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36rtes | what was southern strategy of the '60s, and why do some say it's a myth? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/36rtes/eli5what_was_southern_strategy_of_the_60s_and_why/ | {
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"Until the 1964 Presidential Election, the states that had formerly made up the Confederate States of America were very solidly Democratic - the 'Solid South'. That changed with the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and other anti-racism initiatives that had defined the JFK and LBJ administrations. In that election, the Republican contendor, Barry Goldwater, won some of those states that had made up the Solid South. This was the start of a monumental shift in thinking for the Republican Party, where analysts came to the conclusion that supporting racial divisive legislation would cut support for the Democratic Party in the South and offer a mainstream alternative for Democrats who felt left behind.",
"For the second part of your question people generally say it's a myth for one of two reasons:\n\n1. They aren't aware of the Southern Strategy and the parties essentially flipping social stances due to Civil Rights laws being passed.\n\n2. They have vested interest in being able to say that modern R's aren't the racist ones, D's were for slavery. If the southern strategy weren't a myth to them, they would basically be admitting that the modern R party came about out of pandering to overtly racist voters."
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1wrnt0 | why do i pass out when the doctor gives me a shot? | Whenever the doctor gives me a shot or blood test, I become really dizzy and pass out. When I regain consciousness I'm very hot and I'm full of sweat. It normally takes me a few hours to get back to normal. Sometimes I'll even have a seizure.
Why is this happening? How can I prevent this in the future? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1wrnt0/eli5_why_do_i_pass_out_when_the_doctor_gives_me_a/ | {
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"I'm sorry to sound facetious, but wouldn't it make more sense to ask the doctor this question?\n\nAs a non-doctor, my first guess would be you have a horrific fear of needles. But if that fear response goes so far as causing a seizure, then you're going to need a real doctor to check out why your seizure threshold is so low.\n\nDo you have seizures at any other time?",
"You most likely have an extreme fear of needles. For people with this phobia their blood pressure drops rather severely when a needle penetrates their skin. ",
"You just have to keep breathing.\n\nIn the past, when optometrists check out my eye pressure, I fainted too.\nThat was until one optometrists taught me how to force myself to keep breathing. After that it never happened anymore.\n",
"its a [vasovagal reaction](_URL_1_) which causes a drop in blood pressure. Some people get it with needles (regardless of being scared of them or not). Other examples include [micurition syncope](_URL_0_)"
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7doahm | the appeal of buying name products versus the generic products at a cheaper price. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7doahm/eli5_the_appeal_of_buying_name_products_versus/ | {
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"1. There usually IS a difference between the generics and name brand. Name brand cheerios might taste pretty similar to the generic, but other cereals may vary enough that someone might choose to pay more. Stuff like clothes, you're pretty much buying them for the logo so you can show off how cool you are, so the generic won't do the same thing for you\n\n2. Some products like medicines are more different than you would think, especially those that require an extremely precise dosage (generics need to be accurate within a certain margin to be approved), or if the generics use different capsules/etc containing materials someone might be allergic to.\n\n3. People overvalue name brands",
"It has to do with human nature and psychology. There are certain traits that human beings possess that make us think about things in a certain way. For instance our natural social interactions, where we view some people as reliable or more helpful than others, and we tend to go to those people first for help, can be transposed to inanimate objects through the use of branding. People then associate that brand with certain qualities, as if it were a person. \n\nFor example Aunt Sophies pancakes, made with love in the kitchen by old Aunt Sophie herself. Complete with a picture of a matronly looking woman, wearing southern clothing and smiling. This elevates it from mere flour, to being symbolic of Aunt Sophie herself, making people that identify with that imagery feel that the product takes on those attributes of comfort, love, and familiarity. \n\nContrast that with a plain box that says \"Biscuit and pancake flour\" it doesn't inspire any familiarity or attachment with most people. They don't attribute qualities to it other than if it's no name brand it must be inferior. However, other people may have been raised by parents that bought that particular brand, and it causes their children to form an attachment to it out of familiarity even without marketing or advertising trying to cause this. \n\nMany people tend to make purchasing decisions partly based upon what they were exposed to as children, mostly because of familiarity that started during their childhood which many people remember fondly. \n\nThere are some very good books that talk about branding and marketing, and how consumers make choices. ",
"Depends on the *thing*, but possibilities include:\n\n- Conspicuous consumption. Brand X jeans or brand Y purses are known to be fashionable and expensive, so people want to be seen wearing them.\n\n- Known entity/quality - I know this brand of widget is of reasonable quality but am unsure about the quality of the generic. I may not be willing to risk buying a generic that *might* be good or *might* be shitty.\n\n- Brand loyalty - people are fond of the brand based on past experiences and perceptions of the brand, regardless of actual quality.\n\n- Warranty/assurances - sometimes, the brand has a warranty and the generic doesn't (LLBean and Jansport come to mind)\n\n- Actual differences - for some things, there *is* an actual difference between the products (the branded jeans last longer than ones from Walmart, the store brand cereal has slightly different flavors, the generic pill has the same *active* ingredient, but the patient doesn't tolerate one of the *inactive* ingredients)."
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9f8rpp | new internet copyright law | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9f8rpp/eli5_new_internet_copyright_law/ | {
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" A big issue is one where newspapers, magazines and other publishing agencies will receive a fee whenever a platform provides a link to their articles. It is feared that it will be a huge issue for censoring as sites such as Facebook and Youtube will be liable for the cost and not the publisher. Many people believe that these sites will simply filter out what can be uploaded blocking information that isn’t compatible with their particular ideologies. Algorithms will be used to do this so it is entirely possible and likely that content not protected by copyright will be filtered out and the cost of implementing this will price many smaller organisations out of business, which in turn will increase monopolies held by certain companies. "
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9346sc | currencies in some countries count in thousands, others in one digit numbers | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9346sc/eli5currencies_in_some_countries_count_in/ | {
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"Most countries start out with small, regular denominations, but as their economies weaken, inflation rises and that dollar is suddenly useless. Now you need 1,000 dollars to buy a loaf of bread, so it is easier to just make bills that are for 1,000 dollars.\n\nFor example, a Venezuelan bolivar, right now, is equal to $0.0000083 USD. They are printing bills with 100,000 on them, but they are worth 83¢ USD. It’s getting increasingly worse.",
"Yes. The Japanese yen, for example, used to have smaller parts called sen, which are no longer used."
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mp5nd | why do people hate marijuana so much? (non smoker) | I've never smoked or drank. I was raised with a very Christian family but now I'm far from that life and now an adult so I was wondering what is with the love hate relationship with marijuana?
I know nothing of marijuana myself, but I always see many people like celebs using/"abusing" it. Why? I've just been taught that it is bad, like "murder bad" but no real reason why. I know people take it for medication but what about people on the street? Is it just to escape the stress, are the addicted like cigs?
I read it makes you feel relaxed. Why would this be banned and so frowned upon in such a stressful society if it is true? Isn't that what alcohol does too in a way? Why does the government (American) care anymore about marijuana than sex or drinking if they all "make you feel good"?
I'm hoping for a serious, unbiased response. Thanks.
**EDIT:** Wow I was not expecting this many replies, thanks! I'm going through them one by one reading now!! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mp5nd/why_do_people_hate_marijuana_so_much_non_smoker/ | {
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"To older Americans in particular, marijuana still bears remnants of unpatriotic, hippie symbolism from the 1960s and 1970s. Older people are the staunchest opponents of marijuana (with just [31%](_URL_0_) of over-65s wanting it legalized).",
"A lot of people honestly believe it actually does harm to you because of all the misinformation spread by drug-awareness programs (this is your brain. this is your brain on drugs. Because every drug acts in the same way to literally smash your brain). And of course, since you can't buy any other poisons over the counter, we should make this poison illegal too!",
"It's also because hemp is a fantastic textile product, and was going to over take giants in the textile industry, so in order to stop this from happening they spread propaganda about marijuana, i.e. it kills brain cells, gives you cancer, and leads to more liberal thinking which at the time was quite scary, things such as communism and socialism were feared in the USA so they linked marijuana with these fears to drown out the hemp buisness. Back around the 1920's the growing of hemp (for textile reasons) was encouraged until propaganda was spread. Most of the hatred and fear of marijuana springs from old, and false, fears. The facts are, marijuana doesn't give you cancer, marijuana doesn't kill brain cells but can actually stimulate growth, and there has never been a recorded death caused purely by marijuana. I'm not an avid smoker myself but know many. Also there may be some holes in what I'v said, such as dates and exact propaganda so if someone has corrections, feel free. ",
"Non-smoker here. Well, firstly children are told it's bad. They grow up, and, believing it is bad, want to keep it illegal. Because it's illegal, people tell children it is bad. These children grow up thinking it's bad, they want to keep it illegal etc.\n\nSecondly, if smoked like a cigerette, it can cause lung damage (Basically, inhaling smoke is bad for your lungs. It causes the small nodules in your lungs to stop working). If tobacco was illegal it would most definately stay illegal because it is significantly more dangerous, but it is legal already, and as prohibition showed, making a substance that the public deem as 'okay' illegal doesn't solve anything. \n\nThirdly, it has had ties with schizophrenia(seeing and hearing things that aren't actually there), or more specifically, can reveal schizophrenia if you're genetically dispoisitoned to it already. If your family has a medical history of schizophrenia, there is a chance weed can cause you to develop schizophrenia in the long term really.\n\nOn the other side of the coin, it's loved because it's a good feeling you can get and it's practically risk free(other than legally of course). The lung damage can avoided through vaporising, and the schizophrenia links are sketchy. You may have been told growing up that it is addictive, that's a lie. Tobacco and heroin are actually addictive; they cause physiological changes to your body to make you need more of the substance, and cause negative side effects if you don't. Weed is 'addictive' in the same way shopping, world of warcraft and jaffa cakes are addictive, they're a good thing so you want more of them. It is also impossible to overdose on(short of injecting concentrated THC into your veins) and has toxicity levels lower than that of alcohol, tobacco and, I think, caffeine.\n\nI've also seen talk of marijuanna reducing the risks of certain types of cancer, but I'm not sure how true that is.",
"Corn costs 11 cents a pound, coffee costs $2.35 per pound. Marijuana costs way more - **OVER $9000.00** per pound (at a street price of $20/g) or $1600 per pound (at a dealer price of $100/ounce.) Mo' money mo' problems.\n\nIt is considered a [Schedule 1](_URL_1_) substance (\"high potential for abuse,\" \"no medical use.\") That's a lie of course; pot helps all kinds of problems that expensive prescription drugs are designed to fix.\n\nThere's lots of corporations who have a financial incentive to keep pot illegal - pharmaceutical companies, prison guards, alcohol companies. They give money directly to politicians' campaign funds. They also hire lobbyists. Lobbyists inhabit Washington. Their job is to hang out with politicians and show them flashy powerpoints and buy them drinks and explain the many reasons that pot is bad. \n\nSince politicians like money and drinks, they ignore stuff like Ron Paul's [Industrial Hemp Farming act of 2011](_URL_2_) in favor of their comfortable status quo.\n\n\n===\n\n\nOn the other side of the seesaw, the \"United States of America\" gives policemen the power to lock people up if they burn and inhale some marijuana. They claim that they are 'just doing their job' and 'they didn't write the law, they just enforce it.' That is exactly the problem - instead of acting like human beings and ignoring a clearly unjust law, they're laying hands on peaceful stoners and throwing them in jail. Something like 25% of US prisoners are there for [drugs alone](_URL_0_).",
"In the US, part of the reason marijuana was made illegal in the 30s was mostly to do with fear over Mexican immigrants. At the time, pot was mostly coming from Mexico, and there was a campaign to outlaw it, because a lot of people saw it as 'oh no those Mexicans are going to come over and give drugs to our daughters and take advantage of them'. Movies like Reefer Madness were made and only helped fuel anti-marijuana sentiment. \n\n\nThe same sort of thing happened with opium and the Chinese (oh no, those Chinamen are going to get our daughters into their opium dens and rape them!) and it's the reason why crack cocaine has such a harsher sentence than powder cocaine, although they're almost exactly the same drug - rich white people do the powder version, and poor black people are primarily associated with the crack kind.\n\nThis may not entirely answer your question, but it does provide a bit of historical context. In short, there was a racial motivation behind the illegalization of a lot of drugs. \n\n\nWiki has some stuff about this [here](_URL_1_), and one of the strongest campaigners in the 30s to make it illegal, [Harry Anslinger](_URL_0_), said: \n\n > \"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.\"\n\n",
"Marijuana is a psychoactive drug, meaning that it causes effects to your mind: you think differently, feel differently, etc. When you smoke marijuana, you get \"high\". Trouble is, many people like to smoke marijuana *just* because it gets them high, not just to relieve their nausea or alleviate their pain from other diseased -- they don't have any good reason to smoke it other than to have fun. Responsible adults would never do *that*! (That's why responsible adults never get drunk! Oh wait.)\n\nThe answer is that marijuana isn't actually bad, but just like cussing, it's something that we've been told is immoral, and it's actually illegal as well under federal law. Politicians can't really make it legal right now, either because they were told that marijuana is wrong (because it's illegal) or because, if they were to make it legal, their supporters would get upset. Most of the people who do smoke marijuana don't really care enough to be politically active, so it doesn't change.\n\nNote that, unlike cocaine or heroin or tobacco, marijuana isn't actually addictive. Smoking marijuana does not make you a druggie the way harder drugs do -- you might enjoy it, and you might enjoy it a little too much, causing you to want it more and more, but your body will not develop a physical addiction. You're not going to start craving it so badly that you'll kill people and share needles and do other actually dangerous things. You'll just... like it a lot. Or not. But you won't need to spend months trying to quit, like with cigarettes (where, if you can't smoke for a few hours, you start getting really, really nervous), and you won't steal for drug money.\n\nMarijuana is a \"gateway drug\", which is why it can be dangerous. (This is total bullshit, by the way.) What does that mean? It means that people who smoke marijuana are likely to move to drugs that are actually dangerous, like meth. I guess they figure that if you're already doing something illegal that gets you high, you might as well try other illegal things that get you high, and soon enough, you're addicted to the other things. Now, there's some truth to this, but that's like saying that kissing is a gateway action to unprotected sex. Granted, it is, but kissing won't get anyone pregnant, and hopefully you're smart enough to know that! Same thing with marijuana. It gets associated with things that are actually bad, but it's not itself very bad. But everyone is *told* that it's bad, so nothing is done about it.\n\nWe are seeing that last part changing, right now. Many states are OK with \"medical marijuana\" (using marijuana as a medicine rather than to have fun getting high, because it's much harder to object to sick people taking medicine than to hippies getting high), and many polls show that legalization is popular. That doesn't mean that everyone wants to smoke. I don't want to smoke very much (I've tried it, but I don't really like it). I do, however, support the right of people to do it, because it's not harmful and the government won't let people do it for silly reasons. Hopefully they'll change their perspective.",
"It's not all happy cakes and delicious desserts. It can exacerbate anxiety problems, cause uncomfortable self-dissociation, and make you feel like a general dumbass.",
"People hate marijuana because, in the 30s, the idea that you could make paper from hemp started to become popular. William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper mogul who was heavily invested in the timber industry, feared that the less-expensive hemp would overtake wood as the primary source of paper, gutting his investment. In response, he started a media campaign to associate marijuana use with minorities, which marks the beginning of many false claims about marijuana. In fact, the reason cannabis is now called marijuana is due to this media campaign, which used the Spanish term for cannabis in order to play on generally the negative attitudes towards Mexicans which were held by people of that time period. This succeeded in stirring up public fear and led to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which made non-medical and non-industrial use of hemp a federal crime.",
"Former massive smoker here... this is how **I** see it.\n\nIn and of itself, for the user, physically speaking, pot isn't all that bad. ...and I'd even argue that it's less destructive than drinking.\n\nFor me, the dangers with pot lie in the long term mental and social changes. Eventually, when you're a pot smoker, you immerse yourself into the culture of being a pot smoker. ...you wake and bake. ...get the muchies ...get a good pipe, or a good bong. Whatever. Your friends all do it. You're part of a group that does their own thing that's kinda on the sly. You can sneak off and have a session. If you're in a crowd, you can share the look, and just **know**.\n\n...but eventually, somewhere along the line, you've changed from being someone that's herb friendly and ok with a little weed now and then, into a pot head. Every story has a weed connection. You spend a shit ton of cash on your habit. You don't hang with anyone who wants to do something different, and really, you don't want to do very much anyway. And the high isn't the same... basically you skip high and go straight to baked.\n\nI knew I had to quit when I felt my mind starting to go. I was starting to have problems socialising. I felt like I was getting dumber. I ended up moving to a new city so I could completely remove myself from the circle of friends I had.\n\nNow, when I compare the people I know who puff and the people who do not puff, the non-smokers, generally speaking, have by far a better quality of life and tend to carry themselves as a better human being.\n\n..so, ya. **ELI5: It fucks you up.**\n",
"Interesting question, but I don't think you'll find an unbiased response, because when \"hate\" is involved, emotions are involved, and that usually means there's an existing bias. \n\nI think there's a significant difference from those who simply grew up being told \"it's bad\" and those who grew up around people who had real social problems due to marijuana use, and who came to hate it for that reason. I'm part of the latter group. My distaste comes from real experience with both very close friends having their lives fall out from under them because they didn't want to do *anything* but get high, and from working with people who were consistently late and blasé about their responsibilities because they were stoners who just couldn't be bothered. Oh, and the huge memory lapses. Those are super fun to work with, too. \n\nI also find it humorous that people claim \"marijuana is not a gateway drug.\" It ain't necessarily so. Once you've crossed the line of being okay with using an illegal controlled substance to get high, the path to the next substance is one hell of a lot clearer. There's certainly no moral quandary. And you already know you like to get high. Your fear of getting busted doesn't exist. Why not? Again, personal experience watching people move down the line of drugs. If you've got someone with a propensity toward addiction and you start them on pot, they will love being high and will seek out better highs. Duh. Ask me how so many of my friends ended up in rehab, or as junkies, or homeless, or dead. What's fun in your teens and 20s tends to deteriorate in your 30s and 40s ... and can stand in the way of having a successful life. \n\nAgain, all of this is just ME. It's not based on scientific studies or essays. It's just my opinion, based on my personal experiences over 30 years of relationships with people and drugs. I'm sure someone can come up with a study that refutes my experience. But it can't undo it, or the way it's made me feel about pot. ",
"I dont hate it. I just hate the people who talk about legalizing it at every open second of the day",
"I think deep down it actively disinterests people in capitalist values and its implications, dogmatic religious attitudes, overly logical and close minded thinking of all sorts and if prevoked, becomes threatening towards those institutions. A citizen is interchangeable and has no history - it connects the user to something much older and authentic which, even if unconscious, is hard to dismiss.",
"It's the relaxed part that's the problem. Growing up is stressful and hard. Marijuana initially makes that go away, or at least not makes you care about how hard growing up is. For a lot of people this becomes a real problem as they use it as a crutch to continually get rid of the stress and their focus shifts from things that will help them thrive later on to getting the next hit that will let them feel \"relaxed\".\n\nGrades start slipping, their focus shifts to drug culture (see /r/trees for instance) instead of finding a hobby or activity that will define their career paths. Finally, if they make it through school they don't have the grades to get into college and the interest and passion in anything else to get a good job.\n\nThis doesn't happen to everyone of course but it happens to enough people that it's considered a big problem. I know this because my nephew used to be a very bright, inquisitive kid and now looks, acts and thinks like a character out of cheech and chong movie. He's a high-school dropout, he's got no interests outside the drug culture, and the rest of his life is going to be really hard even if he does manage to get clean and sober which doesn't appear to be happening any time soon. Would it have been different if he hadn't gotten into \"trees\"? Maybe, there's no way to know. But it's pretty easy to point at what he's doing now and saying it's royally screwed up his life.\n\nTL:DR; It basically relaxes you at a point in your life where you're literally fighting for your future. It doesn't kill you or make you sick, but it steals your drive, ambition, and chances for a reasonably happy future.\n ",
"The main reason that Marijuana ever became illegal is because Congress in the 30s was run just like it is today. By corporations. To emphasize, Cannabis has more uses than just for medicinal and recreational use; hemp fibers are some of the most durable and useful on the planet and during the 30s corporations like DuPont that were developing synthetic materials realized that a simple plant could put them out of business, or at least hurt it to an extent. And so, these corporations did everything within their power to put Cannabis in a bad light and pushed for criminalization of the plant. *This* is where the claims about its use by Negroes and the like that Lyme posted above come into play. All were just ploys by big businesses to prevent any monetary losses. **THIS** is why cannabis ever became illegal.\n\nNow, as to why the government continues to prevent any decriminalization efforts today is beyond me. It is obvious that they know the true information behind Cannabis, but it is beyond me why they hide from rationale. \n\nI partake in Cannabis use almost daily, and have for two years straight, I attend a respectable university and have done very well academically. I am not a recluse, an asshole, or a degenerate. Although I can vouch that too much use of the drug can without a doubt affect priorities, the reason parents are so vigilant in keeping their kids from using it is mainly because it's illegal and they don't want them to get in trouble. Otherwise, society has just built itself up on these statements and I think it's afraid to just renounce them and make itself look like a bunch of ignorant people. But really, the only reason for any of the scrutiny of Cannabis is because it is illegal.\n\nTL;DR: It all started from making it illegal, and the shit flowed downhill from there.",
"Personally, I don't like it cause it smells like shit and I hate dealing with people who are high. However, I support legalization. I don't drink either but it's legal, and advertised, and socially accepted, yet alcohol kills and marijuana only produces annoyances.\n\nWhy do people think it's bad? It comes from a long history of prohibitionism throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. A lot of other answers have explained it further, but it boils down to deep-seeded puritanism and an intolerance for all things fun.",
"I don't use it, but I don't have a problem with it becoming legalized. I do, however, have a problem with people who talk about it 24/7 non-stop.",
"Ex smoker here. Smoking is bad because it kills your ambition. Sometimes young people start smoking before they set a goal for themselves. After weed, goals dont really matter. ",
"Former smoker here. I can tell you from experience dozens of stories of it ruining peoples' lives, but it's not the weed's fault. We have the stoner culture that's built up around it and the fact that it's used as a tool for escapism and laziness to blame for it being seen as bad. As with alcohol, it's possible to be a social or occasional smoker, but I've met a lot more occasional drinkers than smokers. Almost everyone I've met that smokes ends up going overboard and letting it fuck up their personal/academic/work lives. \n\nTherein lies the danger of it: most people in our society these days are hedonists, and are addicted to making themselves feel good. Weed provides a dangerously easy way to do this, since it actually activates the cannaboid receptors in the pleasure center of the brain mostly. \n\nThe culture also promotes heavy use, which is also another problem and the reason I quit (sorry everyone who disagrees, stoner culture is fucking stupid and vapid). With all these factors, in addition to it just feeling good (and nobody doesn't want to do something that feels good), very few people can use it responsibly, which gives the entire thing a bad name. It's not actually the marijuana's fault though, it's the that the majority of people who are attracted to it can't use it in moderation.",
"People in our culture have a learned bias against anything that is considered \"too mind-altering\". Even alcohol is looked down on by a large segment of the population, because it can leave one out of control.\n\nIt's this same learned bias that leads people to stigmatize the seeking of mental health care.\n\nCombine that with a decades-old, government-supported marketing campaign against marijuana that stems from a combination of paper industry lobbying (hemp is a cheap, uncontrolled paper source), tobacco industry lobbying (not anymore, but used to be considered a threat because it's so easy to grow), and outright racism (\"Mexican cigarettes\", *doncha know*).\n\nWhat you get is people thinking that MJ leaves you out-of-control (arguable), serves as a \"gateway drug\" (false[1]), and is generally evil.\n\n[1]: it's true that a lot of \"hard drug\" users start with MJ, but that's not a causal relationship. If you are the type of person who is likely to use hard drugs, you start with a cheap, mild drug and then chase a high. If you're *not* that sort, smoking MJ will not make you any more likely to seek out harder drugs.",
"because you guys just won't shut the fuck up about it. I don't care. I have tried it. no big deal.",
"I don't hate marijuana. I hate that people think it is OK to drive on weed. I hate drunk drivers even more, but most pot smokers I've talked to think it is EVIL to drive drunk, but have no problem at all to drive to Taco Bell when they're too stoned to guide a cup of water into their mouth to drink or form a coherent sentence. \n\nI'm all for legalization, but not until they have a way for cops to test for \"too stoned to drive safely.\" ",
"I personally dislike weed because it's extremely habit forming for a lot of young males.\n\nIn my high school if you were a white male then everyday involved weed smoking. Lunch would come and these guys would be off like a shot to some secluded area to spark up. \n\nNow I just associate weed with something dimwitted teenagers do.",
"To older Americans in particular, marijuana still bears remnants of unpatriotic, hippie symbolism from the 1960s and 1970s. Older people are the staunchest opponents of marijuana (with just [31%](_URL_0_) of over-65s wanting it legalized).",
"A lot of people honestly believe it actually does harm to you because of all the misinformation spread by drug-awareness programs (this is your brain. this is your brain on drugs. Because every drug acts in the same way to literally smash your brain). And of course, since you can't buy any other poisons over the counter, we should make this poison illegal too!",
"It's also because hemp is a fantastic textile product, and was going to over take giants in the textile industry, so in order to stop this from happening they spread propaganda about marijuana, i.e. it kills brain cells, gives you cancer, and leads to more liberal thinking which at the time was quite scary, things such as communism and socialism were feared in the USA so they linked marijuana with these fears to drown out the hemp buisness. Back around the 1920's the growing of hemp (for textile reasons) was encouraged until propaganda was spread. Most of the hatred and fear of marijuana springs from old, and false, fears. The facts are, marijuana doesn't give you cancer, marijuana doesn't kill brain cells but can actually stimulate growth, and there has never been a recorded death caused purely by marijuana. I'm not an avid smoker myself but know many. Also there may be some holes in what I'v said, such as dates and exact propaganda so if someone has corrections, feel free. ",
"Non-smoker here. Well, firstly children are told it's bad. They grow up, and, believing it is bad, want to keep it illegal. Because it's illegal, people tell children it is bad. These children grow up thinking it's bad, they want to keep it illegal etc.\n\nSecondly, if smoked like a cigerette, it can cause lung damage (Basically, inhaling smoke is bad for your lungs. It causes the small nodules in your lungs to stop working). If tobacco was illegal it would most definately stay illegal because it is significantly more dangerous, but it is legal already, and as prohibition showed, making a substance that the public deem as 'okay' illegal doesn't solve anything. \n\nThirdly, it has had ties with schizophrenia(seeing and hearing things that aren't actually there), or more specifically, can reveal schizophrenia if you're genetically dispoisitoned to it already. If your family has a medical history of schizophrenia, there is a chance weed can cause you to develop schizophrenia in the long term really.\n\nOn the other side of the coin, it's loved because it's a good feeling you can get and it's practically risk free(other than legally of course). The lung damage can avoided through vaporising, and the schizophrenia links are sketchy. You may have been told growing up that it is addictive, that's a lie. Tobacco and heroin are actually addictive; they cause physiological changes to your body to make you need more of the substance, and cause negative side effects if you don't. Weed is 'addictive' in the same way shopping, world of warcraft and jaffa cakes are addictive, they're a good thing so you want more of them. It is also impossible to overdose on(short of injecting concentrated THC into your veins) and has toxicity levels lower than that of alcohol, tobacco and, I think, caffeine.\n\nI've also seen talk of marijuanna reducing the risks of certain types of cancer, but I'm not sure how true that is.",
"Corn costs 11 cents a pound, coffee costs $2.35 per pound. Marijuana costs way more - **OVER $9000.00** per pound (at a street price of $20/g) or $1600 per pound (at a dealer price of $100/ounce.) Mo' money mo' problems.\n\nIt is considered a [Schedule 1](_URL_1_) substance (\"high potential for abuse,\" \"no medical use.\") That's a lie of course; pot helps all kinds of problems that expensive prescription drugs are designed to fix.\n\nThere's lots of corporations who have a financial incentive to keep pot illegal - pharmaceutical companies, prison guards, alcohol companies. They give money directly to politicians' campaign funds. They also hire lobbyists. Lobbyists inhabit Washington. Their job is to hang out with politicians and show them flashy powerpoints and buy them drinks and explain the many reasons that pot is bad. \n\nSince politicians like money and drinks, they ignore stuff like Ron Paul's [Industrial Hemp Farming act of 2011](_URL_2_) in favor of their comfortable status quo.\n\n\n===\n\n\nOn the other side of the seesaw, the \"United States of America\" gives policemen the power to lock people up if they burn and inhale some marijuana. They claim that they are 'just doing their job' and 'they didn't write the law, they just enforce it.' That is exactly the problem - instead of acting like human beings and ignoring a clearly unjust law, they're laying hands on peaceful stoners and throwing them in jail. Something like 25% of US prisoners are there for [drugs alone](_URL_0_).",
"In the US, part of the reason marijuana was made illegal in the 30s was mostly to do with fear over Mexican immigrants. At the time, pot was mostly coming from Mexico, and there was a campaign to outlaw it, because a lot of people saw it as 'oh no those Mexicans are going to come over and give drugs to our daughters and take advantage of them'. Movies like Reefer Madness were made and only helped fuel anti-marijuana sentiment. \n\n\nThe same sort of thing happened with opium and the Chinese (oh no, those Chinamen are going to get our daughters into their opium dens and rape them!) and it's the reason why crack cocaine has such a harsher sentence than powder cocaine, although they're almost exactly the same drug - rich white people do the powder version, and poor black people are primarily associated with the crack kind.\n\nThis may not entirely answer your question, but it does provide a bit of historical context. In short, there was a racial motivation behind the illegalization of a lot of drugs. \n\n\nWiki has some stuff about this [here](_URL_1_), and one of the strongest campaigners in the 30s to make it illegal, [Harry Anslinger](_URL_0_), said: \n\n > \"There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.\"\n\n",
"Marijuana is a psychoactive drug, meaning that it causes effects to your mind: you think differently, feel differently, etc. When you smoke marijuana, you get \"high\". Trouble is, many people like to smoke marijuana *just* because it gets them high, not just to relieve their nausea or alleviate their pain from other diseased -- they don't have any good reason to smoke it other than to have fun. Responsible adults would never do *that*! (That's why responsible adults never get drunk! Oh wait.)\n\nThe answer is that marijuana isn't actually bad, but just like cussing, it's something that we've been told is immoral, and it's actually illegal as well under federal law. Politicians can't really make it legal right now, either because they were told that marijuana is wrong (because it's illegal) or because, if they were to make it legal, their supporters would get upset. Most of the people who do smoke marijuana don't really care enough to be politically active, so it doesn't change.\n\nNote that, unlike cocaine or heroin or tobacco, marijuana isn't actually addictive. Smoking marijuana does not make you a druggie the way harder drugs do -- you might enjoy it, and you might enjoy it a little too much, causing you to want it more and more, but your body will not develop a physical addiction. You're not going to start craving it so badly that you'll kill people and share needles and do other actually dangerous things. You'll just... like it a lot. Or not. But you won't need to spend months trying to quit, like with cigarettes (where, if you can't smoke for a few hours, you start getting really, really nervous), and you won't steal for drug money.\n\nMarijuana is a \"gateway drug\", which is why it can be dangerous. (This is total bullshit, by the way.) What does that mean? It means that people who smoke marijuana are likely to move to drugs that are actually dangerous, like meth. I guess they figure that if you're already doing something illegal that gets you high, you might as well try other illegal things that get you high, and soon enough, you're addicted to the other things. Now, there's some truth to this, but that's like saying that kissing is a gateway action to unprotected sex. Granted, it is, but kissing won't get anyone pregnant, and hopefully you're smart enough to know that! Same thing with marijuana. It gets associated with things that are actually bad, but it's not itself very bad. But everyone is *told* that it's bad, so nothing is done about it.\n\nWe are seeing that last part changing, right now. Many states are OK with \"medical marijuana\" (using marijuana as a medicine rather than to have fun getting high, because it's much harder to object to sick people taking medicine than to hippies getting high), and many polls show that legalization is popular. That doesn't mean that everyone wants to smoke. I don't want to smoke very much (I've tried it, but I don't really like it). I do, however, support the right of people to do it, because it's not harmful and the government won't let people do it for silly reasons. Hopefully they'll change their perspective.",
"It's not all happy cakes and delicious desserts. It can exacerbate anxiety problems, cause uncomfortable self-dissociation, and make you feel like a general dumbass.",
"People hate marijuana because, in the 30s, the idea that you could make paper from hemp started to become popular. William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper mogul who was heavily invested in the timber industry, feared that the less-expensive hemp would overtake wood as the primary source of paper, gutting his investment. In response, he started a media campaign to associate marijuana use with minorities, which marks the beginning of many false claims about marijuana. In fact, the reason cannabis is now called marijuana is due to this media campaign, which used the Spanish term for cannabis in order to play on generally the negative attitudes towards Mexicans which were held by people of that time period. This succeeded in stirring up public fear and led to the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937, which made non-medical and non-industrial use of hemp a federal crime.",
"Former massive smoker here... this is how **I** see it.\n\nIn and of itself, for the user, physically speaking, pot isn't all that bad. ...and I'd even argue that it's less destructive than drinking.\n\nFor me, the dangers with pot lie in the long term mental and social changes. Eventually, when you're a pot smoker, you immerse yourself into the culture of being a pot smoker. ...you wake and bake. ...get the muchies ...get a good pipe, or a good bong. Whatever. Your friends all do it. You're part of a group that does their own thing that's kinda on the sly. You can sneak off and have a session. If you're in a crowd, you can share the look, and just **know**.\n\n...but eventually, somewhere along the line, you've changed from being someone that's herb friendly and ok with a little weed now and then, into a pot head. Every story has a weed connection. You spend a shit ton of cash on your habit. You don't hang with anyone who wants to do something different, and really, you don't want to do very much anyway. And the high isn't the same... basically you skip high and go straight to baked.\n\nI knew I had to quit when I felt my mind starting to go. I was starting to have problems socialising. I felt like I was getting dumber. I ended up moving to a new city so I could completely remove myself from the circle of friends I had.\n\nNow, when I compare the people I know who puff and the people who do not puff, the non-smokers, generally speaking, have by far a better quality of life and tend to carry themselves as a better human being.\n\n..so, ya. **ELI5: It fucks you up.**\n",
"Interesting question, but I don't think you'll find an unbiased response, because when \"hate\" is involved, emotions are involved, and that usually means there's an existing bias. \n\nI think there's a significant difference from those who simply grew up being told \"it's bad\" and those who grew up around people who had real social problems due to marijuana use, and who came to hate it for that reason. I'm part of the latter group. My distaste comes from real experience with both very close friends having their lives fall out from under them because they didn't want to do *anything* but get high, and from working with people who were consistently late and blasé about their responsibilities because they were stoners who just couldn't be bothered. Oh, and the huge memory lapses. Those are super fun to work with, too. \n\nI also find it humorous that people claim \"marijuana is not a gateway drug.\" It ain't necessarily so. Once you've crossed the line of being okay with using an illegal controlled substance to get high, the path to the next substance is one hell of a lot clearer. There's certainly no moral quandary. And you already know you like to get high. Your fear of getting busted doesn't exist. Why not? Again, personal experience watching people move down the line of drugs. If you've got someone with a propensity toward addiction and you start them on pot, they will love being high and will seek out better highs. Duh. Ask me how so many of my friends ended up in rehab, or as junkies, or homeless, or dead. What's fun in your teens and 20s tends to deteriorate in your 30s and 40s ... and can stand in the way of having a successful life. \n\nAgain, all of this is just ME. It's not based on scientific studies or essays. It's just my opinion, based on my personal experiences over 30 years of relationships with people and drugs. I'm sure someone can come up with a study that refutes my experience. But it can't undo it, or the way it's made me feel about pot. ",
"I dont hate it. I just hate the people who talk about legalizing it at every open second of the day",
"I think deep down it actively disinterests people in capitalist values and its implications, dogmatic religious attitudes, overly logical and close minded thinking of all sorts and if prevoked, becomes threatening towards those institutions. A citizen is interchangeable and has no history - it connects the user to something much older and authentic which, even if unconscious, is hard to dismiss.",
"It's the relaxed part that's the problem. Growing up is stressful and hard. Marijuana initially makes that go away, or at least not makes you care about how hard growing up is. For a lot of people this becomes a real problem as they use it as a crutch to continually get rid of the stress and their focus shifts from things that will help them thrive later on to getting the next hit that will let them feel \"relaxed\".\n\nGrades start slipping, their focus shifts to drug culture (see /r/trees for instance) instead of finding a hobby or activity that will define their career paths. Finally, if they make it through school they don't have the grades to get into college and the interest and passion in anything else to get a good job.\n\nThis doesn't happen to everyone of course but it happens to enough people that it's considered a big problem. I know this because my nephew used to be a very bright, inquisitive kid and now looks, acts and thinks like a character out of cheech and chong movie. He's a high-school dropout, he's got no interests outside the drug culture, and the rest of his life is going to be really hard even if he does manage to get clean and sober which doesn't appear to be happening any time soon. Would it have been different if he hadn't gotten into \"trees\"? Maybe, there's no way to know. But it's pretty easy to point at what he's doing now and saying it's royally screwed up his life.\n\nTL:DR; It basically relaxes you at a point in your life where you're literally fighting for your future. It doesn't kill you or make you sick, but it steals your drive, ambition, and chances for a reasonably happy future.\n ",
"The main reason that Marijuana ever became illegal is because Congress in the 30s was run just like it is today. By corporations. To emphasize, Cannabis has more uses than just for medicinal and recreational use; hemp fibers are some of the most durable and useful on the planet and during the 30s corporations like DuPont that were developing synthetic materials realized that a simple plant could put them out of business, or at least hurt it to an extent. And so, these corporations did everything within their power to put Cannabis in a bad light and pushed for criminalization of the plant. *This* is where the claims about its use by Negroes and the like that Lyme posted above come into play. All were just ploys by big businesses to prevent any monetary losses. **THIS** is why cannabis ever became illegal.\n\nNow, as to why the government continues to prevent any decriminalization efforts today is beyond me. It is obvious that they know the true information behind Cannabis, but it is beyond me why they hide from rationale. \n\nI partake in Cannabis use almost daily, and have for two years straight, I attend a respectable university and have done very well academically. I am not a recluse, an asshole, or a degenerate. Although I can vouch that too much use of the drug can without a doubt affect priorities, the reason parents are so vigilant in keeping their kids from using it is mainly because it's illegal and they don't want them to get in trouble. Otherwise, society has just built itself up on these statements and I think it's afraid to just renounce them and make itself look like a bunch of ignorant people. But really, the only reason for any of the scrutiny of Cannabis is because it is illegal.\n\nTL;DR: It all started from making it illegal, and the shit flowed downhill from there.",
"Personally, I don't like it cause it smells like shit and I hate dealing with people who are high. However, I support legalization. I don't drink either but it's legal, and advertised, and socially accepted, yet alcohol kills and marijuana only produces annoyances.\n\nWhy do people think it's bad? It comes from a long history of prohibitionism throughout the 19th and into the 20th century. A lot of other answers have explained it further, but it boils down to deep-seeded puritanism and an intolerance for all things fun.",
"I don't use it, but I don't have a problem with it becoming legalized. I do, however, have a problem with people who talk about it 24/7 non-stop.",
"Ex smoker here. Smoking is bad because it kills your ambition. Sometimes young people start smoking before they set a goal for themselves. After weed, goals dont really matter. ",
"Former smoker here. I can tell you from experience dozens of stories of it ruining peoples' lives, but it's not the weed's fault. We have the stoner culture that's built up around it and the fact that it's used as a tool for escapism and laziness to blame for it being seen as bad. As with alcohol, it's possible to be a social or occasional smoker, but I've met a lot more occasional drinkers than smokers. Almost everyone I've met that smokes ends up going overboard and letting it fuck up their personal/academic/work lives. \n\nTherein lies the danger of it: most people in our society these days are hedonists, and are addicted to making themselves feel good. Weed provides a dangerously easy way to do this, since it actually activates the cannaboid receptors in the pleasure center of the brain mostly. \n\nThe culture also promotes heavy use, which is also another problem and the reason I quit (sorry everyone who disagrees, stoner culture is fucking stupid and vapid). With all these factors, in addition to it just feeling good (and nobody doesn't want to do something that feels good), very few people can use it responsibly, which gives the entire thing a bad name. It's not actually the marijuana's fault though, it's the that the majority of people who are attracted to it can't use it in moderation.",
"People in our culture have a learned bias against anything that is considered \"too mind-altering\". Even alcohol is looked down on by a large segment of the population, because it can leave one out of control.\n\nIt's this same learned bias that leads people to stigmatize the seeking of mental health care.\n\nCombine that with a decades-old, government-supported marketing campaign against marijuana that stems from a combination of paper industry lobbying (hemp is a cheap, uncontrolled paper source), tobacco industry lobbying (not anymore, but used to be considered a threat because it's so easy to grow), and outright racism (\"Mexican cigarettes\", *doncha know*).\n\nWhat you get is people thinking that MJ leaves you out-of-control (arguable), serves as a \"gateway drug\" (false[1]), and is generally evil.\n\n[1]: it's true that a lot of \"hard drug\" users start with MJ, but that's not a causal relationship. If you are the type of person who is likely to use hard drugs, you start with a cheap, mild drug and then chase a high. If you're *not* that sort, smoking MJ will not make you any more likely to seek out harder drugs.",
"because you guys just won't shut the fuck up about it. I don't care. I have tried it. no big deal.",
"I don't hate marijuana. I hate that people think it is OK to drive on weed. I hate drunk drivers even more, but most pot smokers I've talked to think it is EVIL to drive drunk, but have no problem at all to drive to Taco Bell when they're too stoned to guide a cup of water into their mouth to drink or form a coherent sentence. \n\nI'm all for legalization, but not until they have a way for cops to test for \"too stoned to drive safely.\" ",
"I personally dislike weed because it's extremely habit forming for a lot of young males.\n\nIn my high school if you were a white male then everyday involved weed smoking. Lunch would come and these guys would be off like a shot to some secluded area to spark up. \n\nNow I just associate weed with something dimwitted teenagers do."
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7hpt8u | how can news outlets and others report on accusations? even to the point they ruin peoples lives and careers before being found guilty... | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7hpt8u/eli5_how_can_news_outlets_and_others_report_on/ | {
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"There is no law against reporting such things. The press would be pointless if they could only report on things *after* the government has had its say. It would basically make the news outlets a tool of the government, reporting only on the outcomes the government has decided.\n\nAccusations are relevant and important. While people lament trial by media, the alternative is worse.",
"News outlets can report on accusations because the accusation itself is news.\n\nIf a prosecutor accuses your neighbor of being a mass murderer, that's pretty damn newsworthy. Of course, the prosecutor needs to be pretty sure of the facts, and that he can win the prosecution."
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be1ule | why tap water is drinkable only in some countries but not all? | I know some countries would add Chlorine to water to kill bacteria. But I've seen some Asian countries advice against drinking tap water despite the chlorine. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/be1ule/eli5_why_tap_water_is_drinkable_only_in_some/ | {
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"The water may have bacteria in it if the source of the water isn't fully treated, and the pipes that are used to carry the water may not be safe (for instance, if they are lead pipes, you can get lead poisoning from drinking the water).",
"Water treatment can vary greatly in different countries. Even within different communities in the same country, it can vary widely. \n\nAnd it's not just how the water is treated. It's also the pipes and how it gets to you. I've been in some countries where I was told that it's actually treated well at the source, but certain pipes are older or have had people tap into them and then affect the water.",
"It's not even okay to drink across rich countries like the US. When the water table is polluted, or your infrastructure is using lead or broken, etc, it is unsafe to drink.",
"Some tap water is not so much unsafe as undesirable, either because it barely meets standards and tastes too foul to drink, or because it meets standards for some chemicals (sulfates, IIRC what my chemist friend says) that your system needs time to adjust to, and while adjusting you'll run like a faucet on full.\n\nMy well water before treatment has enough iron in it to be like licking a rusty knife. It'd be legal and mostly harmless, but it's not pleasant."
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119e47 | the misogyny controversy going on in the australian government. | I heard about it on the news, but they didn't really give much context. What exactly is going on? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/119e47/eli5_the_misogyny_controversy_going_on_in_the/ | {
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" > I heard about it on the news, but they didn't really give much context. What exactly is going on?\n\nThe Prime Minister of Australia is [Julia Gillard](_URL_2_). She leads the Labor Party, and she comes from a formalised faction of that party called the Socialist Left, which has a very strong emphasis on social progressivism and democratic socialism. \n\nIn the Australian political system, whoever leads the largest party not large enough to establish government is designated Leader of the Opposition. At the moment, this is a fellow called [Tony Abbot](_URL_0_), who leads the conservative Liberal Party. He sits directly across from the Prime Minister in parliament, and it's his job to be the face of opposition to Julia Gillard. The Australian parliamentary system involves a lot more inter-party discussion than the systems of some other countries. On a regular basis, everyone unites in the House for \"[question time](_URL_4_)\", where the leaders and politicians discuss policy and are questioned by supporters and opponents, and this is broadcast on national TV. So there's a lot of opportunity for arguments.\n\nA little while ago, Julia's dad died. She was missing for a day or two to attend his funeral, then returned looking haggard and worn-out. A conservative Australian radio host named Alan Jones, one of the biggest radio hosts in Australia, went on the air during the funeral and said \"Her father probably died of shame.\" There was a pretty huge backlash and a ton of his sponsors dropped him. Then this week, the Speaker of the House, a man named Peter Slipper, stepped down during a scandal about him sexually harassing staffers and sending creepy/explicit SMSes to people. Tony Abbot issued a statement saying that \"sexists and misogynists like Peter are not fit for high office.\" Then he turned to criticise Julia and said \"[her government has died of shame](_URL_3_).\"\n\nShe made the news for standing up in parliament and delivering a 15-minute attack on Abbot for what she called his over-the-line personal attacks on her over the years, for his hypocritical misogynistic attitudes, and for his immaturity and anger, citing a bunch of incidents over the past few years. The biggest ones were his comments from discussion about women being underrepresented in society, where he he said \"If it's true that men have more power than women, is that a bad thing? What if men are by physiology or temperament, more adapted to exercise authority or to issue command?” Later in the same discussion, someone said \"I think it's very hard to deny that there is an underrepresentation of women\" and he replied \"There's an assumption that this is a bad thing.\" \n\nJulia Gillard is unmarried and childless, and has stated her intent to remain that way. Tony Abbot criticised her for \"not making an honest woman of herself\", and has made other subtle 'she's a whore'-type comments in the past, comments which she (rightfully) says would not have been made if she were a man. She's also criticised his attitudes towards women in general (his speeches have a lot of references to 'the housewives of Australia' and he's called abortion the easy way out for girls who just want to sleep around, etc). More generally there have been a lot of jokes about her being 'on her period' or 'overemotional' when she says anything angry and jokes about her being barren, and jokes that [her boyfriend](_URL_6_) is secretly a woman because he was a hairdresser and she \"seems like the type.\"\n\nAfter her speech, a few other high-profile people in Australia -- including the leaders of other parties like the Green Party and the Sex Party ^(yes, the joke's been made a million times) -- have come out talking about sexism from Abbot and his party leaders, and there's been discussion and analysis of similar, smaller incidents in the past (a little while ago, Julia's Minister for Finance, a gay woman named [Penny Wong](_URL_5_) who has been pretty vocal about the sexism and homophobia she's faced during her career, [got meowed at](_URL_1_) for being 'feisty' in parliament and went off at one of Abbot's partymates).\n\n^((I actually forget whether Penny had the portfolio for Finance or the portfolio for Climate Change at the time and I'm too lazy to check.))",
"This is a page from the Australian Broadcasting Company, it has a video of her little spiel on Abbot.\nIts clips like this that make broadcasting question time worthwhile!\n\nEDIT: idiot forgot the link!!!\n_URL_0_\n"
]
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[
"http://images.smh.com.au/2012/08/18/3566419/Abbott_353-300x0.jpg",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wrL9z3Kvww",
"http://images.smh.com.au/2012/08/11/3547195/art-353-Gillard-300x0.jpg",
"http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ag1o3koTLWM",
"http://i.ytimg.com/vi/gMHOoW1rjVo/0.jpg",
"http://www.alp.org.au/getattachment/8e478e37-bb12-42f8-a65e-ff92cce35dbc/penny-wong/",
"http://resources1.news.com.au/images/2007/10/13/va1237271983670/gillard-5700876.jpg"
],
[
"http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-10-09/julia-gillard-attacks-abbott-of-hypocrisy/4303634"
]
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|
3kqy97 | when a police officer commits a crime why is the police department in charge of the investigation? | Okay from what i understand when a police officer commits any sort of crime the police department investigates it. How is this allowed? Shouldn't there be a separate organization that basically polices the police, Especially now with all the not so good media attention they have been getting. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3kqy97/eli5_when_a_police_officer_commits_a_crime_why_is/ | {
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"there is a division in law enforcement specifically for this. It's called internal affairs.",
"It's not *always* the police who investigate, nor is it always the police department the accused belongs to. It all depends on the nature and severity of the crime. Some crimes automatically get kicked up to another agency, like the FBI, while other crimes will be handed off to a neighboring police department to avoid bias. Minor crimes can be handled by the accused officer's department. Most police departments can handle their own affairs, because they have an Internal Affairs division that investigates crimes and other issues committed within the department. That's why you hear people trash-talking \"IA\" on TV shows and movies - since their job is to investigate other cops, they're seen as traitors or the enemy.",
"The police are there to investigate crimes. We don't have some other body (except at federal levels) to investigate crimes. But instead we set up a separate group *within* the police, whose job it is to investigate other police. We call that group Internal Affairs. Ideally, it does operate separately, although I don't know how well that works or doesn't work in practice.",
"Internal affairs is the separate division that \"polices the police\". But any organization that you have investigating crimes would be police. ",
"In the UK, police alleged crimes and major complaints are handed by a third party agency, [IPCC](_URL_0_)."
]
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[],
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5q3ud1 | why does toilet paper clean my glasses 100 times better than any shirt, tissue or sometimes even glasses cloth? | Toilet paper has become the absolute champion of cleaning glasses for me. Sometimes those special glasses cloths can compete but I don't necessarily have those around all the time and I think they're not even that healthy for glasses. And other than that nothing can compete with the heavenly toilet paper. I'm curious why that is! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5q3ud1/eli5_why_does_toilet_paper_clean_my_glasses_100/ | {
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"text": [
"Toilet paper is clean as it have never been used before. Cloth is often used several times and can contain impurities like fat and acids from previous use. This can get transferred to your glasses when you clean them.",
"I suppose it is because since toilet paper contains wood fibers, it works like a very fine abrasive. The is good at getting dirt particles off of your glasses. When my glasses get dirty, I like to use dish soap and warm water to get all the oils off from when I touch them. They also tend to dry without spots this way, but sometimes I use a paper towel though to dry them. Over time though, this will scratch the hell out of your glass. "
]
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[],
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2bm7gd | why do those "pan-tilt" photos make things look like models? | You know the ones. like [this](_URL_1_) and [this](_URL_0_). | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bm7gd/eli5_why_do_those_pantilt_photos_make_things_look/ | {
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"1. Scale - When taking a picture of something close and focusing on it, the surroundings become smaller in comparison. When looking from the top of a large building, for example, the objects below inherently look like models, it is the same concept.\n2. Lighting - In the first picture note that the lighting is relatively flat and there aren't any shadows being cast. In addition, the photographer or editor focused on the center of the picture to convey a smaller portion of the shot. ",
"Cameras naturally have a distance at which their lenses focus light properly, which is variable and on fixed lens arrangements gives rise to a virtual focal \"plane\". This plane becomes thicker at greater range and thinner up close; while you might be able to get an entire building in focus at a distance, maybe half a penny would be in range up close.\n\nTilt shift cameras can adjust the relationship of their lenses to the sensor, creating the effect of tilting the vertical focal plane down across the scene. When used properly it can put an entire landscape in focus, but when reverses it can narrow the focus onto a targeted element. But this can also make it seem like a normal shot taken of something very close, which implies it is tiny!",
"I'll try and actually explain this as easily as possible.\n\nThe quickest reason for this miniature illusion is depth-of-field, which is the blurry background or foreground effect you see in photography when an object is in sharp focus.\n\nDepth-of-field is usually not achieved in photographs that are taken in landscape or super wide because there is not an object close to the lens for the camera to focus on, and there is no reason for the background to be very blurry.\n\nWhen we take a landscape shot, like the second image you provided, and make the statue in sharp focus, and blur the background and foreground, the illusion of it being miniature is created because that effect is achieved normally on objects where the camera is very close to the object in focus. This, combined with increasing the saturation of the image, makes it seem like these landscapes are miniature toy models."
]
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"http://i.imgur.com/2L2DlTh.jpg",
"http://i.imgur.com/7heY9wq.jpg"
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tnnqb | left hand < > right hand | If I was able to remove both of my hands and sew them back on, with the left hand now attached the right arm and vice versa. With all the tendons attached the opposite finger. Tendon for the thumb now attached to the pinky, this is so the palm of the hand still faces the same way. Would this work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/tnnqb/left_handright_hand/ | {
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"No because it isn't your hand that makes you right handed it's your brain/heart/blood vessels that make you right handed.\n\nThe left hemisphere of the brain while developing is larger and heavier than the right side. The left hemisphere is responsible for the right side of everyone's bodies and vis versa. This side of the brain being developed sooner can mean there is more blood flowing to that area. This means the blood vessels that go to your right arm have a more direct path to your right than they do to your left; assuming you are right handed.\n\n",
"I suppose that because of all the tendons that continue up into your forearm, it may be easier to make the amputation at the elbow and not the wrist. "
]
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2oeoma | why are boxing and mma fights usually paperview | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2oeoma/eli5why_are_boxing_and_mma_fights_usually/ | {
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"People pay very good money to see other people physically blugeoning one another... especially since the fighters are (usually) very well trained, the fights become very technical and impressive in terms of technique, speed, strength, quality etc.",
"lol paperview??? that's too cute."
]
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||
5e9w9q | descartes' need to prove the existence of god | Descartes started the Meditations disregarding everything he knew that can be subject to doubt. Eventually, he found out that, for doubt itself to exist, there must be someone doing the doubting/thinking. Hence, Descartes proclaims that "I think, therefore I am" is the new and indubitable foundation of all knowledge. And in the process, he made the distinction between the thinking thing and the body.
The thing that I don't get, however, is how Descartes' radical kind of doubt requires him to prove the existence of God in order to guarantee everything outside of the "thinking thing." | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5e9w9q/eli5_descartes_need_to_prove_the_existence_of_god/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"You may want to try r/philosophy."
]
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|
efqjs4 | why does youtube sometimes not display comments on videos? | Obviously I’m aware of the option to disable comments, but I’m talking about when YouTube says that no one has made comments, even on a popular video, and reloading the page doesn’t even make this change. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/efqjs4/eli5_why_does_youtube_sometimes_not_display/ | {
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"umm.. I know some will be automatically blocked. For example if you provide a link to [_URL_0_](https://_URL_0_) in your comment it will not appear. So i think it has something to do with the comment having content that is considered \"Adult\" when youtube has lots of kids on it.",
"It likes to filter out comments it thinks are spam. Creators can put a word filter on for comments as well. Also check how you’re sorting comments. Sometimes when you sort by “top comments” it’ll leave out anything new."
]
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3wgdgp | if mammalian blood cells don't have nuclei/ribosomes etc. (in other words having no dna) how is blood useful as dna evidence in crimes? | Just something I wondered as I was reading about the differences between mammalian and avian blood cells. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wgdgp/eli5_if_mammalian_blood_cells_dont_have/ | {
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"So, remember that your blood is a type of connective tissue - it holds more than one type of cell: platelets, white blood cells, among others. That's where it comes from, rather than the mature red blood cells. "
]
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[]
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|
bzx883 | why does anyone use kwh? is it not better to say kilojoule hour since watts are a derived unit? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bzx883/eli5_why_does_anyone_use_kwh_is_it_not_better_to/ | {
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"text": [
"Cause you would have a very big number and having another hour in the unit being stated would just be really confusing."
]
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[]
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|
28966p | is holding the fifa world cup actually a detriment to brazil, or will it provide a boost to its economy. | tIveWgGg5xpaf4ZK1gDpqeBaXHdSYWXDHIU | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28966p/eli5_is_holding_the_fifa_world_cup_actually_a/ | {
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"Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO): FIFA an…: _URL_0_\n\n\nThis guy explains it well",
"The problem is not in holding the World Cup, but in how it was done. If the government made the mobility improvements they promise (better airports, more subways, better highways, etc...), and didn't wasted so much money creating stadiums on the middle of no where, had much less cities holding games, keep the promise of not using public money to build stadiums, maybe the World Cup would be a good thing and the economy in general would end on the black.\n\nHowever, they promise too much, delivered the bare minimum, wasted money and time, used public money to do almost everything, it was not worth to have the World Cup there.",
"It will probably be a detriment, especially because foreign corporations are getting all the best deals to sell food, liquor, and merchandise to the fans. Normal Brazilians are actually banned from a lot of the stadiums and can't sell beer and food to the fans. Plus the government spent billions on the stadiums while there are Brazilians living in shantytowns and the bus fares keep going up and there's not enough funding for public services like healthcare and education. The people are hungry, and they can't eat football. "
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3d5f2h | if i am voting on an absentee ballot, why don't they count it unless the election is a close one? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3d5f2h/eli5_if_i_am_voting_on_an_absentee_ballot_why/ | {
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"because it costs extra money to count absentee ballots. \n\nSo, to take an easy example, imagine an election with a million votes cast, of which 100,000 are absentee ballots. \n\nIf, after counting the 900,000 regular votes, it's 600,000 to 300,000, there's no reason to count the absentees at all. Even if every single one of them voted for the losing candidate, it still wouldn't be enough to change the outcome. "
]
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||
1yfuz4 | how is it good business practice to have a starbucks across from a starbucks? aren't they doubling running costs without gaining customers? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1yfuz4/eli5_how_is_it_good_business_practice_to_have_a/ | {
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"Practically yes, but the thing is that the two Starbucks are probably run by different operators under the same name.\n\nShop chains work like this: \n\nAn operator decides to run a store as part of a chain. He buys the shop and then requests to the stakeholder of the \"starbucks\" name that he use the same name for his shop, participating in the chain. The operator then pays money to use the name, acquire proprietary recepies/equipment/coffee beans to maintain the shop.\n\nTL:DR, The people running it is not starbucks. Starbucks is benefiting, but not the two operators running it.",
"Honestly it all comes down to supply and demand. If their single Starbucks is in a fantastic location, and brings in loads of customers, they aren't able to serve all of them at once, resulting in long lines and short tempers (these are people before they've had their coffee remember). So, they plop another Starbucks right across the street, so that way the location stays the same, bringing in the same amount of customers, but allowing for a much higher efficiency. They don't really lose anything if both Starbucks are always busy. Everybody wins. \n\nOf course, you only win if you like Starbucks.",
"Starbucks js a franchise. In reality starbucks is just a framework: supply chains, distributors, management, PR etc. \n\nMost of the actual shops (bar the core ones, owned by the company itself) are run by people who 'buy into' the franchise. An independent business person will approch starbucks and ask to set up a store. A business person pays a large flat sum to starbucks, plus a percentage of their income montly, and in return they get access to all of starbucks branding, recipes, signage, business practices - and of course, their huge customer base. (they also get extensive advice, help, training, etc) \n\n\nNow, take Joe the coffee enthusiast: \nHe wants to open up a coffee shop and has a truck-load of money sitting around to do it. He could open up his own coffee shop (which in most places, will most likely be surrounded by other coffee shops anyway - including starbucks - the coffee market is competative after all), or he could buy into the starbucks brand and open a starbucks. \n\nIn other words, he can open a \"Cuppa Joe's\" independent coffee house next to a starbucks, (and two other coffee places), or he can open a starbucks next to a starbucks (and two other coffee places)\n\nFrom Joe's perspective, even with another starbucks nearby, it's often more profitable for him (the owner) to open a starbucks. The buying power of a huge multinational corporation will drive his costs down, and their brand will give him an instant customer base. He also avoids the pitfalls of the industry, whatever they may be. \nSo, from the owners perspective, it makes sense. \n\nNow, think of starbucks themselves:\nThey're approached by Joe, who wants to open a second starbucks in his small town (because that makese sense for him). Their choice at this point is to have two starbucks splitting the business in one town (so they get a % of two smaller incomes, rather than one larger one - basically the same thing, Plus the buy-in fees) Orrr they can refuse Joe, and risk having to compete with \"cuppa Joe's\", who will still diminish the income of the original starbucks in the town (perhaps less-so, but still a little most likely - and that money isn't coming to them) \n\nSo, it makes sense to the Franchise too, the majority of the time - and thus these starbucks pop up everywhere. \n\nNow, there is a saturation point where business owners will stop buying into the company, because they'll be sharing the (huge) starbucks customer base with too many other starbucks to make money (even with the benefit of the starbucks franchise bringing down their costs etc) \n\nBut there really isn't a saturation point where starbucks will stop granting franchises (short of out-and-out sillyness) \n\nI hope that made sense. ",
"They are definitely gaining customers. In some situations, putting two establishments so close together can help business overall. There are many factors that go into why someone actually buys something. Things as simple as long lines or not wanting to cross traffic can lower the demand for any item.",
"In New York City there are Starbucks literally on every corner because every day people who have someplace to be ate not crossing the stree for coffee. If it is not convenient people won't stop",
"You also see similar things happening with gas stations. It's not uncommon to see two, three, or even four gas stations at the same intersection.\n\nHaving multiple gas stations at one intersection is good for the driver. When you need gas, just pull into the one that is most convenient. Chances are, the prices will all be very similar, so there's no need to drive across the street to save a few pennies.\n\nThe gas station owners also *make more money* when there are more gas stations around. This is because the intersection becomes known to drivers as \"the place to get gas.\" When you need gas and there isn't a station nearby, you're going to go to the intersection where you know gas is available, which happens to be where there are multiple.\n\nFor Starbucks stores, the idea is the same: if you need mocha frapaccino venti, you're going to go where you know there are Starbucks stores. If there's more than one to choose from, you'll go into the most convenient one. For an isolated Starbucks, the customer might decide crossing the street isn't worth it and ducks into a Peet's instead."
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cb0wp3 | what made the modern space shuttle program so dangerous? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cb0wp3/eli5_what_made_the_modern_space_shuttle_program/ | {
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"The main reason the STS was scrapped wasn't actually risk, it was cost.\n\nThe Space Shuttle was supposed to revolutionise the cost of space travel by being almost fully reusable, but in the end that didn't work out. The boosters splashed down, which meant due to salt water contact they needed to be so extensively refurbished it would've been effectively cheaper to just let them crash and use new ones for each mission. In addition, especially after the columbia disaster, the shuttle itself also went through extensive refurbishment, with every single one of it's more than 20.000 silica heat tiles being expected and potentially replaced.\n\nIn the end, the STS shuttle was a financial Black hole, bringing none of the cost reduction it promised.",
"It was not cost-effective compared to other launch vehicles for tasks such as launching satellites and ferrying crews to the International Space Station. The time and money to recondition the ships for relaunches was much greater than anticipated, making the launch schedules (which were originally envisioned to be every two weeks) erratic.\n\nDue to its weight, it could only attain Low Earth Orbit, which made it useless for maintaining the most valuable satellites.\n\nIt wasn't that the design of the shuttle was so bad, it was complacency at NASA about problems during launch.\n\nNASA was aware that the O-ring seals of the solid rocket boosters were being charred during launch. It took the combination of extreme cold on the day of the launch, making the O-rings brittle, combined with the charring that led to the burn-through that destroyed the Challenger.\n\n\nNASA was well aware that pieces of insulating foam were breaking off from the main fuel tank, but since they had not yet caused an accident, were not rectified. Eventually a foam strike damaged a heat shield tile, resulting in the destruction of the Columbia.",
"The biggest problem with the space shuttle was that, when it was retired in 2011, its technology was 30+ years old. That's the problem with something reusable like a space shuttle. If we had been building separate rockets for each launch that were not reusable, technology would have slowly improved.\n\nAdditionally, the space shuttle program was initially envisioned as being, well, a shuttle (something for frequent transport). There would be frequent space launches. But as the space race wound down and the USSR collapsed, we found the need to use it less and less, which means the benefits of having a reusable shuttle went out the window.",
"There was nothing inherently wrong with the space shuttle. It launched 135 times and suffered two disasters. The first was caused by launching in colder temperatures than the equipment was intended for, which caused a seal to break. The second was caused by damage to a wing during take-off. These were regrettable, but it wasn’t inherently worse than any other space vehicle.\n\nCriticism of NASA and the shuttle comes down mostly to cost. The idea behind the shuttle was that the re-usable launch vehicle would be able to cheaply and efficient taxi people to space and back. Those cost savings were never really realized. Certainly not to the extent promised. Also, the space shuttles were getting old. Given the cost of launching, the cost of maintaining or replacing old vehicles, and the competing priorities (such as trillion dollar wars) they decided that the gains were no longer worth the cost of operation.\n\nMany people criticizing the state of our space program are just complaining that we no longer have flashy missions to the moon and things like that. The US has scaled back its government space program and is now relying on foreign governments and private industry in an attempt to realize cost savings.",
"The Space Shuttle was designed to be much more cost effective at taking things to space **and back**. The goal was a dramatic cost savings in both directions, with hopes that zero-G manufacturing of chemicals/drugs/asteroid-mining/something would be a financial support for the expensive equipment. They could take giant, expensive satellites to orbit and return with tons of something else expensive. \n\nThen it was discovered that it wasn't nearly reusable enough to compete with traditional rockets for satellites to orbit, and the trend in satellites turned out to be \"more + smaller\" rather than \"bigger\". Nobody ever found anything that they could do in space cheaper, :-( so there was no real \"value proposition\" in making Space - > Earth cheaper. \n\nSo now we have lots of optimized systems making Earth - > Space cheaper and we just don't bring things back except people in tiny capsules. The Space Shuttle was a great, safe-ish, solution to the wrong problem. It was the economics that killed it, not the safety.",
"The way the shuttle is mounted - strapped to the side of the rocket, rather than on top of it like all other systems, is inherently more risky. With Challenger, a capsule system could likely have been pulled clear of the exploding rocket with a launch escape system. With Columbia, the heat tiles would have been protected and the foam coming off the fuel tank would have harmlessly dropped into the ocean . Neither of those disasters wouldn't have happened in a more traditional top-mount spacecraft system.",
"Politics.\n\nThe root cause of the Challenger disaster is that those O-rings existed at all. There is no technical reason why the solid rocket boosters needed to be constructed in segments. That was entirely due to a political kickback to award the SRB contract to Morton Thiokol. Being out of state, however, this meant that the boosters would have to travel by rail, which dictated maximum diameter and length of the booster segments, and necessitated the joints.\n\nThere was also political pressure to launch that day, and despite the fact that the engineers raised the issue of those elastomers not performing in the cold temperatures with management, their concerns were overridden, the shuttle launched, it failed in exactly the way the engineers had predicted, and management subsequently tried to cover up that they had been warned.\n\nThe Challenger disaster is a common case study today in business ethics. Look up Roger Boisjoly."
]
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||
9246cn | why doesn’t highlighting text and pressing caps lock uppercase the text? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9246cn/eli5_why_doesnt_highlighting_text_and_pressing/ | {
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"Because the application you're using isn't programmed to do that. It would need to be instructed to intercept and upper case all letters in times where a selection is highlighted and the CAPS key was pressed. \n\nJust like your system is programmed to understand and intercept the CAPS key and hold it enabled until pressed again, to then make all following letters change to their upper case forms. \n\nPart of this stems from the fact that a and A aren't the same letter to a computer (see: CharMap / ASCII codes) and your computer encodes/decodes them based on a signal from your keyboard and your operating system's current Character Map / Language settings. CAPS lock is effectively saying to use the code for an upper case a, instead of a lower case a, when it's enabled.",
"If you're in Word, you can program this yourself.\n\n* Find the Macros section (usually in the view tab). Click it.\n* Type a name, like CAPS, and Click Create\n* In the new window it takes you to, underneath the green comment lines, put this in there (case-sensitive)\n\n Selection.Font.AllCaps = True \n\n* You can then close out the macro window, it keeps everything saved by default.\n* Then go to File - Options - Customize Ribbon and then find the Keyboard Shortcuts - Customize button (assuming you're on a fairly new version of word). \n* Select the Macros category, then select your macro on the right\n* Click in the Press New Shortcut Key box, and tell it what key you want to use (probably shouldn't use the caps lock, but if you want to, hey)\n\nNow when you highlight text and push that key combination, it will change it from lowercase to uppercase."
]
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[],
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||
dnjf5x | how iv fluids are absorbed by the body through the bloodstream | Here in Miami, as well as L.A., there are a lot of pop-up shops advertising IV fluid therapy. These are infused with vitamins to treat various things. How are these fluids, once in the blood stream, absorbed in the same way they would be through oral ingestion? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dnjf5x/eli5_how_iv_fluids_are_absorbed_by_the_body/ | {
"a_id": [
"f5bmade",
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"Not at all.\nThe normal manner of ingestion involves digestion. A process that starts with your teeth and saliva. Then the mixture enters the stomach and is subjected to acid and agitation. Then moves to the intestinal track where the absorption actually occurs. The process happens as your acres of area intestinal surface pulls fluid out of the mixture and much of the nutrients. The remaining material is pooped out.\n\nFYI drinking water goes through the same process, it does not go straight to the bladder as it may seem.\n\nFrom the intestinal system the nutrients and water taken from the mixture gets distributed to the cells. At the same time that oxygen and carbon dioxide are being exchanged using your red blood cells are trucks, cells absorb the nutrients and liquid into the cell.\n\nAfter the cells are done, the liquid abd leftover nutrients leave the cell via the venous blood flow.\n\nAfter making a circuit through the body excess liquid in the blood stream is taken out via the kidneys and urinated out...\n\nSimplified the process.\n\nFYI. Mostly what you get from the IV is liquid which decreases the after effects of drinking too much. Unless you are vitamin deficiency, the rest gets peed out.",
"Then end up in the same place (your blood stream), but they bypass the digestive system completely, so they're not absorbed at all, since that's what the digestive system is for. Once nutrients are in your blood stream, they get delivered directly to your cells. It should be noted that, at least in healthy individuals, IV delivery of vitamins is a total scam. It's snake oil. If you're otherwise healthy, you do not need IV vitamins, and there's 0 evidence of any benefit."
]
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[],
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2pj522 | federal ban on medical marijuana lifted, what this means for federal employees | Does this now mean federal employees and Military personnel could legally use medical marijuana if their state allows it? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pj522/eli5_federal_ban_on_medical_marijuana_lifted_what/ | {
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"Pretty much. And states can sell them legally without worrying about federal raids.",
"Depends.\n\nCan they use it when they aren't working and if their employment allows it? Yes, just like alcohol.\n\nBut they still can't come to work high, and if their employment says that they can't do it, yet a drug test comes back and says that they did, they can still be fired.",
"No.\n\nEmployers can still prohibit drug use (including the government). That has nothing to do with the recently-passed Federal spending bill, which only prevents the Department of Justice from spending money to stop medical marijuana in the current 32 states (plus the District of Columbia) that currently allow it according to their state laws. The states were specifically listed; if another state enacted medical marijuana laws tomorrow the DoJ would still be able to send DEA agents to enforce the federal laws that still prohibit it.\n\nExact text below:\n\n*Sec. 538. None of the funds made available in this Act to the Department of Justice may be used, with respect to the States of Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Oregon, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Utah, Vermont, Washington, and Wisconsin, to prevent such States from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession, or cultivation of medical marijuana.*"
]
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|
1pg8v9 | how exactly does being amish work? | Like do they pay taxes and actually follow state laws and etc | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1pg8v9/eli5how_exactly_does_being_amish_work/ | {
"a_id": [
"cd1zi7e"
],
"score": [
2
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"text": [
"You should ask for an AMA."
]
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[]
] |
|
3a2vh8 | how do you use toilet paper? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3a2vh8/eli5how_do_you_use_toilet_paper/ | {
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"No wonder you're having trouble. You don't wipe with it, you eat a wad of it after each meal. Then after you poop the meal out you expel the wad from your anus. This keeps the entire process clean and hygienic.",
"Along the same lines, can anyone tell me what to do with these seashells?"
]
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[],
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] |
||
2k99th | - the sovereign citizen movement. | I have a very general but kind of dark idea but no idea as to it's history or why I've seen it in the news more and more in recent weeks. Thanks in advance! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2k99th/eli5_the_sovereign_citizen_movement/ | {
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"Group of people who think that if they give up American citizenship, they are no longer subject to American laws such as paying taxes, getting arrested, etc. This is of course is not true because non-citizens living in the US will still have to pay taxes and can still get arrested if they break the law. In fact non-citizens would be even worse off without the protection of the Constitution. ",
"The heart of the movement is the belief that people have a federal law identity and a common law identity, which can be severed by using just the right legal hocus pocus. Once separated, laws, contracts, debts, and parking tickets stay with the federal identity, while your common law identity remains immuned to such things. "
]
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[],
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|
9shi5w | how do you cool something other than radiating away it in space or using a coolant? how do you cool a coolant? | How do you cool something other than radiating away it in space or using a coolant? How do you cool a coolant? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9shi5w/eli5_how_do_you_cool_something_other_than/ | {
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"A coolant is generally just some fluid which is used to carry heat away from a device or location, which as you suspected needs to be cooled itself. The only way available in space is by radiation which is why the ISS has giant radiator fins in order to cool their ammonia coolant.\n\nAnother method of cooling could be to transfer the heat into a substance and then jettison that substance. The engines on some rockets use this by pumping their cryogenic fuel past engine parts to cool them down, then into the engine to be burned and the exhaust thrown out the back (along with whatever heat they absorbed from the parts). But of course that cannot last very long as you quickly run out of material.",
"Coolant doesn't get rid of heat, it just moves it around\n\nThere are only 3 ways to move heat; radiation, conduction, and convection.\n\nSince there isn't much matter in space, neither conduction or convection will work well. Systems that need to be cooled will conduct their heat into a coolant which will carry it to a big radiator which will radiate the heat away\n\nUnless you're packing your heat all into a hot object and ditching it(which isn't sustainable) you're stuck with big radiators in space"
]
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[],
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45ce6b | what does encryption actually entail when it comes to internet traffic? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45ce6b/eli5_what_does_encryption_actually_entail_when_it/ | {
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"Encryption is vital to the internet. Without it network providers or their employees might learn the login credentials to your bank, be able to capture and view secret or proprietary information, send messages impersonating others and many other undesirable things. Encryption provides a means to keep messages secret, ensure the integrity of data, guarantee messages have not been tampered, and provide non-repudiation. The advent of quantum computing is actually worry some as an ultra-powerful fast computer nay make modern cryptography vulnerable. ",
"Alice wants to send a message to Bob. They are very far away. So, she writes a letter and gives it to Chris, who is a very nosy individual. Chris steams the envelope open, reads the letter, and then reseals it and hands it to Bob.\n\nIf you are Alice and Bob, you probably don't want Chris to do that. So you develop an \"inside language\", an encryption code. Now, Alice can write in this code, and she knows that even if Chris opens the envelope, Chris has no idea about what is being said in the letter. When Bob reads it, he will get the message just fine.\n\nReplace Chris with governments, advertisers, your employer or your parents..."
]
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1s1czp | what exactly are the ulcers/"lie bumps" we sometimes get in our mouth and on our tongues? | Seriously, what's going on in there? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1s1czp/what_exactly_are_the_ulcerslie_bumps_we_sometimes/ | {
"a_id": [
"cdt45r3"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"There is not a definitive cause & effect associated with these (I've always called them canker sores). Trauma, such as biting or aggressive brushing, and combined with acidic or spicy foods may initially irritate the area which can later become the ulcer. Some cases may be a flare up of a version of the herpes simplex virus (cold sores and the such) but they aren't one and the same. \nSorry it's not more specific. Sometimes its all there is.\n\nSource: Pharmacy school"
]
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[]
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|
5ohdt3 | in video editing, what's the difference between drop-frame timecode, and non-drop-frame timecode? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ohdt3/eli5_in_video_editing_whats_the_difference/ | {
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"In non-drop-frame, there are exactly 30 frames in every second of footage, i.e., the timecode endings for every second go\n\n :00, :01, :02, ... :29.\n\nYou should only use non-drop-frame timecodes if your footage is 30.000 frames per second.\n\nIn drop-frame, the first second of every minute not divisible by ten misses the first two frames, i.e., 54 seconds every hour have only 28 timecode endings like \n\n ;02, ;03, ;04, ... ;29\n\nThus 108 timecodes are missing per hour. Otherwise there would be 108,000 timecodes per hour so the drop-frame system removes exactly 1 in 1000 timecodes.\n\nNote that no frames are dropped, just that some timecodes are missing so that frame 00;01;59;29 is followed by frame 00;02;00;02. Semicolons are used instead of colons to highlight what's going on.\n\nThis is done because NTSC has only about 29.97 frames per second. In fact NTSC is exactly 1 part in 1001 short of 30 frames per second so the drop-frame notation, using 1 part in 1000, is not exactly right, but it's close enough."
]
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||
li925 | why is the force of gravity not instantaneous? | I know that general relativity says so, but I was wondering if someone can explain it with an analogy or something that makes sense.
Also, is the force of gravity the only thing that is affected. I mean, when the force of gravity disappears after say 1 second, is there a delay in the normal reactive force as well?
Does the speed of light apply to all forces? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/li925/why_is_the_force_of_gravity_not_instantaneous/ | {
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"search the r/askscience subreddit, they get that question a lot, I would bet. But the general thing is that information cannot travel faster than c so changes in the gravitational field will propagate at the speed of light (in a vacuum).\n\nJust to make it weird, even though we see the sun where it was 8 1/2 mins ago, and if the sun disappeared it would take up 8 1/2 mins to notice the change in gravity (and light, but just focus on gravity for now) even with those two facts we orbit the sun where it is now, not where is was 8 1/2 minutes ago.",
"Here's a very eloquent explanation from RobotRollCall using Wile E Coyote.\n\n_URL_0_",
"search the r/askscience subreddit, they get that question a lot, I would bet. But the general thing is that information cannot travel faster than c so changes in the gravitational field will propagate at the speed of light (in a vacuum).\n\nJust to make it weird, even though we see the sun where it was 8 1/2 mins ago, and if the sun disappeared it would take up 8 1/2 mins to notice the change in gravity (and light, but just focus on gravity for now) even with those two facts we orbit the sun where it is now, not where is was 8 1/2 minutes ago.",
"Here's a very eloquent explanation from RobotRollCall using Wile E Coyote.\n\n_URL_0_"
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ayec6j | what's the difference between microplastic and sand? | I recently saw a post about how some beach was covered in tons of micro plastic particles. Why is this so bad, and what is the difference between this stuff and sand (environment-wise of course)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ayec6j/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_microplastic/ | {
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"text": [
"Sand is made from silica in almost all cases, its very pulverized rock, coral etc. While microplastics are of course plastic, which are petroleum based, and can have problems with toxicity."
]
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[]
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3khucy | why does all music attach me to something thats occuring in my life and make me feel nostalgic even a weel later? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3khucy/eli5_why_does_all_music_attach_me_to_something/ | {
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"Because that's effectively how your brain functions. Your brain is a collection of neurons that fire in sequence. Your brain is always being adjusted, new connections are formed as you 'learn' new 'information'. Essentially, your brain is correlating an experience of life with the auditory experience of that specific music. So when the neurons for that music are activated the adjoining ones referencing that memory/experience are fired in tandem. Your brain does this for pretty much everything. I say 'game' you think 'fun'. I say 'car', you think 'travel' or 'speed'. The only difference is that it isn't language it's music. So yes I'd go as far as to say this is normal. It would depend on how often you listen, the time difference between the experience and the listening session, as well as how long you hold on to specific tracks of music."
]
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||
1dja4q | what makes a carbon emissions trading scheme better/worse than a pollution tax? | Advantages and disadvantages of each option, essentially. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dja4q/eli5_what_makes_a_carbon_emissions_trading_scheme/ | {
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"If you have a good sense of how much harm each unit of emissions does, a tax is better (because you can fix the price at that level, forcing polluters to take into account the harm they cause). If you have a good sense of a critical threshold level of emissions, then a cap-and-trade system is better (because you can be sure to keep emissions under the threshold by limiting the number of permits). So for conventional pollutants that have mostly raise concern of localized harm to health, a tax makes a lot of sense. With carbon, we don't yet know marginal cost, but we do know that beyond a certain carbon concentration, really bad things like ice caps melting will happen.\n\nOf course, if you can adjust the tax rate (much harder in the US than in some other countries due to legislative process), you can accomplish a \"cap\" even with a tax -- just raise the tax rate if emissions start rising toward the threshold level.\n\nA trading system is often promoted as being more \"market-oriented\", but that's an illusion. First, it's really a \"cap and tax\" -- you could give out the permits for free, but the whole point is to limit pollution by making it more expensive to pollute, so it accomplishes the same effect as a tax from the perspective of a polluter. Second, the added complexity mostly benefits middlemen and speculators. Third, the volatile price of permits on the market makes it harder for to plan long-term investments, like building new power plants, installing pollution controls, or investing in R & D for renewable energy sources."
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55muqs | how does nasa hold the rocket to the ground when testing these powerful boosters? | Video here:
_URL_0_
So, I've been looking everywhere trying to figure out how do they hold the rocket to the ground when testing such increidible thrust from the boosters.
Maybe the explanation is obvious but I need to know!
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/55muqs/eli5how_does_nasa_hold_the_rocket_to_the_ground/ | {
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"First you build/pour a huge concrete block. Second they mount long metal rails to the block to distribute the force. To those rails they strap the rocket engine. Also usually there is some kind of containment structure around all but one side of the engine.",
"_URL_0_ \n \nThey have it secured to rails in the ground as well as a frame on the front with a solid block."
]
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"http://www.space.com/33669-nasa-sls-megarocket-booster-video-slow-motion.html"
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4puap9 | why is american food so much larger compared to other countries. | I recently went out to lunch to get pizza with some family friends who are visiting from Australia. After we got the pizza and drinks, they were appalled at the size (the pizza was not that large, from an American view). They also were amazed that the server came and gave them free soda refills, which is usual here. We then started to have a conversation about how much food you get in Australia compared to the US. After the conversation I began to remember hearing about similar cases with other countries and how "American sizes" are so much bigger than the rest of the world. Why is that? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4puap9/eli5_why_is_american_food_so_much_larger_compared/ | {
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"I think in America it's really more about \"quantity over quality.\" They want people to think they're getting a bargain, so they give more stuff, even though it's usually made as cheaply as possible. Free refills are a great incentive for people to buy expensive cups of soda and little loss to the seller as it costs them pennies and the average price of a soda (from what I have seen personally) can be $2.50 - $3.",
"Americans have a culture of taking food home for one. In places where the only place to get good food is miles and miles from your home, like where I grew up the closest asian place was 15 minutes by car if you were a speed demon and there was no traffic. You want to have some to bring home to have later. We also don't eat as long. Dining isn't as social here as it is in, like example, Spain.",
"Because food is cheaper and more plentiful in the US.\n\nThis is also why the US is number one on the [global food security index.](_URL_0_)",
"I'm British and visit the USA a lot and I hear people saying how large American portion sizes are all the time and I'm always like... But they're not?\n\nAverage restaurants in the USA do not have larger portions than average UK restaurants. Sure if you go to Cheesecake Factory they're massive, but that's their gimmick...?\n\nSoda though, hell yes. In the UK, and most of the world, soda does not come with unlimited free refills... And it's also expensive, where as in the USA it's not. \n\nI find myself eating less in the USA because you can take food home so easily... Back in the UK, I feel compelled to finish my meal because it cost a fucktonne and I can't take it home.\n\nI dunno what the deal is but I hear this BS a lot and, yeah, it's not really true. ",
"I didn't read all the answers to see if this has been said but here it goes, the restaurant industry is all about making as much as possible. If someone gave you a piece of pizza and charged you $6 you would be upset. However if you were given 2 pieces of pizza and charged $10 you find it to be more in line. This is just an example by the way. The point is the cost to make an entire pizza is probably only $10 in this scenario. But they want to get as much as possible from you. So they raise the price and give you more to make you feel better about the situation. In reality they are still making a hell of a profit off of those 2 pieces. Look at how Lays sells their chips. They used to sell them in bags that were full of chips, however prices on potatoes went up along with manufacturing costs so of course lays had to raise their prices. However they didn't want you to realize they were so most manufacturers either change the product size entirely and keep the same cost (example tootsie rolls) or they make the package much larger with the exact same amount of product. It's proven that we eat with our eyes. We don't pay attention to the $16 buffet because it's all we can eat when in reality you aren't going to eat $16 worth of food. I think I'm rambling but I hope my point came across effectively "
]
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281r2t | why do non-english british people (scottish/welsh/n. irish) resent being referred to as british? isn't that the most accurate/neutral geopolitical term for citizens of the united kingdom? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/281r2t/eli5_why_do_nonenglish_british_people/ | {
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"You are making a massive generalisation, most would be happy being referred to as British. They may define themsleves as Scottish/Welsh/Irish first but British second.\n\nYou may be getting confused with when others refer to the British or British institutions as English - for example the english olympics team, or the queen of england, or the english prime minister",
"Well, they are British, as /u/doc_daneeka said. But, they are also Scots, Welsh and N. Irish, as Scotland, Wales and N. Ireland are countries, and they definitely prefer people referring to what country they are from, not what island they live on or what union they are a part of. What they *really* don't like is being referred to as English! There is a lot of history behind it. England and Scotland has been in different wars for many centuries. Wales was annexed by England. And so on..\n\nI definitely prefer being referred to as a Swede, rather than as a Scandinavian. Not really the same thing, but still.",
"The manner in which they became British is not exactly a pleasant one.\n\n[This guy does a great run down.](_URL_0_)",
"It's a very annoying US-American habit to call everything English \"British\". It seems that nobody learns basic European geography in US schools. \n\nFirstly, Great Britain is made up of **three** different countries: England, Scotland and Wales. \n\nSecondly, when you say \"British\", do you mean English, Scottish or Welsh? \n\nAnd no, the \"British\" accent is not the posh English accent. There is **no** British accent, however there are many British accents. There are many English, Scottish and Welsh accents. \n\nThus, \"British\" means England, Scotland and Wales, and not just England. "
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cowzsv | how do aerosol sprays work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cowzsv/eli5_how_do_aerosol_sprays_work/ | {
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"Liquids evaporate to generate pressurized gas. Water, for instance, does this, but the pressure is less than atmospheric pressure and so it just forms a layer of water vapor above the liquid's surface that slowly drifts away. Liquids that are above their boiling temperature create pressures in excess of atmospheric pressure, and can therefore push things around with this pressure. One or more of these liquids, which boil below room temperature, as well as the thing that is to be sprayed are mixed together in a can. When the can is sealed, the liquids fill it with pressure. When the can is sprayed, the pressurized liquid forces the aerosol out of the can as it expands."
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5mvcgy | if incest is so bad because of recessive genes, how come mentally challenged, (for instance downs) couples are allowed to breed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5mvcgy/eli5_if_incest_is_so_bad_because_of_recessive/ | {
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"Down syndrome is a really rare occurrence ever if two people with Down syndrome had a child it's extremely likely the child will have no problems. ",
"In general, everyone is \"allowed\" to breed. You won't be arrested for incestuous sex (assuming that it's between consenting adults). It's just extremely socially taboo.",
"Recessive genes are not the reason incest is so bad.\n\nIt is bad because it almost always involves someone in power raping a child.",
"Because downs is caused by a chromosome duplication, not recessive genes. Downs people are usually infertile, and in the event that they aren't they still aren't likely to pass it down to their kids because their chromosomes will have had to be put in the right places."
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r1nwt | why do all or most mammals have leathery/rubbery noses, but not humans? | I ask this after a random conversation with my boyfriend about our cat's nose. Also, I'd like to know why dogs' and cats' noses (among other mammals, I'd imagine) are usually cold and moist.
Mostly, though, how come the skin on humans' noses is the same as on the rest of our face, but chimpanzees/moneys/apes, our closest cousins in DNA similarity, have leathery/rubbery noses.
Hopefully someone who has studied biology and evolution more than I have can explain this. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/r1nwt/eli5_why_do_all_or_most_mammals_have/ | {
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"Dogs and cats have wet and cold noses for the same reason humans sweat. A dry nose means the dog/cat hasn't been drinking enough water. Wet nose means everything is fine and dandy. The leathery/rubbery part of a dog's nose is called the rhinarium. The moisture on this part of the nose can trap odors which allows them to be processed better. The rhinarium acts as a good wind detector too and animals with this part of the nose also have a much better sense of smell. A smell can be detected simply by the direction it came from.\n\nHumans lost the rhinarium because we simply do not rely on smell all that well. Our other abilties made up for our lack of smelling ability however and they have gotten better instead. One idea is that the human nose is the best shape and position for living and getting used to colder places. Animals that live in colder places have higher, smaller noses compared to those that live in warmer ones. Smaller noses means they lose less heat from our bodies. Bigger noses allow the animals in warmer places to actually lose heat because they need to stay cooler.\n\nedit: wording, improved explanation etc",
"I was told once that wet dog noses help to dissolve the smellable particles from the air, which makes them easier to sense. Also that a dry nose isn't a good thing."
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9shncw | why do 2 sticks of ram need to be the same when being used in twin ports? why wouldnt two different sticks work the same? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9shncw/eli5_why_do_2_sticks_of_ram_need_to_be_the_same/ | {
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"You can actually use just one. The performance with 2 or more is often faster, therefore 2 is often used. And the motherboard's memory controller is much faster when both RAM have same speed and capacity (generally, using same exact RAM stick model works the best) rather than having different speeds and other factors.",
"They *may* work but dissimilar sticks will be limited in performance to the slower of the two. By having the same kind in paired ports you can avoid losing some of the potential performance. It is best practice to put in the same kind of memory so the timing and speed are the same.",
"Long story short:\n\n‘Ram is sold in kits for a reason.\nRam from the same vendor and part number can be made up of differing manufacturing components over time.\nSome motherboards can be very sensitive to this.’\n\n\n_URL_0_",
"They don't have to be the same as long as they are the same form factor (ddr,... ddr4). Being the same spec increases the odds of getting the most performance out of what you have. Also this mismatch can also create instability, which could lead to BSODs or not even booting.\nPairing ram makes it easier to troubleshoot if issues occur.",
"This isn’t quite the issue it used to be, it boils down to the memory controller on your motherboard having difficulty reconciling two sticks of ram with differing speeds and latencies. These days the memory controller comes baked into the CPU and generally has more compatibility with mismatched DIMMs. However, you will always be limited by the clock rate and latencies of the slowest DIMM."
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pkkbz | the legality of towing. | While I realize that parking in an area where you're not supposed to is, to some degree, a form of trespassing, how is it that some third party can come in, effectively steal your car, and then make you pay to get it back? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pkkbz/eli5_the_legality_of_towing/ | {
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"It's mainly how theft/stealing is defined by law: \n\n > The illegal taking of another person's property without that person's permission or consent **with the intent to deprive the rightful owner of it.**\n\nThe towing company's intent is not to deprive the rightful owner of their property. (take it away forever)\n\nHowever, there are laws against predatory towing (towing legally parked cars) and in some states towing occupied cars classifies as kidnapping. "
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1rfnff | why is israel pissed off with the iran nuke deal? | I would think that a deal saying Iran can't produce a nuclear weapon would be something Israel would be all for, but yet they seem pretty upset about it. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1rfnff/eli5why_is_israel_pissed_off_with_the_iran_nuke/ | {
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"I might be mistaken as I haven't fully read up on this yetbut im under the impression that Iran will be permitted to enrich its own uranium for use in nuclear reactors. Israel claims that's a lie and they intend on weaponizing it. ",
"The issue still isn't resolved fully. The recent deal only applies for 6 months until a longer arrangement is worked out. I can't say for sure what the objections are since most news sources tend to be somewhat vague, but here are the criticisms I've seen from various groups:\n\nThose opposed to a Iran gave up some of the bargaining power. Currently, there are economic sanctions (penalties) against Iran to pressure the country. The recent deal agrees to reduce the existing sanctions and to avoid creating new ones. In exchange, some feel Iran's not doing much, so the US is surrendering its position of power for very little.\n\nConcern that Iran will continue to make efforts to develop nuclear weapons despite the deal.\n\nIssues relating to Israel's involvement in the negotiations. Specifically, negotiations existed for months before anyone from Israel was informed. Israel wants its views considered when negotiations with Iran take place.\n\nInterpretations on what the deal says about Iran's nuclear future. Israel doesn't just want nuclear progress halted. It wants development stopped completely. According to the Iranians involved in the deal, the agreement strongly implies that recognition that the country has a right to nuclear capabilities. This is directly against the views of Israel. \n\nLimitations on what Israel can do. In the past, Israel has made unilateral strikes against perceived nuclear threats. However, now that a deal has been reached, Israel can no longer use unilateral military action without pissing off the countries that made this diplomatic agreement. ",
"The Israeli right wing believes that Iran made no major concessions, and in exchange got themselves the time and money they'll need to cheat and build a nuclear bomb of their own, pretty much like North Korea did. This would be bad, because then Israel wouldn't still be the only country in the region with a nuclear deterrent.",
"Israel didn't want a deal as much as they wanted total capitulation from Iran. So not only did Israel not get what they wanted, but they were also very vocal about what they wanted, and the US ignored them and made a deal anyways. Israel not getting what they wanted from the US in regards to an issue like Iran is very unusual, and so they're likely just as upset about that as they are the actual terms of the deal.\n\nOn a more personal level, the Israel Prime Minister (Netanyahu) has generally campaigned on the idea that Iran is an imminent existential threat that can never be reasoned with, and that his leadership is the only hope that Israel has of surviving. Any deal that potentially reduces the threat from Iran could hurt him politically. \n\nedit: spelling",
"First of all, Israel doesn't believe Iran will adhere to their end of the deal. Specifically, Israel thinks that Iran will still make nuclear weapons.\n\nSecondly, Israel and Iran are still enemies, and nuclear power (weaponized or not) is a huge empowerment for Iran, since it is very viable and relatively cheap for them.",
"They don't believe the deal actually prevents an Iranian nuclear weapons programme.\n\nThe only people who know the truth are the Iranian leadership. If they still want a weapons programme and they think they can get around any roadblocks in the agreement then it does nothing. If they don't want nuclear weapons anymore, then the agreement has done its thing. \n\nUltimately the Israelis don't want Iran to have any nuclear programme, civil or military. Which is unfair, ridiculous and perfectly reasonable all at once. Ultimately every state has a right to develop peaceful nuclear power, but well... does anyone trust the Ayatollahs to stick to peaceful? ",
"As with almost all foreign policy pronouncements, you should consider what audience is being targeted and what the speaker's incentives are. In this case, there are good strategic incentives for Israel/Netanyahu to appear hardline on this deal.\n\nFirst, Netanyahu's domestic political situation is dependent on him being seen as hardline on Iran. He has staked his reputation on this position and so, *whatever deal was agreed to*, he has to appear more hardline than that. So, even if he actually thinks that this is a good deal, or a step along the way to a good deal (good in terms of what Iran would eventually accept), he has to publicly appear \"pissed off\", using OP's language. \n\nSecond, there is the international audience. The P5+1 negotiators (from the United States, Britain, China, Russia, France and Germany) will be able to get a better deal from Iran if they can point to a hardline Israel stance and say to Iran, \"Look, look at the pressure we are under here. If you don't want Israel to reject the deal (and maybe unilaterally bomb your nuclear facilities), you are going to have to give a better deal\". The P5+1 negotiators also seem more reasonable and moderate next to a hardline Israel. \n\nIn addition to strategic incentives, there is a thing called \"fundamental attribution error\". Briefly, this is a psychological phenomenon that all humans are subject to to some extent, where you think that you are a good person and forced to do bad things by your environment, but other people do bad things because they are bad people. So, even though Israelis trust themselves to only use their nuclear weapons defensively, they think that Iran would use nuclear weapons offensively, even if that means effectively committing suicide (through nuclear retaliation). This means that they are far more concerned about *ensuring* Iran doesn't have nuclear weapon capabilities than is reasonable/rational. \n\nThese are the most basic and plausible explanations for why Israel is pissed off with the Iran Nuke deal. There are other possibilities but they are more complicated.",
"For one thing, on the last page of [this report](_URL_0_) (PDF) we see evidence that Iran recently modified its centrifuges to enrich weapons-grade uranium, whereas previously (according to the same report) they had been too inept to succeed.\n\nThe alleged modification is done in such a way that the enrichment can be quickly switched between weapons-grade and non-weapons-grade.",
"A nuclear Iran will free up much of it's oil. Israel has been enjoying a monopoly on oil going to China and other seaward markets as oil from the Caspian basin gets to the Mediterranean through Turkeys pipeline and then gets piped through Israel to the Red Sea and the rest of the world. these countries benefit greatly by being a middle man. It wasn't until Mubarak was ousted in Egypt that the Suez Canal opened up as a viable alternative. Iran would like to pipe oil west through Syria and out east through Afghanistan and Pakistan but these areas are war-zones ravaged with terrorism directed by the US and Israel. Not too long from now, they are going to pull off a Pakistani pipeline, and once Iran has developed it's nuclear energy program, they'll be able to get rich off this. ",
"My personal guess at this point is that Netanyahu is playing up the Iranian threat for domestic political gain. Nothing like an external threat of some sort to really bring in the votes.",
"Because It's a crappy deal. Iran says that they will slow down the process, not stop it completely. Israel wants to make sure that they never get their hands on a nuke. ",
"Because they know Iran's \"Charm Offensive\" is just an act.",
"A better question would be to ask why almost every political entity in the middle east other than Iran, Syria and Hezbollah are pissed off with the Iran Nuke deal.",
"They want the \"threat\" of Iran to exist because it takes the focus off of them and they can use it as an excuse to accelerate their bullshit.\n\nWhen Iran agrees to this sort of thing it makes the rest of the world sort of wonder why Israel won't do it too. At this point Iran has more agreement with the West than Israel and they don't like that.",
"While there are lots of things I'd like to comment on here, I feel the need to *mea culpa* and remember for all of us, once again, that this subreddit is about providing the most non-political short responses possible.\n\nThat said...if you go below the top thread, abandon all hope.",
"Israel wants the US to bomb the piss out of Iran. If Iran and the Americans put all the bad blood behind them and move forward then a war will not happen. Also, culturally Persians are natural friends of the west unlike Arabs who are kinda screwy. A friendly relationship with Iran means that Israel does not get the attention and fawning treatment from American politicians like they are used to.",
"I don't have an inside line to the 'fly on the wall' secrets, but I'm going to bet it has something to do with Iran isn't known for it's open, friendly demeanor and neighborly demeanor with Israel. Iran's leadership has held rallies of their citizens calling for \"Death To Israel!\". IDK about you, but I'd be a little jumpy in their shoes too.",
"Because they don't believe that the Iranians will honor the intent of the deal. ",
"Basically, Netanyahu thinks they're lying. He's an far right winger, so anything less than completely dismantling their nuclear power plants (and maybe even that) is met with suspicion. Remember, Iran has stated before that they'd like to see Israel and its inhabitants wiped off the map. I'm not saying that it's right for them to be so paranoid, but remember the Yom Kippur War where Israel was caught off guard. They still consider that war a failure because they were unprepared. The mainstream opinion of most Israelis is \"Well, this Rouhani guy is sure better than Ahmedinejad. At least they're not denying the holocaust.\" While Netanyahu and his party basically won't be happy until the Islamic Republic has a million sanctions against them and is treated like North Korea, and anything Iran says that's peace-oriented is a bald faced lie. \n\nOf course, everyone knows the Ayatollah, who everyone knows really runs the show, isn't stupid enough to try and nuke Israel, regardless of the aggressive rhetoric. \n\nTL;DR Iran is Netanyahu's boogeyman and he has to keep selling them as such to the voters and the Knesset. ",
"who cares, fuck israel."
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604izd | how one would go about training themselves to wake up later as opposed to earlier | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/604izd/eli5_how_one_would_go_about_training_themselves/ | {
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"Keep your room absolutely pitch black until you want to wake up. Light is the main signaler of your body to be awake, so if you have a window, especially a window that faces East (where the Sun rises in the morning), more than likely the sunrise is waking you up. Get some blackout curtains, and keep your room dark. Put your bedside lamp on a timer and use that as an alarm clock (in addition to an actual alarm clock set five or ten minutes later).\n\nStay up later. Use light as your advantage, and keep your room bright until you want to go to sleep. If you're trying to wake up at, say, ten instead of seven, that means you need to stay up until about 1:30-2AM. Keep your lights bright, especially blue lights, until about half an hour before you sleep.\n\nShift your mealtimes so that you eat a larger meal later in the day. Hunger somewhat regulates your circadian rhythm, and is also somewhat regulated *by* your circadian rhythm. A late dinner will push your cycle back and keep you awake later.\n\nBe very consistent with your changes. Stay up late even if you're dead tired, even if you know it means you'll be more tired the next day. Eat dinner at around the same time every night. Get your body into that pattern and it will shape your circadian rhythm to match.\n\nSide note: this is weird, I'm so used to giving good sleep hygiene advice to fix wonky sleep schedules the other way. This is like...all really bad sleep hygiene, but hey if you want to wake up later that's how you do it."
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jqryi | we covered why americans and the british have separate accents, well why does the north and the south have different accents in america? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jqryi/eli5_we_covered_why_americans_and_the_british/ | {
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"Looks like it might have been answered in the [thread you referenced.](_URL_0_)",
"Looks like it might have been answered in the [thread you referenced.](_URL_0_)"
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5ka3cf | why do people forget actions they were about to do, even almost immediately after thinking it? | I ask because I was thinking about going to the bathroom, then forgot about it, then about a minute later I remembered I had to go. Is there a reason for this occurrence? Merry Christmas btw. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ka3cf/eli5_why_do_people_forget_actions_they_were_about/ | {
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"It's called the Doorway Effect. Or at least that's one of the explanations put forward by researchers about why it happens.\n\nOur brains operate within certain mental dynamics, so they can be best placed to cope with a given situation. A good example of this is when you're reading an interesting novel, then all of a sudden there's a page break or new chapter that shows what's happening in another part of the story with a completely different character. In some respects we almost have to shift our mood in order to become as engrossed in the scene jump as we were before we got there. (This is probably why GOT is so frustrating to read.)\n\nSo when you go through a doorway your brain is \"rebooting\" to get itself wired for a new situation.\n\nEven more curious is that imagining walking through a doorway has a similar effect. The research team brought two groups of participants into a large room. One group experienced the room as a continuous space; the other walked through it after divider curtains were set up to simulate a doorway. The groups were then shown a picture of an unusually shaped object before closing their eyes and imagining walking across the room they’d seen earlier. The first group imagined the room as a big space with no physical dividers; the other imagined walking through the draped doorway.\n\nThey were then asked to jog their memories and pick out the picture of the object from a set of ten images. As predicted, the group that imagined walking through a doorway performed significantly worse on the memory test than the other group.\n\nOne of the reasons they think this might happen is evolutionary. If you leave the safety of your home out into the wilds your brain needs to be prepared to be ready for a potentially dangerous situation. It can't be focused on where you left that red clay you were painting the cave walls with because you need to be ready NOW to take on any potential threat. \n\nIt is really, really annoying that I only remember what I was supposed to leave the house with when I'm 10 minutes down the road. \n\n",
"Just as the other comment says, but this is my teachers explain like I'm 15 explanation.\n\nYour brain has a long term and a short term memory. When you do something in a room, your brain relates this to that certain room, when you leave that room your brain closes that chapter in your brain because you enter a new part or chapter in your life: the other room and erases the short term memory. \n\nWhen you re enter that same room you remember what you were about to do because your brain related the event or thought to that room. That's why you can easier take a test in the same classroom because you relate the given lecture to the room.\n\nOnce you repeat certain actions, your brain slowly moves the memory to the long term storage so you can remember it even in other rooms."
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54ik6r | if most or a lot of disease is caused by inflammation, why wouldn't taking a daily anti inflammatory be a good preventative regiment | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/54ik6r/eli5_if_most_or_a_lot_of_disease_is_caused_by/ | {
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"You have cause and effect backward. Disease is not caused by inflammation; inflammation is a symptom of disease. Specifically, it's your body's immune response.",
"StupidLemonEater is correct. A quick summary is, for example, when bacteria become too plentiful and might invade a certain region of the body. Your capillaries vasodilate. This incidentally gives the redness and heat during inflammation due to the excess blood flow. Then vascular permeability, endothelial cells become \"leaky\", possible from injury or chemical mediators. Neutrophils, other white blood cells, platelets etc. assist in the attack of the infection. Then vascular stasis to allow the chemical mediators and inflammatory cells to respond. "
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3lkazn | can someone explain what fema camps are, and why people are so afraid of them? | expanding a bit. I have a general idea what FEMA is, and what it does. A lot of people I know are concerned about these camps, but I can't get a clear answer to why.
Sub question:
What's the point? Locking humans up only makes them prisoners that can't produce, can't pay taxes and can't fight a war. It seems counterproductive to me, especially when we're...
Edit to finish that sentence that got lost in cut and paste.
...When we're already basically slaves held down by massive debt, illness, laziness and a consistently decreasing intelligence. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lkazn/eli5_can_someone_explain_what_fema_camps_are_and/ | {
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"Many people are afraid that FEMA may eventually lock up people just for disagreeing with the government, ala political prisoners or dissidents.",
"FEMA concemtration camps are a conspiracy theory about how the federal government is going to round up anyone they don't like and put them in concentration camps. When they look for a government agency that knows how to make camps (you know, for housing people after floods) FEMA is an easy target. It is like presuming your school matching band is a covert military unit because they are the only kids at the high school that have the ability to march in sync.\n\nThe fact that you \"can't get a clear answer why\" is often a good indicator you are dealing with a conspiracy theory.\n\nThat said, as a society in the US right now we seem just fine with locking thiusands of people up as punishment so that they can't fight in wars, produce or pay taxes. So oddly that isn't a stike against.\n\nA thorough explanation of the conspiracy theory here:\n_URL_0_",
"FEMA camps have been a favorite hobby horse of the loon fringe for decades. The notion is that FEMA is secretly setting up concentration camps all around the country that they're going to herd people into after the UN One World Government troops (which are massed at a secret base in Michigan) fly in with their black helicopters and take our guns away.\n\nI *wish* I was exaggerating here, but there are people out there who actually believe bullshit like this.\n\n\n"
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5rabbx | why is activated charcoal safe to ingest while burnt grilled parts cancerous? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5rabbx/eli5_why_is_activated_charcoal_safe_to_ingest/ | {
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"Activated Charcoal or Activated Carbon is nothing but Carbon that has lots of space in it to allow gas or fluid to pass through.\n\nThis nonsense that has yet to be proved about over cooked food or burnt food is actually a different chemical. If you think of food it is not just straight carbon but is actually very complex molecules.\n\nSo when it is heated to a high temperature these molecules turn into something else. Not pure carbon.\n\nIt is said that burnt food contains Acrylamides. I used to be a genetic engineer and we dealt with lots of nasty chemicals in the lab. One of the scariest was Acrylamide and I think this is what all the news is about. They have found small trace levels of Acrylamide on the burnt bits and so are concerned. \n\nBut there is no proven link. If you smoke and eat burnt food. Cut out the cigarettes as the level of risk from the burnt food is negligible. Even drinking alcohol will be worse."
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37p1eq | why isn't education fun? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37p1eq/eli5_why_isnt_education_fun/ | {
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"For who? the educator or the educated? It depends on the method, really.",
"The word fun is arbitrary. Each and every person on the planet has a slightly different version of what is considered fun.\n\nSome people enjoy education simply because they enjoy learning.\n\nOthers enjoy it in a certain format (such as hands on) but are bored to death with other formats (lectures).\n\nBecause of this variance, this is going to be an extremely hard for anyone to answer definitively. Although I'm interested to see peoples arguments.",
"Two reasons: it's hard to appreciate something you start getting early in life and are required to attend. Also, trying to meet national standards makes the school system try to educate everyone in basically the same way. What works for one student does not work for another; what is interesting to one student is boring to another."
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d9k9q3 | why can't we use something like vegetable oil as a replacement for engine oil? | Cooking oils also go to high temperatures. Do they expire before a synthetic would?
Edit:
Wasn't wondering to make a substitute. It's not an environmental or political question. Just wondering the *why* (:
Thanks so much to everyone who answered! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/d9k9q3/eli5_why_cant_we_use_something_like_vegetable_oil/ | {
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"Engine oil needs to remain chemically stable at engine operating temperatures, which will routinely exceed 200F and have some areas even hotter than that.\n\nMost food oils aren't chemically stable under those conditions.\n\nThen there are other concerns with cold viscosity (your oil can't be frozen!) and lubrication (can't be too watery!), but first you have to not burn up."
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15krjt | with 48 hours of video uploaded per minute, how does youtube survive? | I mean, that's a **LOT** to store.
Please explain.
Cheers. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/15krjt/with_48_hours_of_video_uploaded_per_minute_how/ | {
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"lots of servers. lots of cables. everywhere. not only is it youtube, it's google drive, everything google really, think about that, that's just google for you. always adding new servers to the collection constantly",
"That's more the average. It's not like there will absolutely be another 48hours of video by the time I'm done writing this comment. There could be more, there could be less. \n\nI suspect that youtube has done a good job accounting for future growth and has a crap-ton of servers and storage at their disposal, and adds additional resources based on the rate of consumption.",
"Very interesting question!\n\nI did a little calculation to determine how much data we're talking about here. So I took a random 1min video from youtube in 1080p for my assumption.\n\nI know that not every video gets uploaded in 1080p, but since this format is pretty much standard nowadays, I used it for my calculation.\n\n1 minute of video is stored as following:\n\n_URL_0_ (the tool is called jdownloader if you wonder)\n\n(27.71 MB) + (17 MB) + (554.43 KB) + (45.8 MB) + (2.81 MB) = 93.8614355 megabytes\n\n--------------------------------------------\n\n(93.8614355 megabytes) * 2880 (48 hours in minutes) = \n\n**263.985287 gigabytes/minute**\n\n(263.985287 gigabytes) * 60 (minutes in a hour) = \n\n**15.4678879 terabytes/hour**\n\n(15.4678879 terabytes) * 24 (hours a day) = \n\n**371.22931 terabytes/day**\n\n(371.22931 terabytes) * 29.530589 (average month according to wikipedia) = \n\n**10.7056838 petabytes/month**\n\n(10.7056838 petabytes) * 12 (months in a year) = \n\n**128.468206 petabytes/year**\n\n---------------------------------------\n\n**This is a fuckload of data!**\n---------------------------------------\n\nAlso, this has to be redundant and geo-redundant to provide the uptime and integrity youtube needs.\n\nThis once more shows how mind-blowingly big google is...\n\nI hope I didn't make any big mistakes in this.\n\nThis is not an answer to your question neither is it in any way appropriate for a 5 year old. I guess you should be able to handle this much math anyways.",
"I would guess massive amounts of storage, probably homebrewed solutions for it like the google servers to keep it cheap, likely running on their own file system, and LOTS of deduplication. I can't imagine running a service like YouTube without dedup. ",
"_URL_0_ \nHere is a link that talks about how YouTube is able to scale. Storage is cheap and easy to buy more space to add on, they have a lot of servers which let a lot of people connect and so some can handle uploads while others let people view videos",
"Pre google buyout this is a good link: \n_URL_0_\n\nFun fact: it started out on a single server. Lols\n\nBut now google owns it. \nLets assume for a minute that google has 2 million servers. Those are all running google file system(GFS). This roughly makes all those servers a big drive to be used. \n\nSo what kinda hard drives is google using? Same shit you can get. its cheap. At their scale it acts fact with the right CDN, caching, other google magic. _URL_1_\n\n2tb per server. * 2 million servers = 4 million terabytes. Or 3906 PetaBytes. \n\nWithout knowing any of their details operationally I'd guess that media, video and photos, are their largest data hogs by volume. \n\ntl:dr lucy lu danced, tigers cried \n\n",
"Last I heard, YouTube was not profitable, though I am not aware of recent figures. _URL_0_",
"Some decent estimates below, but there is 1 issue, it's up to 72 hours per minute already and still accelerating: _URL_0_\n\nDisk is cheap and arrays help with throughput such that I expect they can buy for size over speed per drive.",
"I have no real answer, but a month or so ago someone posted an album of pictures of Google's warehouse of servers and data storage units. There was no size mentioned, but the place was enormous. At least a football field of servers and such stacked 6-8 feet high. It was insane. How they keep up with everything, I don't know. But they have a lot of storage, and a lot of money to get more.",
"Google has multiple backups of the entire internet. I know this doesn't answer your question, but one of their goals is to organize the worlds' information.",
"_URL_1_\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe second link there is from a few years ago, but you can see today just exactly what Google is using their \"dark fiber\" for. Google is one of the largest communications companies in the world. Their fiber network is comparable in size to that of AT & T, L3, Comcast, etc. The major cost of Youtube isn't in storage, it's in bandwidth.\n\nThe reason Youtube isn't sinking Google is that Google owns most of the fiber or cables...telecommunications infrastructure...that a great deal of Youtube gets transmitted across.",
"Google has their own way of building cheap hardware nodes. Harddisks are even cheaper - they even use consumer products. The amount they need reduces the price even further. They also very likely do deduplication.\n\nAnd they build their own datacenters by the dozens that are optimised for high density hardware arrangements.\n\nBasically, they continously build a lot of infrastructure with the intent of running everything on it which they may come up in the future. That's also why they always up the available gmail space",
"Another good question to ask is how much bandwidth YouTube uses. \n\nThey claim that 4bn hours are watched each month, or 1525 hours per second. For simplicity sake, we'll assume these are actual hours watched, not just an extrapolation from the number of views and video time. \n\nThe average Bit Rate of a 360P YouTube video is 768Kbps. There are 5.5 * 10^6 seconds in 1525hrs (watched each second). At 768Kbps per stream that works out to 4.5Tbps of constant bandwidth. Obviously some people are watching 480P, 720P, 1080P and even 2K or 4K videos at much higher Bit Rates. Peak time demand will be roughly double the average. I think it is safe to assume YouTube consumes at least 10Tbps of peak time bandwidth, if not double that much. \n\nIf we assume everyone is watching 1080P, that number goes up to a huge 50Tbps of average bandwidth, or probably close to 100Tbps of peak bandwidth.\n\n\nOn the upload side of things, 72 hours per minute works out to 1.2 hours per second. If we assume a Bit Rate of 1Mbps, that works out to around 5Gbps of constant uploaded video. I would also assume the Bit Rate of the average video is higher than that, so the peak time upload speed may be closer to 25Gbps. \n\nIf we assume everyone is uploading 1080P, this goes up to nearly 50Gbps of average traffic uploaded to YouTube.\n\nThe ratio of content consumed to content uploaded is about 1270:1.",
"off topic but how come some videos take ages to load and others load straight away even though my internet connection has not changed?",
"When YouTube started, they needed some space. Let's say 1TB. When that started to fill up, they bought some more. Say, another 1TB.\n\nOver the months they could calculate 2 things. How much space they needed now, and how quickly it was going up.\n\nEvery time they buy more space, they also have a more accurate way to tell how much more they will need in the next month/year. This allows them to prepare in advance.\n\nEventually, they use so much bandwidth that the entire system slows down. So they they either buy more lines in and out (for simplicity, think of them as connecting another internet line to your house).\n\nBasically, when their bandwidth/storage size/heat requirements/floor space/budget requirements suffers they pay people to redesign it better. But keeping track of how much they need and projected requirements for the next year is how they do it.",
"Lol at everyones mind being blown.....there are companies with many times the storage capacity of youtube "
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"http://highscalability.com/youtube-architecture",
"http://www.odbms.org/download/dean-keynote-ladis2009.pdf"
],
[
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube#Business_model.2C_advertising.2C_and_profits"
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"http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20120521/12065919003/youtube-uploads-hit-72-hours-minute-how-can-that-ever-be-pre-screened-objectionable-material.shtml"
],
[],
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"http://www.voip-news.com/articles/voip-blog/whats-google-doing-with-all-that-dark-fiber-51966/",
"http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/tech-myths/5-myths-about-google5.htm"
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1iqepl | hypnosis, how does it work? first time posing, thanks! | How does hypnosis work? Whats the easiest way to self hypnotize? What are the ranges of applications? THANKS! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1iqepl/eli5hypnosis_how_does_it_work_first_time_posing/ | {
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"The mind goes in to different stages while doing various things. Alpha stage is like when youre exercising, beta is a concentration stage and delta/ theta are when youre in deep sleep or in a good meditative trance. Hypnotists can help you lower brain activity to put yourself in a state where you are very open to suggestion. By reworking your innermost subconscious thoughts, then bringing you back to normal waking function, hypnotists can have an effect on your thought patterns without you consciously knowing. Hard to explain in terms of a 5 year old... sorry. As far as self-hypnosis, effects won't be as good; you could watch a youtube video and view it with an open mind. Hypnosis only helps change things in the individual's mind that they actually want to change. You won't actually be able to be tricked into thinking youre a chicken. Check out binaural beats for more brain wave experimentation. \n\nOh, and the people saying it's bs and it won't work are right; you have to be open-minded for it to work. (If you tell yourself something is dumb and won't work, then you've already made the decision for it not to)",
"There are a lot of misconceptions about hypnosis, so I´ll try to explain it, by explaining what it isn’t. \n\nFirst off, hypnosis isn’t some sort of *special mind state*, in the sense that isn’t something magical or extremely rare. On the contrary, reaching a “hypnotic state” is actually far more common than most people would imagine. For example, while reading a book or watching a movie most people are, in fact, “hypnotize”. That is to say, they are so focus on the book or the movie, that the rest of the world seems to cease to exist, and they are completely submerged in their own minds. And that’s what hypnosis really is, it´s a psychological **“state” of “hyper-awareness”**, but focusing completely on one little thing (i.e. the book, the movie, heck, even driving can be consider hypnotic in a sense) as to no paying any attention whatsoever to “the rest of the world”. \n\nAs to the “applications”, let’s just say there’s a lot, and I mean ***A LOT of bullshit*** out there about hypnotic treatments. I wouldn’t trust any of what you heard about it, unless it comes from a professional psychologist. When in doubt about the therapeutic applications of hypnosis, follow this simple rule: **hypnosis cannot cure anything, but it can help treat somethings.**\n \nAlso is worth mentioning that under hypnosis you cannot remember better events from the past or where you left your keys. Sorry, our memory just doesn’t work that way. In fact, hypnotist have often been accuse of implanting false memories to “patients”, because they make them believe that what they (the “patients”) imagine during the hypnosis actually happen, when it didn’t. It was just people´s imagination playing a role. And this has lead to some tragic consequences. Again, don’t believe all the bullshit that’s out there about hypnosis.\n\nAs for one very good application of hypnosis, that would be stage hypnosis, especially when Derren Brown does it. That’s a lot of free of BS fun, just plain and simple hypnosis without all the bullshit baggage. \n"
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5xy0eg | what is c and how is it different from the other types of programming? | Im taking an intro to engineering course and I've been wanting to take a step into the digital world for a long time. Im doing a project that deals with the introduction to C and when she writes on the board, all I see is letters and random words. Im not sure what any of them mean in the computer world. Can someone help me speak computer?? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5xy0eg/eli5_what_is_c_and_how_is_it_different_from_the/ | {
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"Disclaimer: not an expert, I actually have no experience in C but I have a grasp of the concepts.\n\nMost common programming languages that you see or hear of today, be it Java, C++, or the web dev trio, HTML/CSS/Javascript, are what's known as 'high level languages' and typically go through several layers of abstraction before they're able to be executed by the machine directly. (For example, Java runs on another program called the JVM, which translates it's code into code for the platform it's running on, which is why it's so portable across operating systems)\n\nHigh-level languages generally abstract away concepts like pointers (which 'point' to a specific position in memory, which is helpful for remembering where you stored a value), and you're left with variable names which essentially do the same thing but don't have a lot of the difficulty associated with pointers. (These probably make up about half of those random letters and words, the other half being functions)\n\nC is a significantly lower-level language, but it also gives you more direct control over memory. You can directly manipulate segments of memory rather than having a memory management system do it for you. It's also commonly used in robotics because it's excellent for single-purpose tasks like translating a physical button into turning on a motor.\n\n\nNow, these definitions don't exactly answer your question.\nProgramming is generally very structured and has specific naming patterns, and they can seem confusing or otherwise incomprehensible by the average layman.\nIn low level programming such as C, you're generally going to see two major types of things being named:\n\nPointers/Variables and functions.\n\nFunctions are like mathematical functions, except that they can be called any time and can obviously do a lot more than just mathematics.\n\nVariables, or pointers in lower-level languages, basically store directions to getting a specific value in memory. These values can be simple, like a number or a boolean (true/false value), but they can also be more complex, carefully ordered structs (To people who know C, C has structs, right?) which can contain many values.\n\nNow, functions and variables can be named just about anything, and C's standard libraries (the functions which \"come with\" C) often have very confusing naming schemes. It's a matter of having the proper documentation on hand.\n\nLearning programming can be a tricky task, but there's many ways to get help and resources. Other redditors, if you would kindly link some, go ahead. I'm too lazy at the moment. Also please correct me if I made some huge mistake, or tiny mistake if you choose.\n\n"
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16li8n | why aren't basic antibiotics like amoxicillan over the counter? | Why do I have to go to the doctor and pay X amount of dollars for them to tell me I have the flu, when I already know that, just for them to write a prescription for the medicine? I know it's mostly about making money, but are there other reasons? I would love to just go to the store and ask the pharmacist for it and be on my merry way. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16li8n/eli5_why_arent_basic_antibiotics_like_amoxicillan/ | {
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"Because over use of antibiotics leads to antibiotic resistant bacteria like MRSA. Doctors already prescribe them too much, imagine what a layperson with no medical knowledge whatsoever would do. \n\nBy the way, the flu is a virus; antibiotics have absolutely no effect on them. ",
"Because of antibiotic resistance. \n\nEvery time you use an antibiotic, and fail to entirely kill the bacteria, the bacteria that survive will naturally have a higher resistance to that antibiotic because, well, they survived what the other did not. \n\nAs a result, antibiotics are on a prescription basis to prevent:\n\n1) overuse by people who try to use them when they don't need them (which actually *decreases* how often they are used, countering the idea that it's because of profits). \n\n2) improper use - such as not taking it for the full duration at the correct rate, till all pills are used up, and until the *doctor*, not the patient, is satisfied that the bacteria is eliminated. Most people don't have the knowledge base to judge something like that correctly. \n\nThis prevents, or at least limits, the creation of bacteria that are immune to our antibiotics - a terrifying thought since many of us are live and healthy because of them!\n\nEDIT: Also, the flu is a virus, not a bacteria. Antibiotics will have no effect. Unless, of course, you are thinking of Tamiflu (which is ~~not~~ an antiviral, and works differently- - I have little knowledge about it). For anything other than sever cases of the flu (you can't breathe, get hydration, or eat for several days), in which case you should *get to the hospital* -sleep, good nutrition, and not overworking yourself are the best cures. \n\nEDIT: sorry, \"an antiviral\", not \"not an antiviral\"",
"Antibiotic misuse is *really really dangerous*. The more people use antibiotics, the more bacteria evolve to resist them, and the less effective they are in the future. So it's very important that only people who need antibiotics use them, and that everyone who does use antibiotics does so correctly.",
"Antibiotics are really our only weapon against bacterial infections and they need to be treated with care. \n\nAntibiotics are actually made originally by other bacteria to kill off the surrounding bacteria that compete for resources. This means that bacteria have been using antibiotics on each other for millions of years. We just recently started harnessing them for our own use.\n\nWhy is that important? It also means that bacteria have been evolving resistance to antibiotics for millions of years. They can pass this resistance along to each other. Antibiotics that we haven't even discovered yet ALREADY have bacteria resistant to them.\n\nLet's take Amoxicillan for example. Some bacteria have a way to dismantle Amoxicillin, rendering it useless against them. Their strategy to dismantle Amoxicillin is called a resistance gene. They can pass this resistance gene on to other bacteria, just like a game of telephone, and to their future sons and daughters.\n\nSo, you have the flu. You walk in to Wal-Mart and pick up some Amoxicillin. It doesn't help. You think \"Oh well, no big deal\".\n\nWrong.\n\nYou've got bacteria all over your body that mostly don't cause problems. Now, you just killed off a decent amount of your natural bacteria that are not resistant to Amoxicillin. You didn't kill off the bacteria that are resistant to it, especially the ones with the resistance gene. Guess what? Now you're left with mostly bacteria that are resistant to Amoxicillin. You played god and did some very rapid natural selection to evolve super-bacteria.\n\nA month later, you get a bacterial infection. You pick up Amoxicillin. It should help cure you.\n\nIt doesn't.\n\nBecause you took Amoxicillin before, the bacteria have been exposed to it and the ones resistant to it survived. You taking Amoxicillin when you didn't need it created a new infection that's resistant to antibiotics. You pass your infection on to someone else, they pass it to someone else, and we have no way of stopping it because it's resistant to our antibiotics.\n\nThat's why we don't let just anyone take antibiotics whenever. We keep a strict watch on who is using antibiotics and which ones they use. We cycle antibiotics so that we always have some that haven't been used in a while in case resistance starts to appear.\n\nTL;DR It isn't \"mostly about making money\". It's about not creating super-bugs that are antibiotic resistant. Antibiotics are dangerous in the hands of people who don't know what they're used for.",
"Follow up question: Back in the day, you used to have to get a prescription for the drug that gets rid of yeast infections. (Obviously im not clear on what it is) Now you just have to go to the drug store and buy some. Will the same be available for the antibiotics that fight bladder infections in the future? It just seems so common (like yeast infections) that it seems like that would happen? ",
"Because of people like you, who think that they would help cure your flu (virus) and the fact that each time you take an antibiotic, you are paving the way for a newer, antibiotic resistant, and more deadly bacteria to infect other people.",
"Also, people get sick, get the antibiotic, take it for a few days, feel better and toss the rest of the bottle away or worse, save it for use \"next\" time.\n\nAll this does is allow the meds to kill almost all of the community of germs, allowing those tough ones who remain to adapt to your pathetic attempt to destroy them and become resistant to it so that the \"next\" time you pull out your medicine bottle, it laughs in your face. It has become a strain of resistant germs.... just try to get rid of those little bytches.\n\nTake ALL of your meds, even if you feel better. Wipe out the entire colony of germs so no survivor will grow into a stronger, better germ.\n"
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8qmf64 | why do aircraft entertainment computers behave so slowly, in comparison to other electronics, like phones? | I am trying to understand what is the bottleneck that causes online entertainment systems to behave so slowly. Are they just using super low-end electronics, or is the software just extremely inefficient, or is it something else? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8qmf64/eli5_why_do_aircraft_entertainment_computers/ | {
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"They are usually very old computers, because of the long delays in safety certification for equipment being installed into an airplane.",
"in-flight electronic systems have to be certified by the FAA. Before being installed or retrofitted in an airplane. You can develop new systems and then won't be available for an airliner customer to purchase for years pending FAA approval. Once approved and installed and delivered to customer, you're already talking about 5 year old hardware.",
"It's a shared system, that's your bottleneck. Newer systems, from panasonic at least, run from SSD's these days. It's actually pretty fast, but still hard to find. Most airlines still use the older and therefore slower systems.",
"You have to take into consideration the age of the electronics. Im sure they are pushing 5-10 years of operation. Meaning they were submitted for approval even years earlier than that. If you fly on a 787 or the A350, those Entertainment systems are Grade A awesome!",
"Likely because they're really old computers that haven't been upgraded because there's not much reason to upgrade them if they're not broken.",
"They are just terminals, it's just one or two computers that run every entertainment terminal for the entire aircraft. Basically, they are just slightly intelligent screens, and it's a server that does almost all the work for everybody."
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2kqj4i | how do the 'heads' of large volunteer, completely none profit organisations survive? | Assuming this is their full time job and they are completely committed. Are they able to use a small and reasonable portion of the funds to buy the basics, i.e. food, shelter. Or are there some other means? I.e. Gov funding etc.
Thank you | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2kqj4i/eli5_how_do_the_heads_of_large_volunteer/ | {
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"If you mean the executives of non-profits, they often take home massive salaries. If an organization is non-profit is means it doesn't disburse funds to stakeholders; that status has nothing to say about employee compensation.\n\nThe executive director of the Red Cross made a salary of $561,210 in 2010. This is crap wages for that type of job in for-profit corporate America but most people would consider it fairly posh.\n",
"It depends on the charity. I work closely with several. \n\nOne charity I work with is entirely volunteer-based. Most board members and other key volunteers are retired and looking to do some good. They are unpaid, although they may get some perks. \n\nAnother charity I support has several paid staff. These staff make generally competitive salaries, depending on the size of the organisation. In this case, I would guess that the guy is paid around $50k per year, but it can be any amount. This is part of the \"administration\" portion of the costs, and is perfectly acceptable. ",
"Non-profits are corporations. Corporations are separate legal entities from the people who run them. \n\nWhen a corporation is non-profit, the corporation itself does not make a profit. This means that the money the corporation takes in is spent on stuff. The people who run the corporation are not non-profit people. The corporation still pays its employees, and the people who run it are employees. \n\nThe people in charge of non-profit corporations get very paid generous salaries, often times more generous than for-profit corporations. Between the tax benefits and the need to spend all income, the non-profit corporation dumps a lot of money on the people in charge."
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8dhr04 | its 2018 and we still haven't developed a 100% working medicine against nail fungus, why? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8dhr04/eli5_its_2018_and_we_still_havent_developed_a_100/ | {
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"Because a 100 percent success rate with pretty much anything in medicine is almost unheard of. Also, nail fungus isn't exactly top priority. It's often a chronic condition, and normal nail deformities are often misdiagnosed as omychomycosis and therefore fungal treatments do nothing \n",
"The nail is not vascular - it doesn't have a blood supply. There are cells that make and excrete the keratin at the base of the nail.\n\nGetting medication to body parts is either though inhalation, ingestion/digestion, injection, or topically.\n\nFungi are notoriously stubborn and hearty life forms. Remember, we got penicillin (that kills certain bacteria) from a mold.\n\nIn addition, the way fungi grows, it has hyphae or roots that burrow and spread, not quickly, but persistently.\n\nThe slow growth also means the metabolism of the fungi is slow. The way anti-fungals work is by inhibiting cell functions necessary for life. In a slow growing organism this takes time.\n\nSo how do you get medication to this toe nail?\n\nWell you can apply it topically, but that doesn't soak in all the way. You'd have to soften up the nail then apply the medication and leave it on there for a while. A long while. A very long while.\n\nNo one has that type of time or commitment.\n\nIf we decide to take pills we have to take a lot of pills to raise the concentration in our bloodstream to have any sort of effect at the nail. The amount of this medicine it takes to get levels effective to kill the fungus at the nail bed really, really harm our liver.\n\n**TL;DR ELI5** Fungus grows slowly. Nail bed is not vascular (no blood vessels). There's no real way to get significant concentrations of medication to the nail AND keep them there long enough to kill the fungus effectively."
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17m187 | why is the standard format for a rock band a 4 piece drums/bass/guitar/vocal? how and why did that happen? | I saw Soundgarden play in Toronto (front row! awesome show!) and this question drifted through my mind afterwards. We just accept the d/b/g/v format, with a few variations - rhythm guitar, keyboards, harmonica, etc. I am curious as to how and why this came about. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17m187/why_is_the_standard_format_for_a_rock_band_a_4/ | {
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" > This format is popular with new bands, as there are only two instruments that need tuning, the line-and-counterpoint formula prevalent with their material is easy to learn, four members are commonplace to work with, the roles are clearly defined and generally are: melody line, rhythm section with counterpoint melody, and vocals on top\n\nThis sums it up perfectly, that configuration works incredibly well, along with being low maintenance. Those particular musical instruments are among the most commonly played making it much simpler to set up a band with this configuration. ",
"That comes from jazz music, where that combination of instruments is known as [the rhythm section](_URL_0_). In early New Orleans and Dixieland jazz (~1910s), trumpet/clarinet/trombone would playing the melody and countermelodies, the guitar/piano/banjo would play chords, the tuba/bass (aka upright bass) would play the bassline, and the drum set would keep time. Jazz becomes very popular and 1935-1945 is known as the swing era or the \"Big Band era.\" A [big band](_URL_1_) typically has 12 to 25 musicians. Eventually the big band went out of style and some famous jazz soloists began playing with MUCH smaller groups that only consisted of the soloist and the rhythm section. Some Miles Davis albums only have 5 musicians... trumpet, sax, piano, bass, and drums.\n\nCountry music follows this same trend. In the 1930s, Gene Autry and Roy Rogers are singing cowboy songs with a huge big band behind them. By the late 1940s, folks like Hank Williams are playing with much smaller bands... vocals, fiddle, rhythm guitar, slide guitar, bass, and drums. In the early 1950s, this style of country music evolves into rockabilly (Elvis, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis, etc).\n\n*Edited to fix spelling mistake."
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28tmca | why do we have trouble losing fat if not properly hydrated? | _URL_0_ (at the bottom: Fat and Sick bit)
I understand the mechanism and it makes sense:
* When dehydrated, we have trouble eliminating toxins through normal ways (pee and poop) so we store them, aparently in fat cells, at least partially
* Drinking lots of water "flushes" our body so we get rid of toxins
* Why does not drinking water slow down the fat losing process? How is it even related?
From the infographic: The body does not release the fat unless it's sufficiently hydrated to safely remove these toxins. Why?
Let me know if there is another sub for this, I feel like it's too sprecific a question | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28tmca/eli5_why_do_we_have_trouble_losing_fat_if_not/ | {
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"\"Release the fat\" is a stupid way of saying it, silly infographic. Sounds more like the fat is a monstrous sea creature that is controlled by Davy Jones. \nAnyway, in order to lose weight, fat must be burned. Its an energy source. People get fat because they consume more food than their bodies require for energy, and is therefore stored for later use. So when you exercise (when fully hydrated) you are using up all your stored energy. The fat is converted into stuff that your body can run on, that stuff goes straight into your blood stream so it can reach your heart and lungs and muscles and everything. \n\nNow, if that fat is storing toxins until they can be flushed out by better hydration... it's gonna be shit central if that fat gets turned into energy because all the toxins (that could either make you ill or kill you) will coarse all around your body through your blood. That's pretty bad. \n\nBy the by, I didn't actually know that the body could store toxins in fat cells til now, it's pretty cool if I'm being honest. But it seems to me that what I've said is fairly logical. I think maybe you just didn't understand how fat is lost?",
"The chemical reaction to burn fat requires water."
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4cwmrr | us women's soccer team pay equality issue. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4cwmrr/eli5_us_womens_soccer_team_pay_equality_issue/ | {
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"US soccer is kind of a different situation. Not only was the WNT paid remarkably less than the MNT, despite having much more viewers, and winning, but they also had to play on turf and not grass, which was decided only for the women and not for the men at all, at any level. \n\nIt's pretty bad. If they wanted to argue marketability and viewership, I could see that working maybe with a European team, but definitely not with the US. The women aren't compensated as per marketability and viewership. And if the men were, they would make considerably less money than now. Like, it would be embarrassing. ",
"They aren't doing equal things though are they? And it's ridiculous to suggest they are, it would be like telling English League 2 teams that they have to pay their best players £250,000 a week because that's what Premiership players get. \n\nThat's women's football, they play for a few thousand people at the most whereas the men playing for the same club will play for 50-60,000 each game.",
"There issue is they get paid significantly less than men by the same organization, despite being more successful and bringing in more money.\n\nThe counter argument is that most female players are amateurs, while the men are professionals. That doesn't mean the men are \"better\", but it does mean US Soccer has to compete against professional teams for their services.\n\nYou can also argue the men's team has more financial upside. If the men's team ever came close to winning the World Cup, they would likely bring in more interest and money than the women do. "
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2rr6d9 | how can red, green, and blue pixels make white? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2rr6d9/eli5_how_can_red_green_and_blue_pixels_make_white/ | {
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"[This should help you.](_URL_0_) \n \nPixels use an additive color model.",
"_URL_0_\n\nThe idea is that humans have three types of light receptors, each of which can see a different \"range\" of colors; each type is centered on red, green, or blue. If you show all three colors at the same intensity, then all of the light receptors in our eyes will be activated to the same degree. This shows as white light, because white is the summation of all the colors.",
"Light and pigment are different. RGB pixels emit light, and the combination of these wavelengths makes white light. Pigment absorbs light and reflects particular wavelengths. At the extreme, black absorbs everything, and white reflects everything. Red pigment absorbs all but reflects red. Etcetera. Pigments aren't a source of light like a pixel, they're a destination."
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1lksk1 | why are hotel room air conditioners set to freezing temperatures and often left to run 24/7? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lksk1/why_are_hotel_room_air_conditioners_set_to/ | {
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"I do that, because I need white noise & cold air to sleep. You must be right after me, every time.",
"Why do people hyperbolically describe any room temperature even slightly less than their personal optimum as \"freezing?\"",
"I don't know the reason but I do know that keeping temperatures low reduces bacterial reproduction which would seem a good idea in such a setting.",
"I've always stayed in hotels with the window A/Cs you have to switch on by yourself when you enter the room. I've rarely encountered one that was already on when I got there, but depending on the age of it, fanciness, etc it can be hard to control freezing vs. burning up. I find myself switching it on and off every 30 mins or so because I'm either really hot without it running or really cold when it is on.",
"The ones you've visited were probably left that way from the renter before you. Its likely they cranked up the AC when they were going to sleep and then didn't change it in the morning when they left. ",
"You've just flown into town. You have a backpack and a checked luggage bag and a jacket over your shoulder. You just spent 6 hours on a plane. Waiting to get off. Waiting for your luggage. Waiting for either a taxi or the subway after the flight. You're lugging two weeks worth of stuff with you, and you accidentally walked in a circle once because you put the hotel's address in your phone but the gps signal hasn't picked up yet. You finally get to the hotel and you're a bit sweaty, more tired, and a lot frustrated. You hand over your Ultra Mega Platinum Rewards card and, \"Thank you Mr. CostcoHotDogs. It looks like you'll be staying with us for two weeks this time?\" Yes. Yes you are. You finally get to your room on a Sunday night, fighting the wedding party that's just finishing up their weekend fun. The door opens and a wall of warm stale air hits you in the face. \n\nThis is quite literally the last thing on earth that you want right now. That's why it's cold when you check in. \n\nBut why do they care about my needs... Mr Frequent Hotel Guy and not you, Mr One Night Expedia Rate? Because I spend $18,000 a year on that hotel chain, and that hotel chain only. And I want the room cold when I check in. They don't care about you and your $120 that you accidentally gave them. "
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aw0pm9 | how does cancer start in one specific part of your body and then spread so quickly? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/aw0pm9/eli5_how_does_cancer_start_in_one_specific_part/ | {
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"This doesn't always happen, but can occur with malignant cancer cells. Cancer cells divide and grow uncontrollably despite our body's efforts at preventing this. We can try to regulate growth and kill the cells, but sometimes it's just too much. Cancer cells grow and supply themselves by building blood vessels for the tumor.\n\nWhen a cancerous cell breaks off, it can travel throughout the body via the bloodstream or the lymph. Many often die, but some may settle elsewhere and begin to divide rapidly again. This process is called \"metastasis\". ",
"It does not spread quickly in most cases. However, many cancers are not diagnosed until the patient is symptomatic, which in many cases, unfortunately, means the cancer is already close to metastasizing or has metastasized already. \n\nCancer cells are (usually) nothing but mutated cells of our own body that have lost very important genes that function as part of a \"checkpoint\" system to make sure they only divide when needed and also pass through \"checkpoints\" during this division to make sure all the DNA is copied correctly. When these cells mutate and start dividing uncontrollably, this creates a loop where more mutations become more likely (more copies, more chances of errors, less checkpoints because the cells are already messed up, more chances of errors...etc). One of the things that metastatic cancers do is obviously grow because the cells are continuously dividing. They invade local tissues and blood vessels, and when these cells break off, they can travel and wind up somewhere else in the body and keep being cancerous. \n\nSome cancers can also carry out angiogenesis, meaning the creation of new blood vessels. This serves to both feed the tumor's growth and increases the chance that it will metastasize since it is creating its own blood supply."
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22bzxl | why do modern jet fighters have cockpits positioned towards the front of the body, rather then at the center like most wwii and previous fighter aircraft? | What kind of advantage does it confer, if any? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/22bzxl/eli5_why_do_modern_jet_fighters_have_cockpits/ | {
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"I'm sorry, I'm trying to think of a plane like you are describing and I cannot think of any. Cockpits are usually positioned towards the front to give the best possible view.\n\nWhat you may be noticing is a shift in where the engine is. Propeller driven planes have the engine in front, jet powered planes have their engines in the back. That's where the shift is coming from.\n\n"
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4i89o9 | with camera flash, why do human eyes appear red, while animals' eyes often appear blue, yellow, or green? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4i89o9/eli5_with_camera_flash_why_do_human_eyes_appear/ | {
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"The colour of your eyes under a flash is due to the reflection of the light from the retina (the back of your eye). The back of our eyes is pinky-red from blood (much like the rest of our insides).\n\nMany animals have a layer of reflective cells immediately behind their retina, called the [tapetum lucidum](_URL_0_). This reflects light differently, which depending on the angle of the light and the animal can be blue, green, red or yellow. \n\nThis reflective layer provides an advantage to seeing at night, because the retina gets a second chance at absorbing the light for vision. The downside is that it blurs vision slightly, because it's not a perfect reflector so the reflected light will be slightly out of focus.",
"Human eyes appear red because the light bouncing off the back of the eye in a human eye is bouncing off of blood vessels, which reflect the color red.\n\nSome animal eyes - like cats - have different features. Cat eyes, for instance, have a flat set of cells which bounce light to the retina, which gives them better night vision. It's very mirror-like, and outside light bounces back as yellow.",
"When we had our first child the doctor shone a torch in her eyes quickly to see the red reflection as the lack of reflection can be an indication of brain malfunctions"
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bg9owv | what does it mean when an automatic car has d1 d2 d3 d4 settings? i’ve never understood the concept of shifting gears. | I come from a car family and they’ve tried explaining it to me multiple times. I’m hoping someone else could help it click. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bg9owv/elif_what_does_it_mean_when_an_automatic_car_has/ | {
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"An automatic transmission has multiple gears. In normal operation, the computer knows which gear to pick, but it's reactive, not predictive. For example, if you're going down a steep slope, the car is often not capable of knowing that and downshifting for you, so you're going to want to move the shifter to (for example) D3, telling the car's transmission control unit \"hey, I need to you to not shift above 3rd gear\". Being in a lower gear like that helps you avoid needing to ride the brakes down the whole length of the slope, preventing the scary situation of brake fade. Typically, if it actually says something like D3, it just limits the maximum gear the car will shift into, but it will pick between 1, 2, and 3 as it sees fit. On some cars, you actually do pick the gear that it stays in, though it will shift on its own to prevent harm to the engine or transmission.",
"Most people have already hit the point in that the selection of D1, D2, etc is just the positioning of the gear within the gear box and how the power flows through the transmission line. Low speed means that the smallest gear turns the largest gear on the drive shaft. Another thing to note is that even when the speed at low gear is slow, it has three (ish) times the force vs higher gears. This makes it so that the car is easier to start and accelerate at lower gear, and more RIPUMS (RPMs) is achieved with higher gear. [Here is a youtube video explaining this in old-timey detail. ](_URL_0_)"
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kqwi4 | how did (western?) musicians decide upon 7 musical notes? | Is it possible to have a different number of notes and change the pitch between each step accordingly? Is all of music theory derived from the decision to use 7 notes/12 tones (e.g. what sounds good together, what makes up a chord, chord progressions, etc)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kqwi4/how_did_western_musicians_decide_upon_7_musical/ | {
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"I don't have enough knowledge to go into detail, but I do know that the 7 note scale is not universal. Middle eastern music is based on a completely different scale that has more notes, and far eastern music is based on a 5 note scale. So, yes, it's completely possible! \n\nThe first paragraph here notes all sorts of different styles which are based on a 5-note scale: _URL_0_",
"The seven-note scale is called the 'diatonic' scale (which, according to Wikipedia, means '[progressing] through tones' -- TIL). Musical archaeologists have found some evidence that it's been in use for many thousands of years, but nobody's quite sure exactly when it started.\n\nThere are all sorts of special reasons why seven notes works well, to do with wavelength ratios (the distance between two side-by-side peaks) in the soundwaves. You can split the intervals (distance between notes) into pleasing sounds, like the fifth and octave, which the ancient Greeks thought sounded 'pure', and thirds and sixths, which have been considered more pleasant to listen to for the past four hundred(ish) years.\n\nThere are many cultures that use different scales -- large parts of East Asia use the pentatonic scale, which uses five notes (if you play the black notes on a piano, that's what it sounds like), Indonesia has two different scales of five and seven notes, India has 'rāgs' which contain quarter-steps instead of our half-steps, and in the past hundred years a new one, called the octatonic scale (which has eight notes), has sometimes been used in Western music. The theme to *The Simpsons* is octatonic.\n\nTl;dr: Nobody knows how or when it started, but it's been that way for thousands of years. Other cultures have different scales: our one was historically centred around Western Europe.",
"First, this, which comes (basically) from nature: _URL_0_\n\nThis is where the 12 notes come from overtones of a fundamental. If you read that article, you notice that the problem with this tuning is that each key is noticeably different, and sometimes something like A# will sound different than Bb. In that article, it illustrates how the distance between D and Eb is WAY shorter than Eb and E, even though they're both \"half-steps\".\n\nIn Western Music, I believe (eventually, after a few different schemes I assume) it led to this: _URL_1_ - where most scales weren't terribly different, and you could transpose from, say, C to G without there being terrible difficulties.\n\nNow, we use equal temperament, which in relation to those two methods, is just some well-played \"fudging\". That is, we actually make the intervals all a little bit wrong, so that they are all equidistant in frequency.\n\nI'm not 100% sure on this stuff, but this is how I understand it.\n\nTL;DR: 12-tone and 7-tone came from nature/physics, then we fucked with it to make it easier to use.",
"Awesome! Finally a reason for me to have written my thesis. This is gonna be long:\n\nOkay! A note is just vibrations at a particular frequency. The note that an orchestra tunes up to before a show is A-440: it vibrates at 440 Hertz, and it's has been given the name of \"A\". An octave above that is 880 Hertz, and is also an \"A\". A different A, but an A, because the letters come back around. So, A-880. An octave below is A-220.\n\nWe have here a ratio. A-220 to A-440, an octave above, is 1:2. A-440 to A-880, an octave above, is 1:2. Nifty. Are there more ratios like that? I'm glad you asked!\n\nLet's take E. E is a 5th above A-440. A-B-C-D-E. E is also a 4th below A-880. E-F-G-A. E is 660. You may notice that this number is a nice, clean ratio with both those other numbers. A-440 to E-660 is a 5th, and it's a 2:3 ratio. What?! E-660 to E-880 is a 4th, and is a 3:4 ratio. There it is again! (Sorry, I like this stuff).\n\nSo, there are these 'pure' mathematical relationships in music. But you might have noticed that 660, which is 1/2 way between 440 and 880, is not 1/2 way between the two As. This is cause the HZ is a logarithmic scale (won't get into that too much, but it's cause the As go 110, 220, 440, 880 . . . gets bigger, right?). You might have to trust me a bit on this next part.\n\nSay we split an octave into two equal parts. That would be an A - D# - A. This is the note right between the two As, so we have (now) a 2 note scale. That's boring. Also, that note isn't a nice relationship. In fact, it's a ratio of 32:45. It's freakin' nasty when you play those two notes together. That annoying hum from a machine you just can't stand? Dollars to donuts it's a tri-tone.\n\nOkay, so a 2-note scale is no good. The relationship between those notes isn't a nice, pleasant ratio. What about a 3 note scale? Cut the octave twice, into 3 equal parts? Also boring, also doesn't get close to those 'pure' ratios. How many is good? 12! Fancy that. 12 notes gets really, really close to the pure ratios. And it also gives us some others that are lacking a bit of stability, which is good! Makes the music want to go somewhere.\n\nSo that's the basic reason. If you split the space between two notes an octave apart into 12 equal pieces, it gets very, very close to those pure relationships.\n\n* _URL_1_\n* _URL_0_\nOn the wiki, check especially the \"Tuning Systems\" part. That's the ratios.\n\nBonus 'splanation! I said 'really, really close'. Are there other scales that get closer? There are! The 'Eastern' scale has 32 notes. So, when they play a 5th, it's even, um . . . 5thier than a Western 5th. But! If they have 32 notes, that means they have more 'leftovers' that aren't quite so nice. If you thought the Western tritone at 32:45 was bad, think of some of the ratios you get when there's 32 notes in a scale! This is why when someone plays an Indian raga (sorta a key and a scale combined), they only do 7 notes. If you played a wrong note in those scales, it's really, really wrong.\n\nBonus #2! So, when I say really, really close, what do I mean? Check this out.\n\nIf we start on an A and go up 5 notes we get an E. The ratio there should be 2:3, cause it's a 5th. If we start on C and go up 3 notes, we get to . . . E. The ratio there should be 4:5, it's a 3rd. So E has these two relationships. Clear enough. But E also has relationships with the other 10 notes. And all the other notes have relationships with each other . . . it starts to get a bit complicated.\n\nIf you were only going to be playing in the key of A, great! You just make sure all your notes have the proper relationship to the A, and you're set. But then if you want to play in a new key, the relationships there all point back to A, not to your new key. Problem. The 5ths with A are great. But A isn't the most important note in this new key. And the 5ths with that new note are baaaaad. If it's the flute, you just change your tuning a little. No biggie. Guitar, you gotta re-tune each string, for the new key. Piano: forget it. Everyone's asleep before you're done re-tuning.\n\nEnter the Well-Tempered tuning system! With this you tuned a clavier (like a piano, whole buncha strings, plucked) slightly wrong for every key . . . but just *slightly*. Barely noticeable. And what that meant was that if you were *slightly* wrong for every key, you were mostly *right* for every key. Hey now . . . you know what comes next? Bach! \n\nHe writes the piece the Well-Tempered Clavier. It's actually 24 different pieces, going through all 12 major keys and all 12 minor keys. Not perfect for any one of them, but close enough you'd never notice. This new tuning meant that those 'pure' relationships were pretty dang close in every key, and he could just go hog wild on the clavier. So the piece is actually him showing off what you could do, now that you had a clavier that used well-tempered tuning.\n\nThink of it like the first time someone ever figured out distortion on a guitar and said \"Holy crap, listen to this!\"",
"I don't have enough knowledge to go into detail, but I do know that the 7 note scale is not universal. Middle eastern music is based on a completely different scale that has more notes, and far eastern music is based on a 5 note scale. So, yes, it's completely possible! \n\nThe first paragraph here notes all sorts of different styles which are based on a 5-note scale: _URL_0_",
"The seven-note scale is called the 'diatonic' scale (which, according to Wikipedia, means '[progressing] through tones' -- TIL). Musical archaeologists have found some evidence that it's been in use for many thousands of years, but nobody's quite sure exactly when it started.\n\nThere are all sorts of special reasons why seven notes works well, to do with wavelength ratios (the distance between two side-by-side peaks) in the soundwaves. You can split the intervals (distance between notes) into pleasing sounds, like the fifth and octave, which the ancient Greeks thought sounded 'pure', and thirds and sixths, which have been considered more pleasant to listen to for the past four hundred(ish) years.\n\nThere are many cultures that use different scales -- large parts of East Asia use the pentatonic scale, which uses five notes (if you play the black notes on a piano, that's what it sounds like), Indonesia has two different scales of five and seven notes, India has 'rāgs' which contain quarter-steps instead of our half-steps, and in the past hundred years a new one, called the octatonic scale (which has eight notes), has sometimes been used in Western music. The theme to *The Simpsons* is octatonic.\n\nTl;dr: Nobody knows how or when it started, but it's been that way for thousands of years. Other cultures have different scales: our one was historically centred around Western Europe.",
"First, this, which comes (basically) from nature: _URL_0_\n\nThis is where the 12 notes come from overtones of a fundamental. If you read that article, you notice that the problem with this tuning is that each key is noticeably different, and sometimes something like A# will sound different than Bb. In that article, it illustrates how the distance between D and Eb is WAY shorter than Eb and E, even though they're both \"half-steps\".\n\nIn Western Music, I believe (eventually, after a few different schemes I assume) it led to this: _URL_1_ - where most scales weren't terribly different, and you could transpose from, say, C to G without there being terrible difficulties.\n\nNow, we use equal temperament, which in relation to those two methods, is just some well-played \"fudging\". That is, we actually make the intervals all a little bit wrong, so that they are all equidistant in frequency.\n\nI'm not 100% sure on this stuff, but this is how I understand it.\n\nTL;DR: 12-tone and 7-tone came from nature/physics, then we fucked with it to make it easier to use.",
"Awesome! Finally a reason for me to have written my thesis. This is gonna be long:\n\nOkay! A note is just vibrations at a particular frequency. The note that an orchestra tunes up to before a show is A-440: it vibrates at 440 Hertz, and it's has been given the name of \"A\". An octave above that is 880 Hertz, and is also an \"A\". A different A, but an A, because the letters come back around. So, A-880. An octave below is A-220.\n\nWe have here a ratio. A-220 to A-440, an octave above, is 1:2. A-440 to A-880, an octave above, is 1:2. Nifty. Are there more ratios like that? I'm glad you asked!\n\nLet's take E. E is a 5th above A-440. A-B-C-D-E. E is also a 4th below A-880. E-F-G-A. E is 660. You may notice that this number is a nice, clean ratio with both those other numbers. A-440 to E-660 is a 5th, and it's a 2:3 ratio. What?! E-660 to E-880 is a 4th, and is a 3:4 ratio. There it is again! (Sorry, I like this stuff).\n\nSo, there are these 'pure' mathematical relationships in music. But you might have noticed that 660, which is 1/2 way between 440 and 880, is not 1/2 way between the two As. This is cause the HZ is a logarithmic scale (won't get into that too much, but it's cause the As go 110, 220, 440, 880 . . . gets bigger, right?). You might have to trust me a bit on this next part.\n\nSay we split an octave into two equal parts. That would be an A - D# - A. This is the note right between the two As, so we have (now) a 2 note scale. That's boring. Also, that note isn't a nice relationship. In fact, it's a ratio of 32:45. It's freakin' nasty when you play those two notes together. That annoying hum from a machine you just can't stand? Dollars to donuts it's a tri-tone.\n\nOkay, so a 2-note scale is no good. The relationship between those notes isn't a nice, pleasant ratio. What about a 3 note scale? Cut the octave twice, into 3 equal parts? Also boring, also doesn't get close to those 'pure' ratios. How many is good? 12! Fancy that. 12 notes gets really, really close to the pure ratios. And it also gives us some others that are lacking a bit of stability, which is good! Makes the music want to go somewhere.\n\nSo that's the basic reason. If you split the space between two notes an octave apart into 12 equal pieces, it gets very, very close to those pure relationships.\n\n* _URL_1_\n* _URL_0_\nOn the wiki, check especially the \"Tuning Systems\" part. That's the ratios.\n\nBonus 'splanation! I said 'really, really close'. Are there other scales that get closer? There are! The 'Eastern' scale has 32 notes. So, when they play a 5th, it's even, um . . . 5thier than a Western 5th. But! If they have 32 notes, that means they have more 'leftovers' that aren't quite so nice. If you thought the Western tritone at 32:45 was bad, think of some of the ratios you get when there's 32 notes in a scale! This is why when someone plays an Indian raga (sorta a key and a scale combined), they only do 7 notes. If you played a wrong note in those scales, it's really, really wrong.\n\nBonus #2! So, when I say really, really close, what do I mean? Check this out.\n\nIf we start on an A and go up 5 notes we get an E. The ratio there should be 2:3, cause it's a 5th. If we start on C and go up 3 notes, we get to . . . E. The ratio there should be 4:5, it's a 3rd. So E has these two relationships. Clear enough. But E also has relationships with the other 10 notes. And all the other notes have relationships with each other . . . it starts to get a bit complicated.\n\nIf you were only going to be playing in the key of A, great! You just make sure all your notes have the proper relationship to the A, and you're set. But then if you want to play in a new key, the relationships there all point back to A, not to your new key. Problem. The 5ths with A are great. But A isn't the most important note in this new key. And the 5ths with that new note are baaaaad. If it's the flute, you just change your tuning a little. No biggie. Guitar, you gotta re-tune each string, for the new key. Piano: forget it. Everyone's asleep before you're done re-tuning.\n\nEnter the Well-Tempered tuning system! With this you tuned a clavier (like a piano, whole buncha strings, plucked) slightly wrong for every key . . . but just *slightly*. Barely noticeable. And what that meant was that if you were *slightly* wrong for every key, you were mostly *right* for every key. Hey now . . . you know what comes next? Bach! \n\nHe writes the piece the Well-Tempered Clavier. It's actually 24 different pieces, going through all 12 major keys and all 12 minor keys. Not perfect for any one of them, but close enough you'd never notice. This new tuning meant that those 'pure' relationships were pretty dang close in every key, and he could just go hog wild on the clavier. So the piece is actually him showing off what you could do, now that you had a clavier that used well-tempered tuning.\n\nThink of it like the first time someone ever figured out distortion on a guitar and said \"Holy crap, listen to this!\""
]
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e728aa | how do smart screens work with skin but nothing else? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e728aa/eli5_how_do_smart_screens_work_with_skin_but/ | {
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"Not quite accurate. They also work with conductive synthetic rubber, or other items that can hold a tiny electric charge. Basically, they detect *capacitance.*",
"Screens work with anything conductive. This is why you can get touchscreen gloves - they have metal fibres in the finger tips. You can also get styluses that work with touch screens. You could use a metal pen or paperclip, anything conductive.",
"The type of touchscreen you're referring to is a *capacitive* touchscreen.\n\nThese touchscreens work on a principle of electronics called capacitance. This is the ability of something to store an electical charge.\n\nThe touchscreen is coated in a transparent coating that is conductive (it can pass electricity). When you bring your finger close enough to the touchscreen (your finger doesn't actually have to touch on some devices, as capacitance does not rely on contact) it causes the capacitance of the material to change in that specific spot.\n\nThat thin layer of coating combined with anything conductive that comes close to it forms a capacitor. Think of a capacitor as a tank of water. A tank can store, gain, or release water at will. You could measure the size of the tank of water by filling it up to capacity, then draining it again and measuring how much comes out. The capacitor works essentially the same way, but with electricity. In electronics, all you need to form a capacitor is two sheets of something conductive and a thin gap made up of something that isn't conductive. \n\nIn the case of the screen, one side of the capacitor is the coating and the other side is your finger. The coating is laid out in a pattern on the screen, so instead of one large surface coated in it, there are lots of little spots. Due to the way that capacitors work, by putting your finger on the screen, you are making lots of little capacitors. However, they are all linked on one side because your finger is one piece.\n\nUsing this, your phone can figure out when and where your finger is on the screen by testing any two points for capacitance. If they show capacitance, than that means that your finger is on both of the points. However, if your finger is only on one of the points, it would not show capacitance because there is not a complete circuit.\n\nHowever, since the fundamental design of the capacitive touchscreen relies on whatever touches it being at least slightly conductive, it won't work with anything that isn't."
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xmwi7 | how somes websites know my exact location ? | Like with [_URL_1_](_URL_0_) for example | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xmwi7/eli5_how_somes_websites_know_my_exact_location/ | {
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"For crying out loud, they don't know your *exact* location--they can pinpoint you to the nearest *city* if they are lucky. ",
"I just went to _URL_0_. It doesn't know my \"exact\" location. It was off by about a hundred miles. Hope this helps. "
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9x2u67 | why do things cooked in oil taste good but drinking cooking oil does not? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9x2u67/eli5_why_do_things_cooked_in_oil_taste_good_but/ | {
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"\"Things cooked in\" are the keywords there. Ever smelled burning cooking oil? It's pretty gruesome. Yet it crisps up potatoes deliciously. ",
"Cooking oil really isn’t made for eating by itself, it’s really just there in order to heat things evenly. Think of it as lube for heat, food coated in oil will heat evenly along its surface while food not coated will stick and burn, only on the side touching the heat. Again, oil isn’t for flavor, it’s for even heat distribution. Oils like extra virgin and others with low burning temps aren’t used for frying bc they get very acrid when heated too much. Which is why you see extra virgin olive oil (evoo) used on salads and other cold foods. These oils are for flavor. ",
"There's relatively little cooking oil in properly cooked fried foods. As /u/SlipperyClit69 says, it's there to conduct heat to food. Ever heard someone describe bad french fries as \"greasy\"? Ideally, none of it would be absorbed.\n\n",
"Same reason why eating butter is a horrid experience but eating something cooked with butter is fine, it's mostly the ratio.",
"Why do things cooked in an oven taste good, but eating an oven does not?",
"Can I rephrase the questions to get a better answer? \n\nCooking oil has a lot of calories that should be very good for surviving a long time ago. Our brains are programmed to like high fat, and high sugar foods. Why does pure fat not taste good at all?",
"The good flavors of fried food aren't from the oil, but from the Maillard reactions that the high temperatures cause in the food.",
"In deep frying, the oil is there to cook the food properly (and crispily), not for taste. Ideally, if you were able to extract every last bit of oil from a fried food it'd still taste quite great. \n\nThere are of course, other dishes where oil/fats are meant to taste good, but this is not usually true for frying/vegetable oil. ",
"Why do we want water when thirsty, but water can also drown us? Some things are only good in moderation.",
"Why dose salt on food taste good but eating a spoonful of salt does not?"
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38kf3o | why would i want windows 10 over windows 7 or 8? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/38kf3o/eli5_why_would_i_want_windows_10_over_windows_7/ | {
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"Well, it's free, so that's a start. Eventually stuff won't support older versions, so you'll likely have to get it after a few years. Microsoft has said this is their last major OS, so future versions of Windows will be upgrades to this one, similar to how OSX works on macs.\n\nBeyond that, it has some neat features. I really liked how it handles multi-tasking and it has virtual desktops which is useful. Plus Cortana if you're into that sort of thing.\n\nI ran the dev preview for a bit and really liked it, but it'll be an adjustment for people."
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1morb5 | after all these years, and so many new versions, why is it that microsoft windows is still so vulnerable to viruses? why can't they develop an os that cannot be infected? | Is it really impossible to develop a truly secure OS or is it the culture of Microsoft that prevents them from doing so? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1morb5/eli5_after_all_these_years_and_so_many_new/ | {
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"MS has a limited number of developers working on the OS. There are many more people in the world working to break it than there are to secure it, they only have to find one flaw where as MS has to think up every flaw possibility. Many vulnerabilities also come from third party software companies like Adobe, with things like Flash and Acrobat reader.\n\nWindows being the bigger target that comes down to market share. Why spend your time writing a virus/hack that won't get as many people possible.\n\nIt all boils down to a numbers game.",
"Windows isn't any alone in this regard. It is just so *common* around the world that it gets targeted more often.\n\nUnfortunately, there is really no such thing as a \"totally virus proof\" platform. This would involve having to imagine *every* virus that will ever be invented, including all the new technologies that don't exist yet. Basically - you have to be a mind reader. You can think of it a bit like human evolution; even though we have undergone *hundreds of thousands of years* of natural selection and adaptation, and become resistant to many things, we are still vulnerable in some areas, because bacteria and viruses can evolve and improve over time, too.\n\nOne way to make things more secure is to impose a rule that says \"no one can install an application unless I approve it first\". This is kind of what Apple does with iOS (you can only install things that come directly from their approved App Store; nothing else). But this would be terrible for Windows users. The whole *point* of Windows is that you can install what you want (e.g.: Photoshop, Leage of Legends, IP switchers, business tools, browsers, etc) or even write your own programs(!) so that you can work flexibly. If Microsoft had to manually check every line of code in every application before it could run, then nothing would ever get finished.\n\nAnd so they have to simply *guess* at what the big vulnerabilities are, and work against them. And yet - at the end of the day - no one can predict the future. I could (in theory) make something that is impervious to every virus known to man today, but that doesn't mean someone won't come up with a new idea tomorrow that I could never have imagined. And when you have millions of PCs running Windows, *some* of those people are bound to spend time focussing on it.",
"Most \"viruses\" these days are in the form of malicious applications or toolbars that the user is tricked into installing. Since Windows is most common, most of these applications are made for Windows.",
"It's a trade-off, Microsoft makes Windows very \"open\" to developers so it's easier to make software for windows, but this also means it's easier for people to make malicious programs. Windows is also the most used OS in the world so targeting it will often yield the most victims."
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2u7x1i | what are "free speech zones", how long have they been a thing, and why aren't they considered unconstitutional? | Just recently I have come across this apparent abomination of the U.S. Constitution on the tv show Arrested Development. I thought the idea was a joke because to me the idea seems appallingly tyrannical, but just a few minutes ago i came across a comment in a thread in r/news once again talking about these "Free Speech Zones" and i truly cannot understand how there hasnt been an uproar from american citizens over such a concept. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2u7x1i/eli5_what_are_free_speech_zones_how_long_have/ | {
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"The government can generally regulate the time, manner, and place for speech under the First Amendment. This is why it's legal to outlaw parades on residential streets at night or why government buildings are allowed to ban people from making political rants at government workers while they try to get their work done. There are other rules at work (such as whether the place is a public forum or not) so the government can't just nilly willy tell you to shut up, but it can impose reasonable regulations on when, where, and how you're allowed to speak.\n\nWhat the government *can't* do is regulate the content of your speech. If it's going to let the Anti-Defamation League hold a protest in the city park, it has to let KKK do so as well. \n\nWith free speech zones the idea is that you should have your message heard, but you shouldn't be able to physically interfere with whatever it is your protesting. I don't like them and think they're often used to minimize the impact of speech, but that's why they're legal.",
"[these guys, among others, are trying to fight free speech zones](_URL_0_)",
"Free Speech Zones are places where you can say anything that Liberals agree with. What's tyrannical about them is that they're falsely presented as being havens of freedom."
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5yv8p3 | how is it possible that i had a credit score before having my first credit card? | Hello,
A few months ago, I applied for my first credit card and got approved. It was one of those Discover Student cards. When I got my card and logged into my account, I noticed that I had a FICO credit score.
How was that FICO credit score determined? I never had a CC before. I do have a debit card though. Does that have to do with it? I also pay my own rent.
Other than those two things, I have nothing else that would determine a credit score, as far as I know.
**Edit**: I guess my rent payments have to do with it. Also, I am on a federal student loan, so that makes sense as well! Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5yv8p3/eli5_how_is_it_possible_that_i_had_a_credit_score/ | {
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"Some mobile phone contracts show you are in a credit agreement and are demonstrating you are able to maintain a monthly commitment. At least, that is the case in the UK. Also, if you have bought something like a car, PC, TV, etc, on finance this too affects your credit file.",
"An individual acquires credit in a number of ways. Anytime you get a loan (student loan, personal line of credit, car loan, mortgage, OR a credit card), you are adding to your credit history. You can even get credit by being an authorized user on someone else's credit card (like one's parents; I'm not sure this still works nowadays). You can have an entire lifetime of credit without ever using a credit card. A person gets a credit score as soon as their first loan of any type reaches six months of age."
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97so0y | i understand that whatsapp messages are encrypted before leaving your phone and decrypted on the recipient's phone with a unique key. but what stops whatsapp servers from getting these keys and doing the decryption themselves? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/97so0y/eli5_i_understand_that_whatsapp_messages_are/ | {
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"Absolutely nothing, in fact they do process your conversations, think of a product that you don’t need right now and type it a few times in WhatsApp chat, you’ll be spammed with ads about that product everywhere in the digital space \n\nPrivacy doesn’t exist, careful about what you say",
"If it's using the standard encrytion protocol : \nYou generate a private key ON YOUR PHONE. This one is ridicilously hard to break. Then, using it, you generate a public key that you send trough the servers to your friend. \n\nWhich creates his own private key and send you his own public key.\n\nPublic keys are used for encryption while private keys are used for deceyption. Hence why it's private.\n\nNow you can communicate without any fear by both using the public key of the other to encrypt.\n\nWhy does it work ? You can encrypt a message easily using the public key, but can't decipher it without the private key. (Or centuries of patience).\n\n\nProblem : Being a commercial company, nothing guarantuees us they don't store/generate on the server our private keys. =/\nBut it would be a scandal and a threat to security if they did."
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al68fe | why/how does audio desync with movies or videos while you’re watching when they're pre-recorded? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/al68fe/eli5_whyhow_does_audio_desync_with_movies_or/ | {
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"efb4m75"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"On digital recordings, the audio and video are kept on separate tracks. It's like a video file and an audio file are smooshed together and played at the same time. If something goes wrong, one of those tracks can get a little ahead or behind where it's supposed to be."
]
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] |
|
67md05 | why do humans appreciate views? | Why do humans appreciate views / images when there is no biological benefit to them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/67md05/elif_why_do_humans_appreciate_views/ | {
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"Don't know the answer, but something that could aid our survival is traveling, finding new lands, fresh resources. Gives us more physical room to populate and diversify. I've read before that other humanoids may have died off because of their lack of exploration/diversity. \n\nAppreciating views could help this along. And being curious about the next view. What's over the next hill top, mountain range, valley, lake, ocean.",
"A good view has all the attributes for a good place to survive, if you are prehistoric man. Long sight lines, so you can see enemies (or food). A diversity of ecosystems (some forests, some grassland, etc) - again good for for food and resources. A water supply (lake or river). ",
"Something which most views we appreciate have in common is water, and land which was carved by water (which likely means... water). We find green spaces especially pleasing. So much so that it's recommended for your mental health to keep plants around. Vegetation = food + water. \n\nYes we find some stark spaces beautiful, but the preference is for things like [this](_URL_0_) over [this](_URL_1_). I'm sure you can feel it yourself, even though the latter is beautiful. "
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"https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a9/Seychelles_ocean_view.jpg",
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kqz22 | how the firing mechanism for a gun works | When you pull the trigger of a gun, what happens on the inside of the gun to make it fire a bullet? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/kqz22/eli5_how_the_firing_mechanism_for_a_gun_works/ | {
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"The specifics depend on the gun. Generally speaking: \n-Pulling the trigger causes a part called the sear to move. \n-When the sear moves, it releases the hammer. \n-The hammer moves forward under spring pressure, now that the sear isn't holding it back anymore. \n-The hammer strikes the firing pin. \n-The firing pin now moves forward. \n-The firing pin strikes the primer on a round. \n-The striking of the primer causes a small explosion that ignites the gunpowder in a round. \n\nSafeties work by interrupting this series of events. \n\nIf you'd like a more specific description, you'll have to specify the firearm make and model.",
"The specifics depend on the gun. Generally speaking: \n-Pulling the trigger causes a part called the sear to move. \n-When the sear moves, it releases the hammer. \n-The hammer moves forward under spring pressure, now that the sear isn't holding it back anymore. \n-The hammer strikes the firing pin. \n-The firing pin now moves forward. \n-The firing pin strikes the primer on a round. \n-The striking of the primer causes a small explosion that ignites the gunpowder in a round. \n\nSafeties work by interrupting this series of events. \n\nIf you'd like a more specific description, you'll have to specify the firearm make and model."
]
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6fdd33 | is there difference between hebrew bible and torah? | whatr is the the difference between Hebrew bible and Torah?? Does the "Old testament" have big similarities with Hebrew bible?
thnx in advance | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fdd33/eli5_is_there_difference_between_hebrew_bible_and/ | {
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"text": [
"The Torah specifically refers to the first 5 books of the Old Testament. When people talk about the Hebrew Bible they are referring to the complete Old Testament. ",
"The Hebrew Bible, also known as the \"Tanakh\", is a collection of religious writings, most in Hebrew with a few in Aramaic, which basically comprise Jewish scripture. It's divided into three parts:\n\n1. The Torah is the first five books, from Genesis to Deuteronomy, which describe the creation of the cosmos, the early history of mankind and the Israelites, and Israelite law.\n2. The Nevi'im are the books of the prophets.\n3. Everything else is known as Ketuvim, and this is subdivided into poetic books, the \"five scrolls\" (Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther) and everything else.\n\nThe Christian religion developed from Judaism, so Christians kept the Tanakh, but with some of the books in a different order, and called it the Old Testament, while stories about Jesus and his followers are in the New Testament.\n\nCatholics have some extra material in their version of the Old Testament: this is material that is in Greek *translations* of the Tanakh, but not in the original Hebrew or Aramaic texts -- it's thought these parts were added later. Protestant Bibles don't usually have this extra material; but if they do, they're put in a third section called the \"Apocrypha\", between the Old and New Testaments."
]
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[],
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|
pbkw8 | why do some water bottles have a nutritional label on them and some don't? | I think it's strange to see a nutrition label that just has all zeros for everything, isn't it just water?
Should I be concerned | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/pbkw8/eli5_why_do_some_water_bottles_have_a_nutritional/ | {
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"text": [
"US laws require them. Just like why they require a listing of ingredients. If a bottle does not have one, there is a chance it was part of a multipack and the nutritional label was on the outer wrapping."
]
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[]
] |
|
7tssq5 | how do clocks become fast or slow over time? | For example, I’ll set my watch to the exact time that’s on my phone and a month or so later, it’s 2-3 minutes slow. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7tssq5/eli5_how_do_clocks_become_fast_or_slow_over_time/ | {
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"Your watch is not keeping the exact time. There are 86400 seconds in a day, but if it is mechanically measuring 86399 seconds in a day, then after 2 months, it'll be one minute off.\n\nWe're talking about a 0.001% error here. For many inexpensive watches, it is 'easy' to not build to this level of specificity.\n\nThis is especially true since after 6 months, you'll be 3 minutes out of date at this rate, and then you change your watch for Daylight Savings time anyways, and you'll fix the error then.",
"Your watch likely uses Quartz, which resonates at ABOUT 32,768 Hz. Hertz are a measurement of frequency and time. 1 Hertz is [This](_URL_1_). Your watch basically counts the cycles and knows that after 32,768 it needs to move the second hand. Quartz has a clock drift of about .5 seconds per day.\n\nYour phone uses GPS timing, which comes from atomic clocks. Atomic clocks use cesium, which resonates at EXACTLY 9,192,631,770 Hz. [Interesting read if you are looking for more info](_URL_0_) The clock used for GPS drifts at less than 1 second every 300 million years.\n\n > Since 1967, the International System of Units (SI) has defined the second as the duration of 9192631770 cycles of radiation corresponding to the transition between two energy levels of the caesium-133 atom.\n\nTLDR: Quartz clocks have a drift of about .5 seconds per day. Your GPS's clock drifts at less than 1 second every 300 million years.",
"Have you been travelling at or near the speed of light?"
]
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[],
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"https://www.nist.gov/news-events/news/2014/04/nist-launches-new-us-time-standard-nist-f2-atomic-clock",
"http://www.220-electronics.com/media/images/hertz-cycle.gif"
],
[]
] |
|
bmzmem | how does a 30 minute-hour nap ruin a full night of sleep? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/bmzmem/eli5_how_does_a_30_minutehour_nap_ruin_a_full/ | {
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"text": [
"After 20-30 minute you body gets into a stage of sleep that can leave you groggy if you abruptly wake up.\n\nBasically after this short time frame your brain puts you in deep sleep and expects to make a full cycle of sleep (which is roughly 90 minutes). If you wake up in the middle of that, your body will want you to get back to the cycle. This is why you feel like shit.\n\nIt is advised to either do a very short nap (less than 30min) or a full cycle nap (90 minutes) to get the full benefit. Try it!"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
|
2oi4vu | if cats have a common ancestor so recent, how are they all over the world? | According to [this](_URL_0_), cats have a common ancestor from 10-15 million years ago, which is well after the continents split. So how are, say, jaguars and tigers native to areas so far away? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2oi4vu/eli5_if_cats_have_a_common_ancestor_so_recent_how/ | {
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"Cats are probably the most successful predator among mammals. Keep in mind that there were times when Asia and North America were joined, more than once, during the various Ice Ages. Because they are so adaptable and such successful hunters they were easily able to spread far and wide. They most likely first evolved in the area of the Mediterranean and spread from there.",
"Don't forget that humans have a common ancestor from only about 100,000 to 200,000 years ago: [mitochondrial Eve](_URL_0_). Humans aboriginally native to the same areas as jaguars are believed to have arrived there overland, via the Bering land bridge."
]
} | [] | [
"http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2FPL00000060"
] | [
[],
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"http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mitochondrial_Eve"
]
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|
1ejj1i | fair trade coffee, and why fair trade is more relevant to coffee than other foodstuffs. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ejj1i/eli5_fair_trade_coffee_and_why_fair_trade_is_more/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Worldwide coffee production is 7,358,897 metric tons per year. Coffee is mainly consumed in the western world, while it can only be grown in the so called [\"coffee belt\"](_URL_0_). The coffee belt is dominated by developing countries and so the rest of world, wanting their cheap caffeine fix, are likely to exploit these poorer people. \n\nFair trade aims to do what it says and give these people are fairer deal for their hard work."
]
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[
"http://maxcdn.spotonlists.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/01/coffee-belt.gif"
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||
3b80v5 | why can dog breeds mix with each other? | The connection between the brain and body of any mammal is very complicated. If you mix two dog breeds, wouldn't some of the brain and body come from breed A, and some from breed B? What if a brain component from A connects to a body part from B? Why does it still work? If you were to surgically remove the brain from A and place it in B, would it still work? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3b80v5/eli5_why_can_dog_breeds_mix_with_each_other/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Because dogs are all one species. \n\nDogs are an unusual case - they are *the* most divergent species in the world. This is because Humans have been messing with dogs for millennia, and we've created different breeds for our own use/pleasure. But they're still dogs. In fact, they're still *wolves* - dogs and wolves can still interbreed. ",
"Think of dog breeds like humans. Some humans have red hair, some have black hair. Some humans are taller, some humans are shorter. We've artificially emphasized those sorts of differences in dogs through breeding, but they're still the same species. So just like a really tall black woman can have a child with a short and stocky asian dude, a chihuahua can have a kid with a mastiff. "
]
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[],
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|
205mkg | why does the us government not just block or shut down wikileaks? | What is it about WikiLeaks, as opposed to other websites that get taken down or blocked in other countries, that keeps it up?
All good answers. Thanks :) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/205mkg/eli5_why_does_the_us_government_not_just_block_or/ | {
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"theyd probably just make a wikileaks2.0 or something",
"Because we live in a country where prior restraint requires court approval and is almost never granted.",
"They're hosted in Sweden, where the US government obviously has no jurisdiction.",
"The U.S. government can shut down individual websites, usually kiddie porn sites and the like. They can also disable DNS entries (URL names, such as _URL_0_). However, they can only shut down sites within U.S. boundaries, including overseas territories. The U.S. doesn't have a nationwide filtering system like China, so there's no reliable way to block incoming traffic throughout the country or in a particular state or locality. \n\nAs for WikiLeaks in particular, the federal government claims that reading classified documents is illegal. (Some, but not all, documents on WikiLeaks are classified.) The odds that you'll be arrested/prosecuted for reading a WikiLeaks document are practically zero, because (a) there aren't enough law enforcement resources in the world to monitor individual Internet users so closely, and (b) they probably wouldn't want to even if they could, because going after websites rather than users would be more effective and less costly. \n\nThat said, I don't know if the Feds have made any effort to block WikiLeaks or disable its accessibility in the U.S. But even if they tried, they'd have little success. "
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7uobr1 | what is the difference between dubstep and brostep? | I am very confused about the differences. I heard that brostep is usually “harder,” is that true? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7uobr1/eli5_what_is_the_difference_between_dubstep_and/ | {
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"You pretty much have it right. Brostep is a sub-genre of Dubstep, and Dubstep is much less specific. Really, the only requirements for something to be dubstep are to be ~140-150 BPM, have a 2-step drum pattern (except for Carnival, which is 4 on the floor) and have prominent bass. \n\n\"Dubstep\" has many subgenres, and when most people hear Dubstep they think of Brostep, which is dubstep but \"hard\" and \"aggressive\". I know that sounds vague but I don't have any other way to describe it."
]
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7reoxh | how did they figure out how to eat a pufferfish without poisoning themselves? | Related to [this](_URL_0_).
They would stay away from something they know that is poisonous, right? How did they know that preparing it carefully would make it safe to eat? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7reoxh/eli5_how_did_they_figure_out_how_to_eat_a/ | {
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"The poisonous parts create an immediate tingling sensation when they touch the lips or mouth. So you know something is up.",
"Sorry, missed the point of your question.\n\nKind of the same way.\nNot everyone was getting sick, so someone noticed that if they only ate the flesh without the inner organs, those people didn't get sick."
]
} | [] | [
"https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7rd4x2/eli5_how_did_we_come_to_know_what_was_safe_and/"
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[],
[]
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6fqab6 | what is wind | What cuases wind to happen? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6fqab6/eli5_what_is_wind/ | {
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"One amount of air gets hotter than another. Hot air expands. This expanding hot air moves, causing wind.\n\nEvaporation of water moves heat from the surface to the air. This, and sunlight causes air to heat, causing wind.\n\nEdit: u/cedarbabe is right about it being about pressure, not hot air's expansion.",
"Wind is a result of differences in air pressure in the atmosphere - the movement of air from areas of higher pressure to lower pressure.\n\nThis is linked to the differences in heating of the air and ultimately to the solar energy input that different parts of the Earth receive.\n\nOn the largest scales, the equator receives more solar radiation, and so the air here heats up and rises (hot air rises due to being less dense than cold air). This means that other, colder air will rush in to replace the warm air that has risen. [Large 'cells' of atmospheric circulation are thus created](_URL_0_), which lead to the transport of atmospheric heat towards the poles. (Without this, the polar regions would be even colder and have more extensive ice).\n\nSmaller scale processes work on the same principles - for instance the sea is quite hard to warm up compared to land, and so air above land receives a lot more heat reflected and reradiated from the ground surface on a sunny day. Air above the land will then rise, and air from above the sea will move in to replace it - creating the sort of sea breeze often felt along coastlines."
]
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"http://climate.ncsu.edu/edu/k12/.atmosphere_circulation"
]
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av88ha | how is the amount of calories in a food item determined, and why is it almost always in “10’s”? also is there a maximum calorie amount an item can deviate from what’s listed, or is every item exactly what it says? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/av88ha/eli5_how_is_the_amount_of_calories_in_a_food_item/ | {
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"text": [
"A calorie is the amount of energy needed to raise one gram of water one degree Celsius. The “calorie” seen in food is actually a kilocalorie, which is equal to 1000 actual calories. This is why it’s always listed in “10’s”"
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
9nd7h0 | what is the point of declaring a "mandatory evacuation?" | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9nd7h0/eli5_what_is_the_point_of_declaring_a_mandatory/ | {
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"At a certain point during the disaster, emergency services will NOT go into the evacuated area, either because of risk or because roads have become physocally impassable. Announcing a mandatory evacuation is the first step in notifying residents that if they stay, they may be giving up basic services and utilities.\n\nSource: Florida resident",
"That is the point, people that stay during a mandatory evacuation are literally putting first responders at risk. Mandatory evacuation usually also means that emergency services are suspended in the evacuated area, and residents will not be able to be helped until after the danger passes."
]
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4vcq3h | how did rio de janeiro become the crime ridden, corrupt city it is today? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vcq3h/eli5_how_did_rio_de_janeiro_become_the_crime/ | {
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"[Rapid urbanization] (_URL_0_), for starters, to a city which (like others) was not capable of handling it. Sao Paolo and others have similar problems. Industry and commerce are highly centralised around the cities, so workers have to be there, since the transport infrastructure is so poor. Many poor people crammed together in *favelas*, some trying to get rich quick through crime (theft, drugs, and more).\n\nCorruption is another story: those who have money can use it to make more money, convincing government officials to make public policy for them and not for the people. I mentioned the transport infrastructure and its problems, so what happens if I search for \"Brazil Transport Corruption\"? I find cases like [this] (_URL_1_): \n\n > Brazil's anti-monopolies commission announced on Thursday it had begun investigating allegations that transport providers, including several large international firms, had operated a price-rigging cartel for 15 years in major cities. \n\nSo transport prices have been higher than they needed to be, making it harder for workers to work and have an acceptable standard of living. That's just one example. "
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://perspectivesinanthropology.wordpress.com/urbanization-in-brazil/",
"http://en.mercopress.com/2014/03/21/major-corruption-probe-into-brazil-s-transport-system-providers"
]
] |
||
2th6c5 | why are the hebrew scriptures ("old testament") used by evangelicals to justify their harsh stance on homosexuality, but other parts of those same scriptures are completely ignored (killing adulterers, not eating shellfish, etc.)? | **For Reference**
Leviticus 11:9-12 ESV
“These you may eat, of all that are in the waters. Everything in the waters that has fins and scales, whether in the seas or in the rivers, you may eat. But anything in the seas or the rivers that has not fins and scales, of the swarming creatures in the waters and of the living creatures that are in the waters, is detestable to you. You shall regard them as detestable; you shall not eat any of their flesh, and you shall detest their carcasses. Everything in the waters that has not fins and scales is detestable to you."
Deuteronomy 22:22 ESV
“If a man is found lying with the wife of another man, both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman. So you shall purge the evil from Israel." | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2th6c5/eli5_why_are_the_hebrew_scriptures_old_testament/ | {
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"Because it fits what the person speaking wants the truth to be. Sadly, many religious people tend to cherry pick scriptural points that reinforce the belief they want to have. It's not about the scriptural truth, it's about having a stance or opinion validated by god.",
"Because those other things are directly refuted in the new testament, while the stance against homosexuality is only reinforced. Christians live under the new covenant, meaning the old laws aren't what they're judged on. Jesus himself directly and purposefully contradicts the examples you have. ",
"You're right, most of the time this is the case. Though some take the entirety of the Old Testament as being less relevant than the New Testament. Here they make two arguments: \n1. Christ lays out that sex outside of marriage is a sin.\n2. Paul writes in Romans, and rather ambiguously, the homosexuality is a sin. \n\nHaving grown up in an evangelical church, the good debaters stay away from the Old Testament when arguing theology. If you encounter an evangelical who relies heavily on the OT, he's pretty much a hack.",
"I will give you a non-religion hating answer. \n\nThroughout the New Testament Jesus abolishes many of the old testament laws including sacrifice and food constraints. However homosexuality is addressed as being a sin in the New Testament thus the belief still holds today. ",
"The food was addressed in Acts Chapter 10\n\n* 9 On the morrow, as they went on their journey, and drew nigh unto the city, Peter went up upon the housetop to pray about the sixth hour:\n* 10 And he became very hungry, and would have eaten: but while they made ready, he fell into a trance,\n* 11 And saw heaven opened, and a certain vessel descending unto him, as it had been a great sheet knit at the four corners, and let down to the earth: \n* 12 Wherein were all manner of fourfooted beasts of the earth, and wild beasts, and creeping things, and fowls of the air. \n* 13 And there came a voice to him, Rise, Peter; kill, and eat. \n* 14 But Peter said, Not so, Lord; for I have never eaten any thing that is common or unclean. \n* 15 And the voice spake unto him again the second time, What God hath cleansed, that call not thou common. \n* 16 This was done thrice: and the vessel was received up again into heaven.\n\nYou have to remember that Christianity is not just a \"New Religion\". But it is Judaism fulfilled.\n\nMatthew 5\n\n* 17 Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil.\n* 18 For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled.\n* 19 Whosoever therefore shall break one of these least commandments, and shall teach men so, he shall be called the least in the kingdom of heaven: but whosoever shall do and teach them, the same shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.\n* 20 For I say unto you, That except your righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case enter into the kingdom of heaven.\n\nIt was all fulfilled when Christ Died on the cross for our sins and the Spirit of Christ entered the Church on the day of Pentecost.\n\nDeath punishment for sins was removed when Christ died on the cross.",
"I think because it's easier to hyper-focus on the 'sins' that someone else is committing rather than coming to the realization that there's plank in their own eye... I say this as a recovering evangelical. \n\nEvangelicals turned righteousness into 'sin management', *if i don't do this, this or this, then I'm righteous*\n\nHowever righteousness through out the arc of the OT narrative is more than just merely sin management, but rather is something active & alive, rather than the result of avoiding certain activities. Righteousness is taking care of the widow, orphan & sick, engaging structures of injustice & violence.... but unfortunately many of these very same structures we're to engage give us cheap gas prices, cheap clothing & shoes stitched by the hands of elementary aged children.\n\nSo rather than seeing the plan in their/our own eye & see that we're implicated in the brokenness in the world, its easy to shift the blame to someone else.... imho",
"OP, as a former evangelical, I will do my best to explain this. Understand first: the primary reason why this seems contradictory is the viewpoint from which you are referring to the Bible. This viewpoint is shared by many Christians, hence the misunderstanding makes sense. That viewpoint is this: that the Bible is a systematic code of ordinances for human beings to follow. Hence, contradictory elements within that code appear to invalidate the code itself. This, of course, makes perfect sense...if it were a book of ordinances. \n\nThe essential thing to see here is that the Bible was not written as a list of rules for people to follow. Even the Old Testament itself was not intended to be such (see Galatians 3:23-25). Rather, it is intended to be a revelation of who God is and how He relates to humanity, intrinsically. This is why the Bible often refers to itself as food (see Jeremiah 15:16), something as a source of life, joy, and nourishment for man's heart. \n\nNow, to actually answer your question: marriage between man and woman is intended to be symbolic of the relationship between God and man (humanity). This is why there is a marriage at the beginning of the Bible and at the end (see Genesis 2 and Revelation 21-22). The unity (marriage) between a man and a woman is intended to be a symbol indicative of the unity between God and humanity, thus homosexuality is seen to undermine this symbol and be counterproductive to humanity understanding their relationship with God. \n\nTL;DR--The Bible was not intended to be a list of rules, hence the apparent contradiction. As a book to reveal God and His relationship to humanity, the practice of homosexuality works against God's will for humanity, for the relationship of man and woman are symbolic of the relationship of God and man (gender neutral). Thus, it undermines man's understanding and knowing of God, compromising man's happiness. ",
"Aside from what everyone else here has said, the other excuse for this nonsense I hear pretty frequently is that \"some of the laws\" (like shellfish and not wearing clothes of mixed fabric) were \"just for the people of Israel,\" while others (like hating everybody who isn't just like you) were \"for all peoples in all times.\" Where they get this from I have no idea, but some people will believe literally anything, I guess.",
"When you live your life according to text that was written by stone age peasants that has been transcribed and translated from multiple languages a dozen times you will become a hypocrite of sorts when you try to relate that text to the world we live in today. Do yourself a favor and don't try to wrap your head around the thousands of interpretations of the bible. Follow one tenant; treat others the way you wish to be treated and you will never go astray. Or if the golden rule is too much for you you can always live by my favourite tenant; don't be a cunt. "
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1ocf8u | when you burn a song onto a cd, what happens at the molecular level? | . | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ocf8u/eli5_when_you_burn_a_song_onto_a_cd_what_happens/ | {
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"There's a thin layer of an organic dye next to the reflective layer in a writable CD. The precise chemical reaction must depend on the dye (there are several in use), but basically the laser spot breaks down the dye by heating it. It's only a few milliwatts, but focused sharply enough it'll do the trick.\n\nRewritable CDs are different again. As I understand it they use a thin layer of metal alloy that can exist in different stable phases.",
"I wonder what happened to r/askscience"
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3pt2md | i´ve been reading that iceland didn´t bail out their banks but bailed out the people. what does that mean, and how did they do it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3pt2md/eli5_ive_been_reading_that_iceland_didnt_bail_out/ | {
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"They basically said \"we will bail out domestic depositors, but not international investors\". Most of these international investors had already been bailed out through their own banks who expected Iceland to make good on its promises. When Iceland reneged on the deal, there was a lot of pressure on Iceland to make good on it, both in courts and through international diplomacy. It's still not fully resolved.\n\nThe line that \"they bailed out the people, not the banks\" looks good on a Facebook meme. But the reality is they bailed out their own people by screwing over British and Dutch banks and investors, because Iceland's banking fund for such things was not properly capitalized.",
"I think people in Iceland took a big hit from the crisis, just in different ways than other countries: inflation and currency devaluation, for example. See _URL_1_ and _URL_0_",
"Icleand's currency was slipping against the Euro. Iceland banks upped the interest rates to drive foreign investment. The banks were unable to guarantee such high interest rates and collapsed. The Goverment bailed out the banks but only paid out to their countrymen leaving all the foreign investors in the cold. Icelandic currency crashed along with their stock market and had to have the IMF bail them out. \n \nOnce the recovery kicked in Bankers and Government officials were put on trial for negligence and some were jailed. "
]
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[],
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008%E2%80%9311_Icelandic_financial_crisis",
"http://www.iea.org.uk/blog/iceland-versus-ireland-lessons-from-the-banking-crisis"
],
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] |
||
24glcj | what is the benefit of a trial by judge vs a jury trial? what would be an example of a criminal case where someone might want a trial by judge?instead? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/24glcj/eli5_what_is_the_benefit_of_a_trial_by_judge_vs_a/ | {
"a_id": [
"ch6wn1g"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"If it's a case where there are no facts in dispute, but rather an interpretation of the law, then there's really nothing for a jury to do. In that case, it's a lot easier and faster to go for a bench trial."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
||
1k5ghs | why does the human body metabolize alcohol at a fixed rate (around .015 bac/hour) and caffeine at a rate relative to the ingested amount (with a half-life of about five hours)? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1k5ghs/eli5_why_does_the_human_body_metabolize_alcohol/ | {
"a_id": [
"cbll0ok",
"cbll57n"
],
"score": [
68,
4
],
"text": [
"Bear with me, it's been a couple of years since I took a course in pharmacology. Ethanol is metabolized by an enzyme called alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH). The human body doesn't have particularly a lot of ADH which means all the enzymes quickly become saturated by even small amounts of ethanol. Meaning there is no more free ADH to bind to the ethanol. Which is why ethanol is metabolized at a relatively constant rate. This is called a zero-order reaction. \n\nCaffeine on the other hand is metabolized by CYP1A2. This follows the rules of first-order reactions, which says the speed of the reaction is dependent on the concentration of the reactant (caffeine). The reason is the body has plenty of CYP1A2 enzymes compared to the amounts of caffeine a human being normally consumes. In theory caffeine metabolism could follow zero-order reactions if all the CYP1A2 enzymes suddenly became saturated, like from consuming large quantities of caffeine. But I think the side effects and toxicity would stop you first.\n\nI hope my explanation is satisfactory. :)\n ",
"You don't have to read this page if you don't want, just look at the plot at the top.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nNotice how there is a line marking out \"Vmax\" (V-max). This is the maximum rate at which an enzyme can do what it does and no matter how much more substrate is made available the enzyme will only be able to do its job at Vmax. As the concentration of the substrate approaches zero, so does the rate of the enzymes action. \n\nWhen you ingest caffeine you're ingesting a very small amount of it. 100 to 200 mg or something like that. Spread out through your entire body this is a very small amount of caffeine and as your body is metabolizing it less and less is present and thus the rate of its metabolism is becoming slower and slower. 200 mg of powder is a pretty small amount, [these gel capsules](_URL_0_) contain 100 mg of the compound inside of them. \n\nWhen you ingest alcohol, you drink a lot of it. A 12-pack of beer contains roughly 200 mL of ethanol. That's about half of pint-sized jar. It's a lot of alcohol. Your body can only metabolize it at that certain rate because there is so much of it present in your body."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[],
[
"http://i.imgur.com/FAHu045.jpg",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michaelis%E2%80%93Menten_kinetics"
]
] |
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