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PhDs who successfully landed a job in academia: how's your workload compared to that of a PhD student? | Are your responsibilities as time consuming? Is your mind constantly set to work, due dates and what needs to be done next? How's the pressure to meet the job requirements vs the usual PhD pressure? | Postdoc was fine -largely like an extended PhD although this depends mostly on what your PhD was like and how much academic freedom you're used to.
Tenure track is an unending hell, where you switch from grant deadlines, to brief moments of research, to service and to teaching.
The pressure continues to be largely self inflicted.
But everything takes up so much time. | 137 | 95 |
ELI5: How did grapes become the most popular fruit to ferment into wine? Why didn't we end up with like a blueberry or apple or banana fermented beverage as a cultural standard? | Sitting here sipping a spanish red and pondering how it came to be that grapes were the standard of fermented fruit alcohols and not the dozens of other fruits available. | Grapevines produce an enormous amount of fruit, and it grows in bunches that are easy to harvest. Grapes are soft and easy to crush for juice. Once you have the juice, it ferments all by itself and you're drinking wine.
Berries are a possibility, but you have to pick them one at a time. Blackberries and raspberries grow on thorny vines, in dense brambles. I've picked them both, and it's not a volume task. You'll get all scratched up and very weary picking a gallon of berries, and they're so tasty you'd be an idiot to crush them for a jug of hooch. Other berries, like strawberries, are mostly very recent additions to our crops.
Apples produce abundantly, and are easy to pick, but getting the juice out of them is much harder than it is for grapes. A mechanical press of some sort is required. And they are the best bet of tree fruit. Stone fruits like peaches have the additional problem of a large, slightly poisonous seeds in the middle that you want to avoid crushing into the juice.
Grapes have it all. Easy to grow, easy to harvest, easy to crush. | 23 | 21 |
ELI5: Why do cats always seem to want to lie on whatever I'm working on, or to crawl into tight spaces? | They want to be where your attention is focused. On top of whatever you're looking at is a good bet. The heat from a laptop is an added benefit.
The theory on boxes is that small spaces help them feel protected. | 270 | 390 |
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The Earth's surface area has roughly a 2:1 ocean to land ratio. What is the ratio of ocean biomass to land biomass? (or even ocean biomass:land biomass: atmospheric biomass) | What's the ratio of all known biomass to the mass of the Earth? (I suspect we are negligible) | All waterbodies together make up about a third of the global primary productivity (which translates directly to biomass gain). Tropical rainforests, covering about 3% of earths surface, produce more than 20%.
The open sea has very low production per area (~150g/m²/year), only desserts are inferior(>100g/m²/year). Reefs are great producers (~2500g/m²/year) but to few to make a difference(>0,1% surface). Rainforest are almost as good as as reefs (~2200g/m²/year). Common American and European ecosystems like woods and farmland are around ~700g/m²/year.
Source: Campbell, 2003 | 17 | 36 |
ELI5: what's the point of Secret Service code names if they're released to the public? | It's common knowledge that Renegade is the president's code name. So, if you were to see a man talking about "Renegade" into an earpiece, you'd probably be able to figure out who they're talking about. Given that the names are released to the public, what's the point in using them, instead of just using the actual name, or an abbreviation like POTUS? | A little bit security, but mostly brevity and clarity. In case of an emergency, if you're the Secret Service, you need to be able to refer to the protected individual clearly, unambiguously, and *quickly*. "POTUS" wouldn't always work, because they won't always be POTUS, even if it's POTUS you're assigned to (ex-POTUS will sometimes have Secret Service escorts as well). "Barack Obama" is too long. "Obama" is ambiguous; what if the sniper (or whatever) is targeting Michelle, who is also under Secret Service protection? "Barack" would work in this particular example, since there aren't currently a lot of Baracks hanging around, but "George" and "Bill" would have been too ambiguous when those guys were president; because *most* first names are reasonably common, they aren't in the habit of using that.
Calling him "Renegade" gives a quick, easy name that uniquely identifies him. | 22 | 16 |
CMV: Personal matters (weight, sex, drugs, "gaffes") are not appropriate criticisms of politicians. | By personal I mean just about anything that isn't directly related to the actual task that you are being elected to perform. This would include:
-any drugs you do or used to do
-who you have sex with, what kind of pictures of your dick you send, etc
-rude comments or insults you made, clumsiness, speech errors, bad metaphors (binders full of women, etc)
-How fat you are or other appearance related things
I'm mostly thinking of Rob Ford right now, and all the American politicians like Clinton who were attacked for their sex lives. Even Bush for all the dumb little things he did.
We don't elect politicians to be model citizens, we elect them to do a job like any other. But the way politics works now reminds me of people running for Prom Queen, where its all about "image" and "reputation" and any embarrassment is seen as a failure.
All the information you need to know before you vote for a representative is their positions and voting record (for incumbents), and all you need to for an executive position is their experience managing an office, or their foreign policy if they have military power.
CMV | First, consider why politicians exist.
The general public doesn't have the time or inclination to do massive amounts of work on making laws and running the government.
So we choose a trustworthy and reliable person to act in our best interests full time.
If this person displays bad judgement (even outside the function they are ostensibly elected for), it calls into question their ability and inclination to act in the public's best interests. The same is true with actions like cheating or breaking the law - neither is something you'd expect a trustworthy person to do.
>All the information you need to know before you vote for a representative is their positions and voting record (for incumbents), and all you need to for an executive position is their experience managing an office, or their foreign policy if they have military power.
And what if a new situation develops? If new information comes to light their position on some issues might change as well. In both of these cases, their ability to judge the situation is very important. Their trustworthiness is important so they actually focus on what will be best, rather than what one particular group lobbies for. | 14 | 20 |
ELI5: How do we know the idea that particles don't exist in one definitive spot until we measure them, isn't just our lack of knowledge due to not measuring them yet? | I recommend looking up the double slit experiment. It's usually most newcomer's first exposure to just how weird quantum physics can be. The full implications of the results of this experiment are beyond the scope of ELI5, but the general principle and observation are.
Basic facts in classical physics: if you shoot balls randomly at a board with a single slit big enough for balls to pass through, and measure where they land on another backboard (imagine paintballs leaving a splat). You will see a single bar matching the slit in the first board. Sure, some may hit the corner and fly off at an angle meaning you will get specklings elsewhere, but there will be a big, clear bar. Also, if you increase the number of slits to 2, you will get 2 bars on the backboard. For waves, pretend you lower the boards into water so the slit is half submerged. Then drop a pebble in the water, watch the waves hit the board. The wave on the other side of the board looks like you dropped the pebble right at the slit, moving radially outward. To measure it is a bit trickier, but imagine the backboard is color changing when it gets wet. The higher the wave laps against it, the higher the second color will show. You would expect to see the tallest spot in the middle and it tapers off on either side since the wave had to travel further due to hypotenuse stuff). If you increase the slits to 2, you end up with two different waves as if you'd dropped two pebbles at the slits. These waves collide. If a peak happens to line up with a peak, they add to each other, making the splash on the backboard higher. If a peak and a trough line up, they cancel out and there is no change in the height of the color on the backboard. This ends up with some wavy patterns showing up called "interference patterns" as the two waves interfere with each other.
Ok, now for quantum stuff. Instead of paintballs, let's fire electrons at the slits. (And the slits are a lot smaller now). We think of electrons as little particles. Little spheres that we can shoot like paintballs out of an electron gun. And if we fire them at one slit, we see what we would expect from particles like paintballs out the other side: a single bar. However, if we shoot them through 2 slits, we don't see 2 bars like we did for paintballs, we see an interference pattern like we did with waves.
"Well" think the physicists, "maybe we sent them through too quickly and they bumped into each other causing the patterns." So they send them through one electron at a time. Still, they see wave-like patterns. Almost like the electron splits in two, goes through both slits, then interferes with itself. "No way!" Shout the physicists, "Let's put a special detector next to one of the slits to see which one the electron went through, surely, it can't be both." But when they measure which slit it went through, the interference pattern goes away and out come the two bars like the paintballs.
You see, when we say an electron is both a particle and a wave, one simplified interpretation is that it's a particle, but we don't know where it is exactly. We can only predict a wave of probabilities where it could be, sort of like the individual molecules of water in the wave of classical mechanics... Sort of. Except it's all of the molecules at once in all possible positions. See, when we set the electrons through one slit, any marks on the backboard has to come through that one slit. If you were to freeze the image with an electron on the other side of the slit and measure the probability wave (well, that's impossible, but...) you would see a 100% chance that it came through the one slit (because all the ones that didn't have already beed cut out) and it would look like a superposition of every possible trajectory a particle could have taken.
If you did the same freeze frame with the double slit, you would see that there's a 50% chance it came from either slit. It would start out as a superposition of every possible trajectory of a particle through both slits, but when those probability waves meet each other, the trajectories can interfere and collide with each other. So the electron is in a superposition of having gone through both slits at the same time and interfering with itself. Until we measure it, and the superposition collapses. | 38 | 19 |
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ELI5: How can information be transmitted so accurately with little to no errors even at several MB/s? | If I'm not wrong, information is transmitted in 0s and 1s which is binary.
0s replaced by 1s or vice versa is all it takes to corrupt a file. How is this not prevalent even at high speeds? Even slight disturbance or delay could destroy such fragile signals. | The most common protocol used for communication is TCP/IP which includes mechanisms to confirm all the data is received accurately.
Data transferred over the internet is broken into smaller chunks called packets. That way if a file gets damaged during transport only a small part of it (a single packet) will be affected.
Packets are typically 1500 bytes, or 1.5kb in size
In addition to source + destination, filename, etc Each packet includes a verification called a checksum.
Think of the checksum like a skill testing question
4 x 7 = 28
When the packet is received the checksum is verified. If it has become damaged then the checksum will no longer be valid and the receiver sends a message to re-transmit that packet.
3 x 7 = 28 ERROR
Once all the packets for a file have been received and verified, the file is re-assembled.
Not all traffic is verified in this way though. Instead of TCP some types of traffic use UDP which is 'best effort' protocol. This is used for things like voice chat and video that operate in real time and can afford to have a couple of errors during the transfer process. | 139 | 146 |
ELI5: Why do nonprofit colleges & universities with absolutely huge endowments still charge so much in tuition? | Universities exist not only to educate but in order to conduct research.
Students are willing to pay market rates for the degree and a healthy endowment funds all sorts of programs thst are not covered by tuition.
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CMV: I believe that the Al Qaeda attacks on 9/11 aren't really all that bad when compared to America's response. | Any death is a tragedy, but its how you respond to that event that matters. Preventing future deaths and future tragedies is part of that response. I believe that the best solution to the September 11th attacks in 2001 would have been to selectively bomb Al Qaeda and its supporters including the Taliban. This would have accomplished the US's main goals as stated by President Bush (revenge for America and eliminate Al Qaeda leadership and terrorist capabilities).
The resulting two wars not only cost more American lives than were originally lost on the attacks but also cost the United States dearly when it comes to international relations, clout, and the economic treasure and stability. These results, in my view, completely overshadow the horror of 9/11 and furthermore I believe that almost any limited response would have been better than the actions taken by former President Bush.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Criticism of the American response comes with the benefit of hindsight which always has better vision than foresight. Would the American people have chosen a different course of action other than long term occupation if they had known it would have been in the midst of a population at best ambivalent and wary of them, and partnering with a government that would be made of many short term self interest seeking (read: corrupt) power brokers? Maybe. And perhaps there was a better response. But the fact that it took a decade to hunt down bin Laden, Mullah Omar still remains at large, key enemies such as Siraj Haqqani or Hektmatyar have eluded the coalition *while forces are on the ground* draws great question into whether "strategic bombings" could have been effective (read: had the intel to hit significant enough targets to reduce their long term threat).
Moreover the U.S. needed a bold response to 9/11. Some lowly trained, unsophisticated ragtags had just given the world's greatest power it's biggest black eye in 70 years (at least). The world's "terrorists" had just been given their 'Rocky" moment. The U.S. "Ivan Drago" of A. had just been bloodied (forgive the awkward juxtaposition). Osama "Duke Evers" bin Laden was whispering in the corner to every would be "Rocky" terrorist, "He's cut. You see? He's not a machine. He's a man!" The most powerful nation the Earth had ever seen had just seen the center of its power projection apparatuses (economic/poly - the WTC, military - the Pentagon) bloodied. The civillian populace of the world's champion suddenly questioned whether they were safe in their own home towns. Anything but a rapid and overwhelming response was an invitation to terror groups world wide to mobilize.
This isn't just limited to al Qaeda and like minded violent jihadists who might want to move on the U.S. in copycat. But if FARC or Shining Path in South America, or New People's Army in Asia, or Lord's resistance Army in Africa, or whoever thought that if the U.S. could be bloodied with a response of "strategic targeting" (read: limited attacks that wouldn't break a groups back) than their less powerful enemy was even more susceptible to be struck with direct action. One could argue this even spills over into criminal elements such as Sinaloa Cartel's influence in Mexico, and of course into emboldening the U.S. (and west's) traditional state enemies. No, anything but a "wrath of God" response by the U.S. risked emboldening terrorists and violent organizations the world over, against the U.S., and against other states that certainly wouldn't even be as capable of a response as the U.S. *This goes double-triple-quadruple-infinitesimal for "true believers"...those perfectly willing to give their life for "the cause."* If a true believer thought he could carry out a high profile attack against the U.S. (or his chosen enemy) greatly hurting them while only costing himself and his allies "targeted attacks" (read: limited losses in comparison to their damage) the true believer does it. TChere was a very threat of chaos breaking the world over without an overwhelming response by the U.S.
I don't think there are many that would argue that the execution of the U.S. response was flawed at times in many ways. But again we're looking with 20/20 hindsight. There was a great risk of appeasement to terror post 9/11. The U.S. response (again certainly not without error in execution) was one though to remind the word that it and its allies can reach out with great destruction, thus keeping the terror elements on the run and the world order in place. The intent was just even if the action was with the same flawlessness found in any human action (read: fairly flawed). | 196 | 611 |
ELI5: How does a Hotel determine how large or how many rooms to build when constructing a new building? | I live in the suburbs near a major american city and my job requires me to travel often thru the entire regional area. I have notice a lot of new hotel construction in the suburbs, particularly among the large chain hotel (ie. Embassy suites, Best Western, Courtyard, etc.) I often think, how does the hotel know what is the optimum number of rooms to provide so the hotel stays profitable?
It seems like most hotel developments plan on having their building stay in operation for many decades, but at the rate they seem to be building, hotels locations seem to be on almost every corner. When the economy is good there is always new hotel construction, so it makes me believe the hotel companies think their is some need for them to build another location only a few minutes away from a current operating location. Their must be a formula or process the hotel brands use to analysis the need for another hotel in an area. And once they determine a location how do they determine how many rooms to provide? | Marketing folks analyze the likely travelers to an area, what they are likely to spend, and what there expectations are. Investors bet money that those assessments are right by building a property. The failure rate is pretty high, so this is a known risky venture. Your expectation of "optimum number of rooms to provide so the hotel stays profitable" is unlikely. | 11 | 20 |
[General / LOTR] If elves are immortal, why don't they have an overpopulation problem? Why doesn't each elf have a thousand offspring? | Do they have really low fertility rates? Can they only have offspring for a very short part of their otherwise unlimited lifespans? Do they have little to no sex drive or do they just have more self control than men? | It's a mix of biological and cultural factors. As immortals, elves are willing to wait a while to have children - if there's a war or other hardship going on, why not wait until things are safe before having kids? There will be plenty of time, and it's best not to risk one of the parents dying while the child is still very young. Also they are *very* monogamous - even if a spouse dies, elves do not remarry.
Furthermore, the fëa (spirit/soul) of an elf child draws its strength from its parents. Most elves simply do not have the spiritual strength to have more than a few children. Fëanor had seven children, by far the most of any known elf, and Fëanor was probably the most powerful elf to ever live - his own mother died after giving birth to him because it took too much out of her. So there's a hard limit on how fast the population can grow. | 165 | 89 |
ELI5: People today are able to produce paintings that are indistinguishable from photographs. Why couldn’t artists in past eras achieve this level of realism? | Quality of materials, (paints, brushes, canvas) time, painting detailed pictures requires a lot of time and you have to be able to afford to spend that much time on a single painting, lack of photographs as reference, until Vermeer, who may have used a kind of pinhole camera to create their pictures still images of the subject were not available. | 25 | 17 |
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ELI5: Why do we easily confuse (left/right) and (east/west) but we easily distinguish (up/down) and (north/south) ? | There is a psychological disorder called "left right discrimination", which is a very complex neuro-psychological process involving a the use of sensory and visual information, language function, and even memory. There is no corresponding disorder with up/down/north/south, though.
The reasons for the latter are probably that our basic sense of balance and direction directly involve our sense of up and down (things fall down, gravity pulls us down, etc). It's even in our language, we get up from bed, the thing is up there, it's down there... whereas with left/right it's over there, or by the bed, or on the desk, not "to your left" most of the time. | 31 | 42 |
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ELI5: Why is binary with transistors used in computers? Why not other states like 3 or 4? | I saw this in a video and they said that it was because if there are more states, there'd be "interference" from other devices?
What does it mean? Transistors make use of semiconductors and flow of electrons, why not divide certain voltages for more states?
I apologise if I got any info wrong, but please make me wrong. Layman terms would be appreciated. | Two states are easy. On and off. This is very easy for transistors to compare. You don't need to be careful about what exact voltage the transistors output - just on or off. Making a system that sets exact voltages and differentiates them would likely just end up being a bunch of different interwoven binary systems running at different voltages. Not really a step up.
Now, analog computers have been attempted, but they are less reliable and more difficult to make than digital ones, and ultimately digital was the one that humanity chose to use. | 37 | 43 |
ELI5 Why do people seem to age so incredibly fast after a traumatic experience? | For example a woman I know seemed to have aged at least ten years in a very short time after her grandchild died in an accident. | Cortisol, known as the "stress hormone", causes all sorts of inflammatory responses throughout the body, which contribute to the aging effect. When you add in the psychological implications of the trauma (depression, guilt, etc) that change the person's affect, the combined result is that the person seems ages older than they were. | 10,332 | 22,867 |
"You" are not the atoms in your body but the pattern of atoms. Your consciousness is an emergent feature of that pattern. So, if a person was cloned, arrangement of atoms exact to its predecessor, is it the same person? | I guess this question boils down to what makes a body a 'person' as most would consider consciousness (inc. memories, thoughts etc.) to define individuals, rather than the exact atoms of the body (as 98% of these are replaced yearly anyway). However, this defies our perception of what makes a solitary entity- you wouldn't regard two trees to be the same tree just because the arrangement of atoms are identical to each other. | Saul Kripke argued that an essential feature of "you" is your history, i.e. who your mother and father were, which sperm entered which egg to produce you, etc. A replication of you would not meet these conditions and would not therefore be you. | 29 | 25 |
How do I deal with people who refuse to acknowledge their existing notions of morality? | Hello, I'm an undergrad who recently (past several years) has been interested in moral philosophy. What I'm coming here to ask is, how should I discuss moral philosophy with people who don't want to admit that their moral views rest on preconcieved ideas. For example, I recently got into a discussion with another undergrad about utilitarianism. He was supporting an objective utilitarian moral law's existence, I am of the opinion that morality isn't a hard reality but rather that we should support a utilitarian system based on our emotions/empathy (sorry if that was horribly explained I'm not used to writing my thoughts out). He asked the inevitable question of "So you think rape isn't objectively wrong?" I responded by saying that it doesn't make sense to use an action as an example of an immoral deed when debating what moral framework we should follow, because it's circular (This moral system is bad because rape is bad, and this moral system doesn't call it bad.) He got upset, called me a rape apologist, and left.
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My question is, how do I respond to this tactic without automatically alienating anyone I discuss it with? I get why he was upset and I don't blame him, but how do I phrase my point in a less harsh way for the future? | His argument was that a moral theory needs to be ‘grounded’ in something commonly accepted. Rape and murder are fairly common grounding principles (within the context of in-group it is a universal). If your moral theory has no ground to stand on, it is likely more of an entertaining distraction or excuse generator. (“Likely” is the key word here. Grounding might not be necessary whatsoever, but that would be the position you are up against).
> but rather that we *should* support a utilitarian system based...
By saying “*should*” in this sentence, you’ve done exactly what you’re complaining about. By stating that there is a “should” or “ought”, you’ve already conceded that there is some standard of moral valuations, and then circularly reason back to utilitarian rationale to justify utilizing utilitarian ethics.
I think the way to deal with the problem you’re facing is to simply make the interaction more of a conversation and less focus on winning them over. Be genuinely curious about their beliefs, or else you’ll just be building a straw man. | 81 | 112 |
Why is most life on earth divided in 2 sexes? | Why not 3? or just 1? Is there a specific purpose for the 2?
Would it be possible other life in the universe is divided more then 2 sexes?
thnx | I recall reading that for complex organisms in a competitive environment, two sex reproduction provides the genetic variability needed for competitive adaptation. Three sexes becomes unnecessarily complex - how can you be sure you'll find all three at once to successfully reproduce?
Oh, and asexual reproduction (via mitosis and/or parthenogenesis) is FAR more common for that reason - you don't have to depend upon external factors for reproduction, and you can skip on the energy intensive mating process. | 14 | 24 |
How are radio waves 1s and 0s? | Looking at wifi, how is binary transmitted via radio waves? Is there a difference in amplitude? Phase changes?
[This](https://www.quora.com/How-can-digital-information-be-represented-by-waves) page has some good info, just curious how wifi works specifically; visuals would be helpful if you've got em | The standard method is based on Phase Shift Keying. You broadcast a sine wave, and the receiver measures it's phase. If it's in phase, a 0 is transmitted. If it's 180° out of phase, a 0 is transmitted.
QPSK or Quadrature Phase Shift Keying allows for two bits transmitted at once. If the signal is in phase, that's 00, it it's 90° out of phase, that's 01, if it's 180° out of phase, that's 10, and 270° out of phase, 11.
Nowadays they use something called M-ary PSK, which is like QPSK but allows transmission of as many bits as the hardware system can allow.
Another way to think of PSK is that it divides a circle into 2^M slices, where each slice represents a region of possible phase shifts that correspond to a particular bit sequence of an M-bit symbol. | 31 | 15 |
[DC/Marvel] Why can't the meta/X-gene be injected into non-metas? | And why can't the gene be disabled via injection like an illness?
Surely if the government were against mutants and metahumans they'd be vaccinations onto newborns.
EDIT: *Metas or mutants. | Most vaccinations are basically half-dead pathogens delivered into your body so that your immune system can easily attack it and retain information on it so that any future infections can be handled promptly.
The X-gene is just that, a gene. Genes are a part of you, they're the things that control how tall you get, the patterns on your finger print, and everything else basally biological about you body. The X-gene is in every cell, even if it's not specialized for whatever the gene is expressing.
That being said you could *suppress* some individuals effects through drugs, like someone with allergies takes an antihistamine (not the same mechanism, but just as an example), but the biological aspect of it that makes you sick is still there. | 19 | 16 |
CMV: Black-owned businesses should not be “amplified” on social media | Recently, several platforms such as Instagram and Amazon have introduced a system to boost black-owned businesses. This includes pushing their products to more potential customers and offering more advertising for their brand.
I believe in a free market. I believe that business should be a fish-eat-fish world, with the hardest, and smartest working entities rising to the top. Whoever does better survives. It is quite simple, and I do not believe it is fair to offer any minority, or group of people for that matter, an advantage. Every race should have to play by the same rules. It’s ridiculous to even have to make that statement in this day and age, with these e-commerce platforms seemingly opposing the work of every civil rights leader who strived for a future in which different races are treated as equals. I believe these practices to be examples of textbook racism, but I am open to having my mind changed. | >Whoever does better survives
So if a business can identify and cater to an emerging market — such as “socially conscious people who want to buy from minority-owned businesses” — why shouldn’t they reap the rewards of that marketing advantage?
If you work in a consumer product industry in 2021 and you haven’t realized that social and environmental factors play a huge role in consumer decisions then you’re not very good at your job. | 55 | 41 |
What caused the spanish flu outbreak in 1918 to be one of the deadliest outbreaks ever? What made this version of the flu so deadly vs other flus? | There were multiple factors at work. Here are two that come to mind.
1) WWI - many thousands of soldiers living in close proximity to each other. Sick soldiers get packed into infirmaries like sardines and the virus is spread by either direct contact or by medical staff.
2) Immune reaction - usually, you would expect to see deaths occurring in populations with a below average immune response (ie, the old and the very young). Not this virus! Healthy people DROWNED in the detritus left by their own immune system. Also the young and old died in the usual numbers. | 18 | 23 |
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ELI5: What is an identity graph and why are companies building them? | An identity graph is a collection of identifiers and their relationships to real users. These identifiers could include your email address, third party cookies and other stable pieces of data.
Companies want to buy these because they help make a profile of a person and tie together the data related to different identifiers. | 25 | 39 |
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What effect did the evolution and emergence of birds have on Earth's ecosystems? | I was thinking recently about animals which are accidentally or deliberately introduced to new habitats (like starlings being brought to North America, or rabbits to Australia) and it made me wonder - did the emergence of birds (or any other flying creatures capable of travelling between different isolated ecosystems, for that matter) have a similar effect? For example, did a certain species of bird ever migrate to a new continent/island/whatever where it had no natural predators, and then profoundly alter the balance of the ecosystem in that place?
I realise this might be a bit of a simplistic question because obviously birds evolved the ability to fly over a very long period of time, and also that it might be quite difficult to determine precisely when and where different animals first appeared, but I'd still really appreciate any insights you can provide.
Thank you. | >For example, did a certain species of bird ever migrate to a new continent/island/whatever where it had no natural predators, and then profoundly alter the balance of the ecosystem in that place?
New Zealand is actually a very good example of that; before humans arrived the only mammals on the island were bats. Every other niche that would normally be filled with mammals in most ecosystems were filled with birds. A couple of examples are the "large herbivore grazer" niche that is commonly occupied by ruminants in other ecosystems was occupied by the moa, a large flightless bird, and the role of apex predator which is normally filled by big cats or canines was filled by an eagle that was large enough to prey on moa. | 16 | 30 |
When an organ, say, a kidney, is donated, what
happens to the empty space where it once was? | When an organ is donated, there has to be a space left behind, so do the doctors fill that space with some sort of material that the body doesn't perceive as foreign? Or does the body itself fill the gap? | Normally, the body itself fills the space. How the space fills up depends on the part of the body we're talking about. When a kidney is removed, for example, (retroperitoneal space) the space just closes up. When a part of the brain is removed, the space is filled by cerebrospinal fluid.
Usually, surgeons don't fill the void with other materials. | 463 | 783 |
ELI5: How do developed countries deal with government corruption very well? How do these governments' differ with third-world countries who struggle with it? | The developed countries used to suffer from huge corruption, and many of the changes in their political evolution over the last few hundred years have been made with the aim of preventing and controlling it. Before it came to be seen as a good thing in itself, democracy was a way to prevent high officials corruptly misusing their positions. Many of the day-to-day features of the developed countries and their governments are there wholly or partly to prevent corruption. This isn't just law enforcement, it's things like the rules by which civil servants are appointed (on the basis of ability not connections); external audits of government spending; appeal courts; transparency about government decisions etc.
There are also some features that tend to make countries more or less corrupt: inequality breeds corruption - its' no coincidence that the Nordic countries have the lowest levels of both corruption and inequality. Welfare systems and social safety nets also help prevent corruption, because government officals aren't expected to look after their extended family. And secrecy and complexity both encourage corruption: it's easier to get away with it if people can't see or understand what you're doing. One of the big drivers of corruption is where the government gets its revenue. If the government takes it from the population in taxes, then people hold them to account about how it's spent. But if the government takes it from oil or mining companies in as a fee for extracting natural resources, then there's no accountability for what they do with the cash.
Lots of developing countries have never developed the government systems that prevent corruption. They're poor, with high levels of inequality and no social safety nets, no transparency and no auditors, so governments can get away with huge corruption. In many countries it's become a deeply embedded part of the culture, and it's reflected in how poorly the public sector is paid: you might be expected to "buy" a job by paying off your boss, and then make the money back by extracting bribes from everyone who uses the service that you're supposed to provide for free. | 40 | 74 |
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CMV: it’s immoral to dig up ancient graves for archaeological research |
I think that it’s disrespectful for tombs to be opened just to find artifacts. At the end of the day that was still a person who wanted to be buried in a way they could feel at peace.
Everyone sees ancient Egyptian art and offerings in museums that have been stolen from their burial site. Those objects were considered vital to their passing and religious ceremonies (from what I understand).
I say CMV because maybe there is more educational value (beyond historical) than I’m seeing, and I’m not very educated on the topic. But the concept is just gross. Mummies etc. should be left to rest not put on display in a museum.
I just don’t see how it’s worth it. Sure, ancient civilizations are fascinating. But I don’t think that should outweigh humanity.
People should be able to rest peacefully without being dug up and dissected. | There is endless education to be had, from diet to how people died, what medical procedures were done at the time, what diseases, etc., etc.
Also, in the case of something like Egyptian tombs, esp the ones of the wealthier or more famous -- looters have been looking for and looting those for centuries.
Isn't it better to find, excavate, and treat respectfully than leave or replace and have stuff looted? | 99 | 62 |
Why do our voices "crack"? | The pitch of your voice is determined by a number of things: the length (and thus thickness) of your vocal chords, the size of your larynx and (for a lesser part) the position of the larynx and the shape of your pharynx.
When going through puberty, the larynx, pharynx and oral cavity all grow/change. This has a large effect on how your brain needs to control the muscles in these areas. A cracking voice is just a mistake on your brain's part.
Since emotion, stress and nervousness can have a significant effect on your muscles (shaking hands, not being able to walk) they can also affect the muscles controlling your voice. A cracking voice is the result.
edit: minor spelling mistakes | 31 | 92 |
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ELI5: How does gravity make time slow down? | Edit: So I asked this question last night on a whim, because I was curious, and I woke up to an astounding number of notifications, and an extra 5000 karma @___________@
I've tried to go through and read as many responses as I can, because holy shit this is so damn interesting, but I'm sure I'll miss a few.
***Thank you*** to everyone who has come here with something to explain, ask, add, or correct. I feel like I've learned a lot about something I've always loved, but had trouble understanding because, hell, I ain't no physicist :)
Edit 2: To elaborate. Many are saying things like time is a constant and cannot slow, and while that might be true, for the layman, the question being truly asked is how does gravity have an affect on how time is perceived, and of course, all the shenanigans that come with such phenomena.
I would also like to say, as much as I, and others, appreciate the answers and discussion happening, keep in mind that the goal is to explain a concept simply, however possible, right? Getting into semantics about what kind of relativity something falls under, while interesting and even auxiliary, is somewhat superfluous in trying to grasp the simpler details. Of course, input is appreciated, but don't go too far out of your own way if you don't need to! | Speed is equal to distance over time.
Gravity increases the distance light travels as it curves space.
The speed of light is constant no matter where you are and no matter how fast you're going.
So, if the speed of light is fixed and the distance increases due to gravity then time has to slow to make sure the equation still balances.
The more gravity there is the more space is curved and the slower time moves.
Edit - thank you very much to u/Undead_Kau, u/GamerKingFaiz and an anonymous user for the gold, it's very much appreciated. | 18,354 | 18,684 |
ELI5 - How are people more prone to getting sick when it’s cold? | So I just found out about three years ago that the whole “wear a jacket or you’ll catch a cold” thing is a myth because you don’t get sick from JUST being cold. So why is it that colds and the flu are more common during cold weather? Especially since bacteria and viruses need a warm body to host in to survive? | 1. Sunlight weakens or kills viruses, including the flu. Winter=less sunlight & less time outdoors in sunlight.
2. People spend more time indoors, breathing the same recirculated air as sick people.
3. Kids go back to school. That means they spend a lot of time around other kids, breathing the same air in classrooms, on school buses, etc. If one kid gets sick, it's easy for all of them to get sick, and then they bring it home to parents, who bring it to work. | 667 | 332 |
When deciduous trees prepare for winter, is the trigger from the local weather or from the sun light’s intensity? | If it stayed 90°F into November/December at latitudes 40-45°N, would the trees remain green or would they still lose their leaves due to decreased daylight hours/light intensity from being tilted away from the sun? Or maybe even lose their leaves triggered by an internal clock coded within the tree’s genetics | It's controlled by a combination of factors that may vary depending on the species of tree, but one of the key factors is indeed light. However, it's not about light intensity, but **light duration**: the number of hours the sun is up each day, which is a reliable indication of the time of year (unlike weather, which provides an unreliable time-keeping cue). Daylength patterns are latitude-specific, so trees at a given latitude will have been adapted over millennia to interpret a given daylight duration as the optimal time to drop their leaves (and produce buds for next year's leaves).
The phenomenon of organisms responding to daylength is called photoperiodism. In plants, it may affect not just when leaves are dropped, but when new leaves burst in spring and when flowers are produced. In animals, it often controls breeding seasons, migration, and in some species even seasonal changes in fur color or thickness. | 26 | 38 |
[Marvel/DC] What does Wikipedia look like? Does it have information on cosmic beings? What sort of obscure facts about superheroes and aliens could I find on there? | Major public heroes, it likely has a lot of surface level information on- you could probably find out superman's public appearances, powers,weaknesses and enemies. Likewise major supervillians who are in the limelight- you could get the joker's past crimes (he may well update it himself). Big teams will have headquarters and rosters and leaders and such like. Very large concepts, like the mutant gene, will have scientific pages.
More secret/esoteric stuff is far sparser, simply because fewer people know enough to edit. Subtle heroes like daredevil and batman are more in the vein of urban legends then superheoes. Most interdimensional and extraterrestrial information is vague at best: you might get that Krypon is superman's dead home planet, but that's about it. Likewise concepts like the Speedforce or the Green or the Infinity Gauntlet- likely just a short article with "we don't know much" at best.
Generally, it would be much like any other topic- a good starter but no substitute for in depth study. You could learn who superman is and where he's been seen, but its not going to get you an in-depth analysis of kryptonian biology. | 41 | 49 |
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Do I need to read Wittgenstein's earlier work to understand his later work? | I understand that, in the _Investigations_, Wittgenstein rejects many of the conclusions he comes to in the _Tractatus_. But, I'm not gonna lie, it's his later philosophy in particular that interests me. Do I need to read the _Tractatus_ to understand _Investigations_ in context or can I read just read _Investigations_ by itself? | It depends on what you mean by "understand". Will you be able to understand the logic of W's arguments in PI by only reading PI? yes, with qualifications about how hard that is.
but will you understand the motivation that W had for writing PI, or what he is trying to argue against with the arguments in PI? probably not. | 14 | 36 |
ELI5: Why do prices go down in the holiday season if there is more demand? | Economics 101 would predict that the higher demand in the holiday season would mean higher prices, but the holidays always have lots of sales and prices fall. Why? Is it just because the volume is so much greater that there is a great incentive to beat out the competition? | Straight forward competition. The demand is also general, that makes a big difference. The demand is mostly for 'gifts' or certain types of gifts, so if company X offers tons of 'gifts' at a lower price than company Y, everyone will go there.
At a certain point of specificity that generality-effect diminishes. If a certain brand that is only sold at a certain store is a "hot item", then the price should really go up. Chances are it's already set at an optimal point so it won't really go up.
Supply and demand can get complicated by various market factors. The way supply and demand is taught in basic business courses or high school is just the basic macro-economic version. Doesn't mean it's not valid, it's just often more complicated than that. | 13 | 22 |
Eli5 The sun converts about 4 million metric tons of its mass into energy every second. Does this mean that it's mass reduces significantly over the span of, say, ten years? | 4 million tons a second is a lot of mass to be lost given enough time. Considering the fact that the sun is over four billion years old, does this mean that the sun was physically bigger when it formed?
What about a couple of hundred years ago? Or a few years ago? Could the suns loss of mass imply that it's shrinking over time? | What is "significant" when talking about the reducing mass of the sun? On one hand 4 million tons a second seems significant to us, but the sun is really massive.
Over the course of a year it loses 174 trillion tons of mass. But over the next 5 billion years it will lose 0.034% of its total mass. So yes, it is technically becoming less massive over time, but not to any amount significant to its scale. | 403 | 266 |
ELI5: What’s a “war crime”? I hear people throw this word around so much it’s confusing. | Many, many countries signed international agreements that define what is legal and what is not legal during a time of war. For instance, executing a prisoner of war who was not resisting or threatening his captor would be highly illegal. Targeting civilian buildings where a lot of civilians are is also illegal (like hospitals or schools). Killing civilians in general? Illegal. Wearing an enemy uniform or the symbols of an organization like the Red Cross, which is supposed to be a neutral symbol? Illegal. Attacking the Red Cross? Illegal.
It's pretty straightforward honestly. If you're attacking someone who's given up or who never even participated in the battle, you're probably doing something illegal. | 564 | 290 |
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CMV: Better to destroy humanity instead of another human ending up in hell | Change my view: It is better that all of humanity be destroyed entirely, rather than another human being end up in eternal torment.
Base assumption: Pre-existence is not real, and the choice to procreate is what introduces a conscious, self-aware life into this reality in this universe.
Base assumption 2: Hell is a real consequence for some non-zero subset of humans who have not yet been born.
Base assumption 3: Destroying all of humanity will actually prevent any further humans who have not yet been born from ending up in eternal torment.
Mathematically, the impact of infinite torture upon even ONE human is far greater than all of the suffering that will ever have occurred in the most horrific of ways for all of humanity in this universe, and will occur. Therefore, the impact of one human ending up in a form of hell (technological, spiritually induced, or however) is significant enough that, if real, and if any humans not yet born would end up in hell, that it's far better that we destroy all of humanity.
Reddit, you're being visited by aliens. DNA capture by aliens who force procreation of human entities into a technological hell is a non-zero probability, and one that is possibly certain in the context of the multiverse.
I believe that, if hell is real, we should destroy ALL of humanity at the first possible chance. Change my view. | If we're being utilitarian in a very mathematical sense, we have to ask if there is a heaven to consider here? Because if more total people end up in heaven, you can have potentially have more infinite joy than infinite suffering such that the suffering will never be more than the joy(or whatever opposite of suffering term you like).
Achieving that could become the moral imperative, rather than ending the possibility of it. We can speculate how "heaven" would come about, but technological progress is one possibility that's just as plausible if not moreso than aliens capturing our DNA and making a hell for us. They're at least equally possible if we're just using "non-zero". | 10 | 15 |
If you're immune to a virus, does it still "enter your system" before your immune system fights it off, or it is blocked from entry/replication entirely? | EDIT: Thanks to u/iayork, I know now I was imprecisely and verbosely dancing around the concept of sterilizing immunity (in contrast to -- from what I understand of the term via Google -- infection-permissive immunity).
I asked this question on a question thread in r/COVID19, but I'm curious about viruses and immunity in general, not just COVID.
To shed more light on my question, I have a friend who tested positive for COVID antibodies over the summer (after presumably having an asymptomatic case at some point), had many negative tests over the past several months, and then tested positive for COVID on a PCR test again a couple weeks ago. Both times she was asymptomatic. Could this mean that the immune system is doing exactly what it’s supposed to do — i.e. the second time she got exposed, her body recognized the virus, fought it off, and she was never actually infectious? **That is, I assume “immunity” doesn’t actually prevent the virus from** ***entering*** **your body, but rather your immune system recognizes it and knows how to properly respond.** So can you have a true positive in this case because the virus has managed to make it into your system again and PCR tests are overly sensitive and will pick up on even a miniscule trace of virus? To get ahead of an answer I've already gotten: she has had many negative PCR tests between the positive antibody test and this most recent PCR test (she's someone who tests periodically as a precaution) so it seems less likely to me that this is one of those cases of someone consistently testing positive for months due to viral remnants.
That all said: **COVID aside, how does this work in a broad sense?** We don't test as frequently or with such high sensitivity for other viruses, but if we did, could an immune or vaccinated person theoretically have a virus "in their system" at a level high enough to test positive for it on a molecular test, but not be symptomatic or infectious because their body already knows how to fight it?
\[Edit: formatting\] | To take the general case, what you’re asking is whether there’s *sterilizing immunity*. That is, is the immunity strong enough to prevent all infectious virus, or is it allowing some replication even if it prevents symptoms?
It depends. Several pathogens do give sterilizing immunity, some do not. Many of the big names in pathogens like measles and yellow fever do end up with sterilizing immunity. Influenza probably does not: Infecting an immune person with influenza reduces the amount of shed virus enormously (by over 90%, probably) but doesn’t always eliminate it completely. In most cases, actual infection gives stronger immunity than vaccination (so, more likely to be sterilizing) but that’s not necessarily true - it’s quite possible for a vaccine to give stronger and longer-lasting immunity actual infection.
For COVID-19, we have no idea, because the actual data for vaccines hasn’t been released. With some of the vaccines’ animal data, the vaccine blocked disease without blocking virus shedding, but this was when the animals were given very high doses of virus - far higher than natural amounts.
In this particular case it’s likely the PCR test was a false positive. We can’t do more than speculate because we don’t know details (and if we did know details, it probably be removed from r/askscience as Medical Advice). | 15 | 23 |
Why does Western Psychology Seem to ignore this completely? | Sorry in advance if I am speaking from a place of ignorance and simply have not seen the research or articles which would refute my question entirely. With that, lets get on with it.
The TLDR is this : why is it that Western Psychology and Science seems to largely ignore the unfathomable amount of research and observation done by Buddhists, Hindus, Taoists, etc... into the consciousness, concentration, insight, and reality?
Okay here is the longer read.
I am a studied scholar and meditation practitioner whose specialty lay within the schools of Zen and Vajrayana Buddhism, but you could say in general I am a Buddhist specialist ranging from Madyamaka to Pure Land to Dzogchen to Theravada having dedicated the last decade or so of my life to the practice and study of meditation and this tradition/ method of inquiry into consciousness.
As well, though I would not at all consider myself a specialist in these things, have studied to a degree the methods of the various schools of the Hindus, the Taoist, the Gnostics, etc... and have found them as well to be incredibly useful in understanding the inner mechanism of our reality and consciousness on more than merely and material level.
In all of this however, whenever I attempt to look into what Western Science and psychology has to say on these matters all I find is an outright rejection of their discovers becuase they deal with matters that are not in the realm of the material. I have found the writings of the Jungians to be of some use as well as others, but by and large these aspects of consciousness and its exploration are largely denied, ignored, or squashed.
Why do you think this is? Why is it that that western Psychology and Science turn what seems to be a blind eye to what is (if we are to include the methods and inquiry found within the Upanishads and the Shamans before them) to 5,000 years of methodological research and study on our conscious experience and exploration of the mind?
Thank you so very much! and best wishes. Thank you for taking the time to awnser | Those types of eastern spiritualist traditions tend to believe that you can gain insight about the true nature of reality through introspection and contemplation. The flaw here is that what one person might be able to determine about reality through their introspection might not agree with what another person determines about reality. Science (I will refer to science here in general, not just psychology which is a science) aims to determine an objective reality which we can all agree upon. In order to do this, it is necessary to use objective measurements, because that allows scientest A to test the theories of scientist B (which can in turn be assessed by scientist C and so on). In fact the scientific process of objective measurement has revealed that we are incredibly bad at determining reality through our senses - examples include attentional blindness (not seeing what is right in front of us), the unreliableness of memory, and really how little of the mind is actually accessible by consciosness. Because of these sorts of drawbacks we must rely on objective reliable measures. Early 'psychology' did involve itself with introspection, but it gave way to objective measures because objective measures converge on an agreed reality.
Having said all that.. there has been a lot of research investigating the efficacy of mindfulness meditation, which has found that it has beneficial effects in a range of areas (improved attention/memory, reduced anxiety etc.). You might be interested to read about mindfulness based cognitive therapy and the work of Jon Kabbat-Zinn.
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During its creation, how exactly did the Earth cool down? | As far as I've known the heat energy from the creation of Earth has to go somewhere for Earth itself to cooldown. Where did all that heat go? | Radiation going into space.
Every object will emit electromagnetic radiation, with the spectrum and intensity depending on the temperature of the object. This is called thermal radiation. On the other hand, in the solar system objects also receive radiation from the sun. Ultimately, an equillibrium will be reached where the amount radiated out is equal (in terms of total energy) to the amount of solar radiation absorbed.
When the Earth was young and hot, it radiated far more than it absorbed from the sun, causing a net loss of heat. This caused the temperature to drop, lowering the amount of radiation emited, etc... until an equillibrium was reached. | 37 | 73 |
[General SciFi] Our galactic empire is finally on the verge of creating planetary-scale objects. Is the demolition of planets to gain ressources unethical and should therefore be cancelled? | Centuries of slow, but steady colonization of a few dozen solar systems under my rule have passed.
The Empires' best scientists and engineers keep approaching me to pitch their large-scale projects.
Moon-size structures, planetary and maybe even solar rings, spaceships.
It would take huge effort, but constructing those things promise techological progress (and economical wealth) of unprecedented scale.
But some people keep telling me that the process of aquiring the needed raw materials -carving+melting down planets uninhabited of higher life forms- is unethical.
What do you think? | Ethics are relative to the (possibly sentient) thing being affected.
We already destroy huge amounts of our own planet for progress and profit, sometimes with horrible consequences for life.
If there is no effect on any sort of sentient life, or even life at all, then the pros hugely outweigh the cons. | 19 | 24 |
ELI5: What is "20/20 vision" and why do they call it that? | What is it that makes a prescription 20/25? Why do we use the term 20/20 to describe perfect vision?
Edit: Thank you so much to everyone who answered this! Especially to Teotwawki69, excellent answer. | The top number is an arbitrary designation to indicate what people with "normal" vision can see at 20 feet, and is fixed. The bottom number indicates your vision. So, if you have 20/20 vision, you can see at 20 feet what people with normal vision can. 20/40 means you can see at 20 feet what people with normal vision can see at 40 feet, etc.
This is why a designation like 20/400 generally means legally blind. However, it can rarely go the other way, and there are people with 20/15 vision or better, which means they can see at 20 feet what people with normal vision can see clearly at 20 feet, etc. | 26 | 47 |
ELI5 why gold is referred to when we are speaking of wealth, even though platinum is rarer, less reactive and more expensive? | Gold, as a metal independent of other metals, has been known since the dawn of history, named and readily identifiable. It has a melting point when pure of about 1000°C — which is pretty high for a metal. It occurs unalloyed in nature fairly often.
Platinum was unknown as an independent metal in Western society until the 1500's — and then solely because *conquistadores* discovered (stole) Native Central American artifacts made from it. It is often alloyed naturally with other silver-white metals, and often mistaken for other silver-white metals. It melts at about 1700°C, higher than what most refineries operated at until they understood what platinum is.
Gold is rare, but readily identifiable — of all the metals, it and copper are the only ones that are not naturally some sort of silvery-white in their unoxidised states. So until fairly recently, platinum was unknown or unidentified or mistaken for silver.
There are any number of other rare — and therefore precious — silver-white metals; platinum today is fairly valuable specifically because it is useful, as a rapid catalyst of a number of chemical reactions. That is generally why it is more expensive — there's a high utility demand for it. Gold is so expensive today primarily because there is a high utility demand for it — in electronics. | 19 | 24 |
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I believe that some redistribution of wealth is a necessary component of a healthy, reasonable society. CMV | I don't believe that spontaneous voluntary charity sufficiently provides the sufficient resources or proper allocation of those resources to aid those in need in a way that we as a society feel would be appropriate. I believe that some portion of the tax collected by any major government should go to ensuring the basic human wellness and dignity (clothing, food, education) of those who would not experience it otherwise due to economic circumstances.
I concede that this is not always a perfect arrangement for the health of the economy, but that it is better to reduce suffering at a reasonable cost to economic growth (within the bounds of diminishing returns and necessary growth) than to routinely place net economic prosperity above human dignity.
At risk of sounding stereotypically left-wing, I've only heard one side of this argument presented reasonably and convincingly. | A much more compelling solution to me would be to figure out why we have growing inequality between the rich and poor in the first place, and address the root cause. Government Robin Hood-ery is just an inefficient bandage put on in lieu of curing the disease. | 26 | 42 |
ELI5: What physical evidence do we have that atoms exist and they look like what we think? | Title | Images have been produced which show atoms arranged in the patterns we accept as molecules.
There is considerable evidence that the large molecules called proteins exist and you can participate in trying to figure out how they fold.
Several classical physics experiments can be repeated anytime. They show a beam of electrons sent through a very thin foil will act as if a very dense nucleus scatters the beam of electrons if one happens to hit the nucleus. Otherwise there is no scattering and the electrons pass through the foil as if it were empty space. Thus the conclusion is that atoms consist of dense nuclei surrounded by empty space and electrons in shell orbitals.
This theory has been tested many times in many experiments. When a discrepancy occurs it is considered until an explanation is found. Benzene was an anomaly until its structure was proposed as a ring.
Other physics experiments have been devised to test theories about the behavior of electrons around atoms. They all confirm that modern theories about atoms seem to be true.
Radioactive decay can be measured. Decay sequences can be described and measured. All of this shows that the concept of the atom is sound. | 33 | 24 |
Why does the human body check the CO2 amount instead of O2 to determine if you got enough oxygen? | CO2 forms a buffer system in your blood , it actually exists as several different components depending on how much of it there is (CO2 +H20 => H2CO3 <-> HCO3^- <-> CO3^(2-)). If CO2 builds up in your blood it causes a pH shift. The nifty thing about this is that it's (normally) easy to regulate by controlling breathing patterns (if your blood is too acidic, you have too much CO2, you breath more, and it is expelled. Too basic and you breathe less letting CO2 accumulate). Shifts in pH are pretty easy ways to trigger effects in the body. Oxygen on the other hand is (for the most part) bound to hemoglobin and not just floating around free. Also dissolved oxygen won't participate in the same type of buffering system as CO2 - so it is "more difficult" to develop a system around measuring it. | 38 | 39 |
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ELI5 why some areas rarely have thunders, while others have several in the year. | I grew up on the Balkans where there were often thunders. 2 times out of 3 if it rains - it thunders. Now I live in Berlin, and I've only witnessed three thunderous rains in 4 years. Tonight is the third time. I don't get it. ELI5 please. | To form thunderstorms you need conditions where a big mass of warm, wet air at low altitude can very quickly rise up to high altitude. Usually this happens in areas where a low, warm, and wet air current meets a high, cold, and dry one. The two masses of air basically trade places and cause the massive updrafts that form huge thunder clouds. | 25 | 47 |
Why do photons behave differently in different frames of reference than classical objects? | There is an observer A on the sidewalk at night. Person B is in a moving car passing by A with velocity 30 km/h and throws a ball in front (through the open window) with velocity 20 km/h in reference to the car. Ignoring air friction, A will observe the ball moving at 50 km/h.
Now B does the same thing but instead of throwing a ball they project light with a flashlight. If observer A measures the speed of the light B emitted, it would be *c*, just like if a third person C would emit light from the ground. I know this because I've read that light always travels at the same speed through vacuum (remember we are assuming no air friction). But I don't know why.
Why do photons always have the same speed in reference to any frame of reference?
Why is it not the case with classical objects?
What would be the speed observer A measure if the ball was thrown at 250 000 km/s and the car was travelling at 100 000 km/s?
Thank you. | There is one relativistic formula for the addition of velocities that covers all cases. Given an object moving at velocity v relative to an object moving at velocity u, the net velocity of the first object to an outside observer is NOT u+v, but rather:
(u+v)/[1+uv/c^(2)]
At low speeds, this will be *very* close to u+v, and if v is the speed of light then so is that whole expression. | 27 | 25 |
Professor life in the U.S. | I’m an American but obtained a PhD in Europe and developed my academic career there. I’ve recently repatriated and taken on a mix of adjunct and industry work, all of which is at home. Because of a disability, I am hesitant to work in office but desperately miss teaching and daydream about securing a tenure track role.
Because I’ve primarily lived in the worlds of European (UK, France) higher education, I’m nervous to work in such a role in the U.S. I cannot — physically cannot — spend long hours in the office. My previous universities were very accommodating, and I created a hybrid schedule that worked for me. Is something like this even possible in the U.S. or am I stuck being online forever?
For reference, my capacity for in-office work really is limited to about 16 hours weekly. I can work from home the rest of the time with few issues because I have my home set up to help me manage my physical symptoms. | You haven't mentioned what specific field you're in. In Business/Law, typically:
8 AM - Wake up and get ready for an action filled day
9 AM - Prepare Program Work (Lectures, Program Content etc)
11 AM - Zoom Meetings and Discussions with Grad students
12 AM - Lunch w other Faculty members
1 PM - Second Lunch w Grad Students
2 PM - Collaborating w Researchers through Zoom
5 PM - Pina Coladas w Friends
6 PM - Gym
7 PM- More Pina Coladas
9 PM - Rum and Coke
11 PM - Sleep | 13 | 17 |
CMV: It is a reasonable response for me as a white, straight, males to get defensive when a person, regardless of race, gender, or sexual orientation, tells them that they are “privileged.” | Just to start, I am a white, straight, man. I want to make it very clear that I am NOT denying racism, sexism, homophobia, or any form of bigotry in any way. Things like that absolutely DO exist, and I think they are horrible and the people who promote those concepts are horrible people. (I’m painfully aware I’m not breaking any new ground in saying that lol).
That also being said, I want to make it clear that I am aware that POC, the LGBT Community, women, and all other groups outside of straight white men that I failed to mention here have had it way tougher for YEARS and that there are absolutely inequalities in this world. I am not denying that.
I am not talking about if someone says “straight white men are privileged” as a blanket statement. I’m saying if they tell me, personally, that I am privileged because I am a straight white man.
My simple point is this. You do not know my life. You don’t know the shit I’ve had to go through. The pain and the hardships I’ve had to endure. The abuse, neglect, and economic struggles I have faced. I had to work my ASS off to get where I am, despite all of my struggles, and despite the countless obstacles, some of whom were people.
You don’t know what I’ve been through, and I don’t know what you’ve been through. So don’t tell me I am Privileged. From where I’m standing, if this is privilege, then I don’t know why you would want it in the first place.
Again I am not talking about ALL straight white men, I am talking about ME.
I have had 2 occasions within the past year where I have been told I’m “privileged” in person, and I’ve seen quite a few posts online where I’ve made comments and people have responded as well telling me so.
In the two instances it happened in person, I got defensive and basically started to say, “you don’t know what I’ve been through and I don’t know what you’ve been through so why don’t you back off.” And in both occasions I was cut off and basically told that “white dudes always get defensive when they’re told they’re privileged.”
Well yeah. Yeah I am defensive. I don’t think here’s a single person out there, who if the roles were reversed, wouldn’t get defensive.
So, change my view.
Edit: spelling and grammar (I probably missed some other ones too so bear with me)
NOTE: there’s a HUGE typo in the title. It’s supposed to say “tells me that I AM PRIVILEGED” not that “they are privileged” at the end. Sorry about that.
Edit:
Hey guys! Thanks so much for posting everybody. I walked away from my phone for about 10 minutes and had more comments and DMs then I was prepared for! I’m going to reply to them as swiftly as I can do please bear with me! | Privilege in this regard does not refer to what you have you have to deal with, but rather what you don't have to deal with.
Plenty of straight, white men go through genuinely tough shit. Everyone accepts this to be true. Hardship as a general principle doesn't see color or gender or sexual orientation. Very, very, very few people actually think that being of a SWM identity prevents all hardship. That's nuts.
What privilege is referring to, instead, is all of the things you never had to deal with because of those identities.
Your race doesn't make your life *more* difficult. Your sexual orientation doesn't make your life *more* difficult. Your gender doesn't make your life *more* difficult.
Like a cop might have been aggressive towards you, but they didn't act that way because you're white. You might not have gotten a job once, but it wasn't because you're a man. You might have been punched at a bar before, but it wasn't because another guy thought you were hitting on them. These are the kind of things that straight, white men are privileged to not experience, even if many other forms of hardship are nondiscriminatory. | 312 | 273 |
ELI5: Jump Point Search, how does it work? | I have no idea how this works. Can someone please explain how jump point search can find its way?
Here is an article trying to explain it: [Jump Point Search](http://harablog.wordpress.com/2011/09/07/jump-point-search/)
[Here is an example where it is supposed to show how it works](http://qiao.github.io/PathFinding.js/visual/), but I can't wrap my head around it! (use the menu to the right to compare between A* and Jump Point Search)
Regards,
Kungarna af Island | 1.) From your current square, look vertically and horizontally. If you see the destination, jump to it. If you see the CORNER of a wall, mark the square adjacent to the corner as a "jump point" and add it to your list of jump points.
2.) Look diagonally. If you see the destination, jump to it.
3.) If your current square is closer to the destination than any jump point in your list, travel one square diagonally towards the destination. Else, go directly to the jump point, and move one square around the corner.
4.) Go to step 1. | 11 | 33 |
ELI5: What are those swarms of bugs actually doing when they seem to just be flying around in a small area? | Could be for various reasons, depends on the situation, species, etc.
Usually it's somewhere with a damp breeze (downwind of a river or pond), and food. They see something you don't and are hanging around where the food is for them.
Another reason is a mating swarm. At certain times of the year some bugs swarm up to make the task of finding mates a lot easier (basically like a big mixer). | 110 | 264 |
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ELI5: Why are steroids bad to the body if they enhance physical capabilities and why can't we nullify those side effects? | The body works to regulate hormones by feedback. If it detects too much of X hormone, it won't produce it anymore (a problem whether one is using, or stopping use).
ELI5: That's why ze balls shrink sometimes. | 60 | 49 |
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[Stargate]The novus humans know Canadian/American English from Eli's ancient video lectures, but is that what they actually speak in day to day life? | Why wouldn't they?
The colony was founded by humans who used those languages. Training videos exist that include examples of those.
Outside of expected linguistic shifts that might occur over the centuries with some words that aren't otherwise explicitly demonstrated the language would be relatively resilient.
For example, if no one ever heard or saw the word "buffalo" to be included in any of Eli's videos, but found it in literature, they might not know how to speak it aloud but for a dictionary pronunciation guide. And even then, their grasp of it might fail.
You could end up with "boofaloo" or "byoofallah" instead of the intended "buffalloh" or something similar, but audio training is an excellent way to keep a large portion of the usable language viable.
They might end up inventing their own words for certain things. Perhaps "pudding" never was documented, but they came up with "milk jello" instead. | 10 | 29 |
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[ASOIAF] How do the people of Westros store food stuff during particularly long winters? | The same way food has always been stored for the long term. Drying and/or heavily salting meat. Or just keeping large herds around for regular slaughter. Fishing through the ice is also a possibility. Since animals in westeros aren't extinct even through extreme winters, humans can still hunt now and then as well. (It's likely that they spend more time than in the real world drying/packaging foods and have much bigger storehouses than we do. There's probably a gigantic agricultural industry we just don't see because it's boring and has little to do with politics or wars.)
For crops and plants, drying is still a possibility. As well as growing foods that take a very long time to spoil, like root vegetables and grains. Some plants can also be grown in primitive greenhouses or in manmade shelters to keep people fed some meager amounts for a very long time.
And on top of it all, we know the more southern areas of Westeros are more temparate, so they probably are able to grow food even in the middle of winter. It's likely not as healthy or nutritious as summer-grown crops, but they can still grow it and transport huge quantities up north for a good profit. | 39 | 39 |
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CMV: I am not a self made man. | Looking back at my life I came to realize that despite successes and failures, my life is not my own. What I mean is that every step of the way someone has been there to care for me, to instruct me, to give me advice. For every person I have met that has wanted to attack, sabotage or derail my growth I have met 10 masters, teachers or compassionate souls that have given their time to make me a better human being. This experience has manifested itself through, authors of books, mentors, friends, teachers and kind strangers both offline and online. In some instances I have had the impulse to search out growth but in other instances I have searched out things that might harm me, consciously or unconsciously.
I don't consider my success my own but rather a combination of timing, help from others, hard work and most importantly LUCK. I don't see my self as a self made man because though I have searched out growth, I have also made mistakes. Sometimes I have paid for them and sometimes I have gotten away with them.
But I am here because I want someone to challenge my view and change my way of looking at life. I want to believe that each man is an architect of its own destiny and that I am a self made man.
Thanks
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | Many people are given help and chances to succeed. What differentiates people's outcomes is what they do with that help and what they do with those chances. Sure there is Some luck involved but, Some people do not recognize the chances or help when they see it, they don't use the help or take it or listen. And some people throw away great opportunities left and right. Sure, some people are given more help and more opportunities along the way. But as you said you had multiple masters helping you and advising you. You recognized their value and took what they were offering and more importantly used it. Not everyone does that. You've been in control of multiple decisions that you have made in order to better yourself. You could have just walked away from the help offered.
I will not say each individual is entirely in control of their outcome. But they can influence the spread of where they are going to land both positively and negatively.
There is a reason why people who win the lottery frequently end up not to far off from where they started. A huge landfall of luck just thrown away. Opportunities like that can be used in millions of ways. What you do with each opportunity is what makes you. | 12 | 55 |
ELI5: For you finance guys out there, I’m trying to wrap my head around decomposing stock returns and why it’s used. | Been reading research papers on the topic, bas as usual it turns into deep mathematical proofs on how it can be decomposed. But not how why it should be decomposed | When you own assets of any sort, you want to forecast whether those assets are worth holding on to, compared with selling them and using the money to buy something else.
None of us have a crystal ball, but there are metrics we can use to assess what kind of return a stock might give, in the short and long term. These include cash flow news, which assesses the general money flow (cash in vs cash out) of our investment, and discount rate, which looks at the percentage growth of each dollar we invest, often taking inflation into account.
But which method do we use, and when? For what duration? With so many variables, it helps to break down the problem into smaller chunks. This is called decomposing, where you can split your portfolio in all sorts of ways (currencies, time periods etc) to see which combination of cuts and chunks, if sold or held, would *probably* yield the best returns. | 13 | 26 |
what type of therapy should be sought for trying to get in touch with suppressed emotions from childhood? | To be able to understand how they manifest now in adulthood. | This is a very explicit issue in psychodynamic and psychoanalytic psychotherapy. But insight of such links between past and present could happen in any framework of therapy where emotional experience is the focus of the work. | 15 | 29 |
Why are children especially vulnerable to measles? | Is it because of a general lack of antibodies, or perhaps because the immune system isn't as well-developed? | In the modern world, almost all adults have been immunized against measles. In the old days, everyone caught measles as a child and either died from it or became immune, so they didn't get it as adults. In populations where adults aren't immune (like Native Americans just after Columbus), adults died from measles like crazy. | 31 | 22 |
CMV: The health insurance system of the United States is the biggest organized crime/extortion ring in history. | Extortion, racketeering, preying on the weak and vulnerable. They have leaned on politicians for years for legitimacy. The business exists only to collect protection money from our population. A terrible side effect is the strain placed on the doctors and nurses that are unable to use their knowledge and skill to best treat any patient that comes under their care. My view will not be changed by any job numbers, but if anyone can explain to me how our nation is benefitted in any way or how this leech industry is not driving up our cost of care my view could be changed. | No private healthcare system can run smoothly without health insurance. Now, that’s not to say our medical system runs smoothly — it is an expensive failure, for reasons that include the poorly run insurance system, but health insurance itself serves a vital function.
In countries where healthcare is less expensive, health insurance is purchased to cover the cost of unforeseen expenses. It is not intended to cover the cost of routine medical care. There is a strong argument that ballooning medical costs came first, not the other way around — American public health collapsed (see the rise of corn syrup, the collapse of exercise, etc), and these compounded existing problems such as luxury medicine (for example, MRIs for offices that don’t really need MRIs — compare MRI machines per capita in the USA to Canada). Insurance billing practices are one factor, but hospital administrators also try like hell to overcharge insurance companies for every little thing because “why not, they have the money!” and ordinary people don’t contest it because they don’t have the expertise to tell whether what their hospital is charging them is fair or not.
So, although insurance companies can engage in unethical practices, and certainly do retain lobbyists to maintain their privileged position, medical providers and the rise of “specialists” in place of general practitioners has driven the raw cost of care up just as much, and pushed people into the arms of what used to be a smaller and less powerful business.
TL;DR: fixing other factors that make medicine so expensive would make people less dependent on insurance, and drive down the cost of being insured. | 278 | 3,569 |
How does amputation affect the amount of blood contained within the body? | So for example, if somebody had both their legs amputated. Would the body very quickly adjust to this and ramp down production immediately? Or would it instead change the pressure of the blood within the system in the short term, then decrease the total amount over time?
I read a little about baroreceptors to try and find out, but I don't know.
| Blood pressure is mostly regulated by two processes: cardiac output (how much blood the heart is pumping per minute) and mean arterial pressure (basically the average tightness of the tubes). Both of these things are regulated by certain things as well. Cardiac output is related to how much blood the heart gets in and how hard and fast it pumps. Mean Arterial Pressure (MAP) is related to hormones such as adrenaline as well as chemicals like CO2 and lactic acid.
When a limb is amputated, there are two options to deal with the blood vessels. One is to seal them off (most common) and the other is to connect them to each other as a shunt. If you assume minimal blood loss from the surgery, then as you mentioned there is now more blood per unit are than there was before. The immediate reaction to this is for the pressure-sensitive baroreceptors to signal for the release of hormones which loosen the arterioles. At the microscopic level, the small vessels called capillaries are not strictly pipes and can leak fluid into the tissues which leads to swelling known as edema.
The heart will also be signalled by these chemicals and initially will pump less rapidly and effectively. Soon however, since the loosening of the arteries leads to more space for the blood to be in, the heart starts getting less blood coming in and it will soon resume its normal function. Regulation of blood pressure is actually quite a fascinating topic and the problems when that regulation fails lead to many different consequences that affect billions worldwide.
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Did Darth Vader ever learn how to prevent people from dyeing through the dark side or did he just give up after Padme died? | He found that he already knew how to prevent people from dyeing as long as he was right there in front of them. Or had a clear view of them.
However, when he wasn't around, people were free to dye as they pleased. However, due to the knowledge that Vader himself didn't appreciate people dyeing in the Empire, especially the military, most citizens kept to their natural hair colors. | 86 | 42 |
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How does the body decide on when to use diarrhea or vomiting as a method of excreting hazardous food? | First it would depend on a substances location. After it's left the stomach it doesn't have a mechanism to return. Second it would depend on it's ability to cause water to be released into the intestinal lumen.
Something like an industrial solvent could alert your brain that something is wrong immediately and cause emesis.
There are lots of substances that can cause irritation to the intestine, eg bacterial toxins, which in turn would cause water release as your body tries to get rid of it. Alternatively, a substance could draw out moisture by osmosis eg magnesium citrate. | 12 | 24 |
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Is there any scientific validity to the technique of deep breathing as a cure to anxiety? | Hi r/askscience, I'm a long-time sufferer of anxiety. Popular 'wisdom' has told me that slow deep 'diaphragmatic' breathing is the best cure for this. Is there any kind of scientific evidence for this? | Breathing deeply and steadily will reduce your heart rate and help relax constricted muscles in the chest and neck, reducing physical stress and helping to calm you down through lowering blood pressure. Additionally, breathing in such a way usually requires conscious effort and when a person focuses on their breathing, it also helps take the mind off of what is causing the feeling of anxiousness. | 17 | 21 |
I believe storylines in video games are not nearly as good as those seen in the majority of films and novels. CMV | I love video games, but I can understand why most people do not take video games seriously as an art form. Films have their Apocalypse Now's and their Godfather's (granted, there are also stupid movies but at least there is an AFI Top 100 movies that all have fantastic storylines), graphic novels have Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns, and the Sandman as well as others, and novels, well, it's all about storytelling, so it's explanatory. For games, it doesn't seem as necessary to tell a good story. For example, Splinter Cell: Blacklist got a 4 out of 5 by Adam Sessler although it has a piss poor story. I feel like video games get the shit end of the stick when it comes to storylines, and whenever something marginally good comes along, we hail it as brilliance, i.e. Bioshock Infinite and The Last of US (although they are great games in their own right). The only people in the business right now that seem capable of telling an excellent story is primarily Naughty Dog and Rockstar, and that's it. I'm not really aware of Japanese games, so maybe I don't know much about them.
TL;DR Video games, as a whole, do not have as many great stories as everything else that tells a story. | Games are capable of producing rich and deep stories of an entirely different type. Games tell great stories about places, events or times. They allow for a depth of 'place' that novels and movies are hard pressed to replicate.
Consider your average movie and its limited view and lack of structure. Think of how many lines of text it would take to encapsulate just the smallest description of the rich 3D interactive worlds of a video game. These games have dozens if not hundreds of hours to create a world around us, with sight, sound and words, something no movie or novel has. Are these games telling stories that are the same as a book? Certainly not. They are an entirely different medium, but they are telling a very potent story, and they transport us into another created realm.
A land riddled with ruins and old prophecies can tell us a far richer story of loss and the decay of an empire by placing us there, letting us see the sunlight passing through old spires. We are given to understand the tale of this place.
A haunted house where we are forced to hide in the shadows as monsters stalk in the dimness lets us understand fear. And we can learn the story of the horrors that stalk there all the more potently as we shift through decaying documents while wolves howl in the night.
These are not better or worse stories, they are different stories. Primarily, because unlike most fiction, they are told from the second person. But we are nevertheless transported into a different time and experience something new and creative.
This is an old argument that comes along every time that a new media makes itself known. The stories told by film are very different that novels - they are short, truncated, bereft of any internal dialogue, etc. But we will come to appreciate stories of video games in the same way we have come to appreciate film, not by their similarities with the older medium but in their own merits. | 27 | 28 |
How to be maximally impactful as a kinda-but-not-too-smart person | How would you respond to a student who says "I don't want to research \_\_\_\_\_\_\_\_ because there are way smarter people already working on it." ?
It has certainly been my experience in CS that I get viciously outpaced by the developers who are already smarter than me, AND they put in 60+ hour weeks. Like, I'm a good developer, but if I get /that/ person on my team, then my contributions are hardly noticeable. Does this feel true to you, whatever field you're in?
Side note, off the top of your head, what are some fields with too many scholars and some fields with not enough? | Some researchers are recognized solely for their ability to perform comprehensive literature reviews. You don’t always have to be the one coming up with new ideas. Merely setting the table gives you a seat sometimes.
There’s also a ton of value in interdisciplinary work: Drawing together two discrete conversations, or using theoretical frameworks uncommon to the field to offer new insights. This is a harder path, though, and you are likely to encounter resistance and need to present watertight justification... but it is a way to get yourself out there. | 116 | 122 |
What are the arguments against giving free things to cover basic necessities for everyone? | The 7 basic things that every human being requires to prosper are Food, water, clothing, shelter, education, healthcare, and protection. What happens if we give all the 7 things for free to everyone, like basic rudimentary food like bread and butter or a liquid diet like soylent, basic ultra-cheap clothes that you can buy in Walmart like the 3.67$ Hanes shirts.
We are already providing police protection, fire protection to everyone. Why can't we do it for the rest of the needs? Since this morning I have been thinking about all the free stuff that I receive in any country. The first thing that came to my mind is Police protection. Even if I was a homeless person, I could pretty much approach the police to seek protection. Even if I had absolutely no money and I was in a burning building, the fireman would still show up and save me for free. They wouldn't check my Fico score before deciding if I deserve to be pulled out of the burning building or not right? Similarly, why can't we do the same to other basic things that people need?
I tried to think of a few reasons why people who say this could be bad:
1. If abuse of this free stuff is the concern, then the first thing that comes to my mind is that if you frequently call 911 without an actual emergency, they will come and arrest you. Similarly, if you frequently request free clothes or food, you could be denied these services. There are ways to prevent abuse.
2. Just because a 3.67$ basic shirt is available for free, it wouldn't prevent people from buying more expensive shirts, like a 12$ shirt. I wouldn't wear the 3.67$ shirt to the office as it makes me look cheap. But if I was homeless and that is all I had, I would happily use that. Similarly just because there is a police force available, most organizations don't exclusively rely on them. They hire private securities for their buildings and such.
3. Producing these free things cannot be such a horrendous task. We train police officers and firemen all the time and they are actually paid to receive the training. Training a human being to fight crime/fire cannot be more challenging than producing the 3.67$ Hanes shirts for the masses.
4. People won't become lazy just because they are given a free 3.67$ shirt to wear. In fact, some of us would see this as a prestige issue and work harder to buy a 12$ shirt to prove that they are successful. In fact, I think more people would be able to work harder if they are not scared of becoming homeless. If you take care of the basic needs, more people would be emboldened to go down the entrepreneurial route. I personally would quit my job and try to start a company that would benefit people, animals, and the environment if I wasn't scared of becoming homeless. The fact that I have to work to survive is what is keeping me tethered to my job.
5. Some may ask, who would manufacture these if everyone is guaranteed these basic things. Well, like I said in point 2. Some of us will not be happy with a 3.67$ shirt, eating only bread and butter every day and living in the most basic house imaginable. Some of us have the drive to excel in life and accomplish things that would differentiate us from the rest of the people. Human pride would propel a certain group of people to seek employment in warehouses where they produce these goods.
6. There will be a population explosion. Sure, we are 7.5 billion people currently, we will become a trillion people. At least 1000 of these trillion would be smart enough to figure out how to terraform Mars. The way I see it, the more the births, the more is a chance of a genetic miracle. Who knows 10,000 years from now, humans will evolve to have an extra lobe in their brains thanks to the extreme population growth!
Surely I must not be the first person to have thought of these things. Can someone tell me why providing basic things for free is a bad idea? On the contrary imagine there is a guy somewhere in the world right now, whose only goal for today is to find food. Who knows this one particular guy has the potential to cure cancer or solve global warming or do something to benefit everyone. But! He is currently busy looking for food or shelter. Imagine what he would accomplish if we solve his problem! | Many countries provide a lot of these things for "free" to those that need it. They have government programs for homeless shelters, unemployment assistance, provision of food, clothing, etc.
It's perfectly possible and really more a question of how a government decides to use their resources.
As for why not everything and not for everyone, well that gets expensive and likely inefficient. People that are well off enough to supply their own clothing can just buy their own clothes instead of government provided ones they might not even like.
You're also looking at pretty vast amounts of central planning to provide for example homes for everyone. Not only would that mean high taxes, it's also exceptionally difficult to know what people want and how to allocate resources efficiently.
*Generally*, market forces do a pretty decent job at that, because people (in a very simplified sense) basically govern their own needs and their supply. If people want red shirts, demand for red shirts goes up, which eventually leads to a higher supply of red shirts. Doing this "by hand" efficiently is a very high hurdle and it's not very realistic that you could actually implement a system that does this as well as it happens now. | 38 | 19 |
ELI5: What is machine learning and how does it work? | Machine learning is a discipline that develops algorithms to get computers (aka thinking machines) to learn without having to be explicitly taught.
It works very similar to the way our brains work.
When you are born, your brain is a blank slate, and is hard wired to detect common patterns and associations.
You guess at what something is, and that guess is either validated or invalidated.
For example, imagine a 1 or 2 year old learning about animals. She says "What's that" and you say "cat".
Now, anything with fur and 2 ears is a cat, so when she sees a dog, she says "cat!". You say "No, that is a dog". And another piece to the pattern emerge, and the child eventually understands the concept of "animal" versus "cat"
In the same way, machine learning systems are programmed to discern patterns and associations, and essentially learn through trial and error by being given tons of data, images, words, etc, and it "learns" through that process. | 14 | 24 |
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If virtual reality was realistic and available for everyone (so you could live out any scenario possible), would there have to be made laws for what you could and couldn't do? | Sorry if this is too imaginative or if it's the wrong subreddit, by the way.
If a kind of virtual reality that was just like real life existed and was available for everyone (like the Internet is now), would there have to be made laws for things you could and couldn't do in your virtual reality?
Things like murder and child pornography come to mind, because obviously in real life they're huge offenses since they affect REAL people, but would the moral aspect of it make it necessary for the government to create laws against virtualizing these things? I hope it makes sense, otherwise feel free to ask me to elaborate. | I am unsure whether you are asking based on our current framework of laws or what would be the ideal.
Regarding child pornography, even virtual cp is deemed illegal. That's a debate people here tend to debate. | 24 | 63 |
ELI5: Why do computer screens ripple like water when you press on them? | LCD monitors / computer screens contain liquid crystals. These liquid crystals have properties of both a liquid (like water) and a solid (like a crystal).
The reason for using liquid crystals is that (in combination with polarizing filters), by manipulating the amount of applied voltage it allows you to control the amount of light that is allowed to pass through the screen to your eyes in a given region of the screen.
The backlight behind an LCD screen remains a relatively constant in brightness in most cases and it's the liquid crystals that determine whether to allow all the backlight through, only some of the backlight through, or none of the backlight through to dynamically control pixel brightness on the screen. | 12 | 36 |
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CMV:It's time to stop hyphenating words because they don't fit in one single line. | Whenever I read something in perfect columns I always hate coming across a word broken up by a hyphen just for the sake of having the column of words look nice and be all even. Sometimes you can read the word easily because it's made of components like be-cause or al-ways which isn't so bad. But sometimes the words are made of phonemes that your brain only comprehends when it sees all the letters together like tro-ugh or anac-hronistic or morp-hology. It gives me needless pause when reading a text and I just encountered a problem that put the nail in the coffin for me.
I was reading a journal article on PDF and I was trying to Ctrl-F a word I distinctly remember reading but it wouldn't work. Was I mistaken about the word being in the text? No! I eventually found the sentence I was looking for and to my frustration I realized that I couldn't search it because there was a Fuc-king Hyphen it he word!!! who cares of the right side of columns look a little choppy from time to time. breaking up words doesn't make sense anymore if it ever did.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | It's not just for aesthetics, It serves a practical purpose. A newspaper needs to those columns to fit nice and evenly. Columnists have letter and word counts, and having too many large words that create new lines and push the column down into someone else's real estate. hyphenating a word or two so that it fits the space is the best solution, and isn't a problem 99% of the time. | 157 | 204 |
ELI5: When an infrared non-contact thermometer is pointed at a target, how does it measure the target's temperature and not the temperature of the air column in front of the target? | I never got a satisfactory understanding of one of them. But regardless of exactly how the work;
They measure temperature by capturing the infrared radiation of whatever they're looking at. How much a thing radiate infrared depends on something called 'emissivity' and i think most of tbose thermometers have a setting to correct for it; its 1 for what we call 'black body' and 0 for mirror like or white things, with most real things somewhere in between.
Now your scenario; air is mostly transparent at the wavelength used by the thermometers, so it would only really see ir radiation from the object it is looking at. Meanwhile the transparency also means that the emissivity is nearly 0; it doesn't radiate much radiation, even if it were hot. More accurately, its just that there are far fewer air molecules flying around to emit anything at all, compared to a solid object; if you clump up enough gasses and heat it up, it would emit like a black body. (Stars! And thats how you tell how hot they are too). Finally, in most measurement scenario, the thing you are trying to measure will be by far the hottest thing within the column of air in the visual field of the object, so even if the air was denser and had higher emissivity, it wouldn't emit much.
This would be why its not affected by the air temperarure you are looking through. | 70 | 182 |
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CMV: Exams should be open book/notes. | As an engineering student I find this to be very crucial in learning. Memorizing the material for an exam is not a good way in learning the material whereas having an open book exam makes learning the materials much easier.
All exams should be open resources. It increases note taking skills that are actually used in life and the work field and decrease exam stress. It's not fair to automatically assume that all students can retain a mass amount of information.
Exams should be applicable based and not a memory test. You retain more information by actually doing research and learning the materials than cramping X amount of information then pouring it out onto a test and forget what you learned as soon as you turn it in.
The whole point is to learn the materials, not just memorize information that you will forget. Not everyone can retain information well so by using resources given to you/using outside resources you gain a better understanding/different view of the material which will help you solve a problem that you don't know the answer to.
Edit: for anyone wondering, I am studying electrical engineering in robotics and mechatronics. | Depends on the type of exams and subject.
If a subject doesn’t give you the time to refer to a notebook when you really need to use it in real life (for a job like lawyer, for example), the exam should be more strict.
But if it’s about creative thinking and the use of skills rather than just memorizing raw concepts, yes, then the student should be able to refer to notes and other resources. | 202 | 388 |
How difficult would this project be? | Hello, I am new to programming, currently a freshman in a C++ course. I am not sure if this is the right sub to post this is in, so please let me know if it is not. One of the projects I have always wanted to do was write a program that will automatically perform a water change on my aquariums. Essentially I want to be able to click a button or say a command for example " Hey Google, water change my aquarium". I want the program to turn on a drain pump then turn it off after a specified amount of time, then after it turns off the drain pump, turn on a refill pump and then turn it off after a specified amount of time.
Here is a crappy visual:
[https://imgur.com/a/6tqRCeq](https://imgur.com/a/6tqRCeq)
I am very new to programming ( only been doing it for a week) so I am not sure where I would even start with this or if it is something I should even be attempting right now. Any advice is appreciated, thank you. | Definitely not hard, you can use something like an arduino (a small programamable microcontroller) to control a pump through a relay and then have it be triggered whenever you'd like to. You can find guides for arduino controlled pumps all over the place. The hardest thing might just be having connecting it to a steady water source, but the programming itself will be incredibly simple | 32 | 26 |
ELI5: If there are more colors than the human eye can see does that mean objects reflect more than one color or things we see as one color don't reflect that color but our eyes just can't see it? | Would that mean there could be more skin colors? (This thought just popped in my head and I am now going crazy). | "Color" is sort of an overloaded term that can mean one of several different related things.
There is a spectrum of light. Objects do, or don't, reflect each possible wavelength of light to different degrees. For example, an object might reflect all light below a wavelength of 500 nm, while absorbing all light above 500 nm, or maybe it reflects light close to 600 nm and absorbs more and more the further from 600 nm you get. In this sense, the "color" of an object is a curve describing how it reflects every possible wavelength of light, which takes an infinite number of numbers to describe.
Human perception, on the other hand, is dictated by how that light stimulates three types of cell in our eye (so-called "L", "M", and "S" cone cells, which are most sensitive to reddish, yellowish, and bluish light respectively but have some overlap). If you know how much the light stimulates each of those cells - that is, you know three numbers, technically called *tristimulus values* - you know what "color" it is. The "reflect all below 500 nm and absorb all above 500 nm" object above would stimulate S cells a lot, M cells a little, and L cells almost not at all - that is, it would appear a deep blue-violet. The "mostly reflects around 600 nm" would stimulate L a lot, M moderately, and S very little, and would appear orange.
Since the first definition of color (the how-much-of-each-wavelength-does-it-reflect definition) provides a much larger range of possibilities than the second one (the amount it stimulates each of our cells), there are many possible "colors" in the first sense for each "color" in the second sense. That is, there are different mixes of light that both appear the same shade of (say) blue to your eyes, because they result in the same amount of stimulation to each of your cell types.
You would see a color (second sense) for every possible combination of reflected light (first sense), but you wouldn't always be able to tell the *difference* between those colors.
Finally, not every possible combination of stimuli (color in the second sense) is actually possible. The M and L cells overlap a lot, so you can't stimulate L a lot without stimulating M a little (if you could, you'd see a color "redder than the reddest possible red"). The only way to experience these colors (second sense) is to somehow mess with the processing in your brain; people who take psychedelic drugs often report seeing new colors that are probably the result of the brain getting a scrambled "lots of L and no M" signal and trying to figure out what the hell to do with it. | 40 | 27 |
CMV: I believe most people (including myself) don't know enough about the economy and politics to debate politics. | My friends and I occasionally debate politics when we hang out and as much as I enjoy it, I don't believe there is always so much information out there that none of us can know enough to be able to be confident in what we're saying. For the record, I do have a basic idea of what I'm saying. I realize the Daily Show and Colbert Report aren't exactly hard news shows but I do watch both of those consistently, I listen to npr and economics podcasts, I read articles online that I can find to educate myself but I *still* feel like unless I'm spending hours a day researching, I have no idea what I'm talking about and shouldn't have arguing in favor of anything more complex than gay marriage (which doesn't even get debated).
TL;DR - I feel like unless I spend hours a day researching politics and economics, I'm not qualified enough to have a strong political opinion and I have no right to argue for a position. Please CMV so I don't feel like an idiot.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than just downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | So who is qualified? Only academics, as long as they're only speaking in their area of expertise? *Politicians*, including the President, don't spend hours a day researching politics and economics. Neither do their staffs, who are usually focused on practical matters.
Politics affects everyone, so the more people engage with it, regardless of their level of knowledge, the better off society is.
Edit: spelling | 345 | 1,589 |
CMV: I don't think Islam is problematic. | I'm submitting this because "Islam is a problem that needs to be dealt with" is the #1 post on every "controversial opinion" thread, i.e. it's extremely popular, at least on Reddit. And a lot of smart people, like Christopher Hitchens, have said the same thing, so I don't want to completely chalk it up to Reddit being Reddit.
Anyway, I got into this site through /r/atheism and lurked there for two years before making an account and realizing that there were far more fresh and interesting subs out there. Suffice to say, I'm not coming at this issue with a "we must respect religions even if their adherents do terrible things" attitude. Because . . .
1. I recognize that terrorism, as we usually think of it, is disproportionately Islam-based.
2. I recognize the phenomenon of people in a first-world, highly developed society suddenly becoming radicalized in the name of Islam and plotting terrorist activity or travelling to join al-Qaeda or ISIS.
But, as I see it, this can all simply be explained by the fact that the part of the world that is most predominately Islamic, the Middle East, has been fucked with throughout the second half of the 20th century. Political, social, and economic disorder breed radicalism (see: post-WWI Germany), which found a convenient home in Islam. If Islam hadn't been there, or is removed in the future, I think radicalism would just manifest itself in the next big thing (nationalism, racism, politics, etc.).
Up until the mid-20th century, Islam was widely regarded as one of the most peaceful and tolerant religions out there. And if the Middle East were traditionally a Christian-dominated area, and the West traditionally Muslim, there would probably be people right now beheading journalists in the name of Jesus.
As for "satellite terrorists" in first-world countries, I see it as an inevitability, like the Americans who became Nazi-sympathizers during WWII. If an ideology is powerful enough, it might lure in a small number of idiots elsewhere. It's bad, but it's not unique to radical Islam—there's no hypnotizing verse in the Koran that turns people into terrorists.
I'm not making a defense for religion—obviously it can be a vehicle for hate—but in this case, I think it's just the most convenient vehicle in a long line of them. So if you could wave a magic wand and Islam would disappear, something else would rise up to take its place.
What do you think? I don't really *want* to dislike Islam, but I sometimes feel like I'm being overly tolerant, if that's possible. | To summarize your view, you are essentially saying:
"People who are talking about the need to excise the Crips from our country are missing the point. Yes the Crips are terrible, but there is nothing about their gang that really separates them from other gangs. Rather, it's the economic and political situation that is generating their negative influence, and if you were to magically remove them all today, tomorrow you would just have a bunch of red-shirted Bloods in their place."
Is that more or less the gist? | 13 | 26 |
How do carcinogens work? | How do carcinogens affect the body?
What compounds within food are carcinogenic?
Do carcinogens affect people differently? | 1. Carcinogens are molecules that interact with a cell's system of checks and balances. Normally, our cells read DNA as a to-do list/recipe for carrying out all the necessary functions in order to keep us alive. And they're hella good at it. However, occasional mistakes are made during that process. Lucky for us, our cells have the ability to proof-read everything they do, as well as edit/correct the mistakes. Carcinogens, at various places along this process (depending on which carcinogen) hinder a cell's ability to proof-read or fix mistakes. Where normally a cell would realize that something is awry, a cell affected by a carcinogen would remain blissfully ignorant and carry on with its business.
Example: melanocytes are the cells that make you tan...they produce melanin, which helps block UVB radiation (side note: Gingers have trouble producing the proper kind of melanin, which is why they sunburn easily). UVB radiation is a carcinogen- that particular wavelength of light hits the chemical bonds in DNA molecules and causes the bonds to rearrange. Where you get into trouble is when that UV ray smashes the cell replication recipe... Normally, a cell reads the instructions and at the appropriate time, divides into two new cells. Then those cells just chill and do their job until it's their turn to divide. But sometimes when a carcinogen (such as UV radiation) messes up the instructions, those cells don't know they're supposed to chill. They just start dividing all over again. And since every cell gets it's entire DNA recipe book from its parent cell, the process continues to get passed down and it snowballs until you have a whole bunch of melanocytes that are multiplying like Duggars and don't know when to quit. We call that "Melanoma" in the biz.
2. Any molecule that has the ability to alter the structure of DNA is technically a carcinogen. You hear about "free radicals" and "antioxidants" in health food and supplement commercials... Free radicals are just molecules missing one electron/have one electron too many, and desperately want to gain/lose an electron to become stable. When free radicals run into DNA, they steal an e- or drop one off, which forces the DNA molecule to rearrange, starting that whole Bad-Recipe story over again. Antioxidants are molecules that join up with free radicals to stabilize them before they run into DNA somewhere and cause trouble. A couple other notable carcinogens in food are nitrites, found in smoked/barbecued meats, and alcohol (surprise!).
3. No, but yeah. Everyone's cells and DNA works the same way. Every cell in every person is potentially susceptible to carcinogens. However, since everyone's genes (recipes) are a little different, some people have higher tendencies for mistakes... Since Gingers struggle with melanin production, they don't can't block as much UV radiation, and are therefore more likely to get skin cancer (e.g., melanoma).
TL;DR: carcinogens are mischievous little molecules that interfere with our cells' ability to regulate functions and repair defects. | 20 | 15 |
Why are nuclear bombs detonated while they’re still thousand of feet in the air? | To get a bigger area of effect.
If you detonate the bomb at ground level, only the part of the explosion around the horizontal circumference that will do major damage to buildings and the surroundings. You lose a lot of the force of the explosion upwards into the sky, and down into the ground directly under the explosion (which will do massively damage, but to a small area).
If you detonate the bomb in the air, the force of the explosion that is directed upwards still does no damage, but all the force that would have gone directly into the ground on a surface detonation now spreads out over a much larger area. | 23 | 24 |
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ELI5: If light can't escape black holes, where does it go? Do chemical reactions still happen on/inside them? Can heat escape? | I've heard the gravity is so great in black holes, that not even light can escape. This raises a lot of questions for me. If its swallowing stars, particles, planets, etc, then surely it would be creating incredibly high intensity chemical reactions. Those usually create heat and light (i think). So if the light doesn't escape, does the heat? Where does that light go? Does it exist under the surface of the star? | this raises a lot of questions in a lot of people, so good work, you share something in common with leading physicists.
we don't entirely know what happens in a black hole, it is impossible for us to observe it, but the current belief is that there is a "singularity" in the center that is infinitely small, infinitely dense, and infinitely hot.
there's also a predicted phenomenon called hawking radiation that is generated by the black hole near the event horizon, that could be the answer to what will eventually happen to black holes, that eventually they will slowly radiate energy away and evaporate, but i dont believe this has been proven yet. | 40 | 62 |
How can I support an overworked, unpaid instructor I really like? | I'm an undergrad in a political science department and the amount of exploitation of these adjunct instructors is ridiculous. Underpaid, aren't given enough courses, part-time.. all while admins are making inflated salaries.
So all this being said, I really learned a lot from the class I took (probably one of the best courses I took while in college) and want to do something. How much power do students have? Should I email the director of the program?
Thanks for your time!
edit: title should say underpaid | Nominate them for awards regarding teaching, mentoring, or creative use of pedagogical methods.
Talk to the admins that matter about the subject--the deans, VPs, the provost, even the president/chancellor.
Support any efforts at graduate/adjunct Unions. | 52 | 30 |
Why are research databases so bad at picking up keywords in search string? | Hi there,
I am currently trying to conduct a literature review and I have found this (many times in the past and present) that no matter what combination of very specific keywords I use, the results still end up with random papers that have nothing to do with what I searched.
Now, I know you may say this is because I am being too specific and its just finding the next closest result but when I go on and trawl page after page, I can actually pick up papers here and there that I do need!
But why is pubmed/medline/google scholar bringing up so much irrelevant stuff? | Librarian here, probably because you are using a keyword search so the database shows results where those terms show up anywhere in the article, even the citations or authors’ names. There is a lot of nuance to catalog or database searching, you really have to utilize tools like Boolean operators, subject search, and wild card symbols and quote marks if you want high accuracy. | 12 | 20 |
What's the difference between photoelectric effect and photovoltaic effect? | The photoelectric effect refers to emission of electrons from one material into another, typically into a vacuum, although air photoemission (into a gas) or internal photoemission (from one solid through a barrier into another solid) also exist. The defining characteristic of photoemission is that the electrons are kicked into an unbound state and they are free to leave the material.
In the photovoltaic effect, electrons are excited but they remain in a bound state. These excited electrons do not leave the material but they move around in it until they find a place they can fall back into to release their energy. This can be a hole left in the electronic state of the material by the same or another elevtron after it was excited and moved away, but it can also be a contact with a lower lying energy level. In the later case, the electrons and holes piling up at the contacts generate a voltage and that's the photovoltaic effect. | 46 | 55 |
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ELI5: In theatre, why do so many people want to perform Shakespeare? | A lot of Shakespeare's plays are considered classics - which means that they're respected, popular, and compelling. So for an actor looking for a good role, a prominent Shakespearean part like Romeo, King Lear, Lady MacBeth, Hamlet, Viola, etc. means several things.
First of all, it's often an interesting part that requires a complex range of acting skills - that's appealing to actors who want to challenge themselves or improve their acting abilities.
On top of that, Shakespeare tends to attract good actors and directors - his plays aren't the easiest to understand or put together, so you can be pretty sure that the people working on it are fairly intelligent and talented, which is a good working environment and great for making connections.
And of course, Shakespeare means exposure. Not that many people will make a trip to see a Brecht play, or Ibsen, or Tennessee Williams, or any number of wonderful but somewhat lesser-known playwrights... but Shakespeare is probably one of the most famous names of all time, along with the names of so many of his plays.... that means that people will pay attention and buy tickets when his plays are going on. More exposure means more money, usually, but also more recognition - if you want to get your name out there, earn bigger parts on better stages (or film/TV), it's important that many people know your name. | 20 | 32 |
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Is there a finite amount of matter and/or energy in the universe? | I know that energy cannot be created or destroyed but does the same properties go for matter as well? | Firstly, we have to make a distinction between the observable universe, and the entire universe.
The observable universe is the sum of all points in the universe that are close enough to us, that light emitted from those points has had time to reach us. That is to say: those points are within our causality.
Everything else is too far away for any interaction to happen.
Naturally, we know very little about the "un-observable universe", so any kid of statement is a speculation.
The energy within the observable universe is certainly finite, albeit conservation of energy does not hold true on cosmic scales. | 14 | 19 |
ELI5:Why does restarting something usually fix the problem? | Problems can be caused by a number of things: A rare, randomly occurring error might overwrite some memory. Some unexpected combination of events can send something into an infinite loop or crash a critical part due to a programming error. A bit in memory may flip randomly due to pure chance, heat, or cosmic rays. Something stupid may have decided to consume all memory, grinding your system to a halt. Some programs reserve memory to do a certain task, but forget to release it again when they are done (or they don't realize that they are done). This is called a memory leak, and will slowly occupy your available memory.
When you restart a system, it forgets it's current state and initializes a new, clean, known-good state. All services are started again - whether they were crashed before or not. The data is reloaded and rebuilt in memory, no matter whether it was valid or not. Since all memory got reinitialized, the memory taken up by memory leaks is now free again, ready to be used (or slowly filled up by more leaks until you restart again).
Thus, all the effects of most random or accumulating errors are gone with a restart. Sure such an error could have broken something in a way that a restart won't fix it, but that's rare. | 32 | 39 |
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CMV: Child molesters and violent sexual predators should be sentenced to death. | (Inb4 "What about an 18 year old in love with a 16 year old," obviously that doesn't count. I'm talking about true predators here. Nor am I talking about pedophiles who do not offend, rare though I believe them to be.)
I believe that child molesters and violent sexual predators should be sentenced to death, and I include people who are caught with kiddie porn in that category.
These people simply do not rehabilitate. They remain dangerous until they are dead or incapacitated. I know that some people will say that a life sentence without parole is adequate. I disagree. I don't want my tax dollars going to feed and house these people, and I don't want to run even the (admittedly) slight risk that one of them will escape.
Instead of warehousing them, and struggling to find ways to render them harmless upon release (ie chemical castration, the sex offender registry, restrictions on where they can live and work, etc), we should execute them.
None of the precautionary measures that I mentioned have proven 100% effective in keeping these people from re-offending, not even chemical castration. (Civil commitment is probably the most effective tool in that particular arsenal, but there are serious issues with its legality and I think that eventually the SCOTUS will rule it unconstitutional.)
We know that these people will reoffend upon release. We *know* this. We know that they will never stop, as long as they live. Some of them will even go on to sexually assault other inmates. It is simply irresponsible to allow these individuals to go on living. A zero-tolerance policy of execution for the first offense is the only way I can see to (a) give the victim the justice they deserve, and (b) ensure that they will never harm anyone else, ever again. | The purpose of the government is to secure the rights of the innocent. That’s the only justice the innocent deserve and need to live and pursue their own happiness. The government only punishes the guilty to achieve that end.
How do you know that every single one will reoffend upon release? Where’s your evidence? How many reoffend after spending 20 years in prison?
You can ensure they never harm an innocent through life in prison, so your point b is completely wrong.
If you kill an innocent through a mistake in trial when life in prison would have secured the rights of the innocent better, then that’s a failure for the government’s goal.
If you raise the punishment for these heinous crimes to the same as murder, or worse than murder, then it’s not clear that criminals will do it less. And you’re incentivizing these monsters to also kill and silence their victims. It’s possible that this won’t reduce the number of victims, but will instead increase the severity of the crime against the innocent. | 13 | 20 |
ELI5 : What happens when a country goes bankrupt? | Recently I just read about Sri Lanka going bankrupt so what happens next? | This is a very complex thing to describe in an ELI5. Each case will have their own specifics. Countries don't go bankrupt like companies or individuals because they cannot run out of their own currency since they can print as much of it as they choose. A "bankrupt" country is one where the government runs out of foreign currency. Foreign currency is needed to pay debt borrowed and to facilitate trade ie if a country wants to buy stuff from another country, they have to pay in a foreign currency.
What happens next is that, for most countries, the first agency that comes to their aid is the IMF. The IMF gives emergency loans to prevent the local currency from getting out of control. (It is a Monetary Fund). The IMF will help the country renegotiate their debt in return for policy changes (ie the government should not waste the money loaned to it by the IMF).
The next step is usually, but not always, the World Bank or similar. This organization might help out with longer term funding or for certain development projects undertaken by the government usually if there are poverty alleviation projects.
Internally, it is more challenging. Many (democratic) governments that go bankrupt are voted out of office. The citizens don't like governments that go broke. In the best circumstances the new government undertakes economic reform etc etc. In the worst cases, even the IMF cannot do much and the country spirals into violence and civil unrest.
In many cases, the IMF and World Bank (and other aid organizations) try to provide enough funding to avoid outcomes like mass hunger, complete collapse of the economy and/or rapid increases in poverty but that is sometimes only possible after some time in a pretty bad situation. The actual economic steps vary by country. | 152 | 239 |
Assembly Code | This may be a very general or very loaded question, but how does a computer actually convert assembly Code to binary, or more high abstraction language into assembly Code? | You should take a look at the Nand2Tetris course. A great majority of your questions would be answered doing the projects.
Assembly to machine code is straightforward - they’re 1 to 1 and based on the hardware. It’s a simple translation.
High level programming language to assembly is trickier, and depends on the hardware and the operating system. A compiler will convert the HL code to either byte code, or portable code, which is run by a virtual machine like the Java VM, or assembly, in the case of languages like C++ and Swift.
This process requires taking high level constructs like functions and classes, and converting them into imperative memory and physical structure conscious code that can be executed line by line by a processor. This requires knowing the language you are translating from, like C++, to the language you’re trying to convert to, like x86 assembly. | 15 | 20 |
eli5 the Difference between Asset and Property | Hi everyone,
Can someone please explain to me the difference between these two? I thought Asset would comprise Property but then I noticed property is split into tangible and intangible properties. I was thinking property was part of tangible assets but now I'm confused.
Thank you in advance! | A tangible asset is something you can see and feel. Property you own is a tangible asset. Intangible assets are something you cannot see. An example of an intangible asset would be where you helped someone and they owe you a favour, this is sometimes referred to as goodwill. Please note the definition of what is tangible or intangible can be different depending on circumstance, but owned property is always tangible. | 17 | 31 |
ELI5: How come modern day screens are almost impossible to see with no backlight but older consoles like the gameboy can be seen without a backlight just fine (most of the time)? | Modern LCDs use a backlight to shine through pixels of different shades/colors and display the image. Reflective LCDs like the Gameboy have a mirror backpanel to reflect ambient light through pixels instead. This is also why you can't see the screen at night without a source of light | 47 | 30 |
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ELI5 Why do courts use “not guilty” instead of innocent? | The legal system is designed to determine whether someone is guilty, not whether they are innocent. When the prosecution fails to prove guilt, that in itself is not proof of innocence. Therefore the court states that they are “not guilty” instead. Innocence is presumed. | 225 | 22 |
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ELI5: the scope of a gun is on top of the nozzle the bullet comes out of, so wouldnt the bullet hit a bit lower than where you aimed for? | The scope is adjusted to correct for this (and for bullet drop in flight) at a specific distance. If you change distances, you need to readjust the scope. The scope is not purely parallel to the barrel, otherwise the bullet would always hit low. | 21 | 17 |
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What subfields of Economics is most used in Economics Consulting work? | Can someone tell me which subfields in Economics are need or most used in Economics Consulting work? | I interviewed and got an offer at Compass Lexecon, one of the best economic consulting firms, and have talked to many seniors who work in the field.
A lot of the work in economic consulting involves dealing with competition authorities, e.g. evaluating the impact of a proposed merger, or clearing a company accused of anti-competetive behaviour.
Knowledge in econometrics, and industrial organization would be most relevant to the job. Industrial organization is normally considered it's own field if economics, but taught to undergraduates (I presume you're one) normally under a microeconomics course. It studies competition among firms in a industry, and if you've heard of Bertrand and Cournot models of competition, that's the basic models in the field.
Knowledge of econometrics is also very important, because you're using real-world data to justify whatever you're arguing. | 24 | 23 |
Coders of reddit, I want to start coding, what language should choose to learn and how should I approach it? | Dear Reddit, I want to code stuff, I think its really cool and am prepared to give up some time. The only thing I know that's related to this is translating words to binary. I am thinking of using Ruby on rails; watching tutorials, reading articles, etc. What do you think will be the easiest and help to learn other languages?
Context:
I am a 12 year old boy that wants to learn coding. Now, I know most of you will stop reading this but I think I can do this and I know I wont have a game or a website in a week. I know it will take time. I am very good at learning things, for example, last year I didn't know a thing about computers, reddit or anything but I wanted something to play games on rather than my dads shitty computer which lagged like crazy. So I got into Computer components and started to get what's what and how everything works and what to look for in my budget A few months ago I gathered enough money and built a low-medium spec gaming pc (which I'm pretty proud of). This should tell you i'm serious about this.
P.S I will throwaway this account if get too much hate. | Java is a great language to learn coding with.
* The syntax has similarities with other major languages, like C or even Javascript or Python. This will give you options for learning other languages.
* It is also quite strict on how you code, which helps you avoid learning bad habits as you start out.
* It's a compiled language, which means you have to check that your code is written properly before you can run it, which is probably helpful.
* it's multi platform, so you can use the same code on Linux, Windows or Mac, and other people's code will work just the same too.
* there are some great tools (called IDEs) like Eclipse or Netbeans which will help a lot when coding.
* it's popular so there are tons of resources when you get stuck.
* it's flexible so you can try lots of different programming projects with it, and it can interact with other languages like SQL.
* it's object - oriented which is a valuable concept to get your head round early on . | 24 | 15 |
ELI5: Why do Japenese put extra words after names in sentences sometime? | Examples being “kun” or “senpai” | Those are *honorifics*, which most often are used to show the status of the person being spoken to. In your examples, *-kun* would be used for a male friend close in age, and *senpai* would be used for a slightly older person whom you respect and admire, though the word literally refers to older siblings. | 70 | 61 |
Trying to understand Kierkegaard's Existentialism as a Christian | I recently started reading more thoroughly into Existentialist philosophy - I went to university and graduated with an analytic viewpoint, and the courses/path I followed in my studies did not much lead me towards the existential thought.
As such, I am a novice in this area, but I have some understanding of philosophy on the whole.
In reading Sartre's thoughts on Existentialism and the misconceptions people have regarding it, he mentioned that there are two types of existentialists: christian and atheist. I have found that this divide roughly comes from those who followed on from Kierkegaard (Christian) and those who followed on from Nietzsche (Atheist). (this might be an erroneous read on it, but it appears to be true from what I have seen).
I read some of Kierkegaard, particularly Fear and Trembling and Either/Or, and I have been reading criticism around him to help further my understanding, but I still have one aspect of his work that confuses me.
From what I read, it seems that he had a view that stated the world is subjective, as is existence, and that we precede our essence with existence: we have choice, and he points to numerous examples in the Bible regarding this fact: Adam was given choice to eat or not eat from the tree, and, more famously, Abraham was given choice to sacrifice his son or not. Kierkegaard seems to say that our existential nature allows us to choose, but that in choosing to follow God's will, we are therefore better for it, in the case of fully having faith, we are "great" for it.
So my question is: Doesn't this still suppose that there is a greater power at work in the world that thus precedes your existence? Your existence precedes your essence, and so you have the right to refuse, but you are worse for not accepting the will of this other essence (God), which seems contrary to the idea that your existence precedes your essence, since it adds value judgement to your decisions and thus brings you into an area similar to Socrates's Euthyphro.
Sorry if this is a long-winded way to ask the question: I wanted to provide proper context as well as fully flesh out my question so that I am (hopefully) clear about what I am trying to understand. | Sartre's existentialist maxim of "existence precedes essence" enters the scene a good century after Kierkegaard and is likely one Kierkegaard wouldn't have shared. This is not the broader sense by which Kierkegaard is described as an existentialist or proto-existentialist philosopher. | 32 | 74 |
ELI5: Why is cancer common in organs like the prostate and breasts, but is not in other organs such as the heart or stomach? | The cells in some organs work very differently than in other places. In your heart for example, the cells stop dividing very early in your life. This is why the heart is pretty much incapable of healing any injuries it gets. The cells increase in size as you age, but new ones arent created.
Since cancers come about as a result of mutations arising during cell division, it makes it extremely difficult for a tumor to form in your heart. and the majority of times it does get a tumor, its the result of a tumor somewhere else in a nearby organ spreading to it. | 23 | 26 |
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ELI5: How can a program teach itself to play a game like mario cart? | Software that learns how to play a game is usually based on a machine learning technique called 'reinforcement learning'.
The problem with learning games is that you don't immediately know wheter a certain action or turn will lead to success (Imagine Go or Chess), so you lack labels for unique actions in the game.
So you need a different approach - the reinforcement learning:
A reinforcement learning program interacts with the game in time steps. At each time, the program receives an observation which typically includes the reward (like which rank, how many points it got) It then chooses an action from the set of available actions (randomly, or based on previous rounds or actions). At the next time, you see whether this improved, decreased or held the reward.
When the programs performance is compared to that of an program that acts optimally or really good (e.g. a good human mario player), the difference in performance gives rise to the failure or 'regret'. In order to get better at the game, the program must 'reason' about the long term consequences of its actions (i.e., learn patterns that maximize the end result).
| 13 | 16 |
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