galvanize their voting blocks.",
"Are you married, or do you have a girlfriend/boyfriend? When y'all are fighting, do you stop having dinner or picking the kids up from school? It's like that. Complex, close relationships require both people or countries to be able to relate in multiple ways at the same time. "
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5ki1j4 | why does depression so commonly cause the recipient to lack the ability to feel emotions and think that nothing is okay anymore? | As the title says, why does depression so commonly cause the recipient to lack the ability to feel emotions and think that nothing is okay anymore?
I have been suffering from depression for about 6 years now and over time (especially the past week) I have been able to feel less and less emotions to a point now where I feel practically no emotions throughout the day. Nothing specifically bad has happened to me these past 6 years that should make me feel this way but I do anyways.
This makes me genuinely curious as to why myself and others are caused to feel so hopeless yet nothing at the same time.
I am aware of the *very* basic scientific explanation of depression and how it is a chemical imbalance in the brain, but am clueless about why the effects are what they are.
Thank you in advance for the responses.
Edit: for a bit more information, the lack of emotions question is if you have never and are not taking any medication. I understand how that can be a side effect from some medications.
Also I know this is a super complex and confusing topic of discussion and not too much detail is able to be put into these answers because, sadly, not too much research (comparatively) has been put into this topic. I hope that questions similar to these can help even in small ways towards building awareness. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ki1j4/eli5_why_does_depression_so_commonly_cause_the/ | {
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"The problem with trying to find an answer involving brain activity is that there really isn't a clear cause or concensus among the academic community. The brain is so damn complex and kind of hard to study becsuse literally every brain behaves a bit different.\n\nSome have connected depression to a decrease in neuron, or brain cells, in the hippocampus and the structure itself being smaller on average in depressed people. Others think it's a malfunction is areas of the brain that are connected to stress, anger, and other intense emotions. The presence and production of neurotransmitters like Seratonin and Dopamine might also affect the mind.\n\nPerhaps the best answer is something extremely stressful or emotional in your life created an imbalance in parts of your brain and the brain just kind of goes to shit. A malfunctioning area in the brain induced by excess or lack of hormones and neurotransmitters could impact your entire thought process.",
"Unfortunately, chemical imbalance is actually the best answer. Too much of one chemical, not enough of another.\n\nI have Schizophrenia, and our Negative Symptoms (sz has positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms) are so similar to the symptoms of major depression, that psychiatrists often confuse the two. Apathy/Indifference, amotivation (lack of motivation), anhedonia (inability to experience pleasure), lack of hygiene/self care, and loss of or \"blunting\" of emotions, etc. \n\nIf you are taking any antidepressants, \"emotional blunting\" is a side effect of many of them (Zoloft/Sertraline is notorious for this). Our (sz patients) antipsychotics are thought to exacerbate our Negative Symptoms, while treating our positive symptoms (psychosis, Paranoia, disorganization). \n\nIt has been theorized (though not confirmed) that in major depression/major depressive episodes, Apathy and loss of emotions may be a coping mechanism. Also, in anxiety disorders (which often comorbid with other mental health issues), loss of emotions is also sometimes seen. \n\nIf this answer is not satisfactory for this subreddit, I apologise. OP, I wish you peace and healing. Six years is a long time to suffer with this. ",
"Here's an emotional answer from someone who dealt with this. This by no means discounts the scientific answers below which were actually kinda neat.\n\nFor me, personally, it was because I had incredible guilt and insecurity, and didn't trust people. Emotions were weakness. I trained myself, *unconsciously*, to not feel them, but rather to use them as concepts to manipulate others. Naturally though this made me feel even more guilty and self-loathing. At some point I hated myself so much and it was so hard to feel happiness that just... Nothing was okay. After all, why else would I want to die? If something WAS okay, I'd do that. But there wasn't. So I might as well say farewell.\n\nThankfully I didn't get very ingrained with that by the time I was helped back up. But if you'd like some advice and support on an emotional level, I'd be happy to help you."
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9s6p1r | how can caterpillars retain their memories when they re-solidify and become a moth? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9s6p1r/eli5_how_can_caterpillars_retain_their_memories/ | {
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"Looking at the papers, we don't know yet. There are some theories, but none of them are backed or seem super credible, but the simplest one is that the \"soup\" that the caterpillar turns in to is less soupy than we thought, the neurons just stay lightly stuck together. "
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||
15ycyu | what is the worldview of slavoj žižek ? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15ycyu/eli5_what_is_the_worldview_of_slavoj_žižek/ | {
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"Ok, so let's pretend you're five. Who are you? You're your mother and father's child. Do you have an identity apart from that? Say you rebel. You're still just rebelling against their system, their world view. In your rebellion, are you really free? And who are you, actually? And how do you know?\n\nNow translate that to religion. Say you're raised christian, and then reject it. So now you're an atheist, or believe in several different religions. But you still see the world from the structure you were originally given. You can't help it. Are you really free?\n\nOr take culture. Say you're a minority. Let's make you, say, green in a world of mostly blue people. All the blue people say \"we're all one, at some level. Everyone's just a person. We shouldn't see cultures, we should just see people.\" Of course, it's to their advantage to argue that, because secretly they think everyone thinks blue. But say you buy it. You look for essential similarities, and in doing so accept the blue structure. But you're just traded one for the other. So are you free?\n\nNow take economics. There are so many things you don't like about consumerism. People define themselves by what they own, they do all sorts of things to get more, and people die in terrible fires in Bangladesh just so people in St. Louis can save a few pennies on their t-shirt at walmart. You can't stand it anymore. You drop out of the consumer culture. You renounce the whole cycle of getting and spending and having. Can your renouncement ever make you free?\n\nAnd can there ever be a solution to this? What would it look like? How can we know that the change isn't simply the next step in the same continuum? Can we ever escape?"
]
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3f3dte | how did my first generation get the last name? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3f3dte/eli5_how_did_my_first_generation_get_the_last_name/ | {
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"That depends on where you're from and what your last name is. [Wikipedia has a very in-depth article discussing it.](_URL_0_) It also might be helpful to ask a more specific question. Do you want to know why given names became popular? Why your last name specifically was chosen? How most last names were chosen in some specific area?",
"It depends on your last name. Most often it either came from a job that your ancestor had, or another relationship that they had.\n\nNames like Smith, Carpenter, Hunter, etc. came from jobs.\n\nNames like Johnson literally meant \"this guy is John's son.\""
]
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4ovt1a | how does apple know that your charger isn't an original | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4ovt1a/eli5how_does_apple_know_that_your_charger_isnt_an/ | {
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"text": [
"There is a chip embedded in the charger that sends a specific signal that the apple device can verify. They do _URL_0_ you have to pay more to get a \"certified\" device that licensed the chip from apple so they could get even more money.",
"Really? Having used the original cable and charger from the box after a long while, it recently started giving me notifications that the accessory is not supported... ",
"TL;DR - Apple uses \"encryption\" on their cables/chargers which 3rd party/knockoff brands can't get past/emulate properly. Quality control or money grab, take your pick."
]
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6g0a40 | what advantages did modern humans have over other animals, other than intelligence? | People often seem to think that our brains was what put on us on the top of the food chain, but I find that was not enough in the earliest start of our species. I do hear once in a while that humans have a crazy stamina compared to most of animals, but I do not know anything substantial.
So what advantages does our human biology offer other than the intelligence that made us stand out in the cruel place called nature? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6g0a40/eli5what_advantages_did_modern_humans_have_over/ | {
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"Our bipedal stance was a survival trait - it gave us improved vision, and improved mobility (which connects with the stamina, as we ran in a very different, more maintainable way, which allowed us to chase down prey over many miles).\n\nOn the flip side, the change in our hips, coupled with the increasing size of our skulls at birth, increased maternal death in childbirth.",
"When I took undergrad evolution we discussed a few things human do especially well:\n\n1. Heat regulation. With adequate water, we're especially good at surviving in the heat. Lions, for example, can only exert themselves for a short time in the heat (think 90 F+), whereas humans can run for hours. This isn't a minor difference, either. Humans are the best large land mammal in the heat. No other large animal can operate at high exertion for hours like us. \n\n2. Musculature. We're not the strongest at lifting things but we are good at throwing things. No other animal can accelerate things to the speeds we can. An average human can throw a rock over 70 mph. \n\n3. Neural plasticity. This is obviously related to intelligence, but it's a nuance. Most animals could be described as more instinctual. Humans are born as blank slates. This makes our offspring particularly vulnerable, and have the longest development time of any species. However, it allows us to be highly adaptable.\n\n4. Selective breeding. Human females have hidden ovulation. Most animals can tell when their females are ready to breed, but humans cannot as much. This allows women to choose advantageous times to breed. Ancient human women may have been less willing to mate in times of food scarcity or disaster. This is also related to intelligence, since it requires intelligent choice. Most animals are less able to make these choices, and will mate even when it's a bad idea to do so. ",
"We have remarkable endurance due to our walking stance. Humans can pursue prey, which often depends on sprinting to escape, at a fast enough speed that they prey can temporarily evade, but not rest. \n\nEventually, the prey animal will simply be exhausted, while the human can maintain pursuit and slaughter it. ",
"Persistence hunting! Most animals Can either sprint, or breath/pant. Not both. Humans can run long distances, forcing animals into sessions of sprinting which causes them to overheat and every die. We can sweat to cool ourselves, most animals do not.",
"We're very sweaty, for one. Stick with me.\n\nWhile evolution isn't 'random' in the way put forward by creationists, it's certainly a matter of luck. Sometimes an adaptation can be completely specialised, meaning that you're the very best animal at eating a particularly inedible plant. Like the Giant Panda. But when your habitat is threatened, you're so specialised, and so unable to adapt, that you become endangered. \n\nHumans, unlike Giant Pandas, are very adaptable. We live in hot countries and cold countries, desert, grassland, tundra, wherever. This isn't because of just one trait that's propelled us forward, but our species being lucky enough to have evolved on a 'generalist' route and it coincidentally preparing us for new environments. \n\nThere is a theory that says that the crazy human stamina you mentioned could have played a very big part in our other evolutionary advantages. \n\nHumans are probably the best *persistence hunters*. This is a method of hunting where even though you're slower than your prey over short distances (like a deer), you can just keep on going, walking, running, tracking, and never giving up. Evolution is often about compromise. Many prey animals are adapted for quick reactions and high speed, which is very effective against predators that use the same skills, like lions. This is why we see exciting lion hunts on TV wildlife shows - it's a sprint, not a marathon.\n\nWe're good long distance runners, and poor sprinters. If you had ten minutes to catch a deer, you'd stand no chance. But the deer is a great sprinter, and a poor long distance runner. Great for dealing with lions, not so good for dealing with us. Watch [this excellent David Attenborough video](_URL_0_) of an African tribesman running his prey down for eight hours until it simply collapses with exhaustion.\n\nLuckily for us, the very skills we adapt to become good persistence hunters are great in other situations:\n\n* *Intelligence & communication*:- endurance hunting is easier in groups, think of a pack of wolves tracking prey over a distance. This means intelligence is favoured, to permit social interaction as a strategy to success. This includes communication. As always it's compromise. Humans are the only mammal that cannot breathe and swallow at the same time, and we are the only species that can choke on its own food. This is because our throat is crowded out by our speech mechanism. But it's been net positive. The same intelligence and communication that works so well in hunting has enabled us to collaborate in extremely complex and successful social groups.\n* *Thermo-regulation*:- Many animals can't compete with us over long distances because they simply overheat. Humans can excrete more sweat per unit surface area *than any other species*. We're great at regulating our body temperature, and this may well have developed as a result of this hunting method. Later, when we spread to very hot or very cold environments, we were adaptable enough to cope. \n* *Energy usage*:- Compared to many animals we have larger thyroid and adrenal glands which enable them to utilise the energy in carbohydrates and fatty acids more readily and efficiently. This is how we can keep going after that deer over a long distance. It means that human populations could spread round the globe, being able to live in environments where nothing grows but you catch big prey every few days, or places where there is no hunting but agriculture (when we developed it) means a steady supply of plants to eat. You can continue to hunt and scavenge even if you've not eaten for days.\n* *Shape* - we're upright, compared to our hunched over primate chums. We're no good at climbing trees. But who needs to run around trees catching quick prey if you can just sit at the bottom starving more slowly than it does? There is a theory that our entire shape compared to other primates, short toes, smaller arms, is down to our love for persistence hunting. \n\nOf course not needing to use your arms when running is not only great for the chase, it's great for manipulating objects. Who would be physically best at building a hut, you or a gorilla? So when our intelligence reached the point where we were able to do some *serious* problem solving, we already had a great structure to be able to do it well.\n\nAnd thus, out of us filling a relatively small niche, the persistence hunter, we emerged out of Africa more dextrous, adaptable, clever and energetic than our competition.",
"Lots of advantages. It has been proposed that the intelligence part was never really a big advantage when dealing with other animals and that we devolved our intelligence mostly to compete against other humans.\n\nOne thing that gets often mentioned is that our bipedal locomotion and our stamina means that we can keep running for a long time, we might not be faster than the animals we hunt but we can keep going for much longer and if we use our teamwork to take turns with the whole running down the prey it gets even better. Endurance hunting is what that technique is called and the theory goes that our ancestor were using it to kill animals before we had much in the way of advanced tools and weapons going.\n\nFrom the perspective of a prey animal that must have been something out of a horror movie: you run away but the relentless pursuer is always there following you until you finally collapse in exhaustion and they bash your brains in.\n\nHumans also have had teamwork going for them like wolf packs only much better and can teach each other tricks they worked out like some other smart animals only much better too.\n\n",
"A lot of people have mentioned a good variety of things (especially persistence hunting), but they've neglected to offer up one or two key points.\n\nThe first I'd like to address is that we have a remarkable ability to recover from injury, or simply ignore one and keep going. A lion breaks an arm and it's pretty much left for dead by its pack. A human breaks an arm and... well, we just use the other one. Same goes for legs, feet, hands, shoulders, eyes, ears, tongues, teeth... it doesn't really matter. Humans can just simply keep going through the pain and through the disability so long as we aren't completely disabled. And often, even if we become completely disabled, if we don't die immediately, we'll heal. \n\nThe second thing I'd like to mention is that we're social creatures. Yes, a lot of other animals are social as well, but humans are individual in their ability to care for each other. When a herd of buffalo is being hunted, the head bull will often *intentionally disable the least healthy male in the herd* in order to get the rest of the herd away to safety. Whichever animal is hunting them will fall back and eat the weakened one, and the others will get away. Humans don't do this. We'll care for our elders, our children, our weak, and our weary. If they can't move with us, we'll often stand and fight, or hide. We'll hand feed our weak, making sure they get enough to eat and drink. Other animals see one of their own stop eating/drinking, and they just let them die. They weaken the herd/pack. \n\nAnd it is because of this secondary trait that I mentioned that we've become so adept at *so many different things*. We can climb trees, we can swim, we can sprint, we can jog, we can hide, we can cover ourselves in mud to blend in or cool off, we can hunt, we can escape, and we can *use tools to help us do all of these things*. Because we *were* at disadvantage, so we developed *ways around that disadvantage*. A lion will absolutely kill an unarmed human or even a group of humans. But these humans, they didn't just give up and say \"lions are too strong\", they picked up big fuckin' rocks and sharp sticks and then they fuckin' killed and ate that lion. ",
"Dexterity - the ability to perform tasks with our hands.\n\nI'd say that's the key to everything, in parallel with the intelligence of course.\n\nStamina is one thing we are good at too, but that only brings in the food, just like any other animal able to survive manage to do, it's thanks to our ability to create tools with our hands we could bring that animal down.\n\nSo I'd say what thanks to being upright and having dextrous fingers instead of another 10 toes on another 2 feet! \nOur ability to make tools is what makes us stand out, that required intelligence and dexterity, just look at the whales and dolphins! their brains probably has as much potential as ours, but with a pair of flippers they are kind of limited anyway.\n\nOh, and communications skills too of course, to allow knowledge to pass down through generations, but I guess that's all included in intelligence already.\n",
"This is going outside the box of your question, but I think the biggest advantage *because of* our intelligence is our ability to create and use tools. We're not the only things to use tools. Various other primates do and some of the more intelligent birds such as ravens. I suppose you could say our ability to use tools is helped along by our ability to form cohesive social groups and the fact that there are so many of us.",
"1. Our senses are extremely good. Our hearing is absurdly sensitive and extremely precise. We are unmatched at recognizing *what* we hear and only some echolocating species and some owls could outmatch us at locating the sound source. If our hearing was even a little bit better, we could echolocate too. (dog whistles work because they use frequencies that we can't hear but dogs can, not because dogs' hearing is more sensitive.)\n\n2. Our vision. Not only is the resolution of our vision much better than of almost any other animal, we can also distinguish greens, oranges, browns and greys, which makes most animals' camouflage completely worthless against us. \n\n3. We are not worth much as a prey. We're extremely hard to kill and we take revenge against animals that attacked us before. Few animals are strong enough to safely kill even an unarmed human and we can be armed or have friends nearby. Our bodies don't appear to be particularly nutritious either, according to some recent research. Nothing really wants to hunt us, as just about anything else will provide more nutrition for much less effort.",
"Aside from the ones already mentioned, we also have excellent colour vision. Most mammals are dichromats. They only have two kinds of cones in their eyes that can detect green and blue light respectively. Great apes are trichromats. We evolved a third set of cones allowing us to detect lower frequency red light.\n\nSo how does this help us? Talk a walk through the grocery store and notice the colour of the ripe fruits. Most are red or some variation, like orange or bright yellow. Having our eyes detect red light allowed our ancestors to identify the ripest fruits with the most nutrients. Other mammals can't really tell without tasting it first, allowing us to always snag the choice fruits before they can. \n\nOf course it also allows us to easily identify things that are poisonous as well. \n\n"
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7wd906 | how does the power grid differentiate what customer is using what suppliers power, when it's all going through the same transmission lines? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7wd906/eli5_how_does_the_power_grid_differentiate_what/ | {
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"It does not. \nAll of the producers submit power to the same grid, and all of the customers get power form the same grid.\nEven in countries where the power production market is a free market, the distribution grid is managed by a single company as it is considered a natural monopoly. \nEvery producer sells power to the grid at a certain price, then the grid sells that power to the customers. The thing is that in the case of little private customers, instead of buying from the grid they have a contract with an wholesale company that buys power from the grid and ensures the power supply for its customers.",
"It doesn’t! But a watt of power is a watt of power, so if you use 50 and the power company you use generates 50 and releases it into the grid, bills you for that 50 then it doesn’t matter who made it. Say you choose to get your electricity from a green energy company that only generates renewable power. However much you use if what they’d generate on your behalf, but it technically doesn’t matter whether you use that power directly or the grocery down the road or a house across town.",
"Think of it as a bucket. Several companies fills the bucket, several customers empty it. However, one company owns the bucket, and they know exactly how much each company puts in and each customer takes out. So, they can see that you have taken 1 liter, and charge you for that, and they can see that ElectroCorp has put in 500 liters, and pay them for that.\n\nThat way, it all works out in the end.",
"I assume you’re asking because your local power company is selling people on paying more to ensure their power comes from ‘green’ sources? \n\nAs others have said, it’s just about fulfillment. You pay for green power and they make green power. It’s mushed up in the middle, but it’s there. \nThese programs usually directly fund the production of green power, too. \n\nI work for a power company and we’re about to rollout, for lack of a better term, a community garden solar farm. People are making the investment to produce more clean energy where they live. "
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1srtbh | what do the letters and numbers mean in names of guns like m4a1 or m16 etc? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1srtbh/eli5what_do_the_letters_and_numbers_mean_in_names/ | {
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"The US Army has been giving out M- prefixes to equipment since before World War II. The first number has no significance -- they aren't assigned in order. The A and following number means revised design. A1 means the first major redesign of the equipment, A2 means second redesign, and so forth. So the M16 was introduced in the mid 1960s, a revised version (the M16A1) was introduced in the 1970s, a further revision in the late 1970s is still in use today as the M16A2. The M4 is a shortened version of the same weapon, and the M4A1 is the first update on that offshoot design."
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1jen1g | why nfl rookie hazing is seen as funny and socially acceptable, but other forms of hazing are illegal and much more serious | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1jen1g/eli5_why_nfl_rookie_hazing_is_seen_as_funny_and/ | {
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"Filling a car with popcorn or doing laundry is different from forcing someone to binge drink."
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oen7d | why ice floats when solids normally have a higher density than liquids. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/oen7d/eli5_why_ice_floats_when_solids_normally_have_a/ | {
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"This was explained to me this way:\n\nH2O has a shape formed at about a 100 degree angle, so a very wide V. When it gets cold and approaches freezing, the molecules are not arranged in any particular way, and in fact, very much random. The wide angle V shape causes them to freeze together with a lot of open space between the molecules, making ice less dense than water.",
"Water is unusual in the chemical world in that it is less dense in its solid state than in its liquid."
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dzt17q | in what extent do fruit and vegetables loose nutritional value from the moment they are harvested? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dzt17q/eli5_in_what_extent_do_fruit_and_vegetables_loose/ | {
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"It greatly depends on what kind of vegetable but in most cases: not very much. When the plant is harvested, micro organisms start to deteriorate the substances that make up that vegetables and transforming for example carbohydrates in alcohol (if you have ever eaten an old banana when it gets dark you have definitely felt it), but until something doesn't smell rotten you can pretty much assume that his content in carbohydrates, fats and proteins is still pretty much the same (or at least something that you should not worry about). Some vitamins like C are pretty volatile so for example it's better to eat an orange freshely peeled but an apple will have pretty much the same calories on day one or day five"
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77ftuk | why does the level of a certain pain or sickness, such as wisdom teeth removal pain or waking up with an intense sore throat, seem to elevate when you wake up? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/77ftuk/eli5_why_does_the_level_of_a_certain_pain_or/ | {
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"Well, with the sore throat, when you wake up and you have one, it hurts alot more due to it being dry. Over the day, your throat gets more moist, and helps ease the pain."
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1g9f1f | why is cultural/social liberalism described as being "progressive"? | Is it just a word chosen because it sounds nice (at least in my mind the word 'progress' alone is somewhat associated with inevitability and progressing towards something greater or good) or is there more to it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1g9f1f/eli5_why_is_culturalsocial_liberalism_described/ | {
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"The values of liberalism in the sense of Western enlightenment philosophy tend to by their nature be more receptive or urge towards change (reform, progressivenes) by emphasizing core principles such as free exchange of ideas, equality, development of the unique individual and so on. \n\nEmbracing liberalism will (in theory) make you more open to (perhaps inevitable) reform and progressive thought. ",
"During the French Revolution, which overthrew the French monarch, the National Assembly would organise themselves into two camps when they met. Those who favoured continuing the revolution, abolishing the monarchy, and creating a new Republic sat in the left wing of the hall, and those who favoured restoring the King, rolling back the revolution and sticking to the old ways sat on the right wing. \n\nThat's the origin of the terms 'left wing' and 'right wing'. Left-wing views are those that advocate for social change and going forward (aka progressing, thus progressive) into a new type of society. Right wing views that advocate for tradition and maintaining the current or previous orders (aka conserving them, thus conservative). \n\nLiberalism means loosening the restrictions in a society in some way (socially, economically, whatever). It's not inherently a left or right wing position, and in different countries it can be associated with different wings depending on their social situations. Liberalism being synonymous with progressive is usually an American position, because the leftward movement to liberalise social relations (sexuality, gender, race, etc) has been prominent and organised in American society for 60 years. Right-liberalism is usually termed neoliberalism there. In Australia, liberalism is very associated with the right wing.\n\nThere are also large bodies of political theory (mainly thinking socialism here) that are progressive but anti-liberal in the US conception. ",
"Liberals/progressive - \"Let's make things better!\"\n\nConservatives - \"If it ain't broke, don't fix it!\"\n\nAnd yes, there is some word games going on. \"Liberal\" got associated with inefficient big gov't, so \"progressive\" gained popularity. Also, if you disagree, \"progressive\" becomes \"radical\", and \"conservative\" becomes \"reactionary\"."
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ehkdi4 | how does iodine kill bacteria & why is it different from other cleaning substances like alcohol & hydrogen peroxide? | I've always wondered what the difference is between these cleaning mediums. For example we can't use rubbing alcohol for certain wounds? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ehkdi4/eli5_how_does_iodine_kill_bacteria_why_is_it/ | {
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"How each disinfectant kills microbes\n\n1) alcohol - at 70% concentration it has the ideal aggregation spreed at which the proteins within the microbes denature (misfold) and stick to one another at a rate where everything can aggregate before the peripheral aggregate forms a protective barrier preventing alcohol form further effects.\n\n2) hydrogen peroxide - it is a reactive molecule that can act as a potent oxidizing agent. It essentially goes around stealing electrons and breaking organic molecules disrupting and destroying the cell wall. This causes leaks in the cell and eventual death. It also slows down the growth of bacteria (bacteriostatic not just bacteriocidal). \n\n3) iodine - also a good oxidizer. It goes to oxidize and denature some proteins on the bacterial surface but also blocks the transport of electrons in cellular respiration by oxidizing these enzymes. Sometimes it's mixed with some other things like povidone which makes it much better at destroying bacteria, viruses, fungi, etc. It's basically the gold standard for preoperative prep. It can be irritating and toxic to humans though so you can't use it too freely\n\nThere's a million other ways to disinfect. The choice of the method depends on the pathogen (for example some may have high levels of catalse which destroys hydrogen peroxide protecting the pathogen, some viruses that have an envelope or a membrane making them more resistant to alcohol), and on the situation (internal problem, open wound, semi open wound, etc) as well as other factors. Things like prions for example, none of the above can destroy them, and no real sure way of disinfection is known, but for now we use a combination of strong base, some enzymes, and autoclaving (high temp and pressure). It's just all about the situation, like everything else, just like you can't use lead as a shield against radioactive phosphorous, you can't use alcohol to kill fungal spores.\n\nEdit: English"
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74almh | how does our body read data (genes) | Computers use binary but how exactly does your body read the gene and know to grow blonde hair etc? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/74almh/eli5how_does_our_body_read_data_genes/ | {
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"Genes are made up of sequences of four different types of bases: A, T, G, C. You may have heard that DNA comes in two strands, the double helix. One strand binds to the other strand through matching up bases to their \"complementary base\" on the other strand. An A on strand will bind to a T on the other, G to C, C to G, and T to A. \n\nWhen a gene is being analyzed, the strands are pulled apart and specialized proteins build a *new,* shorter strand out of a substance similar to DNA called RNA. The strand is built on the principle of complementary base pairing, and is packaged and transported away from the DNA once the copy is complete. \n\nOnce the copy is made, it gets picked up by a \"ribosome,\" a little cellular machine. The ribosome looks at the base pairs in sets of three (each set is called a codon). Using complementary base pairing, it builds a protein. \n\nIt can do this because it has access to amino acids, the building blocks of proteins. Each amino acid has a chunk of three bases attached to it that are specific to the type of amino acid. The ribosome matches each codon to the corresponding amino acid, and moves on to the next codon. The amino acids are strung together in a chain, and when the process is complete the chain folds into a protein. \n\nOnce the protein is complete, it performs a function based on its shape and what amino acids it's made of. "
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3qqhsb | the psychology behind pedophilia. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qqhsb/eli5_the_psychology_behind_pedophilia/ | {
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"We don't really know. Some posit that it's a power thing, but that applies only to actual child molesters. Not all pedophiles are child molesters and not all child molesters are pedophiles. When we are little kids, and first start being attracted to people, we are attracted to people are own age. For some, the age they are attracted to simply never changes. There was also a paper a while back (I'm not about to google pedophilia to try to find it again) that went into how there could be an evolutionary reason for it. Ancient humans would would compete for mates, but it was generally only for fertile mates. If one was attracted to potential mates before they became fertile, they would claim that mate before others tried with no competition. I don't think there is actually a *psychology* to it. I mean, there are support groups for people who are pedophiles but basically take vows of celibacy and never even touch a child (another article I came across on Reddit that I'm not about to try to google). I think that it's a hormonal thing. I mean, I'm attracted to women roughly in my age bracket, but I don't choose the specific ones I'm attracted to. Something happens hormonally to make me feel an attraction. I think it's the same for pedophiles. There hormones are simply triggered by young children. Or maybe it's just the extreme form of men's obsession with virgins.",
"Ugh.\n\nSo, let me precursor this by saying that pedophilia is a VASTLY misunderstood \"concept\". Society frowns upon pedophilia for obvious reasons, and because its seen as such an atrocity, it is very, extremely, almost completely impossible to get proper funding for legitimate studies into pedophilia without casting a negative light on it. The fact of the matter is, the percentage of pedophiles that act on their attraction is actually suspected to be rather low. Additionally, there's thought to be a decent (still very small) percentage of the population that is part-pedophile (can't think of a better term) that are attracted to children on top of their normal attraction to people their age.\n\nANYWAYS.\n\nWhen we think of sexuality, we usually think about it on the male-female spectrum, but the fact of the matter is sexuality is vastly more complex than that, based on an enormous variety of factors, to the point where we will likely never get them all pinned down. There are studies that claim men like wide hips because they're \"child bearing\" hips, claims that women like men with deeper voices because it's a dominance thing, claims that some of us like blondes because our mom is blondes, and claims that some of us are genetically gay or bi, and some of us learn it. \n\nThe thing is, that extends to the age we're attracted to, too. Now, there is some suspicion that, as /u/SpareLiver suggested, it might be linked to a long-lost evolutionary trait that sometimes pops up in people, others suspect is may be linked to stages in our own development where something significant might have happened in our lives (abuse, see /u/Serendone), or simply something hormonal got jacked up in our bodies, and things so often do.\n\nIts important to note that in a not-human society, age isn't that big of a deal. Really, even in a non-modern society, age isn't that big of a deal. There were countless societies in times past that had and maintained regular sexual relationships with what we would now consider minors, of both genders. But as we got more \"refined\" we got away from it. \n\nThe point is, sexual preference is an enormous spectrum, with a ton of different factors contributing to it, all of which can be overlapped, or individual, can be gender, appearance, age preference, personality traits, etc. Unfortunately, some people land on the socially unaccepted parts of the spectrum...\n\nSince I'm on my soap box, I want to reiterate, pedophilia is a hugely under represented part of our society. In many states, admitting to being a pedophile is punishable by law, even if you have never acted, or even considered acting, on it. This is also true in many places in Europe. In the US there have been several attempts at changing laws to allow for states to intervene and provide counseling to self referred pedophiles to help them through it and stop them from even considering acting on their impulses and it's met with a massive public outcry every time. This is shitty, and its something that super bugs me.\n\nI should clarify I am not a pedophile by any means, lol.\n\n",
"Are you actually asking about paedophilia or about child molesters?\n\nThey are different and distinct, not that you would know that from the way the media reports it (apparently not a single newsroom in the world has access to a dictionary).\n\nPaedophilia is a sexual orientation characterised by an attraction to pre-pubescent individuals. Just as (most) straight men do not wander around raping women who they find attractive, most individuals with paedophilic urges do not act upon them.\n\nChild molestation is a crime - rape, which can be committed for a number of reasons. The perpetrator may genuinely harbour paedophilic, hebephilic or ephebaphilic^1 urges. More commonly however, they have a power complex and children are generally more naive and easier to abduct, coerce or confuse than adults.\n\nThus, in many cases, where you hear about rings of \"paedophiles\" passing around girls ([example from BBC news](_URL_0_)), they're not padophiles at all. They're rapists, plain and simple. They didn't select young girls or teenagers out of a specific age-related sexual attraction, but because pragmatically, they often happen to be the easiest target.\n\n^1 A sexual attraction to/interest in pubescent and late adolescent individuals respectively.",
"Okay, well, this is not something a five year old should have explained to them buut I am going to honestly try.\n\nThe most important thing to understand is there is no one \"pedophile\" so much as pedophilia is a symptom of several psychological phenomena. Human sexuality is weird. Really weird. So weird that humans can like almost anything. Weird sexual interest is the norm, not the exception. In a lot of ways what constitutes as \"Weird/deviant/perverted\" is (as overused as the expression has become) a social construct, eg, If 100% of the human race had a fetish, would we call it a fetish, or would it just be accepted as normal sexuality. \n\nPlease note, I'm not defending pedophilia in action, so much as showing that, as uncomfortable a notion it may be, pedophilia might just be an organic quirk in humanity that the sufferer has no control over. \n\nA lot of times there are behavioral, and evolutionary psychology answers trying to seek out a root cause, and while these provide a palatable answer, these explanations rarely account for all pedophiles. There are myths that it is because of abuse, but some studies show pedophiles claim abuse after being caught in an attempt to appear more sympathetic (hell, I believed this myth until I actually researched the subject). \n\nUltimately talking the the \"psychology\" of pedophilia is tantamount to talking the psychology of human sexuality. We have laws setting a boundary for sexual acceptability, but these are, well, social constructs. If I were to take a 25 year old woman/man (whom you were to admit sexual attraction), and incrementally de-age her/him (without showing you the age at any given time), would you be able to pin-point the exact point this attraction became pedophilia? Would it stop exactly at your countries age of consent? Would you call yourself a pedophile if it stopped below that line? Would learning this individual was now below that line make them less attractive to you?\n\nBut this is an already acknowledged grey area when discussing pedophilia.\n\nWhat about the person who goes for pre-pubescent or newly pubescent children? For most of them, they didn't chose the pedo life, and most of them will never act on this impulse simply because they acknowledge there is something fundamentally wrong with it. Most that do act have some other, un-diagnosed, problem that simply gets hand waved as pedophilia, as if having a sexual perversion instantly makes you a rapist (remember when they said the same thing about gays?). No matter how sexually aroused a person may get from children, it takes a large amount of mental hurdles or outright sadism to actually have sex with a child. In the former's case, these people are looking for consent, or will project consent onto the youth, in the latter's case, they are effectively rapist/sexual sadist just going for a specific target. \n\nIf there's one thing I want you to take from this response, it's this: Most pedophiles will never hurt a child. You very well may have met a pedophile in your life and not known it simply because they have their urge under control, it doesn't dominate their thoughts and they don't suffer for lack of action on their sexual desires. Humans are not defined by sex. For many sex is a fascinating aspect to human psychology, but, in my personal opinion, it is the most boring and least impressive part of the human experience. Anybody that defines themselves by their sexual interest does not have a healthy grasp of their sexuality (really anybody that defines themselves exclusively by any interest or hobby). We think and feel and make a myriad of connections in our lives. While I will never condone pedophilic behavior, we have to accept that pedophiles are still people on top of this and have a psychological complexity outside of their sexuality. "
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1olhmb | what causes atoms to bond together to create a completely new molecule? | Example: What causes 2 Hydrogen atoms to bond together, and then how do those 2 atoms bond to an Oxygen atom to create water.
What causes 2 Oxygen atoms to bond together to create the air that we breathe. (Also why can't we breathe a single Oxygen atom?)
I'm not limiting it to these 2 elements, it's just the ones that spurred this question.
Are they just all floating around haphazardly in our atmosphere and if they bump into each other they bond to create these molecules? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1olhmb/eli5_what_causes_atoms_to_bond_together_to_create/ | {
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"I'm gonna try to keep this ELI5, and by doing so, I'm going to make some simplifications that won't necessarily be technically correct - so anyone who is considering calling me out on it, bear with me.\n\nThe two most important parts of the atom are protons and electrons. Protons, we say, are positive, and electrons negative - you can picture this like the north and south end of a magnet, where protons are south and electrons are north. Just like the north end and south end of a magnet will attract, protons and electrons will attract, and two of the same kind will also repel. Therefore, atoms like having the same number of electrons and protons.\n\nChemistry happens when different atoms change their electrons around, either by swapping them or sharing them with other atoms. Atoms keep these electrons in \"shells\" around the protons in the centre. Shells, if you can imagine, have a pre-set amount of space in them. Each shell can only carry a certain amount of electrons, and different shells can hold different many electrons. A shell that is made to have two electrons in it, will then very dearly want to have exactly two electrons in it. This isn't always the case, as a two-spaced-shell will sometimes only have one electron in it. The atom does *not* want to have a half-empty shell. The atom will be unhappy. It will feel sad and empty and alone.\n\nLet's say an atom is using a shell that can fit two electrons in it. When that shell has exactly two electrons in it, the atom will be very pleased. It has not too many and not too few. This atom will be very difficult to react with, because it will not want to swap or share its electrons with another atom - why should it? It has the exact amount of electrons that he desires, he is happy and balanced, and you'll have to do a lot of convincing to get him to share. An example of an atom like this would be helium, a noble gas, which is *highly* unreactive - you will almost never have a compound with any helium in it.\n\nHydrogen, on the other hand, oh no - it only has one electron! That's not a good shell. It's half empty! This means that a hydrogen atom will be very keen to find another atom that is willing to share an electron with him. If a hydrogen atom finds another hydrogen atom, these two sad, lost souls will very happily share their electrons with each other. This will not be a case of one hydrogen atom giving an electron to the other one; it's more like they begin to \"hold hands\". If two people are holding hands with each other, they both have two hands; their own hand, and their partner's. Like this, each hydrogen (even if they only have one electron each), now have \"two\" electrons in the sense that they have their own electron as well as the other atoms' electron. \n\nIn a similar fashion, oxygen has two electrons too many - so two hydrogens will happily \"hold hands\" with these excess electrons. It is because oxygen vs. two hydrogens have such a good combination of too-many-and-too-few-electrons that they get along so nicely, and why water exists so much; because this reaction is likely to happen as it is so convenient. \n\nAs to WHY it happens, well… it's favourable for them to do so. In a situation like the one with the two hydrogens, they both feel better (or rather, become more stable) because of it, so that reaction happens very easily. It'll just be a matter of proximity; if they're close enough to notice each other and go \"hey, I want an electron and you want an electron - let's share!\" then they will. You don't need to initiate it, and you don't need to poke around to make it happen. It'll happen by itself.\n\nIn other situations, it will be POSSIBLE for two atoms to join up in a certain arrangement but not necessarily as easy as with the two hydrogens. In that case, they'll need a little bit of convincing. Heating substances up is generally the easiest way to speed up a reaction; when the atoms become hotter, they'll more around more and be more prone to knocking into another atom and start the electron-interaction. \n\nSo yeah. The haphazard floating isn't too far from the truth, but the atmosphere has been around for a while so chances are if two atoms that are THAT prone to reacting, they'll already have met and reacted a while ago. Simply having two things near each other is usually all you have to do for the more easily-reactive-reactions to kick off though - dropping sodium into water is an example. For the more difficult ones, it'll usually be proximity + something else like heat.\n\nSorry it turned out so long!"
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agw30y | why is japan suffering from deflation, and why does the government want to stop it? | Just like the title says. I'm a complete beginner when it comes to understanding this kind of stuff, but it seems like this has been happening for a while and that there's no way for the government to stop it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/agw30y/eli5_why_is_japan_suffering_from_deflation_and/ | {
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"Deflation means that stuff is worth less because there is less demand, which increases the value of money. This is bad for markets and the economy in the long term.\n\nIt's not like things just going on sale and is happening across a wide range of industries.\n\nIn the immediate term, it seems like a good thing, because it means people can buy more with the money they have.\n\nIn the long term it's bad, because companies make less money despite the value of money going up overall. This means production slows down, meaning people get laid off and unemployment goes up.\n\nA small amount of inflation is actually good for an economy. When it goes negative, it means that people aren't buying things. Which means there's too much production and/or not enough consumers. ",
"I think the question why is probably complicated and even reputable economists will disagree. Deflation is defined as the general reduction of the prices of goods and services in the economy. \n\nWe might be used to certain things becoming less costly over time - personal computers for example. However, in general across the economy, most prices rise over time; ie there is inflation. Inflation impacts consumer behavior because it incentivizes spending rather than saving because $10 today buys more stuff than $10 next year.\n\nWhen there is a period of deflation, holding on to money and postponing consumption makes more sense because the reverse is true; e.g. if you know that PC you wanted would be cheaper next month, you'd postpone buying it now.\n\nSo the aggregate result of consumers postponing consumption is aggregate demand falls - and that leads to underutilized capacity in the economy (factories cannot run fully, etc) which then leads to lower profits and lack of investment and slower economic growth.\n\nDeflation rewards savings and punishes debt. Sounds like a good thing but this is also a problem because the money supply is also reduced when people don't borrow (banks have excess reserves) The overall lowering of economic activity leads to reduced employment and investment.\n\nWhy is Japan suffering from deflation? Perhaps several reasons: over investment in capacity in the past, (too many factories chasing insufficient demand); asset bubble burst (Japanese real estate prices were sky high until mid 1990's - then it crashed) - since people feel they're less wealthy they spend less; too much debt, possibly companies and people reduced consumption to pay down debt; demographics - Japan has a rapidly aging population and older people spend less and save more as they plan for retirement. \n\nThen there are fairly technical monetary policy reasons which are harder to understand - basically whether the central bank policies reduced money supply too drastically, were they too late in reducing interest rates. Government action also contributes: could they have taken more bad loans off company and bank books? should the government go further into debt to fund infrastructure spending? "
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4rr85i | what happens if the winner of the 2016 presidential general election declines the presidency? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rr85i/eli5_what_happens_if_the_winner_of_the_2016/ | {
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"[The 20th amendment](_URL_0_), section 4 covers it. The Vice President elect becomes President.\n\n*[..] if the President elect shall have failed to qualify, then the Vice President elect shall act as President until a President shall have qualified; and the Congress may by law provide for the case wherein neither a President elect nor a Vice President elect shall have qualified, declaring who shall then act as President, or the manner in which one who is to act shall be selected, and such person shall act accordingly until a President or Vice President shall have qualified.*\n\n\n\n"
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9qg1c3 | how does the gas/fuel industry work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9qg1c3/eli5_how_does_the_gasfuel_industry_work/ | {
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"Gas stations receive daily shipments of gasoline, an usually only hold a day or two's worth of fuel underground at any given time. I used to run a gas station, and during the summer months my gas station would almost run out several times a day. \n\nThat fuel comes from a rack somewhere near by. Think of it like a warehouse for gas, where a lot of fuel can be safely stored onsite away from people. There are about 5 racks within an hour of my old station, and they supplied every gas station in the area, regardless of what company is on the gas station. \n\nIf something happens at the closest rack, then the second closest has to pick up the slack and do double duty to supply its normal stations and the other stations that are running out now. \n\nIf the problem goes on for long enough, or affects multiple racks, like a hurricane in the gulf shitting down refineries, then stations will run out while waiting for their next shipment.",
"problem simply is, once one station is empty, all the drivers will resort to the next one. Thats how multiple gas stations can become empty"
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8fia1s | who gets money for streaming dead artists like chopin on spotify/tidal etc.? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8fia1s/eli5_who_gets_money_for_streaming_dead_artists/ | {
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"The people who played/recorded it. And a certain amount goes to the heirs, if the composer is deceased less then 70(?) years ago.",
"A specific performance of a piece which is in the public domain is typically owned by the organization which created it. While Chopin's music may be free for everyone, the specific production is likely owned by some entity which would license it for broadcast.",
"When recording classical music, copyright is held by the people who performed/recorded it. There are no rights to the composition itself but there is the potential for somebody to hold rights to a particular *arrangement* of the piece.",
"Pay for plays on spotify/tidal/etc is negotiated with artists' recording labels; the streaming service has an agreement with whatever entity has the license to distribute the performance of the music, and that entity then pays out to the artists according to the terms of *their* arrangement.\n\nIn the case of modern songwriting there's usually some sort of mechanical royalty for songwriting credits in addition to what goes to the performer; in Chopin's case he (or his estate) obviously wouldn't get that since his work is in the public domain"
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2rfqiq | who owns reddit / who pays for it / are there shareholders which control its posts? | Skimming through a mix of comments from _URL_0_ has left me confused:
* "Reddit gold is a bunch of bullshit. Reddit is owned by one of the largest publication companies in the world and they make their money like everyone else: advertisement.
They've gotten really good at masquerading advertisements as user generated content and people are starting to catch on. Reddit is paid for by Conde Nast publications, and they wouldn't own it unless it was profitable for them."
* "Has anyone found Reddit / Conde Nast to be behind placements / inflated upvotes? I would think an ad agency could figure out how to game reddit without going through reddit directly."
* "Reddit has been independent since 2012, although Advance Publications is still the largest shareholder."
* "They are not a subsidiary of any company. Reddit has its own board of directors and controls its own direction."
* "Reddit is (not?) publicly traded."
And at the same time if someone could ELI5how shares / publicly traded / subsidiary and those other keywords mean and how they relate to each other, that'd be great!
Thanks :) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rfqiq/eli5_who_owns_reddit_who_pays_for_it_are_there/ | {
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"Reddit is owned by Advance Publications, which also owns Conde Nast.",
"Every business has at least one owner. The owner(s) could be other businesses, individuals, a government or a combination of all three. When there is more than one owner, the ownership of the business is *shared*, usually according to how much money/work each owner has invested.\n\nThe company is divided up into units called *shares*. Each share represents a small chunk of ownership in the business–buying shares in the company means you own a part of the company. Owning part of a company means you get a share of the company's profits and you have some control over the company itself.\n\nSome companies are publicly-traded, meaning anyone can buy shares in that company on the open market. Most of the biggest companies in the world operate this way. If you have $50 in your pocket, you could buy a share in Microsoft right now (as of this typing). And as a shareholder in Microsoft, you would receive a share in its profits (called a *dividend*) and you could attend its shareholder meeting and vote in its elections to decide who sits on its board. Of course, Microsoft has about 10 billion shares available, so owning a single share won't give you much of a say in anything.\n\nSome companies (such as Reddit) are not publicly-traded. This means the only way for you to get shares in the company is to make a private deal with an existing shareholder. You can't just go and buy the shares on the open market.\n\nAdvance Publications, Inc. is a majority shareholder in Reddit.\n\nReddit used to be a subsidiary of Conde Nast, which means Conde Nast fully controlled everything Reddit did and got all of Reddit's profits. Companies use this kind of arrangement to help keep things organized. For example, a company like Sony Corporation will establish subsidiaries like Sony Computer Entertainment, Sony Pictures and Sony Electronics. Each subsidiary is a company in its own right, but they are all directly controlled by the parent company.\n\nAdvance Publications is a majority shareholder in Reddit, but it does not directly control Reddit."
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3eojdt | how do mortgages work, and what is the best strategy in the current market? | I have a vague understanding of how it works, the bank loans you money, you pay money every month with the total sum you pay over the term being greater than the amount of the original term, but past that I have no idea what things like variable vs fixed rates mean for a practical standpoint.
I can guess they mean the amount of interest changes, but what does this mean in reality, and when is this a good thing? Also most morgage products are something like: 2.250% - 1 year fixed rate -closed, or 3.40% 1 year fixed rate open. What do the 1 year bit mean, and what does the open vs closed bit mean?
Living in one of the worst housing markets (Vancouver) I feel like I should have a handle on these things. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3eojdt/eli5_how_do_mortgages_work_and_what_is_the_best/ | {
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"*Simple mortgage* (usually called a \"fixed-rate\" mortgage):\n\nYou borrow the principle (the amount that you pay for the house) and you pay back the principle and a fixed interest rate on the principle over a fixed term.\n\nThis is, for most people, most of the time, the best kind of mortgage. Your monthly payment will only change if you are also paying other things like taxes and insurance at the same time and those things do vary a bit over time.\n\nYou should only consider another type of mortgage if you really, really, really can't qualify for a fixed-rate mortgage for the amount you need to borrow, or you have some extraordinary life circumstance that might impact your borrowing decision.\n\n\nMore exotic options:\n\n*Variable Rate Mortgages*. These are mortgages where the interest rate you pay changes over time in relation to some benchmark. The advantage is that right now the rate you'll pay is usually less than the rate you'd pay with a fixed rate mortgage. The downside is that we live in a time of ahistorically low interest rates and they are virtually certain to rise over time. As the benchmark rates go up so will your mortgage interest rate. That means that you'll pay a different (and likely higher) amount each month in the future.\n\nSometimes you can make an informed gamble on a variable-rate loan if you have reason to believe that you won't own the home you're buying for a long period of time and you won't be exposed to higher interest rates in the future. For example, maybe you work for a company that often relocates staff and you expect to live in the home you're buying for 5 years or so before moving. You might gamble that the interest you'll pay with a variable rate mortgage will be less than you'd pay for a fixed rate mortgage, and that when it's time to move you'll be able to sell your house easily.\n\n*Balloon-payment mortgages* (sometimes called \"interest-only mortgages\"). These are mortgages where you pay an initial low monthly rate, but at some point in the future the monthly payment becomes much larger. Again these are mortgages for people who want to take a gamble. Maybe you can afford the intro rate, and you have a high confidence that when the increased rate starts you'll be able to afford that payment (perhaps you're a doctor doing a residency and making very little income but in 5 years you'll be in private practice and making a lot more money), or you're speculating that you'll be able to sell the house before the payment amount increases and you want to minimize your costs in the interim."
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3mqzgp | how can some diet drinks have no nutritional value? | Think those sparkling Sam's Club waters or some other diet drinks. There is very clearly some sweetener in there yet it has 0s all across the nutritional facts label. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3mqzgp/eli5_how_can_some_diet_drinks_have_no_nutritional/ | {
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"There are lots of things that are safe to consume that your body can't do anything with- it doesn't use the substance to facilitate chemical reactions or build your body (like the vitamins and minerals listed on nutrition facts) and it can't extract any energy from it (like fats, proteins, or carbs). Some of these chemicals still bind to the taste buds in your mouth and fool your body into thinking that they are sugar, but you don't actually get anything from them nutritionally.",
"Diet sodas don't actually have zero calories. Artificial sweeteners like aspartame (nutrasweet) have the same 4 calories per gram as regular sugar. So why do diet sodas advertise zero calories? Aspartame is several hundred times sweeter than sugar - so you can sweeten a diet soda with only a fraction of a calorie worth of aspartame. Then the FDA lets you round it down to zero on the label (since it's only 0.4 or 0.25 calories)."
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d0q2mc | why is the confederate states of america flag so associated with racism? just becauss of slavery in the past? did i just answer my own question? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d0q2mc/eli5_why_is_the_confederate_states_of_america/ | {
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"\"Just\" because of slavery? Isnt that enough? The entire Civil War was fought over slavery and the Confederate States used that flag, so yes, you did answer your own question.",
"The \"Confederate Flag\" you see today was never actually the national flag of the CSA or any Confederate state. It was one of many battle flags used by the Confederate armies during the war, and was later adopted by groups like the KKK as a symbol of white supremacy.",
"Despite its original use, the confederate flag has remained a symbol for the values of the Confederate States, namely the supremacy of the white man and his right to own slaves. Losing the civil war wasn’t just a political loss or even just an economic one. When people lost their slaves they lost their entire way of life. Many southern families had owned slaves for generations and many were even raised by them. Then suddenly, after the bloodiest war in American history, a war that pitted families against each other—after losing all that they also lost the riches and luxuries of cheap labor. A lot of southerners *never* got over that and a lot taught their children to never get over it. \n\nThat’s why the rebel flag is more than just an historic reference and why the “culture, not hate” argument is so flimsy. It’s a banner for those who want the antebellum lifestyle and social hierarchy their ancestors enjoyed to be dominant again."
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2ajnnr | why has there not been a successful electric forced induction system for motors? | Is there no market? I know there are some with minimal gains and false claims of extreme gas mileage but what prevents someone from making a decent bolt on fan that puts out the PSI needed for performance gains? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ajnnr/eli5_why_has_there_not_been_a_successful_electric/ | {
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"It would take a lot of electrical power to turn a fan to do that. That power would have to come from the alternator, which is not 100% efficient. The motor to drive the fan is also not 100% efficient, so you'd lose twice. At least with belt- or exhaust-driven systems, you only lose once.\n\nAlso, a motor rated for continuous duty at high RPM in the vibration and heat of the engine bay would be expensive and heavy. The alternator would have to be beefed up, too. This means the electric solution would be expensive and heavy.",
"It's a matter of efficiency. Having an electric pump or turbine that could create the same amount of pressure as a turbocharger or supercharger would require significant electrical draw, necessitating a much beefier alternator that would increase parasitic loss of power from the engine. To make one worth it requires lots of complication, money for r & d, and advanced technology (specifically in bearing friction and heat management). Turbochargers use exhaust gas to drive the compressor, superchargers use a belt. Both use the operation of the engine to compress air, but without added complexity of electronics. \n\nTurbochargers and superchargers already work pretty well, so not a lot of companies have a strong priority on electric forced induction. They do work on them though, so someone will figure it out eventually. ",
"The power has to come from somewhere, and going through the extra steps of the generator and then an electrical motor, both of which has losses, just wastes energy. \n\nTaking the energy from the exhaust, as turbos does, makes much more sense, as that energy would have been wasted otherwise. Taking the energy straight off the crank shaft, as superchargers do, also has benefits. But generating electricity, and then immediately converting it back to angular kinetic energy in an electrical motor introduces losses, both because generators and motors aren't 100% efficient, and because there will inevitably be some resistive losses as well. And if the thought is to store the energy in a battery, there is losses both when charging and discharging the battery. \n\nAlso, it wouldn't really be that revolutionary."
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2mqnsa | how does government privatization provide benefit? it seems like it just makes companies rich and they, in turn, pay their employees less than they would make working directly for the government. | It seems like it benefits the owner of the company hired. He can then,in turn, save money by paying the employees less, and providing less benefits, than the government would directly. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2mqnsa/eli5_how_does_government_privatization_provide/ | {
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"The basic idea is that a company with a strong motive for profit will have more incentive than a government to deliver a cheaper, better, more cost efficient product."
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2tanma | why do advertisers bother to pay to show commercials in locations that don't offer the product/service advertised? | For example, I always see those The General Auto Insurance commercials, but I live in a state that doesn't offer that service. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2tanma/eli5_why_do_advertisers_bother_to_pay_to_show/ | {
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"National spots are cheaper than doing 40 states. Think of it like going to costco.",
"With things like fast food restaurants it's to build name recognition. you might not have one near where you live, but if you're traveling and you see one in your mind you'll say \"oh shit, a sonic! I want to try one of those wacky breakfast sodas they advertise all the time!\" then you go, and they make their $8 off you. ",
"I hate this. I work at a McDonalds south west of Albany so our customers get national commercials, Albany reigion commercials, and NYC metro region commercials. However we are so close to Massachusetts the store is in the Boston region, but far enough away we dont get Boston region commercials. We get a lot of angry confused customers who cant get the deals they see on tv which we have no control over. Needless to say I have become excellent at customer services and defusing situations.",
"Media buying is like hunting. \n\nAiring a commercial for a regional golf store during a golf tournament on a local channel is like setting up a deer stand, putting up a feeder, and then waiting for a deer to walk up to you so you can shoot it from 10 feet away.\n\nAiring a commercial for a regional golf store on ABC is like dropping a nuclear bomb on the forest. You're going to hit a lot of stuff that isn't deer, but you will almost certainly hit a deer.",
"I get so pissed off when i get chick fil a commercials because thats my favorite fast food place and its not even in my state",
"A lot of ad companies buy \"scatter ads\" which are cheap and don't necessarily target the correct audience geographically. Also, scatter ads can be extras thrown in as added value for large accounts. Sometimes, they are to make up for the fact the show didn't pull as large of an audience as expected.",
"Sometimes I feel like it may be a mistake that nobody cares about fixing. Where I live (southeastern PA), they air O'Rilley Auto Parts commercials on Clear Channel/iheartwhatever stations, despite there being no stores in my state or most of the surrounding ones. ",
"I hated Sonics ads because there was none around nd the ads made me wish there was one nearby. They built one recently and then I learned just how bad the food was. Such dissapointment",
"Because if I'm ever in another universe where they apparently exist, I'm definitely going to Sonic.",
"advertising creates demand. if there's enough demand, they'll enter that market.\n",
"Like Dave and Busters. We get commercials on TV, and they're 2 hours away. They suck too, BTW.",
"Almost every comment is saying the same thing, that it is about broad coverage, etc, which is true. However, I've noticed ads appear in my town, and within a year, that business opens it's first location near me. Perhaps they were per-establishing their image into your subconscious in preparation.",
"Always depresses me seeing the commercials for CiCi's Pizza Buffet. I went to one over a decade ago while on vacation in Florida, thought it was the greatest thing ever. I live in California and have never seen one in the state. But I still get to see the commercials.. all the time.. for all you can eat pizza for $5.. ",
"Damn you CiCi's Pizza. Mocking me 1000's of miles for the nearest one",
"Sonic burger and your amazing looking drinks in southern california",
"They don't, like it's been pointed out sometimes it's cheaper. \n\nOther times you're offered markets as part of a package. For example I'm a broadcaster in one city, we have two sister stations in nearby cities. There is no FoodChainA here but it is in the other two cities. My city was offered by our corporate marketing salespeople as sort of a \"SalebutnotaSale\" because you just got a service you can't use. That costs us nothing extra to provide.\n\nIn other cases there's a hub which handles the actual distribution for several broadcast, cable, or satellite systems across several markets, and the salespeople sold you everything in that hub.\n\nOther times the actual footprint of a broadcast or cable market, or due to the difference between broadcast and cable distribution networks you may need to cover two whole markets to reach your target audience, which is partially in both or straddled between the 2. \n\nI forgot to mention ad companies will bundle ads to lower their costs. We may not be the target market but it's cheaper for them on the macro scale and pumps our sales.\n\nFinally content can come prepackaged with ads, because that time was sold upstream.\nEdit: Spelling and grammar \n\nEdit 2: Ad companies mention",
"Yeah I've seen the Al Harrington's Wacky Waving Inflatable Arm-Flailing Tubeman Emporium and Warehouse all the time but there isn't one nearby. If I were to ever pass by one I'd definitely visit ",
"I work in media and schedule the exact commercials you're talking about every day. \n\nIn a majority of cases, these are through a barter or clearing house type buy. So General (from your example) contacts the clearing house and buys 200,000 spots for pennies on the dollar. The clearing house then schedules them across all the stations they deal with nationwide. Because General is paying such a low rate, they don't get to specify which stations they air on, or what times. And because these commercials have a lower rate than the local insurance down the street, the stations can schedule them at a time that less people are watching, and therefore, the cost is less expensive for a spot (for TV, this is midday or overnight). If you see them outside of that time, it means the stations probably have commercial time they have to fill. \n\nHope this helps explain it!!",
"Here in Michigan, we advertise \"pure Michigan\" commercials to our own people for traveling... to our own state... ",
"My neighbor across the street had at & t Uverse and my mom called and it wasn't available on our side of the street. "
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519zb4 | why do some car exhausts hurt ears miles away while louder cars next to you are okay? | Basically why do some car exhausts hurt ears even if they are mile away but sound deeper/heavier while louder/lighter exhaust sounds are okay even though you're standing next to car? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/519zb4/eli5_why_do_some_car_exhausts_hurt_ears_miles/ | {
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"The chambers in your ear structures have their own resonant frequency(s), which if a sound that matches that frequency closely at enough volume is heard, can cause (usually mild) physical discomfort.\n\nAlso, if a sound is loud enough, you may experience discomfort from just having that much energy/air movement inside your ear structures- like clipping on a microphone or overdriving a speaker.\n\nA similar thing can really bug me; when driving or riding in a car and only one window is open, sometimes there's a lot of rapid pressure changes from air pushing into and out of the car, making a buffeting sensation that's really not pleasant to the ears. Just cracking another window dampens it out, though.\n\nHowever, if you're exposed to very loud *sounds* which create that effect, that much sound energy is also likely to damage your ears, so it is to be avoided. \n\nIf you're experiencing significant physical discomfort or actual pain from hearing distant car exhaust, it would probably be a good idea to speak with an audiologist or your GP to make sure it's nothing to be concerned about."
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fyv08c | after our eyes adapt to the dark, why can't we see water? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fyv08c/eli5_after_our_eyes_adapt_to_the_dark_why_cant_we/ | {
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"Fun fact: you look through water all the time inside your eyeballs! A watery liquid fills the open space inside your eyes between the retina (back wall and picture receiver) and the lens (middle and, yes, like a magnifying glass). Sometimes people see “floaties” that are actually solids in that liquid. \n\nPure water is clear, so, when you open your eyes underwater, you see through it about the same as air. If you could open your eyes inside uncolored jello or glass, it would probably look a lot the same. The difference from air to the others is that they are thicker (I know, duh) but light moves through them slower, too. Water inside a glass looks dark because of the difference in light speed from water to air. So when you “see” clear stuff, you usually notice light bouncing off the edge (staying on the thinner side) or changing direction going in and out of the thick side. When there’s less light bouncing around, it’s harder to see those differences.\n\nOkay, Speed of Light. Right, it’s a constant, which means the speed is always the same, but it changes depending on what it’s moving through? It’s always the same in each thing, and the number you heard about is the speed in Nothing, also known as vacuum. The difference in speed from vacuum and another substance is called its Refractive Index."
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eu25y7 | why and when did farms change from square parcels to circular? | As a city folk who never was on a farm, I notice, with the help of Google maps, that a lot of farms seem to be circular. I presume it's easier for a long arm to have a center point and make a circle to spray water, pesticides, etc. But why does it seem like this wasn't the case 30 years ago? And doesn't a circle waste an ample amount of space in a given square? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eu25y7/eli5_why_and_when_did_farms_change_from_square/ | {
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"It does waste a percentage of the corners of each plot, however they now have automated swing arms at the end that can overcome most of that issue. \n\nTechnology has improved immensely with electric motors and gps control. Circles used to be fairly rudimentary. Nowadays the increase in yield easily can offset the cost, and the improved circle technology is somewhat more resistant to issues and headaches(nowhere near perfect). \n\nSome crops remain better served by alternative irrigation methods. Drip lines for example can produce superior onions compared to pivot based.",
"[Center-pivot irrigation](_URL_0_) was invented in 1940 by farmer Frank Zybach, who lived in Strasburg, Colorado. It is recognized as an effective method to improve water distribution to fields.\n\nWriter Emily Woodson characterized the increased use of the center pivot irrigation system as part of a profound attitude shift towards modernism (expensive tractors, center-pivot irrigation, dangerous new pesticides) and away from traditional farming that took place in the mid-1970s and 1980s in the United States.",
"Can't answer when.\n\nIn most modern farms and most wealthy economies that still have farming, land area is seldom a constraint. It is more typically efficiency in capital and labor costs that dominate the economics of farming. \n\nThe circular irrigation is simpler and cheaper capital wise, easier to repair and install (and move). The loss of not farming the \"extra\" bits is relatively unimportant (ie you wouldn't spend a LOT more money to irrigate only to make relatively LITTLE additional output)"
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2uhqv9 | do the people on "to catch a predator" have a choice whether its shown on tv or not? | if they do, why the fuck do they sign a release? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uhqv9/eli5_do_the_people_on_to_catch_a_predator_have_a/ | {
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"Worked in TV here. Not that I've ever worked on a TV show that was \"news oriented\" or whatever TCAP is but I used to be in charge of securing \"appearance releases\" from people that we caught on camera. If we didn't get a release they couldn't be filmed. That's my experience. I'm sure producers don't always honor that. \n\n\nSource: Former reality TV show production assistant here: I've only dabbled in reality (mostly do TV spots and music videos). Two main shows I've worked on that come to mind: \"Day Jobs\" (GAC), \"Big Country\" (A & E)\n\n\nPS: Never work on a reality TV show. It will eat your soul."
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fb36zk | why are paper receipts still a thing in 2020? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fb36zk/eli5_why_are_paper_receipts_still_a_thing_in_2020/ | {
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"Because I don’t want to get spammed for the rest of my life because I bought one thing once at one store\n\nEdit - a word. I am drunk",
"Partially because retail technology hasn't advanced as quickly as other technology. I know one major chain was still using Windows NT in 2010, I know quite a few are still using 7.",
"Because of the marketing practices of companies who not only spam you with their products, but they also sell their databases. You buy one bag of chips and suddenly you're receiving ads from a prince in Ethiopia offering you a million bucks if only you transfer him 1k.\n\nAlso, lack of education. Many workers and clients, and even business owners tbh, are virtually ignorant to IT advances, and thus resistant to use it. They just don't want to bother to learn new stuff.",
"Because you can take away a proof of purchase without giving the shop any of your personal details.",
"Because even when they sign up for paperless receipts on their loyalty cards they still want the receipt"
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bdqa0d | what is the difference between the white and black keys on a piano? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bdqa0d/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_the_white_and/ | {
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"The white keys are naturals (a-g) and the Black keys are the flats/sharps\n\nAll the white keys are one \"step\" apart, and the Black keys represent a half step. So the Black keys are in between tones",
"The black keys are no different than the white keys, strictly speaking. Mechanically, they all cause a felt hammer to hit a string (actually a set of strings that are close together) inside the piano causing a sound at a particular pitch.\n\nThe difference in terms of why they are black and smaller has more to do with a bit of music theory. If you're not familiar with basic scales, then this won't help all that much, but here goes:\n\nThe C major scale is composed of all white keys on the piano. You can play it super easily just by starting with middle C (which is right in the middle of the keyboard) and hitting every white key until the next highest C note. In fact, it just keeps repeating at higher and higher pitches. \n\nIn fact, if you were to play along with a song that was written in the key of C major (or the equivalent E minor), you could hit random white keys all across the piano keyboard for the duration of the song and you would sound in key, and possibly sound \"good\" if you were in rhythm. \n\nThis is super oversimplified, but hopefully that gives you an idea. If you really want to know more, then you have to learn some basic music theory. There are thousands of videos on YouTube that can help with that.",
"As everyone else said, the black keys are flats and sharps, and the white keys are natural notes. But the black keys are paired up in sets of 2 and 3 so the pianist can distinguish the notes from one another."
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6vfo5o | how do scammers from india get a hold of phone numbers from united states and europe? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6vfo5o/eli5_how_do_scammers_from_india_get_a_hold_of/ | {
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"Names can be put into online phone number directories like whatever your equivalent of Canada411 is. They can just pick a random name and a number will probably show up.\n\nTl;dr\n\nIt is the same way the first T800 found Sarah Connor.",
"Usually they just use a phone book. They are rather easy to come by and many nations now have digital phone listings online.",
"You can purchase huge databases of names & numbers from marketing companies. Or you can look on torrent servers for the same for free. Or you can just sequentially wardial numbers. Out of all of the scam calls I've gotten over the years, only one or two have actually used my name in the call.",
"In the event of OP asking about Caller ID \"phone numbers\"\n\nThere are a near infinite number of VoIP providers, many of whom offer local numbers on both the inbound and outbound side (making it cheap to use, especially in countries where you don't pay if the call isn't answered).\nThere is no way to trace these as you can often use laundered/untraceable payment methods or straight up fabricate a business address. That is if the VoIP company and user can be identified, as many scammers use redirects or temporary conference calls (someone else calls you, then them, then hangs up) to make it difficult if not impossible.\n\nThese providers then supply whatever Caller ID the scammer desires and most systems will show that and either \"out of area\" or the state the area code belongs to if it isn't one of the big 3 landline providers.\n"
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5l01k0 | why do we not feel the weight of water above us in swimming pools? | If we placed, for example, 100 litres of bottled water on our body when lying flat on the ground we would expect the bottles to feel heavy against our body (pushing down on us). Why is it that when we are at the bottom of a swimming pool with hundreds of litres of water on top of us we feel no such pressure? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5l01k0/eli5_why_do_we_not_feel_the_weight_of_water_above/ | {
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"You do feel the pressure. You need diving equipment because you feel the pressure. Your ears pop because you feel the pressure. Submarines need to withstand the pressure.\n\nEdit: It occurs to me now that you meant \"why don't we get pushed deep underwater because of the pressure above\", and the answer to that is that the pressure below you is larger than the pressure above you, so there is actually a force pushing up. This is buoyancy. There's more pressure below you because if there are 100 liters above you, there are more than 100 liters above the bottom of you, if that makes sense.",
"It's because you are being pressed that hard from every direction, not just one. Just one makes your body want to squish out the sides. All over just squeezes you. You do feel it, though - it's why your ears feel like they need to pop at the bottom of a pool.",
"One word: Buoyancy.\n\nWater in a bottle is suspended and the weight of that water is acting upon its container, adding to the container's apparent weight.\n\nBut when you're *IN* water buoyant force is acting upon you, as it does everything in the water, including the water itself. Essentially, think of it as the water floating in itself. The water above you is exerting a downward force on the water beneath it, the pressure of which is countering that weight with buoyancy. Hence everything in the water (and the water itself) is essentially weightless, however the volume of the water still exerts pressure on anything below it, hence higher pressure the deeper you dive. "
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jiwfo | the phrase "property is theft." | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jiwfo/eli5_the_phrase_property_is_theft/ | {
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"\"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race have been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men, 'Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.'\" \n\n-Yaboy Rousseau \n\nI have no idea if this is pertinent, as I'm not familiar with the phrase, however this is what it made me think of and it seemed appropriate. \n\nAlso, I should hope that five-year-olds read Rousseau. ",
"To claim something as your own property (to \"homestead\" it) involves taking it away from everyone else (to \"enclose\" it from the commons). All property ultimately descends from exclusion of others.\n\nProperty, as conceived in law, entails the right \"to use or abuse\" something — so if you claim something as your property, this means you may destroy it, reducing the total wealth of society.\n\n > [H]aving recalled and confirmed my initial formula [(Property is theft)], I added another quite contrary one rooted in considerations of quite another order[...]: *Property is freedom.* [...] In respect of property, as of all economic factors, harm and abuse cannot be dissevered from the good, any more than debit can from asset in double-entry book-keeping. The one necessarily spawns the other.\n\n— P.-J. Proudhon",
"\"The first man who, having fenced off a plot of land, thought of saying, 'This is mine,' and found people simple enough to believe him was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders, how many miseries and horrors might the human race have been spared by the one who, upon pulling up the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellow men, 'Beware of listening to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to all and that the earth belongs to no one.'\" \n\n-Yaboy Rousseau \n\nI have no idea if this is pertinent, as I'm not familiar with the phrase, however this is what it made me think of and it seemed appropriate. \n\nAlso, I should hope that five-year-olds read Rousseau. ",
"To claim something as your own property (to \"homestead\" it) involves taking it away from everyone else (to \"enclose\" it from the commons). All property ultimately descends from exclusion of others.\n\nProperty, as conceived in law, entails the right \"to use or abuse\" something — so if you claim something as your property, this means you may destroy it, reducing the total wealth of society.\n\n > [H]aving recalled and confirmed my initial formula [(Property is theft)], I added another quite contrary one rooted in considerations of quite another order[...]: *Property is freedom.* [...] In respect of property, as of all economic factors, harm and abuse cannot be dissevered from the good, any more than debit can from asset in double-entry book-keeping. The one necessarily spawns the other.\n\n— P.-J. Proudhon"
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1im1tc | music theory (major key, minor key, chord etc etc) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1im1tc/eli5_music_theory_major_key_minor_key_chord_etc/ | {
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"There are 12 notes in the western musical alphabet:\n\nC C#/Db D D#/Eb E F F#/Gb G G#/Ab A A#/Bb B\n\nThis is the **chromatic scale**. We call the **sharp** (#) and **flat** (b) notes \"enharmonic\" because they sound the same, but their naming depends on context, particularly the **key** .\n\nThe major scale is the basic foundation of Western tonal music. It is made by starting with the root note of your key (the note that your song resolves to), then going up the scale in a series of *whole* and *half steps*. A whole step is two notes on the chromatic scale (from C to D) and a half step is one note on the chromatic scale (from C to C#). I'm going to notate the major scale with W and H for whole and half step.\n\n**C** C#/Db **D** D#/Eb **E** **F** F#/Gb **G** G#/Ab **A** A#/Bb **B** **C**\n\n W W H W W W H\n\nThe distance between the root of a key and other notes is called an **interval**.\n\nC - > Db - Minor second\n\nC - > D - Major second\n\nC - > Eb - Minor third\n\nC - > E - Major third\n\nC - > F - Perfect fourth\n\nC - > Gb - Diminished fifth\n\nC - > G - Perfect fifth\n\nC - > Ab - Minor sixth\n\nC - > A - Major sixth\n\nC - > Bb - Minor seventh\n\nC - > B - Major seventh\n\nThe most common chords we use in western music are **triads**, which are made by \"leap frogging\" notes in a music scale. There are three types of triad in a major key: major, minor, and diminished. A major chord has a root, major third, and perfect fifth. A minor chord has a root, minor third and perfect fifth. A diminished chord has a root, a minor third, and a diminished fifth.\n\nMajor:\n\n**C** D **E** F **G** A B\n\n**1** 2 **3** 4 **5** 6 7 (1 3 5)\n\nIt's a major chord because it consists of a **root** note, a **major third** (two whole steps above the root), and a **perfect fifth** (three and a half steps above the root). The relationship between the root and the third largely defines the sound of a chord. Major chords (with two steps between the root and third) tend to sound happy, while **minor chords** (with a **minor third**, one and a half steps between the root and third instead of two steps) tend to sound sad.\n\nMinor:\n\nIf we start of the D note in the key of C major, we see that the distance from that to F is only a step and a half in the chromatic scale, and thus a minor third.\n\nC **D** E **F** G **A** B\n\n1 **2** 3 **4** 5 **6** 7 (1 b3 5)\n\nDiminished:\n\nC **D** E **F** G A **B**\n\n1 **2** 3 **4** 5 6 **7** (1 b3 b5, B is the 1 here)\n\nA **seventh chord** is the most basic **extension**, chords that go beyond three notes. It is simply adding the seventh note of the scale, like so:\n\n**C** D **E** F **G** A **B**\n\n**1** 2 **3** 4 **5** 6 **7** (1 3 5 7)\n\nThis a C major 7 chord. There are several kinds of seventh chords, such as **minor seventh** (1 b3 5 b7), notated as Xmin7, and **dominant seventh** (1 3 5 b7), notated as X7.\n\nI know this is a lot to take in, so I recommend going to _URL_0_ and starting from the beginning there. Spending a day or two on each lesson and rereading as necessary is a great way to learn theory. I'm happy to help with any other questions."
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4f1iuf | what is the line of colored circles on every package of food? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f1iuf/eli5_what_is_the_line_of_colored_circles_on_every/ | {
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"Do you mean the squares at the top of the box?\n\nThese are registration points printed onto the box so the machinery can work out where and how the box is sitting.",
"Each one is a splotch of the colors of ink that will go onto that package. Quality control folks can use them to check if the printer is, say, running out of a color or if a color's alignment is off.",
"Those are gradient tint bars for the different ink layers. When printing, only four (sometimes seven) ink colors are used. When layered over one another, they make other colors. These squares are used to make sure that the four (or seven) base colors are accurate over long print runs are are \"hidden\" in the margins... places that get folded under flaps or pasted over that the product maker doesn't expect you to see when you buy the product.\n\nFour color process: cyan, magenta, yellow, black inks\nSeven color process: cyan, magenta, yellow, black, orange, green, and purple inks\n\nsource: worked for the largest paper company in the world putting graphics on paper cups",
"Printer here and as others have said they are used for quality control with regards to ink density. It is to make sure that the colours are correct and that the printed material will look correct. \n\nAlmost all printed stuff will have things like this on them as well as some form of crosshairs for colour registration. Most things will have these bits trimmed off, like leaflets and labels, but I would guess in an effort to save money on packaging they don't remove them or it might not be easy to do. \n\nThis is what the crosshairs look like when the register is off. [click](_URL_0_)\n\nThe colours should sit on top of each other to make the image look correct. These are used to help the printer align the printing. "
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3wzem5 | how is a 720p image displayed fullscreen on a 1080p screen? | Or any other size on any other size. Basically, if an screen is not a multiple of the image it is displaying, how does it display it? I can see how a 1080p image might be displayed on a 2160p screen, it just uses 4 pixels for every 1. But when it is not a nice multiple, I have no idea how it does it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wzem5/eli5_how_is_a_720p_image_displayed_fullscreen_on/ | {
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"It's a process called resampling. Basically, for each pixel in the output image, the fractional pixel coordinates of the input image are calculated, and then some function of the actual (integral) nearby input pixels is used.\n\nA very bad way to do this is just using the nearest pixel. A reasonable way is to do a linear interpolation. Fancier ways involve quadratic or cubic functions.\n\nFor example, line 50 of a 1080p image is in the same place as line 33.33 in a 720p image. So a linear interpolation might take 2/3 of the values from line 33 and 1/3 of the values from line 34. That would have to be done in both the x and y axis.\n\nScaling images down is actually somewhat trickier, because you have to look at more pixels in order to prevent aliasing, which is where stripey things look weird.",
"Even using even multiples doesn't look that good, it winds up being blocky. \n\nWhat they use are three processes, called decimation, up sampling and interpolation. \n\nWhat they do is find the least common denominator and highest common factor of the two sizes. That means the smallest number both can be easily divided by and the highest number that both share as a factor. Therefore you find two numbers that when you divide both sizes by you get the same thing, and when you multiply them you get the same thing. \n\nWhat you then do is scale up, then scale down. Say I have an image of 30x30 and want it to be 25x25. The least common factor of these is 5, so I scale up the original image by 5x, to 150x150. I don't just copy every pixel though. Assume that the value, or color and brightness of each pixel is relatively similar to nearby pixels. If I scale up, and know the value of every 5th pixel in the 150 x 150 image I can guess what the values are in between them. This is called interpolation. The easiest is linear, you assume that the pixel values vary linearly between each other so you find the value of the lines between pixels (their values are the height) and then fill in the gaps based on those lines. There are better ways to do it, but that's the simplest. \n\nNow I have a 150x150 image. Now get rid of every six pixels between points. Now I have my values for the 25 by 25 sized image. However there's a problem called aliasing that pops up when you do the math. Basically if the original image had sharp corners or tight curves, when you decimate it you get rid of that information and error pops up. Smooth curves turn into stair steps and sharp edges have wavy patterns around them. So what you do is filter the image before you decimate it to smoothen out that data and lower the error.\n\nNow you might say, that's really inefficient. You're adding 5x the original data in between, not to mention you have to process 5x the original data. There are techniques of doing this through really clever filtering, and it's essentially the same thing as interpolation without going up first. The math is just more complicated. "
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6abu8k | why are items in shadow, where there is only a single light source, still easily visible? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6abu8k/eli5_why_are_items_in_shadow_where_there_is_only/ | {
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"Light bounces and reflects all over the place. It scatters. So light is bouncing off walls, floors, cielings, objects, and the scattered light is illuminating in other directions beyond what the light source can point at directly.",
"A shadow doesn't mean there's no light in a spot. It means that a spot has less light than its surroundings. Your eyes interpret this as shadow, even if there is still light falling on that location.\n\nIf your single light source is falling on other objects in the vicinity, they are going to reflect light as well. So while they aren't a light source in the sense of producing light, they're still a light source in that they are redirecting light in other directions that aren't necessarily line-of-sight to your lightbulb. \n\nAs such, objects out of line-of-sight can still be illuminated by these 'other' sources. It's less bright since the intensity is less than if the lightbulb itself were shining there (some light has been scattered or absorbed along this roundabout path) and so you see the area as shadowed, but not pitch black. "
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6zzi6p | why are vitamin recommended to be supplements but not replacements? at the end of the day, aren't we just intaking the same chemicals, regardless if it came from a pill or orange? | Like why is it not good to take a vitamin C pill as a replacement if you need vit c rather than eat an orange?
If the vit c pill had vit c in it, then there shouldn't be concern? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6zzi6p/eli5why_are_vitamin_recommended_to_be_supplements/ | {
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"By definition to be a replacement you would have to stop getting vitamins from other sources. Most foods have some vitamins, so the pill is supplementing what you got from the food. They can't be a replacement as long as you insist on continuing to eat food.\n",
"Because in the first world we get all the vitamins we need just from getting food, at least for most people. So the pills supplement the lack from the food, if you have one.\n\nHowever, the number of people that use supplement pills vs the number that need them, has a far larger number for the first than the second.\n\nAs always when it comes to these sorts of things, talk to your doctor if you think you have any vitamin deficiency, get tested for one if they agree that you are showing symptoms, and only get them if you test positive for a deficiency and they don't think that a diet change would be enough. Which is unlikely, but possible.",
"Many vitamins are volatile, meaning they are not stable for very long and break down quickly. For instance a ripe orange has plenty of vitamin C but the moment it's picked and is cut off from the host plant, it begins to slowly decay including it's vitamin content. \n\nVitamin supplements attempt to store the vitamins in a stable form, but they do decay and have a short shelf life. Also the form of the vitamin in the pill may not be the best form for absorption by the body. \n\nEating fresh foods is 100% compatible with our ability to absorb the vitamin, and it's known to have a high % of vitamins present without them being broken or expired from age. \n\nVitamin supplements may not always be bio compatible (in a form our bodies readily absorb) and the amount of vitamin still intact by the time it gets to the stomach is often lower than advertised. \n\nHowever, vitamin supplements contain high amounts of vitamins and are more concentrated, so this somewhat overcomes the loss of bioavailability and purity. ",
"Some vitamins are made as replacements such as sublingual b12 for people that can't make the intrinsic factor of the stomach. ",
"This is assuming that vitamin c is the only thing in an orange that's valuable to your body, and it's not, there's sugars, there's phytonutrients and some small amount of proteins and electrolytes, there's the water of course, and a lot of fiber. As part of a diet an orange goes a pretty good way towards giving you a variety of nutrients, the pill gives you a concentrated, large dose of only one. \nA multivitamin or a specific vitamin tab or pill are most useful in giving you boosts of vitamins in case you are deficient on any of them. For people who are at risk of being vitamin deficient, it is more cost effective to give them a multivitamin prescription, which might cost $15 for a whole year supply so that they will definitely get at least their recommended daily dose (or more in certain cases) for a whole year, than it is to do expensive blood tests for vitamin levels and only know whether a person has an adequate level at that time. So for a pregnant lady it's better for her to get a multivitamin high in folic acid because it helps in neural tube development and not having enough can be catastrophic for the baby. Excess folic acid will be peed out anyway. Some vitamins, mostly those that are fat soluble (like vitamin D) can build up in the body because they are not excreted as easily, but vitamin poisoning is not nearly as common as vitamin deficiencies are. So just don't overdo it with any vitamin.\nAs others have pointed out, most people in a first world society should get enough vitamins from the food they eat. However, sometimes lifestyle choices, diet, regional access to food/care, poverty, age, and various other factors can still lead to vitamin deficiencies. Drinkers for example tend to be low on thiamine and magnesium, which can cause arrhythmia sand neurological changes respectively. Low vitamin d levels in the elderly can mean poor absorption of calcium in a population already prone to weaker bones.\n\nTLDR:vitamins are not a replacement for a varied diet, but they are a (mostly) safe and cost effective way to prevent or treat deficiencies that can be from inconvenient to catastrophic.",
"In addition to vitamins, there are lots of other nutrients your body needs, like protein, carbs, sugar, fats, fiber, salts, etc. that aren't provided by vitamins. Since vitamins help your body use those other nutrients, you're basically asking why we need wood for a bonfire when we could just use lighter fluid."
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79hbrw | recent experment says the universe shouldn't exist? | I read 2 articles today explaining that a new experiment at CERN states that the universe shouldnt exist? It has something to do with matter and anti-matter and how if there were equal amounts at the big bang there should be no universe. I assume theres more to it because its just an article but I was wondering if anyone could elaborate.
(Both articles I read if anyone is curious)
_URL_1_
_URL_0_
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79hbrw/eli5_recent_experment_says_the_universe_shouldnt/ | {
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"Well, clearly those experiments are wrong.\n\nOr not *wrong,* exactly, but they're focused on such a specific theoretical area of physics that they can come up with postulates (\"the universe shouldn't exist\") that seem ridiculous in ordinary conversation.\n\nYou can breathe easy, though. I think the universe exists.",
"Antimatter is a polar opposite of matter. Everything is reversed. Regular protons are positive electrical charge. Anti-protons are negative charge. Anti electrons are positive charge. Anti neutrons are same electrical charge but ha e opposite magnetic momentum's.\n\nWhen a matter particle and antimatter particle collide, the annihilation reaction consumes both particles and emits energy equiv to the mass energy of both those two particles.\n\n\nSo the question is...as we observe the universe, we see trillions and quadrillion tons of matter....but almost no antimatter. We create antimatter in laboratory settings. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter were present during the formation of the universe, it would just annihilate each other and be nothing...so what in our universe prefers matter to antimatter.\n\n",
"The claim that the universe shouldn't exist is either a grave misunderstanding of natural sciences, or an abreviation. I strongly suspect that what the scientist meant with that is that the universe shouldn't exist according to our current model of it, and was just shortened to \"the universe shouldn't exist\". For scientists, it's clear what is meant, but others might easily misunderstand it.\n\nSo, he's saying that there's either something that they aren't accounting for, or that their current model is incorrect. That's nothing bad at all, natural science is all about finding models that describe our world, then finding flaws in it, then finding better models that \"fix\" those flaws, and repeat. A similar situation was when Einstein discovered relativity - the accepted model back then required some medium, so-called aether, for light to travel through. However, they were utterly unable to find any signs of such an aether. Einstein then thought of a new model that didn't require such an aether - that's scientific progress.",
"Hi, Antimatter physicist here.\n\ntl;dr, Experimenters looked for a small difference between a specific parameter of matter and antimatter, and found no difference. The universe still exists, so there must be a small difference somewhere else, and life goes on. \n\nFull text:\n\nThe Universe does exist, we just don't understand why there is an uneven amount of matter to antimatter in the observable universe. \n\nThe issue the scientist is referring to - the Baryon Asymmetry problem - is because when pure energy is converted into mass (such as in the first few seconds after the big bang) an equal amount of matter and antimatter should be produced, according to experiments we've carried out here on earth. If Baryon Symmetry was conserved, the universe would have produced exactly equal amounts of matter and antimatter, which would have annihilated causing the universe to die in a brilliant flash of light.\n\nHowever, looking at the ratio of energy in the form of the cosmic microwave background and observable mass in the universe, we can estimate that roughly 6 baryons for every 10 million baryon-antibaryon pairs produced survived. \n\nWe have some ideas of how this might happen, and might occur in the standard model under the \"sakharov conditions\" - one of which requires simultaneous charge and parity (CP) symmetry violations. \n\nCP symmetry has been shown experimentally to be violated by Kaons and B mesons, but not to the degree that explains the asymmetric nature of the observable universe. Something about matter must have violated CP symmetry in the early universe that caused it to be slightly more favourable to be formed over their corrisponding antiparticle.\n\nWe can probe CP and it's bigger, more rigorous brother CPT (charge, parity and time) symmetry by searching for minute differences between matter and their antimatter counterparts. This is the challenge several of the research groups (gbar, alpha, alpha-g, atlas etc) at the antiproton decelerator section of CERN have undertaken.\n\nBy searching for minute differences in the properties of matter and antimatter in a very precise manner, we can eliminate the propeties that couldn't possibly drive the CP violations (to the degree of accuracy we have observed) and look elsewhere. In the first link, they looked for any difference in a particular property (magnetic moment of the antiparticle) and found it to be equal to the corresponding particle.\n\nIn this case they move onto some other property, or they change their apparatus to measure the property to a higher degree of accuracy. Because there could be a wide contribution to Baryon Asymmetry from lots of small CP violations, studying these antiparticles to high accuracy is ideal."
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"https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/universe-shouldn-t-exist-cern-physicists-conclude"
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23dqhj | why does everyone hate tom cruise so much? | Seriously. I don't get it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23dqhj/eli5_why_does_everyone_hate_tom_cruise_so_much/ | {
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"Scientology and his tirades against psychiatry and mental health meds",
"I know he gets a lot of animosity for his public work on behalf of the Church of Scientology.\n\nThe Church of Scientology has an extraordinarily shady past, and relies heavily on an extremely aggressive PR campaign using celebrity members to present a \"good\" face and using a veritable army of lawyers to attempt to quash publications that paint them in a bad light. I won't go too far into that, because ELI5 isn't the place for a CoS rant, but that strikes me as the most likely reason.",
"I don't. Fucking love him in Top Gun and Tropic Thunder.",
"They don't. Not everyone hates Tom Cruise. In fact, most people could not care less what the guy does outside of his movies.\n\nIt is just that the bunch of 15 year old kids that call themselves the anti-Cruise or anti-Scientology group is really loud and always online.",
"We like Tom Cruise pre 1995ish before he became a scientology nut job. Days of Thunder, Top Gun, Interview with a Vampire and Mission Impossible all represent good Tom Cruise and Tropic Thunder was firmly in his nutjob days but we collectively give that a pass."
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3assr7 | what's happening when i literally crave sugar or salt? | When not hungry*
It feels like when I am thirsty and need to have it to reach homeostasis.
When I crave sugar I have a really strong urge to eat some sweet candy or fruit like a mandarin or watermelon, but not something high carb like ice cream or cake, which I only feel like for dessert. When I crave salt it's usually fries or some savory snack, or even miso soup? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3assr7/eli5whats_happening_when_i_literally_crave_sugar/ | {
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"Well, you basically answered your own question .. it's essentially an effort for your body to maintain a state of homeostasis. \n\nAssuming you are not a diabetic, your pancreas is constantly monitoring and controlling insulin and glucagon levels. (And if you are a diabetic, you must monitor and control your own blood sugar and insulin.) When your blood sugar drops below the normal range, your body recognizes this drop and \"craves\" glucose (or sugar).. or just feels hungry. Eating cake and ice cream is, in fact, not a good solution to raise the blood sugar because simple carbs cause a quick spike in the blood sugar and a subsequent fast bottom out causing a need to eat something else to again satisfy the hunger/craving. This is one reason why for people who are dieting, it is suggested to eliminate sugary foods and simple carbohydrates and replace them with complex carbohydrates. (Complex carbohydrates are digested/broken down and used differently in the body.) \n\nWith a bodies salt/sodium balance you must also mention fluid balance, as they go hand-in-hand. If you are drinking an excess amount of water, you may find that you are craving salt. With regard to diabetes - one symptom of diabetes is increased thirst - so if you are drinking a lot of fluids, you will then subsequently urinate a lot also. In the earlier stages of diabetes, you will probably lose a lot of the ingested sodium AND glucose particles (called PID - particle induced diuresis) via urination this way; however, in the later stages of diabetes, the kidneys will start to become involved and the symptoms will change ... (sorry, let's get off of the diabetic tangent, shall we?)\n\nIf you are sweating a lot (such as via exercise or because of high outdoor temps) you will find that your body loses fluid and sodium... and therefore they will both need to be replaced. You will most likely crave both. \n\nOur \"cravings\" are a result of hormonal regulation... e.g. thirst is controlled by a hormone called antidiuretic hormone or ADH. \n\nAnyway. Hope that helps answer your question. There are a lot of potential factors. Medications, diseases, and pregnancy can have an effect on our \"cravings.\"\n\nedit: corrections"
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d18yk7 | why does your nervous system tingle when your elbow hits something? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d18yk7/eli5_why_does_your_nervous_system_tingle_when/ | {
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"Your ulnar nerve can be struck against the bone when you hit something with your elbow. This impact can cause a transient tingling in the area that is inneverated by the nerve, which is the pinky finger side of your hand."
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2pgwzj | the current conflict over the arctic | I know that Russia, many Scandinavian countries and Canada are very pissed about the whole thing. But why? is there a substantial amount of oil there? is it all about trade-routes? And could it become a major issue(like a more active cold war to what i would assume would be a few subs firing pot shots at each other)?
And is it related to the methane plumes under the ice shelf? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pgwzj/eli5_the_current_conflict_over_the_arctic/ | {
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"The Arctic ice shelf is shedding its ice caps at a significant rate. Some people think that by around 2060 or even 2040 you will start to see ice-free summers in the Arctic area.\n\nWhat this means is that the natural resources of that area - oil, minerals, gas - are now going to become easily accessible. So of course everyone wants in on it. They're beginning to make their moves over it in preparation for the future. The US did some seabed mapping there, Russia planted a flag there and so on.\n\nNow, there's an agreement called the [UNCLOS](_URL_0_), which is supposed to be a 'central authority' of sorts. It's an agreement, so a country could go ahead and do what they want, but risk the ire of other countries. But to do it the 'proper' way, they need to go through UNCLOS by submitting their intentions to claim areas there.\n\nSo far the main players are Canada, Russia and Denmark. The US did not join UNCLOS, which may be a missed opportunity as it does have Alaska up in that area. Norway is not interested in that area. \n\nThere's also the 'hype' bit. The North Pole itself isn't anything special, but it does drum up public support and gives things a good media spin. \n\nIt is impossible to predict if it will lead to wars, but remember that wars are usually fought over ideologies or resources. Resources can keep a country going for a long time, so it's pretty important. So basically, if things are handled well, there will be a resolution with some noise. If they aren't handled well there may be off-and-on conflicts in the area.\n\nTerritorial waters tend to be a 'vaguely' recognized concept. For example, Chinese boats are frequently seen in Philippines waters and vice versa. There are always claims and disputes, and sometimes they lead to flashpoints and sometimes they just get forgotten for a while."
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ohbi0 | why is k2 (synthetic marijuana) bad for you? | What does it do to you on a molecular level that is different than marijuana? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ohbi0/why_is_k2_synthetic_marijuana_bad_for_you/ | {
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"It hasn't yet been determined to be bad for you. The danger lies in the novelty; research has not been done on the physical or neurological effects, and it simply hasn't been around long enough to know what might happen after long-term long term use. It, like everything fun, probably causes cancer, but no one's done definitive research on it yet. "
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23z50l | the matrix movies | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23z50l/eli5_the_matrix_movies/ | {
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"Robots became self aware and live in peace with humans for a while. Then humanity decides they're going to destroy all robots, so the robots that escaped made their own robot city in the middle of the desert and tried to coexist with humans. They asked to humans to be recognized as their own race. Humanity didn't want that, declared war, and destroyed the atmosphere because the robots ran on solar power.\n\nIn order to have continued existence, the robots enslave humanity and use their bodies as batteries for power grids so they could continue to have energy. The humans' minds are kept in a virtual reality so they don't know what's going on.\n\nNeo is Jesus and saves humanity from the evil robots.",
"Yeah I watched all Matrix parts countless times and never understood the \"The ne and Scion thing\". Was \"The One\" part of the machines plan and if yes was oracle just another robot? Did humans manage to make peace only because od Agent Smith anomaly?",
"One thing to think about; the machine, or more specificly the oracle, planned EVERYTHING. And it all went according to plan, for the first time (they tried many times).\n\nSo the humans darkened the sky, which did nothing to the machines but risked killing the humans. So the machines saves the humans by putting them inside a virtual world. They act as the battery (or, according to one behind the scenes theory, it was originally the CPU, because using humans as battery is stupid) for the machine, making both machines and humans survive. So you stupid humans looked upon it as slavery, and started to rebel. We needed to find a way of making peace. The architect had this idea about a chosen one, because the humans are easily swayed by one posing as a messiah. But the Architect lacked understanding of the human way of choice. And the oracle was created to learn from humans. She uses Trinity to make her fall in love with Neo, so that when Neo get the choice he does the right thing. He saves Trinity, Trinity sacrifices herself for him, and he is free to sacrifice himself for humanity. They surrender, and there is finally peace between human and machine. Which was all the machines wanted all along. It was the humans who insisted on keeping the fight alive.\n\nTl;dr: The machines are the good guys.",
"Ok, so I wrote out a detailed timeline a while ago. I've seen bits and pieces of the truth (as I understand it) in here but nothing that spells out the whole damn thing. I don't want to hide it behind a link, so I hope copy/paste is kosher...\n\n----------------\n\nKEY RESOURCE: [The scene with The Architect (Colonel Sanders + TV room + Mega-Thesarus)](_URL_1_)\n\n* Human/Machine war, machines use solar panels, humans trigger nuclear winter to frustrate solar-panel-using robots, humans lose anyway and get hooked up to a gigantic simulation to keep them happy while they're used as power cells or computing cores or whatever.\n\n* The Architect is the machine-intelligence responsible for making the simulation. He makes a paradise. People quickly figure out that they're in a simulation due to glitches, memory of the war, or whatever. They get bored / curious about the world beyond the simulation so they suicide by the millions to escape it. Joke's on them, since this kills them in the real world too, but it's enough of a problem that The Architect is asked to fix it.\n\n* He thinks \"fine, if they don't want heaven maybe they'll be satisfied with hell.\" The exact same thing happens: people figure out they are in a simulation and mass-suicide in a futile attempt to escape.\n\n* The Architect, frustrated, tries to put Agents into the simulation that will weed out the dissidents before they amass a following. It doesn't work because machine intelligences have a hard time finding and infiltrating human groups based around existential issues they don't identify with. The mass \"suicides\" continue.\n\n* The other machines are like \"Hey, Architect, you're a fabulous simulation maker but when it comes to humans you clearly don't have any idea what you're doing, so we're bringing in The Oracle, a program designed to understand humans, to help you out.\"\n\n* The Oracle realizes that the problem of identifying existentially-curious humans has already been solved. By humans. Even with Agents roaming around humans still manage to glob together into existentially-curious-clubs (ECCs) which serve as the ignition points for all the mass-suicide trouble. In fact, the Agents only encourage this behavior. The Oracle takes advantage of this by \"blessing\" one ECC with special powers: they get to play with mind-interface tech, hop in and out of the matrix, and do all the nifty kung-fu stuff. They get a home in Zion, ships with which to pluck individual humans out of the matrix, and an unspoken promise from the machines to more or less look the other way while they go about their business. This lets the \"blessed\" ECC rapidly absorb all other ECCs until you get Zion, a real-world metropolis for the existentially curious. When Zion gets too big the machines wipe everyone out and start over. Existentially curious people never achieve enough of a critical mass in the matrix to become a problem (since they leave for Zion) and they also never achieve enough of a critical mass in the real world to become a problem (since they get periodically slaughtered).\n\n* The Oracle's diabolical plan is almost flawless, but it needs a push to get started. The first person in the \"club\" has to know that Zion and the special powers in the matrix weren't \"earned\" (and therefore possibly just another mechanism of control). They would naturally and correctly suspect a trap. This leads to the idea of \"The One,\" a person specially chosen by The Oracle who is capable of lying to their followers and accepting that they're leading them to their doom in the best interests of the rest of humanity. This is why \"The One\" is so special: those requirements rule out almost everyone.\n\n* The Oracle finds such a person and sees the plan through. Five times. People that reject the matrix are herded into Zion none the wiser and systematically eliminated before they can become a threat.\n\n* The Oracle loses faith in the whole idea of the matrix. She thinks that humans and machines need to figure out how to coexist on more equal terms, and that doing so will create a brighter future for both societies. She's now hell-bent on tearing down the very thing she created. She can't do it openly or the other machines will simply replace her, so she comes up with a diabolical plan instead.\n\n* She needs to give the humans bargaining power against the machines. Enough to negotiate peace with the machines but not enough power to completely eliminate them. To achieve this end, she crafts a virus that will take over the matrix and then pivot to take over the machine world if left unchecked. The virus is Mr. Smith. She gives Neo the deactivation code (a cookie) to use as a poker chip when bargaining with the Deus Ex Machina (the spiky president-of-the-machines thing at the end).\n\n* Neo finally looks the gift horse in the mouth and confronts The Oracle ([\"You're not human! / It's hard to get more obvious than that.\"](_URL_2_)). She tells Neo that all he can do is have faith and trust her (or not). He probably takes this at face value, but if she were being blunt she could have said \"I've fooled smarter people than you five times in a row. If you think that your own logical facilities are powerful enough to vet my claims, you're a fool. Your cause is hopeless without me, so your only option is to hope that I'm being straight about wanting to help.\"\n\n* Mr. Smith absorbs \"The Oracle\" and gets a collection of manipulative pre-recorded messages for his trouble. They look kinda-sorta like prophecies because The Oracle *does* know how future events will play out, but that's only because she orchestrated them. The fact that Mr. Smith doesn't understand this until the end means that he certainly didn't assimilate the real Oracle program. But getting attacked by Mr. Smith might make her less suspicious to the other machines (\"Machine Police: OK ORACLE ADMIT IT YOU MADE MR SMTH! Oracle: Who me? No, I'm just another victim! He attacked me too!\")\n\n* Neo bargains with Mr. Spiky Machine President, using the Oracle's poker chip (the Mr. Smith Destruct Cookie) to arrange for humanity's freedom. Arguably, he doesn't understand that the cookie is the critical factor, and simply thinks that he's bargaining with his l33t kung-fu sk1llz (then again, maybe it's a combination of the two, since he also probably got those skills from The Oracle).\n\n* [The Architect congratulates The Oracle on a game well played.](_URL_0_) Doesn't that scene make more sense now?\n\nI don't know how much of this was obvious to other people, but based on the amount of bashing Matrix #2 and #3 get, I suspect I'm not the only one who completely missed the point the first time around. If you were one of those people, hopefully this will help you enjoy them more :)\n\n\nEDIT: daftmutt points out that The Merovingian has \"survived [Neo's] predecessors\" and is therefore not The One Mk. 5. Fair enough, that was speculation on my part and I'll retract it (EDIT3: I did retract it). This doesn't really affect the analysis: his role is that he knows what's up with all of \"The Ones\" and drops Neo hints. That's still clearly the case.\n\nEDIT2: louieanderson points out that The Oracle doesn't just represent faith, she also represents the philosophy of Spinoza (free will is the process of understanding your predetermined decisions). Therefore maybe Mr. Smith did get the real Oracle after all. I'm not so sure that follows because two facts indepently support the hypothesis that Mr. Smith didn't get her: her reappearance at the end and because Mr. Smith is her creation (or at least an inevitability she thoroughly predicted and exploited) and at least partially under her control. She wouldn't plan on getting perma-assimilated and letting Smith know of her grand plan would be counterproductive."
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kjahj | the current state of the 2012 election race | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kjahj/eli5_the_current_state_of_the_2012_election_race/ | {
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"The republicans haven't chosen a candidate yet. The primary/caucus season will start in early 2012. \n\nThe democrats will presumably nominate Obama/Biden again. \n\nWhat's your question?",
"As far as the Republican primary polls go:\n\nPerry (29.9%) is in the lead, despite being a complete idiot. This goes for most of the other candidates, too.\n\nRomney (19.4%) is in second place.\n\nPalin (11.3%) is in third place, despite not running.\n\nRon Paul (8.8%) is far back, because he has had a few reasonable ideas, and Republicans can't let a slip-up like that slide.\n\nMichele Bachmann (7.1%) is losing considerably. Most experts attribute this to the fact that she is a crazybitch.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n",
"Here are the straw poll results for this year (averaged together)\n\n\nFinish\tPotential candidate\tPercentage\n\n1\tRon Paul\t19.74%\n\n2\tMitt Romney\t14.27%\n\n3\tMichele Bachmann\t8.08%\n\n4\tHerman Cain\t7.82%\n\n5\tNewt Gingrich\t5.72%\n\n6\tTim Pawlenty\t5.36%\n\n7\tMike Huckabee\t5.02%\n\n8\tRick Perry\t4.77%\n\n9\tSarah Palin\t3.97%\n\n10\tMitch Daniels\t3.71%\n\n11\tThad McCotter\t3.07%\n\n12\tRick Santorum\t2.86%\n\n13\tDonald Trump\t2.43%\n\n14\tJon Huntsman, Jr.\t2.31%\n\n15\tChris Christie\t1.4%\n\n16\tGary Johnson\t0.88%\n\n17\tRudy Giuliani\t0.43%\n\n18\tJim DeMint\t0.34%\n\n19\tPaul Ryan\t0.27%\n\n20\tBuddy Roemer\t0.24%\n\n21\tHaley Barbour\t0.20%\n\n21\tMike Pence\t0.20%\n\n21\tTed Turner\t0.20%\n\n21\tJoe Wilson\t0.20%\n\n25\tJohn Thune\t0.13%\n\nJust so we're being fair, Rick Perry wasn't even in the race until recently and these are the straw pools since January.\n\n\nI'll leave my opinion out of this answer.\n\nEDIT: Sorry, forgot [source.](_URL_0_)",
"Oh, the U.S election race...",
"The republicans haven't chosen a candidate yet. The primary/caucus season will start in early 2012. \n\nThe democrats will presumably nominate Obama/Biden again. \n\nWhat's your question?",
"As far as the Republican primary polls go:\n\nPerry (29.9%) is in the lead, despite being a complete idiot. This goes for most of the other candidates, too.\n\nRomney (19.4%) is in second place.\n\nPalin (11.3%) is in third place, despite not running.\n\nRon Paul (8.8%) is far back, because he has had a few reasonable ideas, and Republicans can't let a slip-up like that slide.\n\nMichele Bachmann (7.1%) is losing considerably. Most experts attribute this to the fact that she is a crazybitch.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)\n",
"Here are the straw poll results for this year (averaged together)\n\n\nFinish\tPotential candidate\tPercentage\n\n1\tRon Paul\t19.74%\n\n2\tMitt Romney\t14.27%\n\n3\tMichele Bachmann\t8.08%\n\n4\tHerman Cain\t7.82%\n\n5\tNewt Gingrich\t5.72%\n\n6\tTim Pawlenty\t5.36%\n\n7\tMike Huckabee\t5.02%\n\n8\tRick Perry\t4.77%\n\n9\tSarah Palin\t3.97%\n\n10\tMitch Daniels\t3.71%\n\n11\tThad McCotter\t3.07%\n\n12\tRick Santorum\t2.86%\n\n13\tDonald Trump\t2.43%\n\n14\tJon Huntsman, Jr.\t2.31%\n\n15\tChris Christie\t1.4%\n\n16\tGary Johnson\t0.88%\n\n17\tRudy Giuliani\t0.43%\n\n18\tJim DeMint\t0.34%\n\n19\tPaul Ryan\t0.27%\n\n20\tBuddy Roemer\t0.24%\n\n21\tHaley Barbour\t0.20%\n\n21\tMike Pence\t0.20%\n\n21\tTed Turner\t0.20%\n\n21\tJoe Wilson\t0.20%\n\n25\tJohn Thune\t0.13%\n\nJust so we're being fair, Rick Perry wasn't even in the race until recently and these are the straw pools since January.\n\n\nI'll leave my opinion out of this answer.\n\nEDIT: Sorry, forgot [source.](_URL_0_)",
"Oh, the U.S election race..."
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3wfvez | why did the europeans find the united states, and build the foundation of the country, and not the middle easterners or the africans or the indians or etc.? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wfvez/eli5_why_did_the_europeans_find_the_united_states/ | {
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"The Native Americans found it first. Then the Vikings found it but didn't do much about it. The Western Europeans were different because they had recently developed much better ships. Anyone who had ships of this quality, and in such numbers, and a will to sail the remote ocean, would have found the Americas.",
"After the Ottman Empire blocked over-land trade between Europe and Asia, Europeans began searching for sea routes to Asia. During this age of Exploration, Colombus found America, and eventuallg the rest of Europe heard about it.",
"It's all due to Geography. It's no coincidence that out of all of the powerful European countries at the time, the ones that became the most influential in the new world were Spain, Britain, Portugal, and France. They were the closest geographically to the new world. The Africans had a similar distance to travel, but their level of technology with regards to water travel wasn't good enough to cross the Atlantic. The Chinese and the Japanese had good levels of technology, but the Pacific Ocean a lot larger and harder to cross than the Atlantic. So in short, why did Europeans build the foundation of the United States: because it was easier for them to make it there. "
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vxrl2 | why peanuts have a very high fat content, yet are widely considered 'good for you' | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/vxrl2/eli5_why_peanuts_have_a_very_high_fat_content_yet/ | {
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"Fat isn't bad. We need to unlearn that bit of mid-90's wisdom. Natural fats, in moderation, are very good for you. Peanuts in particular contain many fats that are considered good for cardiovascular health.\n\nSo what is about fats? Eating too many calories are bad, and fat has a lot of calories. Eating too much fat is bad. Eating man-made trans-fats is bad. As long as you moderate everything, you'll be doing great. That's true of most foods. Carbs are good for you, but too many are bad. Protein is good for you, but too much is bad. "
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5yeha7 | if silicon is neither a conductor nor an insulator, how do you get it to behave like one or the other? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yeha7/eli5_if_silicon_is_neither_a_conductor_nor_an/ | {
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"Silicon is made into an insulator by oxidizing it.\n\nIt becomes more conductive when doped with very small amounts of other elements. Silicon has four valence electrons in the outer shell. If you mix in a little boron or aluminum which have three valence electrons, you create an P-type semiconductor. Conversely, an element like phosphorus or arsenic which have five valence electrons can make an N-type semiconductor. ",
"I think a better question is how can something neither conduct nor insulate?"
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4p893b | if your bladder is able to hold approximately 375ml, but you drink 1 liter of water - where does the other 625ml go, if it technically wouldn't fit in your bladder? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4p893b/eli5if_your_bladder_is_able_to_hold_approximately/ | {
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"The water you drink is absorbed by the large intestine and circulates through the bloodstream. It's gradually placed into the bladder over time with other waste products filtered from your blood by your kidneys.",
"The body slowly absorbs the water through your intestines, so it's steadily released into the bloodstream. Additionally, a good amount of it stays in your intestines and comes out with your poop. Lastly, you sweat out a good portion of the water throughout the day. It may not seem like much, but your skin stays moist, all the while water is evaporating through your skin. \n\n",
"What you are asking about is called [Fluid Balance](_URL_0_) and is an aspect of homeostasis in all living things. Urination is only one part of our osmoregulation, other factors include defecating, sweating, and salivating. \n\nAt any given time your body maintains a healthy amount of water and excess is sent to the bladder. When the bladder is full you need to urinate. When the body is low on water you need to drink. The frequency and amount of both are dictated by a number of factors which result in the feelings 'thirsty' and 'gotta pee'. This transfer of water is handled by the blood stream which circulates through the various organs involved."
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ej08zh | how do game developers build games around next gen consoles without knowing the software/hardware of the systems | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ej08zh/eli5_how_do_game_developers_build_games_around/ | {
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"They do. Hardware developers release next gen specs and even developer kits to software developers well before commercial release.",
"They know well, well in advance what they'll be working with. Development kits have been in the hands of developers, for the ps5 at least, for a couple of years now.",
"Most games are developed so that the game doesn't care what console it's going to be played on. Then the studio will use a SDK, System Development Kits, for a console to make the game run on the console they want it to work on.\n\nFor todays and future Xbox and Playstations they usually develop like they were making a game for PC, because the hardware is very similar, just that the consoles are very specific while PC is very undetermined.\n\nIt is also very common to use a game engine, an already created framework to create a game on, like Unity, that in itself provides tools and assistance to make a game run on different consoles.\n\nCertain, specific studios also get information beforehand what the hardware, or at least performance, of the new consoles are going to be and can create a game accordingly. They have to sign a contract that says that if they tell anyone else this information they're going to be in big trouble.",
"How do you know that the game developer that makes the game that will be available at release does not know the specification of the system? The release specification and even prototype hardware to the developer before they are revealed to the public.\n\nThere are leaked photos of PS5 development kits from developers so they do not just know the specification but even have running hardware today.\n\nEven if you do not have the hardware you can have a good idea of how they will work just from the specification. The rumors of a PS5, for example, is a 8 core AMD 3 rd gen Ryzen CPU with an AMD Navi GPU. Both of those products exist on the PC market today. The Navi GPU is what is used in the Radeon RX 5000 series GPU. \n\nSo you can build a gaming PC with quite a similar specification of what a PS5 will have today. So if you have code that is written to be portable you can write stuff that works on PC today it can work quite similar on the PS5 when it is released."
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38oiwi | why/how does smoking affect your blood-sugar levels? | I know smoking is terrible for you. I just don't understand how someone's blood-sugar can drop so rapidly from it... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38oiwi/eli5whyhow_does_smoking_affect_your_bloodsugar/ | {
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"Could this be why I feel sick sometimes when I smoke? My blood sugar is already fucked. "
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38qgh9 | why was miami considered so cool in the 80's, and what happened to cause it to lose that status? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38qgh9/eli5_why_was_miami_considered_so_cool_in_the_80s/ | {
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"There was an insane amount of money flooding Miami due to cocaine. Many drug busts later and it is what it is today. Check out the movie Cocaine Cowboys."
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447zxb | who really foots the bill when a corporation goes bankrupt? the unpaid bills? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/447zxb/eli5_who_really_foots_the_bill_when_a_corporation/ | {
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"Whoever those bills are owed to, as the corporation does not have to pay them, so the debtors are shit outta luck on recouping that money. ",
"The **meaning** of bankruptcy is that the business either won't pay its whole debt or won't pay it in time. If you're a creditor, then you can experience one or more of the following:\n\n1. You get paid later than you were supposed to;\n2. You get paid less than the whole amount you were owed;\n3. You don't get paid at all.\n\nIt all depends on the details of the loans and the bankruptcy."
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2fjs4l | how does costco afford their high minimum wage? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2fjs4l/eli5_how_does_costco_afford_their_high_minimum/ | {
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"The subscription fees are essentially free money since they don't pay for anything they can use it to pay wages and someone decided to knife the competition and put it towards their most important customer:their employees",
"Many, many big box stores can afford to pay their employees more. Look at Walmart, they have huge profit margins, yet they're known for underpaying their employees. Most companies prefer to make as much money as possible at the lowest cost possible. Why pay employees more for doing the same job? \n\nCostco, on the other hand, values their employees and knows that a well paid worker is a happy one.\n\nEdit: goddamn I get it. Profit margin is the wrong thing. \"Profits\" would have been better wording. You can all chill the fuck out now ",
"Low turnaround, subscription fees bringing in a guaranteed amount of money each year, and basically treating it like a skilled job instead of one focused on turnover. ",
"The wages also help to promote their place in the community, so more people will feel better about shopping there (and not consider it low class). Walmart runs OK for a few years, but the backlash comes from the fact that many of their employees are on government assistance. The people that work there are part of the community, and while not rich, can at least afford to live a middle class life there.",
"Costco does a lot of things different from typical retail stores that balance the cost of paying higher wages.\n\n- as others mentioned membership fees, big income with little overhead.\n\n- Merchandising, when you go to a Costco its just a simple warehouse with concrete floors and steel shelves with pallets on them. they save huge amounts of money by not having fancy displays and other marketing materials. Additionally shopping directly off pallets saves the labor of restocking or constantly reorganizing in order to look presentable.\n\n- Buying, Costco buyers are aggressive and get great deals. Because of the volume that Costco buys it has a lot of buying power. Better prices bring in more members which goes back to the first point.\n\nSOURCE: I'm a Costco Employee",
"The Walton family makes up 40% of the Forbes [\"Ten Richest People in America\"] (_URL_0_) list. Wal-mart is responsible for 4 of the 10 wealthiest people, in one of the wealthiest nations the world has ever known. They could pay more, they choose not to. ",
"Something i haven't seen mentioned is retention. Many Costco stay for a long time, which lowers saves money because resources don't have to be used constantly training new employees. Also the longer an employee remains the greater their domain knowledge, which boosts productivity, and this justifies the higher wage. On the other hand the minimum wage positions at Walmart have a lot of attrition which requires constant training and yields employees with little knowledge and bad productivity. ",
"Costco also carries much les in the way of products a well, and everything is stocked by the pallet. So where wal-mart has lots people pushing out small carts with a dozen products on it to restock shelves. Costco has a dozen or so people whipping around on forklifts through the night, and a somewhat smaller staff during the day.",
"Costco is one of those big companies that believes that paying a high wage leads to higher long term profits, and I commend them for it. Think they're doing it out of the goodness of their heart? Nope.",
"None of these answers are remotely close. Costco wants to make as much money as they can, like everyone else. Turnover is very expensive. For low skilled jobs, turnover is common. There are two ways to combat this cost. The first way is to document the process and create a method so people off the street can be hired and have a short learning curve. People come, people go, and the store runs with very little hiccup. Theyve invested in a system to minimize the cost of high turnover. The other alternative is to directly lower turnover. People may be irrational individually, but you can predict the average of a group. If you increase the wages significantly, you'll decrease turnover. The silver lining to doing this is, well, free marketing. People talk about how great costco is to it's employees. Free word of mouth marketing. I'm in full support of costco, but let's not pretend they aren't in it to make money. They are.",
"It's not called minimum wage... ",
"Difference in business model. Basically Costco sells a lot of just a few items, compared to Walmart, which has to sell some of everything. As a result, Costco has a lot fewer employees than Walmart -- half as many per square foot of store. Since Costco's model requires so few employees, they have much higher labor productivity per employee, and therefore pay more.\n\n[Here's an article.](_URL_0_)",
"By not making ALL of the Walton Family to the FORBES list every year...",
"I read that the CEO affords himself no more than $500k yearly salary to be able to give more to his employees.",
"For some unknown reason, they charge people just to enter the store.\n\nAnd people seem perfectly okay with that.",
"A. i'd like to work for CostCo B. And maybe this has been mentioned, but I've read articles that say senior staff, ceo's, etc. take home reasonable salaries. Not that they work cheap, by any stretch of the imagination - but they're not making over inflated, million dollar + yearly incomes for being desk jockeys. ",
"What if I told you nearly every company could pay their workers a decent wage, but unfortunately the people on top don't want to be *less* rich. ",
"Reddit likes to talk about how Costco is so much more generous than Walmart with their workers and Walmart could easily pay more, but this article, [\"Why Can't Walmart Be More Like Costco\"](_URL_0_) by Megan McArdle, explains how Costco affords its high wages so easily. You should read the whole thing to get a fuller understanding, but here is the key point:\n\n > Costco has a more highly paid labor force--but that labor force also brings in a lot more money. Costco's labor force, paid $19 an hour, brings in three times as much revenue as a Walmart workforce paid somewhere between 50-60% of that. (There's a bit of messiness to all these calculations, because of course both firms have employees who don't work in stores--but that's the majority of their workforce, so I'm going to assume that the differences come out in the wash.)\n\n > This is not because Costco treats its workers better, and therefore gets fantastic productivity out of them, though this is what you would think if you listened to very sincere union activists on NPR. Rather, it's because their business model is inherently higher-productivity. A typical Costco store has around 4,000 SKUs, most of which are stacked on pallets so that you can be your own stockboy. A Walmart has 140,000 SKUs, which have to be tediously sorted, replaced on shelves, reordered, delivered, and so forth. People tend to radically underestimate the costs imposed by complexity, because the management problems do not simply add up; they multiply. \n\nAlmost everything stems from the cost of maintaining very few total items on offer. When you think about \"Costco workers\" or \"Walmart workers\", you are probably thinking of cashiers, but that is not the bulk of either of their workforce. The cashiers probably have a relatively constant productivity vs the number of SKUs but that is not the case for stockboys, forklift operators, etc. Because of the kind of customers each serves, Costco can maintain a much lower cost per item sold.",
"_URL_0_\n\nEveryone who is bashing Wal-Mart should read that.",
"what is COSTCO's min. wage? also high min. wage sounds like an oxymoron.",
"Because they're a national chain who makes a lot of money. Most nation chains are able to pay above minimum wage but they don't bc they just don't care ab their employees",
"I worked there for 10 years. The secret is that we never had enough employees to do the job well. Each morning the Boss would ask how many people could we cut. The only time when we have enough employees were the days before the big Boss would come visit. (A lot of stuff gets hidden that day) ",
"Upping the minimum wage by a few dollars, makes a huge positive difference in employee satisfaction while having virtually no negative effect on profitability of a well run company. The myth that higher minimum wage is a job killer, is bullshit formulated in the deep sphincter of a greedy executive.",
"CostCo breaks even on sales vs operating costs, and as a company rule they only charge a 13-15% markup. Their core demographic is suburban $100k+ earners, so they carry more expensive products, but sell them with very little (by rest of retail industry standards) markup. The volume of higher priced goods supports the ability to pay the wages.\n\nAll membership fees are profit, and the only source of it.\n\nIngenious business model, however only effective if it can capitalize on higher priced goods, thus earning more $ per foot of retail space at a lower margin. The available customer base for this type of model is relatively small compared to the general population.",
"Many corporations actually *could* afford to offer a high minimum wage, they just *choose* not to.",
"They also still sell those awesome huge hotdogs and a soda for cheap.\n\nThat place rules.",
"If they're following the law, they have a duty not to deprive the shareholders of profit or advantage. As such, they must calculate that the wages they set maximize long term value.\n\nThe high wages generate good publicity and high retention, and prevent problems from organized labor. They also make employees work harder and better: Costco employees are highly incentivized to keep their job, because it pays above the market rate for their skills (if they get fired they will have difficulty finding a job that pays nearly as much). They don't steal (translates to a very low shrinkage rate), they aren't rude (translates to a high customer satisfaction rate), and they don't loaf or slack (translates to fewer employees needed).\n\nFor employees with at least a year's tenure, Costco's turnover rate is only about 6% (that includes firings and employees who quit). That's extremely low for their industry.",
"I've worked for Costco for the last 22 years. Worked in tires, membership, photo, sales, stockting, assisting, cashiering and returns. I like the fact I don't take my work home with me make $23 an hour plus every Sunday is time and a half for everyone regaurdless of the hours you put in. I don't worry about numbers or sales because it's not my job to do so. Everyone knows their part in the company as a whole does what their told, gets done and repeat. I consider myself lucky to be part of this. While most companies try and figure how to get ahead, we figure how to keep going with the same gameplan and have opened numerous locations worldwide, most recently in Spain. Every person in the workforce today, no matter the company, just wants to be treated fairly and paid fair. Its why we live. To provide not only for ourselves but for others who depend on us.",
"All American large corporations can afford to pay high wages. Many choose not to so the ones at the top take home all the money. It is called greed. "
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"http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2014/09/01/we-cant-reduce-inequality-by-forcing-walmart-to-pay-like-costco/"
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6o2wb1 | is there any place on earth (besides antarctica) that no country owns or lays claim to? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6o2wb1/eli5_is_there_any_place_on_earth_besides/ | {
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"You can leave off Antarctica; even though a few countries have agreed to divide it up amongst them, other countries have claimed parts for themselves that overlap. Notably, China, Russia and the USA have no official claim in the original treaty, but all three tend to use it however they want.\n\nYou'll most likely find that places on earth have overlapping claims more than that there are areas nobody lays claim to.\n\nThat said, I don't believe anyone has laid claim to the Mariana Trench, for example. Most waters are considered \"international\" beyond a set distance from land (that changes from place to place). Sovereignty over airspace and below-ground locations also is variable.",
"There is no established land mass that's unclaimed. Lots of land area are double claimed. \n\nOf course new islands can occasionally pop up due to volcanic activity. Maybe you can find one in middle of nowhere more than 200 miles from any other established country.",
"There is an 800 sq. mile, trapezoid shaped piece of land between Egypt and Sudan that is not claimed by any nation. The only other unclaimed land (by humans) is in Antarctica or in space."
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6igmif | if urine is sterile, would it be safe to bathe in? | If so, would it be better to bathe in urine rather than tap water? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6igmif/eli5_if_urine_is_sterile_would_it_be_safe_to/ | {
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"Urine isn't sterile. All urine has some level of bacteria. Plus, once it hits the urethra, it's going to get even more bacteria, even if it was sterile in the bladder.",
" > If so, would it be better to bathe in urine rather than tap water?\n\nNo, not better than water. First off, urine probably is not sterile, and it won't be once it is outside regardless, as the environment would contaminate it. Even if your urine bathwater were sterile, which, again, it very likely is not, the moment you jump in it, it's not going to 'sterilize' you, you're just going to un-sterilize it. \n\nPlus now you're covered in urine, which is mostly water that also stinks. \n\nIt wouldn't be likely to kill you of course, unless it contained some nasty pathogens. \n\n"
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2g2czm | why are africans (specifically kenyans & ethiopians) so much faster than everyone else? | I'm just curious. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g2czm/eli5_why_are_africans_specifically_kenyans/ | {
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"I think you're conflating marathon wins with speed. Those nations produce a lot of marathon winners because their people have to cross distances on foot and because of the elevation, which makes their cardiovascular abilities better. ",
"A big part of this is tradition. When a nation begins to excel at something, that nation usually invests more time, money, and effort into it. Look at America and Swimming or Britain in Cycling.\nChildren growing up in Kenya are more likely to hear about famous Kenyan runners, more likely to take the sport up, more likely to be able to make use of the excellent trainers and facilities in place *because* of that tradition, and therefore more likely to become good runners.\n\nIts self fulfilling essentially.",
"History of subsistence hunting, genetic predisposition for those that excel at that to have offspring that continue to produce successful offspring that refine the traits that make them successful at that, long term exposure as a group of people to higher altitudes. Kenyans and Ethiopians aren't necessarily faster than everyone across every discipline of running. You don't see many Kenyan and Ethiopian sprinters at the world stage level. Not to mention the human disposition to being successful at long distance running. \n\nAs for sprinting, it has to do with a higher center of gravity, higher calf muscle insertion (also the reason black guys have a harder time building mass on their calves). Fast twitch/slow twitch is largely environmental, as well as being partly genetic. You can build those groups of muscle independently of each other, regardless of genetics. \n\nIt's a give and take. You don't see a lot of white guys in the world 100m or 200m finals, and you don't see a lot of black guys in the finals for Worlds Strongest Man competitions. Different groups of people are more successful at different things. Although it's worth mentioning that there are all different groups of people, even at the world competition level for sprinting. Hell, even China had a man on the track. \n\nA lot of it is also cultural. Success breeds funding which breeds more success. ",
"This is why.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nReally interesting TED talk overall.",
"There's a Radiolab podcast about this.\n\nThey have a high endurance for pain. Also, height.",
"A real answer...\n\n\"Two separate, European-led studies in a small region in western Kenya, which produces most of the race-winners, found that young men there could, with only a few months training, reliably outperform some of the West's best professional runners. In other words, they appeared to have a physical advantage that is common to their community, making it probably genetic. The studies found significant differences in body mass index and bone structure between the Western pros and the Kenyan amateurs who had bested them. The studied Kenyans had less mass for their height, longer legs, shorter torsos, and more slender limbs.\"\n\n\nSource: _URL_0_\n",
"I Googled \"why are kenyans such good runners\" and the first page has many entries that explain this in great detail.",
"Many factors at play:\n\n* They live in the perfect climate for running training (high altitude, dry, no pollens, perfectly mild running temps)\n\n* They are extremely motivated as it is a great way to escape poverty\n\n* Many of them grow up fit and run/walk long distances to school from childhood\n\n* Culture of excellence, distance running is a favorite sport in some areas whereas in America most potentially great athletes would rather play other sports\n\n* Genetics",
"It should be noted that Africa has the highest genetic diversity of humans on the planet. This is a result of humans first emerging from African grasslands. ",
"For some of them it's their training. Right over the boarder of kenya is Mt. kilimanjaro. It's a popular place for them to train. Go to the high altitudes and then run a marathon every couple of days for a few months. Your body compensates for lower oxygen by making more red blood cells. They then go strait from there to somewhere like boston, sea level, and their blood can just carry more oxygen. That burn you feel from running is lactic acid building up in your muscles. Lactic acid forms from glucose not being fully broken down because of lack of oxygen in the muscle. So more oxygen = less lactic acid = less burning and discomfort while running. I'm not saying this is their only advantage but it sure does help.",
"Good answers, but it may be a little more [gruesome](_URL_0_) than that.",
"From Malcom Gladwell's article *Man and Superman*: \n > A runner needs not just to be skinny but—more specifically—to have skinny calves and ankles, because every extra pound carried on your extremities costs more than a pound carried on your torso. That’s why shaving even a few ounces off a pair of running shoes can have a significant effect. Runners from the Kalenjin tribe, in Kenya—where the majority of the country’s best runners come from—turn out to be skinny in exactly this way. Epstein cites a study comparing Kalenjins with Danes; the Kalenjins were shorter and had longer legs, and their lower legs were nearly a pound lighter. That translates to eight per cent less energy consumed per kilometre. (For evidence of the peculiar Kalenjin lower leg, look up pictures of the great Kenyan miler Asbel Kiprop, a tall and elegant man who runs on what appear to be two ebony-colored pencils.) According to Epstein, there’s an evolutionary explanation for all this: hot and dry environments favor very thin, long-limbed frames, which are easy to cool, just as cold climates favor thick, squat bodies, which are better at conserving heat. \n_URL_0_",
"They have high levels of type 1 muscle fibers. These fibers are intensely resistant to fatigue and allow a higher steady state threshold (they can run faster for their 'pace' and still use oxygen for energy production to keep energy production flowing.) ",
"There's not much that's natural about it - training for long-distance running is an extremely popular sport in Kenya and Ethiopia, and participation rates are high. They have good trainers, a good national program, and good incentives to win prize money to take home.\n\nCompare their performance [to ultra-marathon runners](_URL_0_), and africans pretty much vanish from the rankings. All the top competitors in those are from places like Greece, Russia, the UK, and Japan, yet we don't go on about how those groups are \"faster than everyone else\". \n"
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4exa7d | why is it racist to say "i'm not attracted to x ethnicity"? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4exa7d/eli5_why_is_it_racist_to_say_im_not_attracted_to/ | {
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"I wouldn't consider that racist. The word does come loaded with a fair amount of baggage and misunderstanding, though. ",
"Personally I don't think it is or should be. If I'm a dude who's attracted to other dudes is that sexist? Attraction is subjective, the problem is people who put their nose in my goddamn bidness.",
"It isn't but sjws are so quick to be offended for disadvantaged people that it's very easy to cry racism and walk away feeling better about themselves not realizing that they aren't doing anything other than stroking their own egos. \n\nNot one of them would try and do anything to actually address a problem. "
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ut1cm | alan alda sponsored flame challenge: explaining science to an 11-year-old. | Alan Alda gave a [great interview on The Colbert Show.](_URL_1_) In it, he mentioned he was sponsoring a competition to see who could best describe a flame to kids.
The winner was recently announced, and I think this subreddit will really enjoy [the winnner's submission.](_URL_2_)
The contest details and additional entries can be found at
_URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ut1cm/alan_alda_sponsored_flame_challenge_explaining/ | {
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"Just as I started rewatching M.A.S.H!"
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47hyoa | what happens to the stitches after a stitched wound heals up? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47hyoa/eli5_what_happens_to_the_stitches_after_a/ | {
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"If there internal stitches they can be self dissolving where in a few weeks your body absorbs them. Or in the case of external stitches snipped out with scissors. You can remove your own but the doctor usually wants to check on the healing/look for infection. ",
"Physiologist here, who has performed, literally, thousands of animal surgeries in his research career (including large animal surgeries) and who has been trained in microsurgical techniques with neurosurgery residents during my training.\n\nBroadly speaking, all suture materials are classified as either \"absorbable\" or \"non-absorbable\".\n\nNon-absorbable sutures are made from materials that do not break down or dissolve easily in the body. Examples include silk, various polymers (polypropylene, polyester, nylon), and stainless steel wires (which are used to close bone cuts of the skull and sternum, for example). I've operated on animals (and have observed human surgeries) where an animal/patient was re-operated on years after an initial surgery and these sutures were still present in the body.\n\nAbsorbable sutures are made from either natural (catgut) or man-made materials (polyglycolic acid, polylactic acid, polydioxanone, caprolactone) that break down in the body. These days, most absorbable sutures are made from man-made polymers. Absorbable sutures break down in the body by two major mechanisms, hydrolysis (the polymer undergoes a chemical reaction with water that breaks the polymer chain) and proteolysis (the polymer chain is broken by enzymes in the body that cut peptide (protein) chains).\n\nIn a typical surgery, tissue is closed (sutured) in layers. Absorbable sutures are frequently used to close inner layers and non-absorbable sutures are generally used to close the outermost layer (skin, the sutures you see after a surgery). The inner absorbable sutures hold the tissue layers together so that normal wound healing can occur and provide mechanical strength to prevent the wound from opening (dehiscence). Over time (days to weeks, depending on the size and material of the suture) these sutures are broken down into tiny fragments (by hydrolysis or proteolysis) and are phagocytosed (eaten) by white blood cells. \n\nThe surgeon, of course, removes the non-absorbable sutures holding the skin closed after an appropriate period of time.\n\nIn general, there are many hundreds of different sutures used in modern surgery that differ from one another by the material used to make the suture, the size (diameter) of the suture, the construction of the suture (i.e. a suture formed by a \"braid\" of the material versus a single filament of the material), the length of the pre-packaged suture, and the size/shape of the attached needle (and there are many different needle configurations used).\n"
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38bfny | what are actually the good and bad "vibes" we get from people? | With strangers, friends, and even family, sometimes we can sense someone having "good vibes" or bad vibes" - what causes these "vibes" to emanate from people? And maybe more importantly, how do we make sure we give off the right "vibes?" | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38bfny/eli5_what_are_actually_the_good_and_bad_vibes_we/ | {
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"There are so many subtle (hard to spot and even harder to consciously understand) cues that we give off when communicating with someone. Body language, for example - some professions (law enforcement comes to mind) are trained to spot tiny changes in posture or barely noticeable eye movements that indicate when a person is MORE LIKELY telling a lie or a truth. Our minds are wired to pick up on these subtleties and help us judge individuals or situations that might be dangerous. It's not always obvious to us, but if we're lucky, our mind gets a general \"feel\" for someone. \n\nAs for giving off the right vibe? I think if anyone could control the vibe they give off that they could be a great liar! Don't try to sway what people think of you, just be as honest as you can (with yourself and others) about whatever you say and do.\n\nEdit grammar"
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9zubbg | how does the nasa space station not float away in space? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9zubbg/eli5_how_does_the_nasa_space_station_not_float/ | {
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"Gravity. It's only about 200 miles from Earth, and therefore is pulled on very hard by our gravity. Same reason the Moon stays around.",
"The space station requires a force to prevent it from flying away into space. This force is the gravitational pull of the Earth.",
"It's how orbit works.\n\nGravity pulls it in to Earth, and centrifugal force pulls it out. If it orbited too fast, it would fling away like a kid on a merry-go-round. If it orbited too slowly, it would curve in and fall to the ground, like a cannonball shot out of a cannon would eventually hit the ground.\n\nIn fact, the Moon is orbiting *slightly* too fast, and is getting about an inch further away every year. Unnoticeably small, but it'll add up in a billion years or so\n\nThe ISS has thrusters that let it precisely control it's speed",
"It’s traveling in a circle really fast. 17,500 miles per hour. It’s also being pulled down by gravity towards the planet. The speed that it is traveling sideways is the speed needed to keep “falling” without hitting anything. That is what is referred to as “orbital velocity.” That’s fast enough to make a circle around the earth every 90 minutes."
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2dwnk9 | tensors | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2dwnk9/eli5tensors/ | {
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"These things gave me some trouble until I grasped one simple fact: a tensor is just a list of things. It's a fairly generic object. For example, a tensor could contain a list of material properties. What's nice about them is they can be used to condense how an equation is written. It's really useful shorthand particularly when using tensor algebra. But there's nothing a tensor does that you couldn't have done long hand.",
"Not really ELI5, but this is a great introduction to tensors:\n\n[Kolecki, Joseph C. An introduction to tensors for students of physics and engineering. National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Glenn Research Center, 2002.](_URL_0_)",
"These answers aren't really \"like you are 5\" so here goes. A tensor is simply a way of mathematically representing physical information, generally at a point in space.\n\nA few examples:\n\nSay you want to represent information regarding temperature. You just need a single number ( a scalar or a 0th order tensor).\n\nNow say you want to represent fluid velocity in a flow. You need 3 numbers to represent the components of velocity in the three orthogonal (perpendicular) directions. We arrange these numbers in a row and call it a vector or 1st order tensor.\n\nWhat about a stress field. Well stress doesn't really exist at a point, it exists on a volume, but we can make that volume small enough that we consider it to be a point. For simplicity we assume it is a cube, to let us take advantage of orthoganality. Well, on each of the 6 faces, stress can act in the 3 directions, so you need 18 numbers. However, it turns out that those numbers come in pairs, so you only need 9 numbers, which can be conveniently arranged into a 3x3 matrix called a 2nd order tensor. This is done because if you name the columns \"x\", \"y\", and \"z\", and do the same for the rows, then the xy element in the matrix is the component of stress acting on the x face in the y direction.\n\nYou can have any order tensor you want; however in mechanics anything greater than 2nd order starts to lose meaning. In physics however, tensors can get big. Tensors are used because you can perform tensor math operations on them to quickly perform otherwise very time consuming algebra. Tensor math is just fancy ways to add and multiply the elements together in meaningful ways. \n\nOther people have been referring to \"transformation\" you can apply to tensors. This is why we use tensors, not what they are. This is referring the fact that tensors are generally representing information that is associated with particular directions, so not only is the value of the elements important, but we also understand the directional association of those elements. So if you want to know the portion in only a certain direction, or what the values are if you change the reference frame (for example rectangular to polar), you can create a transformation matrix and multiply the tensor by it, and get the solution. This is the reason we use tensors - you eliminate using a bunch of nasty formulas and doing each one for each direction and instead do a single matrix operation.\n",
"TIL: It's impossible to ELI5 tensors. "
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2blfea | just how bad are the potential effects of more and more antibiotic resistant bacteria? would it cause a global crisis or just be an inconvenience? how long are we looking at before it does become critical? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2blfea/eli5_just_how_bad_are_the_potential_effects_of/ | {
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"The criticality of anti-biotic resistant bacteria isn't guaranteed. If the world tones down on its anti-biotic use, primarily by cutting down on beef or reducing cow density in farms, the growing resistance rate can be curbed",
"There is no way to tell. Right now, if you get a bacterial infection, we can usually treat it by using antibiotics to kill it. If a bacterial infection evolves to the point where our strongest antibiotics don't kill it, then it will be like we don't have any medication at all. This can mean a minor inconvenience, or it cause a global crisis. In the 1300s, bubonic plague, a bacterial infection, killed 30-60 percent of the population of Europe.\n\nThat being said, modern societies understand the link between improper hygiene and bacterial infection. As long as we keep washing our hands (which doesn't kill bacteria, but simply removes it) and properly cook our food (bacteria can't become resistant to boiling) then we should stand a far better chance of survival, even without effective antibiotics. Developing countries might get hit pretty hard though.",
"Antibiotic resistance is bad. The technical name for flesh-eating bacteria is methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA). Hospitals started calling it that because they wanted staff to immediately be aware that treatment with vancomycin (pretty much the last antibacterial option) was warranted. \n\nExtensively-drug resistant T.B. is another one that gives doctors nightmares. Some of these patients have to be treated with chemotherapy. If this strain becomes widespread in the population, we'll be back to square one with this disease. \n\nBut one of the most important things people don't realize with antibiotics is that we depend on the bacteria in our gut (our microbiome) for good health. When we take an antibiotic, or eat animals that have had antibiotics fed to them, we are killing good bacteria that we need. It's not easy to replace these once they're dead - yogurt only contains a handful of bacterial strains and most of the ones we really need don't grow easily outside the body. One of the hot theories right now (with quite a bit of evidence supporting it) is that the huge rise in autoimmune disorders we're seeing, including diabetes, food allergies, Crohn's disease, and even obesity, are probably a result of us killing off this helpful bacteria with antibiotics in our food and environment.",
" > ELI5: Just how bad are the potential effects of more and more antibiotic resistant bacteria? \n\nIt would mean diseases that are currently treatable with antibiotics will become untreatable. This ranges from the bad to extremely bad. Things like childhood ear infections which are essentially routinely treated with antibiotics, or infected cuts would become untreatable. Now we know quite a lot about how to to deal with some injuries and do a shitty job of it because we have the antibiotic crutch. But the very serious side is things like antibiotics given to prevent disease say during/after surgery. Well that wouldn't work. \n\nBut where is it a problem already might be worth considering. Staph and strep both have drug resistant if not drug immune forms. Mortality rates have jumped from single digits in the early 90's to ~40% of people infected with the drug resistant strain. \n\nClostridium difficile (C. Difficile in the media) is a diarrhoea causing bacteria commonly found in hospitals. It kills about 14000 americans a year already, and it's sometimes treatable.\n\nThe list goes on, but in the absolute worst case: no new antibiotics and antibiotics becoming drug resistant and we could easily be looking at mortality rates for infections to go from single digit percentages, killing mostly children and the very old to 30 or 40% mortality rates and doing serious harm (amputations, disfigurement chronic pain, etc. ) to everyone else. \n\n > Would it cause a global crisis or just be an inconvenience? \n\nCrisis is subjective. Humanity will survive either way, and we certainly survived before antibiotics (which have only really been around since 1943). But we would be looking at significantly higher mortality rates from injuries and casual infections. It would certainly be very serious.\n\n > How long are we looking at before it does become critical?\n\nThe first drug resistant bacteria emerged in 1947, though new antibiotics dealt with that. \n\nI would say it became critical around 15 years ago. Since then people have continued to not follow advice and given antibiotics routinely (off the shelf without prescription) to livestock, and people have continued to try and 'save some for next time' when they start to feel better. Those were both known problems, we didn't deal with them, and now there are many drug resistant strains of bacteria. Banking on scientists to invent new drugs is not a great strategy. \n\n\n",
"A little bit off topic, but I'd like to point out that the vast majority of antibiotics we use are not for human use. We use about 80 percent of antibiotics on our livestock [(source)](_URL_0_), and these are all fed to them at low quantities. What we are effectively doing is giving the bacteria themselves a \"vaccine\" of sorts, exposing them to non-lethal doses of antibiotics, allowing some with resistance to surivive. This resistance increases over many generations.\n\nThe main way we could put an end to antibiotic resistance is cutting out antibiotic use from livestock completely.",
"One of the serious problems with antibiotic resistance is the impact on surgery. What are currently very safe routine procedures would suddenly become risky with no effective antibiotics. ",
"To summarize: potentially catastrophic, especially if people keep getting antibiotics for little bugs. Oh, and if you get a script for antibiotics, take all of them. Don't stop when your symptoms subside. Why? Mutation. Darwinism comes in and takes the surviving bacteria, gives them some new coding, and BAM! MRSA!",
"A lot of other redditors have summed it up pretty well, but I'll throw my hat into the ring. \n\nThe degree of severity of potential effects of more antibiotic resistant bacteria depends both on how they are resistant and what bacteria we are dealing with. In general, antibiotics either kill bacteria (bactericidal) or stop bacteria from growing (bacteriostatic). They typically do this by interfering with the structure of the bacteria or its replication. Some bacteria our body can handle pretty well on their own, it's just that we use antibiotics to help our body in the process, prevent further complications, and provider faster relief from the illness. Other bacteria are much more dangerous and difficult for our body to fight. The potential effects of bacteria becoming more resistant to antibiotics depends on the bacteria, the illness it causes, how widespread the bacteria is, and how effective other drugs/treatments are at killing it. Some bacteria are pretty puny and susceptible to a wide variety of antiobiotics, so if they developed a resistance to one, it wouldn't likely be that concerning immediately. Others are already difficult to treat and/or may only have a few options, so when they become resistant it is much more dangerous (examples being -MRSA, as mentioned currently only has a handful of effective drugs, -tuberculosis is already challenging to treat, spreads easily, and makes people very sick, so resistant TB is scary, and -Vancomycin resistant enterococcus, or VRE). Additionally, more resistance means having to use drugs that are more dangerous. Dangerous being harder on the body (Vanco can really trash your Kidneys), more difficult to administer (multiple times daily as opposed to one time), or being required to be IV as opposed to oral. \n\nI would argue we are at the critical time if not slightly passed it for a number of reasons. The first being (at least in the US), there are no new major antibiotics being developed at this time. It's a complex issue but by and large the current classes of antibiotics (typically divided by how/where they effect bacteria) are what we've got and there's no major changes on the horizon. Antibiotics are not typically big money-makers for companies and they require a lot of work to develop. As another redditor mentioned, if we developed a new method completely of treating infections, drug resistance could become a moot point, but with nothing like that arguably existing or being feasible for wide-spread use in the next 50 years, a global crisis could develop if the current and up and coming resistant bacteria become ubiquitous and displace the susceptible bacteria that are current prevalent in most communities. Right now, most community acquired staph aureus infections are *not* MRSA, but you may be much more likely to get it if you're in a country or region of a country where there is an increasing incidence of it and you're a hell of a lot more likely to get it in a health care setting. Because resistant bacteria already exist and are out there, that cat is out of the bag. The severity and if it becomes a true crisis (causing widespread death, etc) depends completely on if all providers (physicians, vets, etc) become better antibiotic stewards and new medications/methods are developed to treat the bacteria. I would argue we haven't reached the point of no return quite yet, but we've already made it more challenging on ourselves than necessary. \n",
"We just start inventing more antibiotics! The problem is that they aren't commercially big sellers so the drug companies focus on the money making diseases. There are about a zillion potential treatments for bacteria that we haven't bothered with yet, because capitalism basically.",
"One thing that I haven't seen touched on in some of the other explanations is the larger scale, evolutionary level view of the problem. \nAntibiotic resistance is very expensive for bacteria. Cells with antibiotic resistance have to use ATP (like bacterial energy money) to keep it up. because of this, bacteria with antibiotic resistance do not grow or multiply as fast as bacteria without resistance, so they do not compete well *unless* antibiotic use is common enough for them to keep the genes despite the cost. So if bacteria became resistant to all antibiotics, if we just stopped using most of our antibiotics for a few years, they would lose their antibiotic resistance after a while because it would be harder to compete with faster growing, non-resistant cells. \n\nThere's one other small tangent related to a problem with that idea--some bacteria have what's called \"plasmid addiction\". In ELI5 terms, bacteria keep some of their genes in what are called \"plasmids\", little rings of extra genes that can sometimes be passed from bacteria to bacteria without having to reproduce. A lot of antibiotic resistant genes are on plasmids, and some of the plasmids have an evolutionary trick that helps make sure that bacteria don't just get rid of them when they aren't needed any more. The plasmid has genes for a poison and for an antidote. If the bacteria gets rid of the plasmid, it stops making both the poison and the antidote, but the leftover antidote in the bacteria's cell stops working faster than the leftover poison does, so the bacteria dies. This makes sure that only bacteria that keep their plasmids survive. This makes it very hard for some bacteria to lose their antibiotic resistance if the resistant genes are on a plasmid with a poison/antidote pair. This can make it harder for us to wait for bacteria to lose their antibiotic resistance. \nThis means it's very important that we start cycling antibiotics now, using only a few antibiotics for a while, then switching to a completely different set a while later. It makes it much harder for bacteria to build up multiple resistances by making the expensive antibiotic resistances bacteria build up useless later on. "
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1ojvji | why only a small fraction of my donations actually go to benefiting a cause | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ojvji/eli5_why_only_a_small_fraction_of_my_donations/ | {
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"Sometimes its fraud. Other times its because:\n\n* It costs a lot of money to fundraise\n\n* Charity workers need to make money too.\n\n* You need top-level salaries to attract people to run big charities.",
"_URL_0_ might help you decide where to spend the money you donate."
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26yilo | is it possible for casino owners to manipulate the slot machines, so that you don't win very often? | Also how is it possible to detect such manipulation? I guess it's illegal and the casino owner will go to jail, right? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/26yilo/eli5_is_it_possible_for_casino_owners_to/ | {
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"Every slot machine is programmed to have a certain number of winning combinations, such that if the lever is pulled an infinite number of times at a given setting, the payout ratio (i.e. the ratio of money given out over money taken in) will equal some X. That X is determined by the machine's owner. In the short term it's possible to deviate from X, but in the long term, like with all games where the player plays the House, the House will win.",
"the machines are always rigged. they are programmed to spit out a 95-97% payout rate. the rate is regulated by the gaming commission and machines are randomly spot tested.",
"Slots have what is called a return rate. The minimum rate is controlled by the government but applies to all the slot machines. The return rate is about 90%, maybe a little higher. Basically if your slot machines collect $10,000,000 in a month, they must pay out $9,000,000 leaving you $1,000,000 in profit. The pay out can be in any amount, it can be tons of $10 winnings or $500,000 jackpots. The payout rate can be adjusted for each machine as long as the overall payout meets the mandated minimum. \n\nIn Vegas, casinos will set high payouts for slots in the front entrance, about 98%, so people walking by will see other people winning. Unlikely to hit a jackpot but lots of small payouts for people to get excited bout. Slots by common pathways have low payouts. Maybe 70% or 80%. Slots by the bathrooms, slots by the bank where you cash out your chips. These are meant to get the, \"well just one more on my way out\" people. \n\nAs long as the overall payout is at the government minimum, this is all legal. Casinos are subject to random inspections where they will take a random machine and check that the code installed matches the code they have on file and is payout out the correct amount. Casinos have every reason to be honest as a casino makes tons of money for very little effort and no one would want to risk that.",
"No, this is a myth. A slot machine's payout rate cannot be adjusted by the casino directly. The total payout over the life of the machine (~100 million pulls) is programming into the machine's computer chip at the factory, based on the specifications requested by the casino when the machine was ordered. For each individual pull, the computer inside the machine uses a random number generator chip that decides how much you win for that specific pull. But over the lifetime of the machine, it will pay out EXACTLY what it was configured to pay at the factory. That preset payout percentage cannot be changed without returning the machine to the factory to be disassembled and reprogrammed.\n\nIn US states, slot machines are *meticulously* monitored and audited for correct payouts in all states where they are legal. This ensures that the state, the casino and the customers all remain happy. Casinos that are caught breaking the rules face fines or revocation of their gambling license. Casino industry organizations are also extremely diligent about ensuring that their members follow the rules, because if one casino in an area is busted for cheating, the entire area will immediately lose most of their customers. Considering the high profits that casinos already take in, there is zero reason for a casino to try to screw gamblers in this particular way anyway. Slot machine players who get screwed by overly tight slots will simply move to another casino.\n\nHere's some specific info about how this works from [an article about casinos in Kansas dealing with the perception that their slot payouts are too low](_URL_0_):\n\n > ... **it is a myth that the casino makes changes just because a machine is paying off or has hit a jackpot**, Cooper said. The casino knows a machine will pay out exactly what it is programmed to pay out over its life. Each change, as well as every new machine, has to be approved by the Kansas Lottery, which owns and operates the games, and the Kansas Racing and Gaming Commission, which regulates them. \n\n > Changing the computer, documenting the change and testing the machine involves the casino and both state agencies, he said. A typical conversion can take one to three days. “One of the things people want to believe is that at any given moment, someone can just flip a switch and change payouts or shut down a machine,” Kocher said. “It doesn’t work that way.” \n\n > The racing and gaming commission performs monthly audits on the payout percentages of each machine to make sure it meets the mandated 87 percent threshold. It also has a contract with an outside auditing firm, RubinBrown LLP, which has offices in Kansas City and St. Louis, to come in if the commission suspects any foul play.",
"Nope. There are literally stricter regulations on slot machines than on voting machines.",
"no, setting aside a whole mess of regulation, it wouldn't be beneficial for them to do so. \n\nthere's a reason they're called 1 armed bandits. you're rolling a 1 million sided die and only win on a 1. they want you to win, because it draws in 999 thousand other idiots who won't. "
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jli2j | why does google buying motorola give them a better position in the patent wars? | Like I'm 5 please.
[Relevant](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jli2j/eli5_why_does_google_buying_motorola_give_them_a/ | {
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"You come up with some great idea that will help your classrooms day-to-day life. You tell teacher about it and she says \"what a great idea, AyeGee, I'll make sure you get credit for it.\" Timmy and Bob also come up with ideas for your classroom, and both their ideas are similar to yours. All three of you told teacher about it at the same time. Now, you could all start fighting over whose idea it was, but instead, you partner up with Timmy. It's BOTH of your ideas. Now who has more pull with teacher against Bob?\n\nYou: google\nTimmy: Motorola\nBob: Apple (primarily, really all the other phone makers)\nTeacher: Patent office\nArguments between kids: Lawsuits\n\nGoogle now owns all of Motorola's patents, which gives them a wider array of things with which to say \"No see, we patented this tech\" either before others, alongside others, etc. \n\nThis is a simplistic view, but hey, you said LI5.",
"Listen to [this](_URL_0_)",
"The US patent office is really bad with computer technology, a lot of the patents duplicate, overlap, are vague or just plain invalid.\n\nSo technology companies patent *everything* the can, even stuff they will never use. \n\nThis has led to a complicated legal situation. If Google develops a new product, they have to worry that Microsoft or Apple or Bob's House of Software has a patent sitting in their vaults and will wind up suing them. Even if Google wins, the legal fight can be very expensive.\n\nSo for Google, getting more patents is like getting more ammunition. If Microsoft sues them, they are more likely to have patents that cover the product, which strengthens their legal position.\n\nPerhaps more importantly, they are more likely to have patents that could apply to Microsoft's products, which make them more likely to play nice. ",
"You come up with some great idea that will help your classrooms day-to-day life. You tell teacher about it and she says \"what a great idea, AyeGee, I'll make sure you get credit for it.\" Timmy and Bob also come up with ideas for your classroom, and both their ideas are similar to yours. All three of you told teacher about it at the same time. Now, you could all start fighting over whose idea it was, but instead, you partner up with Timmy. It's BOTH of your ideas. Now who has more pull with teacher against Bob?\n\nYou: google\nTimmy: Motorola\nBob: Apple (primarily, really all the other phone makers)\nTeacher: Patent office\nArguments between kids: Lawsuits\n\nGoogle now owns all of Motorola's patents, which gives them a wider array of things with which to say \"No see, we patented this tech\" either before others, alongside others, etc. \n\nThis is a simplistic view, but hey, you said LI5.",
"Listen to [this](_URL_0_)",
"The US patent office is really bad with computer technology, a lot of the patents duplicate, overlap, are vague or just plain invalid.\n\nSo technology companies patent *everything* the can, even stuff they will never use. \n\nThis has led to a complicated legal situation. If Google develops a new product, they have to worry that Microsoft or Apple or Bob's House of Software has a patent sitting in their vaults and will wind up suing them. Even if Google wins, the legal fight can be very expensive.\n\nSo for Google, getting more patents is like getting more ammunition. If Microsoft sues them, they are more likely to have patents that cover the product, which strengthens their legal position.\n\nPerhaps more importantly, they are more likely to have patents that could apply to Microsoft's products, which make them more likely to play nice. "
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67zohk | why do some people fog up car windows significantly more than others? | I've noticed that any time in riding in vehicles on colder days, the windows on my side of the vehicle fog up while everyone else's windows stay mostly clear.
Why are there some people who create more fog than others when near a cold window? Does it have to do with a warm body temperature? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67zohk/eli5_why_do_some_people_fog_up_car_windows/ | {
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"Some people have a larger lung-volume than others, it could have to do with temperature, but mostly it's going to be a matter of the rate at which you're breathing. Humans exhale quite a bit of water, but at rest, in a car, most of us tend to breathe pretty slowly through our noses, which minimizes the rate at which we're releasing water vapor. \n\nSo... mouth-breathers, people who for whatever reason are breathing more deeply/rapidly, that kind of thing will contribute. "
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6d50gn | what the frick's a blast furnace? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6d50gn/eli5_what_the_fricks_a_blast_furnace/ | {
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"A blast furnace is a type of metallurgical (ie having to do with making metal) furnace used for smelting (producing pure metal from raw ores that simply contain the metal in some amount) to produce industrial metals, generally iron, but also others such as lead or copper. It uses blasts of hot air through from the bottom to cause the chemical reactions that reduces the ores into metals.",
"The Blast Furnace is a members-only minigame situated in Keldagrim for smeltingbars which require coal. The furnace here only requires half as much coal when smelting usually, so it can be useful when smelting the ores that require more coal. It is designed to be used by a team, but it can also be worked by a single player if the correct strategy is followed."
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2g9oew | what's the difference between a villain and an antagonist in a story? | I thought these two terms were interchangeable, until I read a movie review about Frozen in that Elsa was the antagonist, but not the villain. What's the difference? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2g9oew/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_villain_and/ | {
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"Protagonist is the main character of the story, while antagonist is their rival. On the other hand, the Hero is the good guy, while the Villain is the bad guy.\n\nIn classic stories, the protagonist is the hero while the antagonist is the villain, but it isn't always so. Consider heist movies, for example - in these movies, usually the protagonists are thieves, while the antagonists are the cops.\n\nElsa isn't the villain because she isn't considered a \"bad\" character (her being an antagonist is somewhat arguable).",
"One term carries moral weight while the other does not. A villain is an evil character while an antagonist is simply anyone in opposition to the main character (the protagonist).\n\nElsa is not evil, she's just a misguided girl having a hissy fit. In the end, she comes back around to fight the real bad guy - the prince. She's the antagonist because, through much of the movie, she is resisting the actions of the main character.\n\nIn contrast, if you look at Disney's Snow White, the queen is evil to the core. This makes her a villain.\n\nThe main character does not even have to be the good guy. For example, let's look at the movie Scarface - a movie where the main character is murderous, drug dealing gangster. He is the protagonist, because the story revolves around him, but he is by no means a hero. The cops that are out to get him are antagonists, because they oppose him, but they are not villains, because they acting based on law & goodness."
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5m43bf | what are each programming language's real-world function? | Why use Java over C# or C++ in a specific scenario? This applies to even Python and Pascal as well
Edit 1:
I understand how software works and how a language is a different way to communicate to the computer. I understand that you can connect software languages to real-world languages (i.e. Grammar = Syntax)
But I am wanting to know - during *insert problem here*, why should I use *insert language here*
Why use one over another? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5m43bf/eli5_what_are_each_programming_languages/ | {
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"Programming languages are like real-life languages. There are times one may be easier to communicate in - like speaking French when you're in France - but for the most part they all communicate the same things. \n\nIf you want to program a sensor to detect when you press a button on a remote and then do something, you'll probably have an easier time in C since it was designed to keep stuff like that simple. But if you don't know C, you can still use Java or C# or whatever you do know, it will just be expressed differently.\n\nSo really, they all serve the same function to communicate what you want to do to the processor. The only things that change are how that's expressed and how familiar you are with how to express it.",
"In simple terms: market usage, language capabilities and total \"lines\" of code it takes to achieve programming \"x.\" Hence why python exist...less code and easier to understand for new market programmers.\n\n\nThink of this way...you can build your own library of code, however you need a machine to process and read that code...\n\ncapability of processing the language and the consumers technology capability...is really what comes down to what language is used in applications IMO",
"Lots of reasons:\n\n- What languages do I and my other developers know?\n- Are there good libraries in the given language, that are useful for the task we're doing?\n- Does the language work in the environment we need (on Windows? in the browser? on a mobile device?)\n- Does the language make it easy or hard to express the things we need to do? Are we trying to do something quick and easy, or do we need language features that build robust code for the long term?\n- Do the available compilers provide the performance we need? Some languages are designed for performance, others aren't.\n\nFor adults:\n\nThere's a deeper question in here somewhere which I don't really know the answer to, which is something like \"How much of a language's characteristics are really inherent to the language itself, and how much are non-inherent attributes that just depend on the environment, libraries etc\". For instance, Java and the Java Virtual Machine are closely linked in practice, but I don't think they need to be. There's probably not any fundamental reason you couldn't write native code (or browser code, for that matter) in Java, for instance.\n",
"during **insert problem** here, why should I use **insert language** here?\n\nHere are some suggestions for common problems you may need to solve, as most would have a programming language that's more suitable than the rest.\n\n* You want to make one application that you can distribute which runs the same on all Mac, Linux and Windows versions? Your application doesn't need to do high performance or speed intensive things? **Java**\n\n* You want to write an application where you will compile and distribute different versions for Mac, Linux and Windows? Speed is important? **C** or **C++**\n\n* You want to do smart things like extract meaning from text, parse documents, compare documents for similarity, or experiment with machine learning algorithms? It's a program that you will run but you don't need to distribute it to others to run on their machine? Speed isn't that important? **Python**\n\n* Windows application only? **C++** or **C# and the .NET framework**\n\n* Android app only? **Java**\n\n* iOS app only? **Swift**\n\n* An app to distribute on Android and iOS? **Java** and **Swift** (you probably need to write your app twice, in fact double the work!)\n\n* You want a fast number crunching application that runs on Android and iOS? Use **C++** for the number crunching part and **Java** and **Swift** for the pretty part of the app (the *front end*).\n\n* You want an interactive website? **Javascript**, or **PHP and MySQL**, or **Ruby**\n\n* You're making a TV, a TV remote, an MRI machine, or a car diagnostic system (these are called embedded devices)? **C**\n\nOf course every language can do every operation, but some have better support for some tasks than others. I do not intend to imply that this or that language can't do this or that task. Rather I am trying to illustrate what I would recommend from a neutral point of view to a person who has a precise task in hand and has developers in all languages at his/her disposal.\n\nFor example Python has very helpful libraries for interpreting text. So it would be the number 1 recommendation if you have to parse documents, etc, while doing this in C would be painful. \n\nMarket share is also a factor. For example Java has many flaws as a programming language which Microsoft tried to fix in C#, however Java is still more popular than C# and it's also the language of choice for Android. This makes it a more natural choice for many tasks, which in turn increases its popularity! If you try to go against the flow and do things in an uncommon language, you encounter problems as you can't Google for help so often, or may find that a library (such as machine learning) isn't as well implemented. All other things being equal, a widely used language is a better choice."
]
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2091rq | let's say i buy a stock for $100. it loses value, and i sell it for $90. who gets the $10 i lost? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2091rq/eli5_lets_say_i_buy_a_stock_for_100_it_loses/ | {
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"The dude you bought it from sold you a stock worth $90 for $100. Thus the dude you bought it from wins, you lose. The stock does not have any real inherent value. Its only worth what the buyer and seller agreed its worth. You agreed to pay more than the next dude agreed. Thats all that happened. The guy who overpays is the guy that loses the money.\n"
]
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||
42hpvn | how is it that the super bowl became such a massive tv event with million dollar commercials? | ELI5 how is it that the super bowl became such a massive TV event with million dollar commercials? Was this a case of clever marketing, a surge in TV sales, or other? In other words, when was it that the Super Bowl become what we know it to be today? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42hpvn/eli5_how_is_it_that_the_super_bowl_became_such_a/ | {
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"text": [
"Take the most popular sport in the US. Now make it the championship game, put it on television on a prime day where most people are off work and voila. you have the making of the biggest show of the year"
]
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[]
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|
2wr6fz | why do people sometimes accidentally switch the first letter(s) of two words when speaking? | Ex: Its a dow snay tomorrow! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2wr6fz/eli5_why_do_people_sometimes_accidentally_switch/ | {
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"Most of the other comments here are just anecdotes or jokes, so here goes. I have a constellation of minor issues that cause this to occur frequently for me. First and foremost is a mild speech impediment (both stuttering and cluttering). Cluttering usually involves a pressured style of speech where syntax can be disrupted. This can be a primary cause of spoonerisms. Stuttering can cause secondary spoonerisms for myself because I will get 'caught' on part of a word and accidentally continue the sentence from another part, then try and backtrack so I just get a 'syllable soup'.\n\nThese are for everyday mixups - I also get migraines where my primary migraine 'aura' is speech disruption. If it's a bad migraine, I just simply can't talk. It's like I'm absolutely pissed drunk, and I speak in monosyllables. If it's a bit less bad, every other sentence is syllable soup. If it's a minor one, it will just be syllable missplacement, which frequently causes spoonerisms or just a wrong syllable in a word.\n\nSome examples of my issues:\n\nIt's a snow damorrow tay. (Mix of ends of words, failed attempt to fix.)\n\nIt's a dow snay tomorrow. (Spoonerism)\n\nIt's a snow day tomay. (Second end of word gets 'stuck' probably a stuttering related issue)\n\nIt's a snow damorrow. (Dropped part of sentence)\n\nIt'snow day tomorrow. (The two s-sounds are mistaken as being sequential)\n\nIt's sn-a snow day tomorrow. (Misplaced word in sentence)\n\nLemme know if you want any more explanation or examples. Speech impediments are fucked up, because they make you feel like an idiot, and a lot of the time you make 'work arounds' that make it less clear that you've got a speech impediment - until you fuck it hardcore.",
"Out of 30 top level comments in this thread, I removed 28. Only one person actually answered the question with an explanation (the other person had a related question, so I kept it up).\n\nI apologize for removing your comments, but lease try to follow the rules of the subreddit.",
"This is a spoonerism.\n\nThrough-out college I would often hear about spoonerisms. Linguists tend to find them really funny. But good explanations for them are hard to find. As I specialized, I created my own explanation of whats going on. Speech is processed primarily in two places in the brain. Words, their meanings, and a \"whole representation\" of their sound are stored in one area. Individual sounds, how to assemble them, and a \"sequential representation\" are stored in another area. Typically the whole representation was much faster than the sequential representation. What this means is, the information about the meaning and sounds of the word is usually processed faster than the information about how to assemble those sounds. Sometimes information about how to put sounds together is processed before the sounds that should be used arrive in that part of the brain. This process takes less than about 10 milliseconds. By the time the correct sounds have shown up, the phonological processing has already happened and you end up with two words what have their syllables all mixed together. \n\nAgain, this is a hypothesis, but it's a better explanation than the next best hypothesis: \"The brain is a librarian that selects words based on their first letter. Sometimes it makes mistakes.\"\nSource: BA Honors in Psycholinguistics. Focusing on Dual-Route hypothesis in reading and speaking. "
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2o514j | who profits from the current ukraine crisis? | Clearly the NATO and Russia are both losing in this current crisis. This raises the question of who is profiting from it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o514j/eli5who_profits_from_the_current_ukraine_crisis/ | {
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"This is a complicated question, and the simple version is no one is profiting now, the profits will only come when the crisis is over. Profits though wouldn't be monetary but strategic. NATO would gain a country with a direct border with Russia and increase their bufferzone between Russia and the west, while Russia wants to maintain it's soviet buffer with Europe. For Russia it's also a matter of prestige to keep allies from the Old Soviet block.\n\nNow, there is a theory that was presented by an ex-Putin cabinet member which says Putin is trying to destroy the east via this conflict as a way to start talks with Ukraine in which they'd agree to receive aid from Russia to rebuild the east in exchange for their loyalty and staying out of the EU and NATO. Thus keeping them as allies.\n\nThat's if we only count countries in the scenario. If we count private entities then obviously whenever you have two sides selling weapons to both camps then the weapons companies are the ones who profit.\n\nEDIT: Also I'm not sure why you're saying 'NATO and Russia are clearly losing'. This is a chess game and the only real loser is Ukraine which is taking the blunt of the conflict.",
" > Clearly the NATO and Russia are both losing in this current crisis.\n\nNATO isn't losing. Ukrainian crisis is the best thing to happen, for NATO, in a long time.\n\nPretty much all NATO members (except for the US) were limiting their expenditures more and more year after year.\n\nThe US was constantly trying to get other NATO-members to step up their involvement, but they all would keep declining.\n\nNATO was sliding into irrelevance. At the end, they were trying to position themselves as the protectors of the world from Iran (for the lack of any other \"mission\"), but that wasn't working out. They were still becoming less relevant with each passing day.\n\nAnd now, well, they are the saviors of the western world, once again. More relevant than ever.\n\nAnd since any entity fights for its existence above all other objectives (which is just natural), it's really safe to say that NATO (as the organization) is the greatest beneficiary of this whole situation.\n\nRussia is definitely losing. But Russia would be losing in either case. Years of problems/corruption/tensions compounding. No good exit strategy really exists.\n\nEurope is losing. Economically, this whole thing is really damaging. But it's a matter of political principle. If they don't step up, they'll no longer be viewed as one super-entity. Instead, they would be de-facto divided back into separate countries.\n\nThe only truly winning parties are US and China.\n\nFor the US, it's crucial to make sure Europe and Russia don't get too comfy together, because then the dominance of the US would diminish. Which now, thanks to the Ukrainian situation, is no longer a possibility for another 10-20-30 years. US is still the only big dog in town for the foreseeable future, or at least until China steps up.\n\nAnd for China, Russia is now forced to deal with them on their terms. China can now dictate the terms of Russia's \"turn to the east\" that was announced. Russia is backed into a corner, and China is the only alternative for Russia. Which is a great advantage for China.\n\nThat's globally.\n\nLocally, in Ukraine, it's mostly various groups of oligarchs and field commanders that are trying to get bigger piece of the pie. Some are losing and some are winning.",
"The person profiting the most from this crisis is obiously Vladimir Putin, since his approval rating has soared due to the crisis and Russians who were sick and tired of him have started standing behind someone who has led Russia to behaving like a superpower. That to many Russians is more important than how the country is heading towards a recession. However how people he will be if the crisis drags on and Russia's economy continues to weaken will be left to be seen."
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6bqgbg | why are people with below average iqs (say, 85) so much easier to spot than people with above average iqs (like 115). | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6bqgbg/eli5_why_are_people_with_below_average_iqs_say_85/ | {
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"Most interactions in society don't require much intelligence. It's pretty easy to learn how to grab things at the store, pay with cash or a card, and drive a car. If you have a high IQ you can do all of those things, but there's nothing about your doing them that would show you have a high IQ. You're simply showing that you're not so below-average intelligence that you can't drive or interact like a normal person. In other words, you wouldn't notice someone having a high IQ unless you saw them doing something that required a high IQ (assuming you even understood it and could tell that it required a high IQ since many of those fields are specialized). And most people with high IQs aren't trying to show off to every person they meet for every interaction.\n\nPeople with low IQs are noticeable because they struggle with simple interactions that people have to do all the time. That makes it pretty obvious for anyone who encounters them.\n\ntl;dr - Most things in society require you to operate at about an average or slightly below-average level. People with high IQ can usually do that without a problem, so you don't notice it. People with a low IQ can't, so you notice it.",
"I would say that people with a higher IQ know when to talk and when not to versus those who have a lower IQ who just talk about stuff they know nothing about...which is very obvious. "
]
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[],
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