title stringlengths 0 299 | text list |
|---|---|
The light dependent and the light independent stages of photosynthesis. | [
"The light dependent stage is where the leaf take in the energy from the sun and turns it into energy it can use (ATP and NADPH) for the next step (the light independent stage).\n\nThe light independent stage is where the leaf takes that energy (the ATP and NADPH) and uses it to break apart CO2 molecules and put them back together again into glucose molecules (which is a very convenient way to store energy for later use, since ATP and NADPH don't last very long on their own and can't really be transported around the plant's body to be used by other cells)\n\nFor a much more in-depth explanation of all the steps (more appropriate for A-level biology than my ELY5 attempt) I highly recommend you watch [this](_URL_0_) video.",
"The light stage is the part where light excites electrons in the photosystems; the energy of the excited electrons is used to generate ATP and NADPH.\n\nThe light independent stage is the stage where Carbon is assimilated through the calvin cycle. This uses the energy and reducing power derived from ATP and NADPH which was generated in the light dependent stage."
] |
How do snow fences prevent snow from building up on roads? | [
"As the air moves through the slats, it has to slow down to get through. This pool of slower moving air, on the upwind side of the snow fence, is carrying some snow with it. The slower air can't haul as much snow, so it drops it there instead of dropping it in the road.\n\nOn the downwind side, the air has lower pressure, and the lower the pressure, the less it can carry, so any snow that does get through the fence has a second chance of hitting the ground.",
"It's actually the signs with the fences that does the job. They say \"no snow beyond this fence\".\nEveryone knows that snow is notorious for rule-following behavior."
] |
How do they get animals to act? | [
"They same way you teach animals anything. Treats. Lots of treats!"
] |
the medical explanation for why in Saving Private Ryan, the medic's hands were all curled up after he go shot. | [
"tendons in the hand, it takes effort from your muscles to straighten your fingers. Try it your self stretch them straight then relax and watch as they curl back towards your palms...",
"I would say the primary reason was he was acting and trying to make it appear as if he was in pain. The closest medical reason I could think of would be from breathing too fast because he was in pain and scared. Hyperventilation can cause someone to \"breathe off\" too much CO2 and experience spasms in their hands and feet called carpopedal spasms. Decorticate posturing would be another cause but would likely involve more posturing of the arms and a decrease in his mental status, since he is talking and somewhat conscious I would lean toward the hyperventilation.\n\nEdit: Clarification.",
"I can't remember where he was shot off the top of my head, but what the medic is doing is probably Decorticate posturing. Its a response of the body to extreme shock and injury to the brain/spinal cord. \n_URL_0_\n\nsource:EMT training"
] |
me: why do skunks and marijuana smell similar? | [
"The chemicals that \"give off\" the smell you are noticing belong to a group called \"terpenes\". Various terpenes are found all throughout nature and are the reason you are reminded of one item's scent by the other. I would venture a guess that a skunk and \"Skunk\" share a common or similar terpene. Limonene, for example, is common to both Cannabis and the ordinary orange peel. Source: my reddit handle is...",
"Despite these comments, I am on board with you and looking for a similar answer.",
"I don't know why people are acting like this isn't a thing they smell very similar depending on the type of pot. I have also been in people's yards who are definitely not growing or smoking pot and some gardens have the same odor so I think it's just a plant smell..",
"This was the most anticlimactic ELI5's ever.. just wanted an answer, all we got was people arguing over the smell of weed and a dead animal.",
"Yes it does! I'm beginning to think based on the opposing comments here that a percentage of the population is born with a genetic affinity for becoming detection dogs much like the ability to taste ptc paper.",
"Here's my best guess:\nTHC synthesis is facilitated by a compound called Acetyl-CoA. This chemical is found in darn near everything, but in the trichomes of cannabis it hits pretty high concentrations. Acetyl-CoA is a thiol, meaning it has a sulfur group at one end. The scent of skunks anal scent glands is also caused by thiols.\n\nIt seems likely to me that the high concentration of Acetyl-CoA (or related thioesters) necessary for THC-A biosynthesis is the culprit for the skunky smell.\n\nEDIT: /u/peppyroni brought up a good point about 'skunky' beers being caused by the same thing. That fits with my hypothesis, as the chemicals in strong beer hops (hoppy = skunky) are also synthesized with high Acetyl-CoA concentrations.",
"I agree with O.P. I don't smoke weed and living in Louisiana I've smelled plenty of skunk odor. My roommates smoke pricey weed and it smells just like skunk ass and It's terrible. In fact, even as a teenager when I smoked weed It used to always remind me of the smell of skunk. Personally, having many friends who toke up several times a day I'm excited about odorless marijuana.",
"I have no proof, but I've read somewhere that it's the same chemical compound in both. Same in 'skunky' beer. Sulphur Somethingic Somethingite is the lazy scientific name.",
"I could point you to some trees that smell like semen, but that will only deepen the mystery...",
"I totally get this. When I came to the Bay Area, that was the first time I smelled weed. I immediately thought \"skunk\". I smelled too many of those growing up in the Midwest. I don't mind weed itself, it's just a smell that doesn't exactly bring a pleasurable memory.",
"there will be times when a skunk is hit and on the side of the road where it smells unmistakably like pot.",
"[Not an exact explanation, but funny none the less.](_URL_0_)"
] |
what exactly does "Promise to pay" on a bank note means? Who exactly makes the promise to pay the barer of the bank note, and what does this pay is actually supposed to be paid in? | [
"On the vast majority of banknotes, it doesn't mean much of anything anymore. Historically, banknotes were redeemable (at times practically, at other times only theoretically) for a specific amount of precious metal (usually gold). But that hasn't been true for most currency in decades. For example, the Bank of England has this to say about the phrase on their banknotes:\n\n > The words \"I promise to pay the bearer on demand the sum of five [ten/twenty/fifty] pounds\" date from long ago when our notes represented deposits of gold. At that time, a member of the public could exchange one of our banknotes for gold to the same value. For example, a £5 note could be exchanged for five gold coins, called sovereigns. But the value of the pound has not been linked to gold for many years, so the meaning of the promise to pay has changed. Exchange into gold is no longer possible and Bank of England notes can only be exchanged for other Bank of England notes of the same face value. Public trust in the pound is now maintained by the operation of monetary policy, the objective of which is price stability.",
"Old banknotes were papers which promised that the bearer of the note could trade it at the bank for the stated value (usually in precious metal ilke silver).\n\nIf you had silver on account at a bank, instead of hauling that around, you could get a paper which said that the recipient could go and pick up the silver whenever he or she wanted. Now we get to exchange paper instead of silver.\n\nMost currencies today are central bank notes and are not backed by a physical commodity, but sometimes old language can hang around for legal and traditional reasons. I suspect that they represent a legal fiction where they still appear. Currencies that don't have this language have different traditions."
] |
why does a natural gas furnace have to be vented out of the house while the gas oven/gas cooktop does not. What happens to the exhaust gases created from the oven/cooktop? | [
"* A gas furnace burns waaaaay more fuel than a small oven or cook top. That's the reason its gasses have to be vented while for the oven the natural air exchange is good enough.\n* You use the oven only while cooking so you would be aware of problems, while a gas furnace operates automatically.\n* Ovens need to be in a room where you can ventilate (i.e. has windows that can be opened), local building regulations have all the details",
"It's all the same exhaust gases. Difference is volume. Oven is usually not on for 12 hours of the day, every day during the winter."
] |
Who is Chooter and why was she fired from Reddit? | [
"Her name is Victoria, and she was the Director of Talent at Reddit, she also coordinated all of the AMA's.\n\nWhy she was fired, we do not know. What we do know is that it's lead to a massive shit storm.\n\nYou can read more about it here: _URL_0_",
"_URL_1_\n\nU/chooter is Victoria from Reddit. She helps with all the AMAs but she just got fired and nobody knows why\n\nEDIT = spelling"
] |
how does the vibration from heavy bass during a concert or in the nightclub not harm our bodies? (Apart from eardrums) | [
"First lets put some numbers up to compare a normal and the loudest concert in the world:\n\nLess than 110 is the average maximum a train's horn can be across the world.\n\nSilenced .22 lr rifle – 116 db\n\nA night club - 118 db\n\nLighting hitting you - 120 db\n\nAverage Rock Concert - 121 db\n\nSilenced .22 pistol - 122 db\n\nA loud night club - 125 db\n\nSilenced 9mm pistol (glock) – 130 db\n\nSilenced .223 (ar-15/m4/m16) rifle – 134 db\n\nSilenced .45 acp pistol - 135 db\n\nLoudest concert in the world - 137 db\n\nSilenced 12 gauge shotgun – 137 db\n\nProbably fake readings of a night club - 152 db\n\nNon-silenced 9mm pistol (glock) – 157 db\n\nMusket - 160+ db\n\nBecause sound is merely compressed and uncompressed particles/molecules/atoms/stuff moving around. If it had enough energy to hurt you it would just be an explosion.\n\nThe loudest concert is less than 1/17th to the sound of a pistol (because db measurement is weird). Stun grenades are around 150-170 db making it on par or about 9 times louder than a rifle. In fact a grenade is measured to create 192 db. Or about 8 db away from killing with just sound alone.\n\nIf there was a crowd this would be the world's most loudest concert:\n\n_URL_0_",
"Because, pretty much by definition, *sound* waves don't carry enough energy to injure any part of your body other than your ears, which are *remarkably* sensitive.\n\nThe front row at a very loud rock concert could experience sound pressure around 120dB. Excruciatingly loud, right?\n\nBut that *perception* of \"loudness\" doesn't really tell you all that much about how much *actual pressure* is involved. The standare unit of pressure in the metric system is the pascal. One pascal is equal to a single kilogram of force, per second, applied to one square meter:\n\n* 1 pa = 1kg/m*s^2\n\nWhich is really not all that much, when you think about it. Picture approximately enough sand to fill a 20oz soda bottle. Now take that and spread it evenly over an area the size of a large beach towel. If you were lying under the towel, and that amount of sand were suddenly evenly deposited over the surface of the towel, you'd hardly notice. \n\nWell that 120dB noise represents approximately. . . 20Pa. Twenty time as much sand! If someone dumped *that* on you all at once, yeah, you'd *notice*. . . but only a bit. Hardly enough to even mildly inconvenience you if it were evenly spread out across the entire surface of the towel.\n\nThing is, we need to be talking something on the order of 7,000 Pa (7kPa) before primary blast injuries (i.e., injuries purely from the pressure of the shockwave itself as opposed to falling over, stuff falling on you, etc.) become a *possibility*. That's at *least* three hundred times as much energy as in the *loudest* rock concert. And when an energetic event causes enough energy to actually *injure* you, what you have isn't \"sound\" anymore. It's a shockwave. Sound, as such, doesn't have enough energy to hurt you. It's the shockwaves you *can't* hear that'll turn your insides to goo.",
"This makes me wonder, how can I know the amount of db I am receiving from my headset?"
] |
What are stretch marks? | [
"You have two layers of skin: the epidermis, which is the outer most layer, and the dermis that sits below that. Both of these layers can be broken down into even smaller layers. In the lower layer of the dermis lies collagen. Collagen is rubber band like strands of proteins that essentially holds up all the shit above it. Whenever the skin stretches, such as in pregnancy, weight gain, rapid growth in puberty, and the body fails to keep up with this process by not producing enough collagen to hold everything up, the existing collagen tears, and you now have a stretch mark.",
"Take a rubberband (the older the better) and stretch a small portion of it a decent amount. As you stretch it it will become lighter as small fibers are being torn apart. Upon un-stretching it that discoloration will still be there as well as the damage."
] |
The British were able to extend much control over the Chinese during the 1700s and 1800s by selling them opium. Why would the legalization of drugs in the U.S. not result in the same dire consequences for the U.S.? | [
"Because Opium was officially illegal in china for most of that period and didn't become legal until after the Second Opium War in 1858. When China started to grow their own, the British lost much of their influence.\n\nIn otherwords, the British had influence BECAUSE it was illegal.",
"This question is not about drugs so much as it is about trade imbalances: IIRC, the British opium trade grew initially because they had a severe trade imbalance over tea, which they purchased extensively from China and in payment for which China would only accept silver. To work around this, they began selling opium to the Chinese, correcting and ultimately reversing the silver trade imbalance. \n\nEven prior to the opium trade, the Chinese extremely strictly limited and controlled foreign trade, forcing all of it to go through specifically designated districts in Canton. However, despite their absolute control, the Chinese were unable to stop the importation of opium. \n\nPredictably (and as we see today), this lead to harsher and harsher crackdowns, beginning in harsh treatment of Chinese participating in the trade, and culminating in mass confiscations of opium and the like. Officially, these actions were justified morally (i.e. the normal Drug War stuff), but presumably it was also important to stop that transfer of silver out to the British. \n\nThis is effectively the state we have today – we attack the supply, and confiscate drugs from smugglers. Unfortunately for China, the drug traders had the militarily superior British Navy backing their trade, and the British viewed the drug confiscations as confiscations of their nationals' property. They retaliated, and things generally went downhill for the Chinese from there. Imagine if the South American drug exporting countries had armies powerful enough to invade the U.S. because we sank a drug lord's cigarette boat. \n\nNow, when you talk about how the British \"exerted much control over the Chinese,\" you're talking about this silver trade imbalance, the great irony being that China's citizens, through their imports, sent the nation's silver, and thus its military purchasing power, directly to the British, who used that wealth to subdue them. \n\nSo, would this (or does this) apply to the modern Drug Wars? Well, sort of. Trade imbalances like this impoverish the buyer and enrich the seller. Is that happening? Yes, but relative to the size of our overall economy, the drug economy is so small that we're not at risk economically the way the Chinese were. \n\nOn the other hand, we are hugely enriching our trading partners – not always a bad thing, but given that in this case our partners are some of the worlds' most dangerous and ruthless criminals, yeah, giving them the money to buy a small army's worth of weapons sucks. \n\nHowever, we're trading with ruthless criminals *solely* due to the fact that drugs are illegal. Were drugs legal, we'd be enriching Recreational Pharma inc. (a Delaware company), not the Pablo Escobars of the world. At worst, we'd be funding legitimate companies in other countries, something we do via legitimate foreign trade every day. \n\nStill, despite giving these bad guys the money to arm themselves, they're still not going to be strong enough to invade us – again, the relative size of the drug trade is just too small. \n\nHowever – many people *do* worry that trade imbalances weaken us and strengthen our potential enemies. It's not drugs, though – it's the much, much bigger legitimate foreign trade that could pose a threat. Consider that every single product we buy that contains either (a) electronics or (b) molded plastics is shipped directly from China (ironically, that same Canton/Guangzhou region we talked about before). \n\nIf you're worried that some foreign country with a strong military and arguably superior technical and human capabilities is going to drain huge amounts of our currency, don't worry about drugs – look at every iPhone you see on the street. \n\n*edit: Sorry, totally not LY5. Oops.",
"Just because it's decriminalized doesn't mean it can't be legislated. We could still control the trade, importation, tax, sale, etc. like we already do with alcohol and tobacco. Decriminalization doesn't mean a free-for-all."
] |
Why do aircraft need so much maintenance? | [
"Let me just throw 2 random facts out there. This is a long story short version, I'm sure someone else might post a more detailed one.\n\nThere are over 250 MILES of wiring in a 747 and over SIX MILLION parts (half of which are bolts, rivets ect).\n\nPoint being, it all needs to be inspected, and replaced or repaired as necessary. There's a lot that could go wrong. \n\nThere are also parts that have expirations, so to say. Some of these parts can only be used X amount of cycles, or X amount of flight time. There are 4 types of inspections, A, B, C, and D type checks.\n\n A check is common, gets done aprox every 125 hours or every 200-400 cycles. 20-50 man hours (remember, 20-50 mechanics means it can get done in 1 hour, which is not uncommon for a repair facility, in fact, most have hundreds). \n\nB check, done every 4-6 months, 150 man hours.\n\nC check, every 20-24 months, or by flight time determined by manufacturer, could take 1-2 weeks.\n\nD check, or HMV (heavy maintenance visit), aprox every 6 years. This is a SERIOUS inspection, tearing a lot of the plane apart to make sure it is all good. Can tank up to 50,000 man hours and can take 2 months or more depending on what needs to be done. \n\nMost planes also have progressive inspections to keep time of the plane on the ground down. So one year, they might tear the whole right wing apart and make sure it is all working, next might be the tail, so on and so forth. \n\nIt is all in the name to keep us safe. \n\n\n\nTL;DR, could be 6 million parts or more depending on the aircraft (commercial world), and just making sure they're all doing their job so planes don't fall out of the sky. \n\nCredit: graduated A+P student, about to get my A+P license (aircraft mechanic) in the very near future.",
"Every now and then if you are very unlucky you mar crash your car at something like it's maximum cruising speed, say 100kph. Hopefully, were that to happen your cars secondary safety features, crumple zones, seat belts, air bags etc would work as designed and you might be spared death or serious injury.\n\nThose safety features depend very much on the central passenger cell being both very strong and rigid.\n\nIn an airplane, there are really no secondary safety features. Even the seatbelts are really only any use in keeping you seated in the case of some heavy turbulence. As for the strong and rigid passenger cell, an airplane fuselage lacks even the structural rigidity of a coke can, scaled up.\n\nWhat's more, you will probably be crashing at something approaching 400kph, and for good measure all the fuel will probably explode as well.\n\nThe only sure way to avoid death and horrific injuries in a plane crash, is to not crash in the first place. Hence the obsession with maintenance, checklists, and fail-safe systems.\n\nWhen it is only you and your mate going to the beach, you might get away with your cars worn out brake pads, and besides what's the worst that could happen?\n\nWhen it happens to be your Grandma and 600 of the ladies from her bingo club flying back from the beach at [Teneriffe](_URL_0_), it's just not worth the risk."
] |
Deep sea exploration. What's being done and what has been done? | [
"I have a friend who is a hadal (deep deep sea) ecologist so I'll answer with what I know from talking to her. \n\nWhat do we know? very little. Her PhD dissertation is trying to figure out what is down there and what they eat - in other words, the most basic ecological questions you could possibly ask. \n\nWhat's being done? Exploration. She has been on several cruises already in the past year to different trenches where they use a variety of equipment (including submarine type robot vehicles) to collect organisms and try to see what they can find. Once they have animals they do genetic analysis and look at stomach content, etc. \n\nThere's still a lot to be done - it is a branch of science that is wide open for discovery and will really start taking off soon. It's pretty amazing and exciting really, that with everything we know about the planet and beyond we are still at such a basic level of understanding about the deepest parts of the ocean."
] |
Why is Bob a funny name to children? | [
"I don't know for certain, but I can infer several reasons:\n\n- In addition to being a palindrome, it's linguistically simplistic. There was a study conducted at the University of Alberta that suggests that one's expectations have an impact as to the subjective \"funniness\" of a word. It could be that the unusualness of the occurrence of the certain letter permutation, as well as the term's unexpected simpleness, could make it seem funnier.\n\nWikipedia page on the study: _URL_0_\n\n- I would wonder if there is a societal aspect to the humour. That is, if other kids think the name \"Bob\" is funny, then maybe I should, too. This might even be on a subconscious level, as kids are trying to fit in with their peers."
] |
Can humans be allergic to meat? | [
"Yes. After being bitten by a Lone Star tick, you can develop an [allergy to red meat.](_URL_0_) I'd bet this isn't the only situation."
] |
public key cryptography. | [
"Imagine you can only decode my message by counting to some big *secret* number. But you have no idea how big that number is. However, I tell you that in order to code the message to me, you use my public coding number of 27. Now all anyone needs to do is count the rest of the way to the really big *secret* number to read the message, but only I know how far that is so no one can decode the message but me.",
"Also [Public Key Cryptography: Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange](_URL_0_) (now with colours!) by [ArtOfTheProblem](_URL_1_)"
] |
Cloud Storage and how it's different from storing stuff on servers like we always have | [
"\"Cloud\" is just a marketing buzzword. It means servers.",
"Technically, storing your files on a server is no different than \"cloud\" storage. The phrase \"cloud\" was invented to give less computer-savvy people a way to visualize how their data is being stored. They picture some intangible thing that they can't really reach, but *exists*, and it's easier for them to conceptualize."
] |
Why do smaller dogs generally live longer than large dogs? | [
"Larger dogs have larger bodies, which require larger organs and larger bone structures. Larger organs and bone structures have to work harder and don't typically last as long. On top of that, we have traditionally used larger dogs for work, which adds \"extra mileage.\""
] |
When we jump into very cold water, what occurs in the human body that makes us feel acclimated when we're actually getting colder? | [
"your body has a process of adjusting to things as they happen so you dont become a husk of a person from sensory overload - ie putting on cologne in the morning that you wear regularly you will smell for a few minutes then it goes away, you still smell it, but your brain purposely ignores it so you can pay attention to necessary items. \nsimilarly, when you jump in to ice cold water, at first you feel your skin and muscles tighten, your stress as the coldness lowers your body temperature, but then your brain decides you are not in danger and goes back to normal functioning."
] |
Why do the Bloods and the Crips hate each other so much? | [
"It wasn't always that bad until drugs got involved. With the advent of cocaine and crack, the gangs needed to have places to sell it because it was an extremely profitable revenue stream. Eventually, those territories began to overlap and what was once minor disagreements turned into outright violence.\n\nIn short, C.R.E.A.M."
] |
Where is a virus/malware stored in a computer system, how is it removed? | [
"A virus/malware is a program like any other but it's task is to harm you computer. It is stored on your hard drive and it can be remove by deleting the file. Unfortunately, most virus execute on windows loading so you load the virus every time you launch your computer.\n\nThe tricky part is to know which files to remove since any virus will try to make their name seems like it's a windows file. There is also some virus that inject themselves into other files so you can't really find them."
] |
How come Germany isn't filled with anti-semitism, or is it? | [
"After WWI, germany was given a slap on the wrist, and longed for revenge and glory.\n\nAfter WWII, the allies realise they can't do that mistake again, they literally remove the state of Germany from the map. Little by little, the West and East Germanies are allowed to regain their independence from the Americans and Soviets respectively, to eventually rebecome a whole state in 1990.\n\nAll during that time and afterwards, the German people has been undergoing an honest remorse process, the state apologizing countless times for Germany's actions under the nazi regime, and children in school were also taught about the true historical horrors of wars, the holocaust, etc.\n\nOpenness and education, sprinkled with harsh legal sanctions for neo-nazis and any kind of hitlerite propaganda.\n\nOn the other hand, Japan, despite also clearly losing WWII has never openly talked about its massacres in china and most importantly Korea, which sadly contributes to current political, cultural and personal tensions between Japan and the Koreas.\n\n\n(This is ELI5 so this is an extremely simplified explanation)",
"Everyone here is correct, but also, there was a psychological experiment carried out that basically proved that no matter how bad you personally feel about the action, if someone in authority is telling you to do it, you could very well do it.\n\nIt was called the [Milgram Experiment](_URL_0_). Basically, the participants were asking questions to another \"participant\", and whenever they got it wrong, they would shock them with increasing voltage. There was no second participant and no shocks, it was all pre-recorded voices.\n\n65% of participants in the original experiment followed through, administering the maximum 450 volt shock, which is lethal. It is highly applicable in this situation, and gives some credence to the \"I was just following orders\" excuse.\n\nSo a lot of people didn't actually hate Jews, gays, or at least some of them didn't. They were just following orders, disconnecting themselves from it and shifting responsibility to their commanders.\n\nEDIT: Oh yeah, highly unethical experiment, and supposedly flawed because he ignored some conflicting evidence, but there it is. Enjoy! _URL_1_"
] |
How do people get addicted to prescription drugs, such as painkillers? | [
"Imagine a pie factory. This pie factory makes ten pies a day. It is a shitty pie factory. \n\nOne day the pie manager hires an additional pie maker who is awesome at making pies. He makes twenty pies a day. \n\nAfter a while The other pie makers in the factory Realise they can start slacking off and being idiots and don't really make pies anymore because they only need so many pies a day. \nThey are in a union so the pie manager can't fire them. \n\nThe new hire pie maker eventually gets fed up and quits.\n\nThe original pie makers have been slacking off so long they barely remember how to make pies, and so it takes time to get back to ten pies a day, and during that time the pie manager feels like shit has trouble sleeping and gets night sweats amongst other things. \n\nThis makes him want the new hire back. And he is willing to steal his moms tv to do it, because customers became used to purchasing 20 pies a day and that extra revenue felt SOOO good.",
"When taking painkillers, the drug makes your body release dopamine and oxytocin (pleasure causing chemicals). They also make your brain eat up all you seratonin. Seratonin regulates mood and helps regulate sleep, this is why when withdrawing, you feel depressed and restless. \n\nBut to answer the question directly: When taking these something like painkillers for an extended period of time, the painkillers act as sort of a surrogate for your mood regulating chemicals, so production and release of these chemicals is halted. When stopping the drug, your body has to \"remember\" how to make these chemicals again, and until then will \"crave\" them. \n\nMay not be 100% accurate but that's the best I could come up with.",
"they feel good\n\nwhen you feel bad, they can make you feel good\n\nwhen you feel bad all the time, you can take it all the time and feel good all the time\n\nif you keep taking it all the time, eventually you will have to keep taking it all the time to just be normal. it won't make you feel good anymore. it just makes you feel normal\n\nif you stop taking it, you get really sick\n\nsicker than the worst flu you've ever had\n\nyou can make it go away by taking more\n\nit's an endless cycle. \n\n[nuggets](_URL_0_) is a short animation that explains it much better than i could",
"They grow a tolerance. That's the shortest answer I can come up with. They take the regular dose - it isn't enough passed a certain point so they take more.",
"It's a slippery slope... I started taking a couple vikodin maybe once a month with a co-worker. Was kind of skeptical at first but once you feel the effects your sold. slowly over time we started taking them maybe twice a month, and then months later every Monday at work. After you have a taste for it, it seems like a no brainer to take a couple pills when things aren't going your way. I had a bad break up and said fuck it, and started taking them daily, because I had a near endless supply (or so I led myself to believe) Well no supply lasts forever so I ended up running out and thought I was strong enough to deal with the dreaded withdrawals I had heard about. Well, let me tell you, no one can express how absolutely terrible opiate withdrawals are and make you understand until you live it. The physical withdrawals alone might be tolerable (still torture) if it weren't for the crippling psychological effects. You feel like a rat in a cage that's being slowly lowered into boiling water. Your fight or flight system is in full swing because your brain is trying to convince you to get more opiates regardless the consequences because it is telling you that you are dying. I caved of course and found more opiates, and these happened to be much stronger. At first i would take little bits to stave off withdrawal, but it gets to a point where life is so terrible that you have to use more. This was just the beginning of my addiction. Was probably 7-8 years ago. eventually progressed to shooting heroin (promised myself I would never try heroin and i promised myself i would never inject anything. So much for that) I started the heroin in the same way my addiction manifested in the first place. Too depressed and done with life to care about the consequences. You could compare it to whatever makes you happy in life; picture whatever that is was taken away, and now you have to live life depressed and without purpose. The drug steals your ability to experience happiness, and sometimes any emotion at all if your not on it. It makes life this endless chore of finding a way to experience pleasure one more time before inevitably you take a hit thats too big and you are released from your self-constructed hell. The real struggle for me is not finding that option unappealing.\n\nTL;DR Everyone would like to think they aren't a cliche' and can handle heavy drug use, but it's a lot more insidious than that, and will change how you reason with yourself."
] |
Why is my muscle memory so much better than my memory for other things? | [
"How much effort did you make in learning that instrument? Months, years? How much effort did you make in remember those names? Probably not much."
] |
How do companies continue for years without ever making a profit? | [
"The value of a company and whether investors want to be involved is not based on current earnings or profitability, but instead on what they think it will eventually be worth. \n\nCompanies called Venture Capitalist specialize in providing seed money to these companies while they are just starting out. This money keeps the company going during the early years when there is little or no income. Usually in return they get a piece of the company and make out like bandits if the company become the next big thing. Most of the time, the bet fails, but when they hit, they hit big."
] |
If an AC unit says it is 900w, what is the time frame in which it uses that much energy? | [
"A Watt is a complex unit, like a Newton. \n\nA Watt is actually a measure that includes time. \n\nOne Watt is equal to one joule per second. \n\nSo 900 watts means 900 joules per second.",
"A Watt is a unit of power. In physics, power and energy are two separate, but related, concepts. Energy can be thought of as the ability to do work (in this case, cooling your room). Power describes how fast that work is happening, and can be expressed as work per time, analogous to the way that speed is expressed as distance traveled per time. Asking how much energy an AC unit uses at 900W is like asking how far a car will go at 60 MPH. Electrical energy usage is usually billed by the kilowatt-hour (kWh). A kilowatt-hour is the amount of energy that is used to do work at 1 kilowatt for 1 hour (1 kW x 1 hr = 1 kWh). Since power is energy per time, when you multiply a unit of power by a time, you get energy again. To figure out how much energy your AC unit uses, you just need to multiply the power (900W or 0.9 kW) by the time that the unit is running for.",
"1 hour. *technically* speaking, it will draw 900W 'constantly' or every second. However, for your power bill's purposes, it will draw .9 kWh every hour.",
"Continously. Watts measure a rate of energy transfer (power), not the sum amount of energy. \n\nThink of it like pumping gas into your car. Watts would be the speed of the pump (the gallons per minute the pump is transferring) While the gallons in the tank are the amount of the energy transferred. It wouldn't make sense to ask how much gas is in 5 gallons per minute, but it would make sense to ask how much gas is in the tank. \n\nIn electricity, that quantity is usually measured in kilowatt hours (kwh), or the amount of energy transferred in 1 hour at a rate of 1kw. \n\n1kw for 1 hour equals 1 kwh. 2kw for a half hour also equals 1 kwh, because it is transfering energy twice as fast. \n\nFor fun, 900w is same rate of energy transfer as 0.0273 gallons of gasoline per hour (because gasoline has a set quantity of stored energy)",
"Whenever it's running at full power draw. It's like asking in what time frame does a 500 hp muscle car use 500 horsepower?\n\nLet's say it's running on a battery that can output 7 kiloWatts(KW) and store 14 kiloWatt-hours(kWh). That denotes a battery that can output at most 7,000 watts for 2 hours(7 KW x 2 h = 14 kWh).\n\nIn this case, the AC draws up to 900 watts when running, which might be five hours a day, so it would consume 4.5 kWh a day. The battery could sustain that for about three days.\n\nUsing an electric car as an example, an electric car might average 3.2 miles per KWh, but its motors will be rated at 500 kW. The 500 kW is equivalent to horsepower that allows it to accelerate or pull heavy loads, whereas kWh represents how far it can go.",
"The time frame is one second. \n\nWatt is not a unit of energy, rather: it represents the rate at which energy is transferred. \n\nIts time unit base is 1 second, and energy unit base is one Joule, so if one Watt is the consumption rate, then it means every second, one Joule of energy is transferred (in this case used up by the appliance). \n\nSo if your appliance is using 900 Watts, it is consuming 900 Joules of energy per second."
] |
Why does it seem that there are always massive breakthroughs in finding a cure for cancer, then we never hear about it again or It seems we never actually get any closer? | [
"Because the media is very very very very bad at properly reporting scientific breakthroughs.\n\nMeaning they hype up something gigantically, taking it out of context, presenting it as if it is already ready to be used, but in reality that is never how it goes. Usually what happens is \n\n1. someone does research, realises that cell X is present in nearly all early stages of cancer Y, and that maybe if we find a way to detect cell X, we can find cancer Y when it is still easy to treat.\n2. a paper is written about this, indicating that caution is still needed, tests are still in progress etc etc.\n3. Media reports it as AMAZING NEW CANCER BREAKTHROUGH, WE CAN NOW DETECT CANCER EARLY.\n4. Scientist cries and drinks.",
"There are many types of cancer; even, say, \"lung cancer\" is better thought of as several different diseases. \n\nWe *have* effectively cured some types of cancer--the 5-year survival for skin melanoma, prostate cancer, thyroid cancer, and some other types are quite high, and some subtypes of cancer are trivial at this point. \n\nFor other cancers, we *do* get closer--unsurvivable cancers become occasionally survivable, and so on.\n\nAll of these improvements start out as a promising result on a few patients. Many of these promising therapies do not play out--a drug that cures 8 of 10 patients may frustratingly fail to do anything when tested in 80 patients.\n\nBut the media loves a good story. \"Cure for cancer found\" gets a lot more clicks than \"Promising but unproven improved treatment for one kind of cancer found.\"",
"Researcher comes up with a discovery. That discovery is super promising and has great potential. Then they need to spend years testing it, going through multiple trials and experiments to ensure that it's repeatable, that it's safe, that there aren't side effects, that it actually does what that researcher hopes it does. \n\nThat takes years. And often that promising breakthrough didn't pan out once it went through trials. That amazing cure turns out to not be that effective in practice. That new procedure turns out to be too risky for use on most patients. \n\nProgress is made, but slowly, and not with a huge celebration but with doctors and researchers getting new tools to work with. The general public doesn't get told about every new development in our war against cancer. Most of it is esoteric and not exciting. \"New drug that is 5% more effective\" is great, saves tons of lives, but isn't going to get clickbait headlines.",
"In addition to all of the excellent points made by the other posters here, I'd also suggest that the reason you don't hear much about all the various treatments for cancers is that you don't have cancer. If you had an interest beyond the casual observer, such as needing the treatment, you'd probably know a lot more about them.\n\nThat's more of a selection bias than anything else though.",
"The news sensationalises the results of scientific studies, partly because the actual results/implications are too minor or subtle to clearly portray to laymen and partly because they're businesses and it's in their interests to draw as many views as possible, which they can do by using exaggerated headlines. Note that you'll see these stories far more from CNN and Fox than from the BBC or ABC (as in Australian cousin to the BBC, not the US TV channel), who have no profit motive.\n\nThe reality of scientific research is that the huge \"EUREKA!\" moments are very rare, and that scientific work is done over many years by thousands of people each discovering small details and building on the work and results of others. This doesn't make for easy attention-grabbing headlines. Progress is being made on cancer treatments, but each individual step is on the lines of \"by combining this and that, 20% of rodent test subjects had a reduction in tumour size of this specific cancer; these results seem promising and future studies should test on humans.\" Then someone else will come along and say \"Hmm, if that combination did this for the liver, could we use the same principles but with *this* to work on the colon?\", and test that, and so on. But you don't make money by running \"1/5 OF MICE HAVE REDUCTION IN TUMOUR SIZE WITH NEW TREATMENT: IF IT WORKS ON HUMANS, MIGHT EXTEND LIFE OF SOME LIVER-CANCER PATIENTS NOT RESPONSIVE TO CHEMOTHERAPY\" as the lead story on your TV news show. You make money with \"SCIENTISTS DESTROY CANCER CELLS\"."
] |
Why don't we wake ourselves up when sleeping in an uncomfortable position? | [
"When your brain falls asleep your body is flooded with chemicals that both numb and paralyze muscles, so yeah, you dont actually feel it until you wake up."
] |
Why when I get sick does only a single nostril get clogged? | [
"contrary to popular belief, your nose doesn't get clogged with snot, it gets clogged by the blood vessels expanding...so blowing your nose a lot does not clear it. I always thought laying on one side relived pressure on the other allowing me to have at least one working nostril. Failing that, lying on my back but in a slight sitting up position and breathing through my mouth in a controlled fashion brings my heart rate down and usually relieves some of the blocking....but I agree it's a pain when trying to sleep",
"Short answer: humans have a [nasal cycle](_URL_0_) where one side gets partially congested, then switches. When you're sick, the congested side is swollen and closes more than usual, but the cycle remains."
] |
Why do many songs have the same four chord progression? | [
"It's mostly *Western* music that does this, because of our scale-system. Different cultures do different things, but *we* have identified [12 'primary sounds'](_URL_1_) on which to base our music. \n\nWhy 12? Why not 20? Or 50? That's to do with how well the human ear can distinguish between frequencies. The system isn't 100% perfect, but was 'close enough' for most people, and became the standard.\n\nEach tone has its associated chords. For example, if we decide that the first tone is C, then a 'C Major Chord' (by definition) must be comprised of [C, E, and G](_URL_0_).\n\nNotice, that you *already* have the note 'G' in a C Chord. So, when you're looking for a chord to transition to, it makes logical sense that you'd choose a G Chord, because you're already using one of the central notes. To go to something else (e.g.: B major, made of B, D#, F#) would be quite jarring, because your brain isn't 'prepared' for any of those notes. Or a more complicated example: A major (A, C#, E). Yes, this chord has the note 'E' in common, so why wouldn't you use it? Because the other note (C#) is in direct contrast with the root chord (C). So, by dint of chordal-structure, there are some combinations that just don't work as well.\n\nSo yes, partly it's conditioning. But there's also a real reason why some chords (the 'famous 4 chords') are used so frequently.",
"IIRC there have been scientists who have done studies that said people like to hear things that are familiar. Like stuff they've heard before. It triggers a dopamine reaction. Dopamine is a chemical in your brain that makes you happy. So when you hear that 4-chord progression, it sounds subconsciously familiar and therefore you like it, even if it's in a song you've never heard before. It sounds \"good\" to you and it sounds \"good\" to the artist when they made it. \n\nNow obviously it's more complicated than that, but that's basically my understanding of why we have so many 4-chord songs."
] |
Why do people go to see Operas in languages they aren't fluent in? | [
"Why do a lot of russians enjoy AC/DC even though they can't speak english? Because music is universal. Anyone can listen to music, and vocals are an instrument. All part of the piece.",
"The music is beautiful, and a translation is always available - usually projected onto a screen, but if not, available in program notes.\n\nIt's like watching a movie with subtitles.\n\nMoves can be dubbed, though it's hard to do well.\n\nYou can't translate something without needing to also change some of the music, which is why people don't usually do that."
] |
What causes the heartache you feel in your stomach/chest when you love someone and miss them? | [
"subtle physical changes you get, but don't notice. changes in breathing, digestion, muscle tension, etc. The odd sensation is a result of a bit of confusion. All the symptoms you get are features of the sympathetic nervous system. So the activity of the sympathetic nervous system ends up triggering the.. sympathetic nervous system. This all happens because it does not recognize a difference between physical and emotional pain.\n\nBut anyway. the largest part of this system is the vagus nerve. That is what's transmitting the 'heartache' feeling. You'll notice you're not just feeling it in those couple areas. You'll feel it in your throat, in your jaw.. _URL_0_ everywhere along this path, and specifically along that path and nowhere else.\n\nWhy does all this happen? We don't know. But we do know whats physically happening.",
"I think it's just anxiety. Separation anxiety is mostly thought of in regard to kids from their parents or dogs from their owners, but no reason you couldn't get it from being apart from a loved one. \n\nWhat Are the Symptoms of an Anxiety Disorder?\n\nSymptoms vary depending on the type of anxiety disorder, but general symptoms include:\n\n•Feelings of panic, fear, and uneasiness\n\n•Problems sleeping\n\n•Cold or sweaty hands and/or feet\n\n•Shortness of breath\n\n• Heart palpitations \n\n•An inability to be still and calm\n\n• Dry mouth \n\n•Numbness or tingling in the hands or feet\n• Nausea \n\n•Muscle tension\n\n• Dizziness \n\n\n_URL_1_",
"In French, instead of saying \"I love you\" to someone, people say \"Tu se manques\". It means \"you are missing from me\". I felt compelled to share this because I believe it describes your feeling very perfectly. (And Sablemint did an awesome job explaining your actual questions.) I love this because instead of telling someone that you love them as they leave, or hang up the phone, etc., you express to them that their absence from your life affects you. Very poetic."
] |
If someone were born in Hawaii, before its annexation into the US, could they run for President of the United States? | [
"It is actually (probably) a misconception that someone must be born in the US to become President. The Constitution states that you must be a \"natural born citizen.\" Note, this is not the same as a \"native born citizen.\" What it probably means is that only those people who were American citizens at birth may be eligible to be President. You can be a \"natural born citizen\" even if born outside the US.\n\nNow the reason I said \"probably\" in the first sentence is because this specific question has never actually been raised before the Supreme Court; we actually don't have a for sure answer. Still, IMO, the language clearly implies that only people born with American citizenship (i.e. never had to \"naturalize\") may become President. \n\nI am attorney, fwiw"
] |
How will people feed and clothe themselves after all minimum-wage jobs are automated? | [
"This doesn't answer your question but this is the premise of Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano which you might enjoy. It is satire and written in the 50s so it's not in any way realistic but it is entertaining.",
"I think it is unlikely that we will ever reach a place where all machines can do everything better than people can, and where new technology ceases to create new employment. \n\nIf you look at some examples:\n\n* Cars replaced the horse-and-buggy. The support industry for all of those horses (stables, feed, vets, drivers, coachmen, etc) died out, but we got car mechanics, manufacturing, car washes, gas stations, car salesmen, auto insurance, etc.\n\n* Central heating replaced fireplaces. Instead of chimney sweeps and wood-delivery, we now have repairmen, salesmen, filters, parts, etc\n\n* Coffee creation has become (mostly) automated, but people still pay several dollars more in order to have a barista make it, because of the variety, customization, and quality difference.\n\nYes, some innovations and automations destroy far more jobs than they create, but others do the opposite. As technology allows for more customization [how many options for a cell phone (and stores designed to sell them to you) are available compared to stores that exclusively sold land-line handsets?] and becomes more complex (it's possible to be an expert on some of the things you buy, but how many people are experts on all of it?), demand for new specialists rises. Being a \"specialist\" here doesn't even mean \"has years of schooling\" as much as it does \"went through a week of training that the customers don't have time to go through for everything they want to purchase.\"\n\nIn addition, automation is all about efficiency. For the most part, the technology that automates human jobs comes along and replaces the very oldest of jobs still in circulation. New discoveries aren't automatically automated; it's the oldest, most common, and widest-spread procedures that are replaced first. Printing became automated when so many people wanted printed material that it became inefficient to have humans write out each word. It's possible for people to work to invent automation for rarer procedures/jobs, but why spend the time? People are everywhere, so frequently they *are* the least resource-intensive way to do a job. They're only replaced when a machine becomes the more affordable option, which, given manufacturing costs, repairs, replacements (Apple products aren't the only machines that cycle every two years), electricity, cooling, and maintenance, isn't always the case.\n\nBasically, society has historically adapted to technological improvements by inventing even more technological improvements. There's often a panic/lag/employment dip while one industry is dying out, but then there's a boost as the replacement industry comes into its own (the publishing industry, brick-and-mortar stores, and cable companies are examples of today's fading industries, but even now they're branching out and adapting by moving online, specializing, and coming up with new ways to stay relevant). Often, governments will \"pad\" failing industries to keep the economy on an even keel, but that's a bigger issue.",
"I honestly don't know what the actual solution will be when that problem arises, but personally I hope it'll take the form of a welfare state in which those that don't want to work aren't forced to and a lot more emphasis is put onto art and entertainment. Doubt there would ever be a problem with not having enough people to do the few jobs that are left because there are always those that want to contribute or either live beyond what a standard welfare check could provide. Personally I don't think that eduction will be nearly as expensive or strenuous as you seem to be implying. I'm not an educated person but I completely understand how a computer works, how to fix one, how to take one apart and reassemble it, and even basic programming; my mother, who didn't grow up with computers, barely understands how to create a word document. As the technology becomes more commonplace younger generations will have a better grasp of how it works.\n\nGiven the political climate of our age I can totally see why you think uneducated people will be seen as useless, but honestly by the time this problem arises I really hope that the world has made strides toward helping their fellow man instead of fulfilling the needs of the powerful.",
"People always seem to forget that society has been through revolutionary changes before. Yes, automation will take away some unskilled (and possibly skilled) labor, but there will always be jobs that will take its place. society never functions as a vacuum, there will always be enterprising people who look to make a buck off of cheep labor and desperate situations.\n\nThe worst thing that could happen is the government stepping in and creating a dependence on them with no incentive to rise above and overcome this shortcoming. \n\nHuman being will never be redundant because we are the primary objective so to say. We look out for our own self interests (many times to a fault). Our critical thinking skills and interests of self-preservation mean that a large percentage of the population will \"find a way to make it work\". The quality of life might not be the same though...\n\nAnd if I can add my own personal side note on this idea.\n\nIf a fully functioning and capable human being finds themselves in a situation like you describe where they become \"obsolete\" and they look to everyone else to make their situation better but take no personal responsibility to improve their situation, then I say let society move on without them...",
"To avoid widespread poverty, society will have to create enough jobs in new industry to accommodate advancements in technology, i.e. the Internet, Data Mining, etc., or implement a widespread welfare program decoupling a living wage from usefulness to the work force.",
"Here is a fine and fun concept tackling the problem of automation takenerrjorbs: _URL_0_"
] |
Christian mystics | [
"TL:DR Faith is a funny thing. Miracles are performed and if you are not agreeing to it, it's your faith in the miracle that led to it's failure. Ergo, any miracle you don't see is the result in your lack of faith. You weren't changed by your deity? You didn't believe enough. To deny change means you are not worthy.\n\nPersonal experience, vote as you will.\n\nMy mother was a strong believer in faith healing. Even after I pulled scripture to show her that strong walkers of the faith also got sick to an almost fatal degree, she still believed that lack of faith was directly attributed to her failing health.\n\nWent to a faith healing when visiting her, it was Sunday. The preacher pulled me to the front to witness the power of faith in healing as he told a woman with obvious back injuries (which I shared and knew intimately) that the cause of her pain was that her legs were not the same length (as I watched the pastor's wife slide her thumb under the \"patient's\" shoe and pull her shoe out. I looked at his wife, then him, then waved my hand and pushed her shoe back where it belonged.\n\nThey made a mighty show, professing God's healing power and claiming her healed. I whispered to the patient she needed to have back surgery.",
"That's not the same as [Christian Mysticism](_URL_2_), which is a more traditional thing, often related to monastic life - ie a guy living in a cave on his own in the 3rd century in Egypt. As the link shows, that's a hell of an abridged synopsis on my part. \n\nThe snake handlers and whatnot work their congregation into a state of [religious ecstasy](_URL_1_). They use techniques that get the audience out of a 'rational' space and into an 'emotional' one. Rhythmic, fast-paced singing/music, energetic preaching ... they're also in a crowd, so their inhibitions are lowered : it turns people to jelly. They're already susceptible to be 'open' to the message, so their natural defences are even lower and they fall 'into' it. It's not dissimilar to voodoo drumming. \n\nWhat is interesting is ... this is not dissimilar to meditation, it's just that the method is different - but in such a ceremony there could be a very real shift in brainwave oscillation that changes the way people are perceiving the world. _URL_0_",
"\"Speaking in tongues\" (glossolalia) like you see in modern pentecostal churches is simply a learned behavior that mimics the speaker's native speech patterns but doesn't contain enough internal structure to give it meaning. Just an odd thing people do when they get together, apparently."
] |
What happens to the 3 minutes and 55.9 seconds in a day? | [
"23 hours and 56 minutes is the amount of time it takes the Earth to make one rotation around its axis. However, during that time, Earth also makes about 1/365 of a revolution around the Sun. This means that Earth needs to rotate around its axis for 4 more minutes in order to orient itself relative to the Sun.\n\n[This image explains it](_URL_0_). It takes 23 hours and 56 minutes for Earth to get from #1 to #2, but a person standing where the red arrow is pointing will no longer be directly under the Sun. It takes 4 more minutes for Earth to get from #2 to #3, where the point where the red arrow is pointing will again be directly under the Sun.",
"That's the time it takes for the earth to turn through 360 degrees. But in that time it has also moved through about 1 degree of its orbit. So it has to turn another degree or so to get the same bit of the earth pointing at the sun again, and that brings the solar day up to 24 hours."
] |
Since different animals on different islands and continents evolve different traits, why is it that fish such as a bass in a lake that is not near a river have not evolved differently in Georgia versus Minnesota | [
"The Georgian fish likely has only been isolated from the population in Minnesota for a short time (geologically speaking). If you were to leave one population of bass in a lake in Georgia and another in Minnesota and leave them isolated for a very long time, they will, indeed, diverge into different species.",
"Are you sure that they haven't evolved some slightly different traits? It may not be noticeable to us, but an ichthyologist might be able to tell the difference between a Georgian and Minnesotan bass. Or the drift could have only occurred on the genetic level, not exhibiting in noticeable physical features."
] |
Why is cut faster than copy on a PC? | [
"You may imagine that cutting requires additional time to write zeroes to the old places on the disk aside from writing in the ones to the new places, rather than copying which just writes the ones, and as such cutting will take additional time because it's actually a copy-first, then-delete process.\n\nHowever, that is untrue. Most modern OSes do it by a little bit of cheating. Rather, information about the placement of all files on disk is written to this giant file called the index; when you copy files, indeed there is physical writing done on the new spots and the index is updated to tell the filesystem that now it has a new file at the new spots. However when you cut and paste files, no physical writing is done; simply the index is updated to tell it that the file now should be known by another name (its full path with the new directory). On our file explorer interface, it looks like the file has really \"moved\" but actually it's just our filesystem showing it at a different directory, no physical change on the disk level has been made. It's thus a much more efficient and shorter process than copying. \n\nIf you have heard people talk about drive fragmentation, this is how it happens over time when files within the same directory are actually dispersed across different parts of the physical hard disk."
] |
What exactly happens in the eye of a storm? | [
"in the eve of the storm it is very calm, not much wind is present due to wind rotating around the eye not past it. if you are able to stay in the eye you will be completely safe. the wind spirals upwards due to convection(pressure difference) around the eye."
] |
If illegal drugs were made legal, what would happen to drug cartels and other criminal gangs? | [
"They would probably diminish since the law would protect those doing things legally. They would probably get involved in other criminal things like blackmail and extortion.",
"There would still be some drug business for them, as there will always be a black market. Going though completely legal channels means paying taxes and tariffs, so an organization that can avoid those can sell a cheaper product with a higher profit margin. \n\nIn Colorado there are still people growing and selling pot illegally to avoid the ~25% taxes at the retail level. Hell, there's even a black market for maple syrup. \n\nThat being said, they will still feel the pinch as they lose a TON of money to legal trade. That's one of the biggest arguments in favor of legalization. The question becomes where they will turn for money after that, and I imagine most of them already have other ways to make money.",
"The same thing that happened to gangsters when we legalized gambling. Their influence diminishes and they pursue other means of generating revenue.",
"Last year the Cartels affected the Lime prices by holding up shipping yards.\nOur sports arenas refused to buy limes for months. Mexican beer just tasted like regular beer. It was the worst.\n\nEdit: spelling, added a source per request.\n\nSOURCE:\n[It was really two years ago, not one](_URL_0_)",
"One note for all the \"They will move on to other things.\" Posts.\n\nThey are currently not doing as much of the \"other things\" because it is less profitable. Unless they stumble onto a gold mine, they will definitely be hurt and will likely shrink because of the loss of profit.",
"Organized crime is always involved in things that are illegal. Much of that would remain without drugs. But drugs are their most lucrative source of money. With a large flow of money and profit, under basic economics, that attracts a lot more interest, which leads to more men, and then more competition for that profit. \n\nSo if drugs were made legal, the cartels would remain involved in their other illegal activities: prostitution, extortion, kidnapping, numbers games, illegal gambling. But they would employ much less people, and have less money for it (because they are already involved in those activities anyway). It would significantly shrink the amount of black market activity. A drug dealer or smuggler suddenly becomes a regular store clerk at a pot shop and a regular truck driver. Illegal high risk / high reward jobs become safe, mundane, and legal jobs.",
"I doubt they will legalize meth or some of the stranger drugs. You still have plenty of people that do those. Their profits will be hurting though. And you have hookers, kidnapping, ext",
"I was watching some documentary about the legalization of marijuana in Colorado, and one point they brought up is that there are still people illegally growing and selling the plants. People still buy it illegally because of a few reasons, notably its cheaper cause its not taxed and you don't need to go to the store during its hours. I'd assume if other drugs were also legalized then the cartels would take a hit, but I'm not sure how much. But they don't exist simply to move drugs, they'll do whatever they can to make money, so as others have said they'd move on to other business plans, like kidnapping or extortion.",
"They would move to prostitution or gambling or kidnapping for ransom. They cannot hope to compete with US agribusiness when it comes to growing relatively hearty plants, like pot, opium, or coca.\n\nIt might not be a good thing, all those stoned folks, but it would be a very bad day to be a druglord.",
"The Mexian Cartel for example, is being forced to diversify like many businesses threatened by competition. \n\nHere's an article from last year about how the legalization of marijuana in the US has affected the Mexican Cartel: _URL_2_\n\n\"U.S. Border Patrol has been seizing steadily smaller quantities of the drug, from 2.5 million pounds in 2011 to 1.9 million pounds in 2014. Mexico’s army has noted an even steeper decline, confiscating 664 tons of cannabis in 2014, a drop of 32% compared to year before.\"\n\n\"A key problem is that cartels have diversified to a portfolio of other crimes, from sex trafficking to stealing crude oil from Mexican pipelines. They also make billions smuggling hard drugs. Seizures of both heroin and crystal meth on the U.S.-Mexico border have gone up as those of marijuana have sunk, according to U.S. Homeland Security, with agents nabbing a record 34,840 pounds of meth in 2014.\"\n\nTL;DR: Mexican Cartel as an example is selling less weed but diversified into other crimes like sex trafficking. They're also selling more meth and heroin. \n\nEdit: Forgot this article from 2012 predicting the decline in weed revenue for the Mexican Cartel. _URL_2_",
"They'd wither. Many would go out of business entirely, and the rest would become much smaller operations, probably focusing on another vice like prostitution or going the extortion route. Drugs are their #1 cash flow, far and away, and legalizing would be like cutting off their oxygen.",
"Well keep in mind that despite being legal, there is still a black market for cigarettes. This is especially true in places where cigarettes are very expensive.",
"They'd find some other way to be a blight on society.\n\nMy guess is that they'd get into the mobile phone and data plan market.",
"If you want a realistic well articulated answer to this question, and to the impact on \"the war on drugs\", read this book; \n\n\"Chasing the Scream, the first and last days of the war on drugs\" by Johann Hari.\n\nConsider what happened in the US under alcohol prohibition in the 1930's and the damage it caused, and then what happened after alcohol prohibition ended. The smartest thing western society could do would be to end the drug wars and legalize drug use. It sounds counter intuitive, but considering the human cost of the actual war on drugs far out paces the impact of drugs themselves, it becomes self evident. Lets stop destroying lives and families for some misguided sense of arrogant morality.\n\nI can't do this argument justice in a readit post. Read the book! Educate yourself.",
"If that happens they will literally have to close shop and move on to 'pursue other interests' (I don't want to imagine which ones those would be). But yeah the drug business would be dead. \n\nThe so called 'war on drugs' cannot be won with weapons, we either have to make it legal and regulate it, or we need to stop buying every single gram of drug produced in the Western Hemisphere.",
"expand if they are not already involved into extortion/kidnapping, human trafficking, prostitution, protection rackets. Even if drugs are made legal the cartels/drug gangs go away, if anything it might cause an increase their market penetration or diversify into areas that are much worse than the drug trade.",
"Most likely the same thing that happened with alcohol. You go buy it peacefully and legally for a fraction of what people are paying today.\n\nThe cartels and gangs would move into another business or deal in drugs that were still illegal.",
"they wouldn't go away, they would go into other ventures (weapons, sex work, human trafficking, etc). Just like the organized crime didn't just go away after prohibition.",
"They legalised cannabis in Colorado and crime dropped across the board.\n\nSome would keep using dealers through habit but... Not many.",
"They would probably go legit, since the law would benefit their business venture and they don't have to enforce it anymore."
] |
why 4G doesn't cover as much area as 3G | [
"4G typically runs at a higher frequency than 3G. This means that it can pack in more data, but it also means that it travels less distance before the signal degrades. \n\nThis is why you hear low-end bass coming from the car driving down the street, but you can't always hear the lyrics. The lower frequencies travel through material (the car, air, your door) better than higher frequencies.",
"4G/LTE is at a higher frequency, higher frequencies have less range and less penetrating power."
] |
Why are some plants like spinach edible but plants like grass are not? | [
"you can eat grass...you probably just wouldn't like it and wouldn't get many nutrients out of it!",
"The reason you get no nutrition from grass is because the carbon skeleton that makes up cellulose (the stringy, fiber-y stuff that makes up plants) cannot me digested by humans. Humans are unable to break down cellulose because we lack a specific enzyme to do so. Cows on the other hand, do have this enzyme and are able to break down cellulose into glucose, and therefore obtain energy from ingesting cellulose. Spinach and other leafy vegetables are also mainly cellulose, but they are also generally rich in vitamins and minerals and are tasty (to some). \n\nCellulose in your diet it still important, as that is what people are talking about when they say fiber is good for you. It is definitely good for you, but you get no nutrition from it. As to why it's good for you, that's a whole other can of worms and feel free to ask if you are interested.",
"Edible vs nutritious. Some plants are toxic and filled with poison. Some like grass need a really long long digestion time that our tums are not made for. Spinach and lettuce etc are less fibrous and break down easily with our teeth and digestive systems allowing you to get the nutritional value you require from it."
] |
What happens to animal species if a wall was build between the U.S and mexico Border? | [
"They don't go across. Any animals on one side will be stuck on that side. If they normally migrate across the border, they will no longer be able to."
] |
Gravity proportional to mass and volume | [
"The total gravity created by an object is proportion to its mass. No other variables (such as volume) are needed.\n\nThe *effect* of that gravity on a second object (such as you, or a satellite) depends also on the second object's mass, and of course the distance.",
"If you want gravitational force you use the Gravitational constant (in other comments, it's look-up-able), the mass of the two objects (M and m) and the distance between the two (r) in the form F = GMm/r^2. \n \nThis involves a lot of calc but works really well when the objects are spherical or are points. The earth and the moon are roughly spheres and people are small enough to be considered points. \n \nIf you want to know the Gravitational field at a point, you just use g = GM/r^2, this gets you gravity at that point, this is the acceleration that would be applied to some mass at that height. If you pop in numbers for G M and r, you'll see that g at earth's sea level is about 9.81 m/s^2",
"ELI5 style. Mass and your distance to the centre of the mass determine the force of gravity. But they are not equal. Changes in distance have way more effect on gravitational force than mass does(that's the r^2 people have been mentioning in other comments). So having half the mass and half the distance to the centre don't cancel out, you get twice the gravitational force, because distance is counted twice. The moon is much less massive than the earth, but it's surface is closer to the centre of the moon than earth's surface is to its centre. So gravity doesn't decrease as much as you'd think by looking at mass alone."
] |
What is the gross (usually green or white) stuff caked onto drinking fountains, and why can't they do a better job cleaning it off? | [
"Mineral deposits from the water/pipes\n\nIt's in the water anyways, so its not like its dangerous or toxic.\n\nUnless you're living in the USA, then it's lead and is dangerous and toxic.\n\nAlso look up CLR (calcium, lime, rust) cleaner. \n\nThat \"gross stuff\" is why CLR exists."
] |
Why after a perfect nights sleep why do some people find it so hard to get out of bed and are still tired while other people would be full of energy and find it easier to get up | [
"Circadian rhythm could be part of it. \n\nSome people fall asleep and wake naturally at different times than our jobs / commitments make us wake up. \n\nNaturally, i'll fall asleep about 4am, wake about 11/12. That's my body clock. \n\nAny sleep that doesn't mesh with those times is always less productive. \n\nHow long are you actually asleep for? \nDo you have any other medical issues?\n\nEither way, speaking to a doc isn't a bad idea, as there could be many reasons, and sleep is very important. You could be sleep walking, having trouble getting into deep sleep, or have sleep apnea.",
"Because there are other factors like the persons' physical and mental health. You might also want to be checked for Sleep Apnea, especially if you wake up with a sore throat or partners complain you snore."
] |
Why do we lose our memories of what we got up to when highly drunk? | [
"Someone actually told me the answer to this but I was highly drunk at the time and don't remember",
"When your parents drink a lot of that nasty tasting stuff they call alcohol it messes around with how their bodies work in a lot of different ways. \n\nOne of these ways is in their brain, think about your favorite toy box, when your want to put a toy in your toy box you have to do these steps:\n\n1. Pick up the toy\n2. Walk to the toy box\n3. Open it and put your toy inside\n\nBUT you can only put your toys inside when your mum is their as she has the key to your toy box. \n\nNow imagine your toys are actually memories, whenever you brain wants to store a memory it has to the same steps:\n\n1. It has receptors (like your hands) they pick up the memory.\n2. Imagine then your legs are things called 'steroids' they move the memory to the memory box\n3. Finally neurons will fire telling your brain to put the memory in the box (imagine the neurons are you actually putting the toy in your box)\n\nNormally you'll always have your mum their to open the toy box. But if for some reason you're a drunk five year old, your mum won't always be their to open the box. She'll be their sometimes, but not others. When she's not their to unlock your toy box, you can't put the toys in their and just leave them where they get lost, the same for memories. \n\n**TL;DR** **(AKA Not the five year old version): **\n\nAlcohol interferes with brain receptors that produce steroids which cause neurons essential to memory and learning to misfire. (The Neurons shut themselves down when exposed to alcohol so they essentially don't become compromised)\n\nAlso once you have one 'blackout/amnesia' you're chance of having another one increases.",
"I believe [Cliff Clavin](_URL_0_) can answer your question best, son.",
"And it's a shame too, because I am nothing but witty and intelligent when absolutely shitfaced.",
"This has to do with how much alcohol you drink within a certain amount of time. Basically if you were to drink 1 drink a hour (one shot, one beer, one mixed drink by a bars standards, and also depending on your weight) for 6 hours the chances of you blacking out and/or forgetting the events of the night are slim, Unless you have a type of alcoholism. \n\nHowever if you were to consume six drinks in 1 hour your body can't keep up with the sudden rise in your blood alcohol level. This also affects your long term memory, Blacking out. So you could still know what happened, or nothing at all, or minor details.\n\nSource: My Intervention & #3232;\\_ & #3232;",
"Your brain decides to clock out for a bit while all of your body's energy is directed to the liver.",
"I can't explain, but I do intend to do extensive research on the subject this evening...",
"When you go to sleep, your brain sorts through all the stuff you've done and decides which things you should know about. We call this censorship. Your brain censors some things you do when drunk because they are so awesome your sober brain would be upset that it has to do boring stuff.",
"I had a teacher say it is alcohol poisoning. Your body focouses on processing the alcohol and turns off various functions (like long term memory). Also, it's more to do with how fast you drank rather than how much."
] |
How do headphones make noise sound like it's in the middle of my brain? | [
"Your ears and brain are confused.\n\nYour brain gets the location of sound from the delay of the audio and volume difference between each ear due to (amongst other factors), your head being between them (see: _URL_1_ and _URL_0_).\n\nSince sound coming from headphones is fed directly into your ears, this delay is not present so your brain gets confused on the actual location of sound. \n\nNote some recordings (or post processing done on the receiver) take these cues into account to provide the information your brain requires for locating where the sound is supposed to come from (example: _URL_2_)\n\nThis is usually not done as it's assumed audio is coming from speakers not that close to your head."
] |
if we say an atomic clock is wrong 1 second for every 1 000 000 years, have we actually a better way of measuring time? | [
"Yes, two atom clocks. You do not know which one is right but it gives you an indication of how accurate they are.",
"Not necessarily.\n\nBut if you put ten atomic clocks in a room and come back and check them a year later, you can see if they have drifted apart, and use that to estimate their accuracy over longer periods of time.",
"1 sec/million years is orders of magnitude less accurate than the cesium clock in Boulder. It's something like 1 sec/15 billion years",
"Atomic clocks aren't the only source of accurate time measurement. For instance, [pulsars](_URL_0_) are a pretty reliable time reference. And relatively easy to observe."
] |
Can someone explain me how electronic component get old? | [
"One reason is due to [electromigration](_URL_0_). The diffuse metal atoms in various components in a computer experience a momentum transfer with the electrons (and holes left by electrons) that gradually cause electrical shorts to form on a nanoscopic level. (metal atoms eventually get pushed around enough to form connections they aren't supposed to)\n\nAnother more immediate reason would be the electrolytic capacitors that are commonly found in components. Because of Ohm's law, anything that isn't superconductive (basically **everything** in common practice) experiences electrical resistance, and this resistance comes about as heat. This extra average kinetic energy of the ions in the electrolyte paste found in [electrolytic capacitors](_URL_1_) actually causes the ionic conductive fluid to evaporate enough that the electrolytic capacitor stops functioning. This is one of the more common reasons electronics die.\n\nSorry I didn't further elaborate, but I saw this right before heading off to bed. Hopefully this expands your knowledge base a little bit more on the subject you are curious about. :)",
"Heat can also be a big factor in component failure. Obviously, in order to control where the electricity flows, the channels have to be insulated from each other, no matter how big or small the component is. And the nature of moving electrons along non-superconducting traces and components means that you're going to generate heat. And that heat helps to break down insulation, oxidize metal, all sorts of nasty things. Over time, the cumulative heat damage slowly degrades the components, until they reach the point of failure."
] |
Legality of using real life people in fictional stories | [
"Famous people can and often do copyright their own image and likeness in order to prevent this from happening, and for people who have done so you must go through their estate even after death. Lincoln never did this, and neither did most of the long dead famous people you see on TV."
] |
Why is it that when its dark, stationary things look like they're moving? | [
"The center of your retina is missing the cones that process low-light, giving you a nighttime blind spot, directly ahead.\n\nSince you cannot actually see an object when you focus on it in the dark, you have to look at something near it. Then your natural response is to attempt to focus on it directly, and so it disappears again.\n\nThe back-and-forth process of seeing it and then losing it makes it seem like the object is moving."
] |
How Does A Computer Virus Actually Get Onto Your Computer? | [
"You get computer viruses from another infected computer on your network, or by getting tricked into installing it yourself. Viruses are only one part of the malware family, though. There's also trojans, worms, rootkits, spyware, and adware."
] |
Major differences between USA's constitutional rights and European Convention on Human Rights | [
"A very large portion of the US constitutional rights are not basic human rights. They are the basic rights of a citizen of the US. Some of these rights are also granted to non-citizens but they are not all innate rights you have simply by existing."
] |
V from V for Vendetta's philosophy | [
"FASCISM BAD. ANARCHY GOOD.\n\nThat's about the thrust of it.",
"I think the simplest way to explain is the actual quote he says '[People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people](_URL_0_)'\n\nBasically, governments should do their jobs and represent the people, otherwise shit will go down.",
"The philosophy of Fawkes plays into the destruction of symbols as being distinct from real power. The imaginary security we feel from seeing policemen or our military are not truly security but an association with them as a symbol. V is a product of the underbelly's scourge when security, through a war of \"morality\", places many people (homosexuals, muslims, etc.) into concentration camps to test biological weapons on. V survives but only due to a fire (he started with his knowledge of chemistry in the comic books using simple fertilizer) but is badly disfigured. The mask therefore covers the atrocity that is the government's actions in physical form. \n\nV uses a lie to tell the truth. He kills what is wrong with society (in the form of his torturers and oppressors) who persist on false fronts. The media being controlled is the most obvious of these and by killing the Face of England he has destroyed a symbol of falsehood. They promulgate violence to keep up a lie, V does it to reveal the truth. The truth for V is a land of Anarchy where people can do as they please. Anarchy is not chaos, but responsibility for one's actions without any interference.",
"Not necessarily talking about the movie but not every revolution can be peaceful. Look at the French revolution for example.",
"The philosophy behind V for Vendetta is, to put it quite simply as stated by V himself, \"People shouldn't be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.\n\nExpanding on that, the government in V4V was the definition of authoritarian. Think Nazis (what they were based on). The idea is that even Anarchy is better than the situation they were in.\n\nAs for the second portion of your question which can basically be boiled down do \"is it wrong to fight evil with evil?\", that is a very hard question that humanity has struggled with for as long as humans were capable of advanced thought. \n\nThis movie explores that question (rather well IMO) from, the stance of \"No, not if it's required\". You can see from, the gentleness in the man, the way he handles the inspectors (who he knows want peace), the way he cares for Evey, etc etc that evil would not be his first choice if in fact he had a choice. \n\nThere's also the fact that the government tortured him and for all intents and purposes was \"the enemy\". Look no further than the wars of Korea and Vietnam for examples of hate used as a weapon. It all boils down to \"If we allow ourselves to believe that the enemy is human as well, we will not be able to go through with what we must\".\n\nSorry for the long post, but you can see that discussions involving the philosophy of a film such as V4V can be long and convoluted.\n\nEDIT: More info! If you're wondering whats the deal with the masks in things like Anonymous, just apply the principles above to today's political climate. The members of the hacktivist group Anonymous (not the 4chan anon) abide by essentially the same principles. In their eyes, the government is corrupt and it's time for the citizens who have the ability to stand up to do so even if their actions may be classified by some as \"evil\".",
"The Guy Fawkes connection is just symbolism drift. The key event is \"guy trying to blow up the government\" and \"guy trying to establish Catholic theocracy\" got lost somewhere between history and mentally unstable individual trying to start a revolution.\n\n > why does he hate the way the government treats people if he is willing to kill and torture to promote his own cause\n\nNot sure what you mean. We tend to think serial killers and people defending themselves from serial killers are different even though both are using violence."
] |
How do major airlines pay for new aircraft? Is it one lump sum or are they constantly paying Boeing/Airbus for old and new aircraft simultaneously? | [
"Finally! I can step in here, as I work for one of the largest aircraft leasers in the world. My company raises cash through bonds, other leases, dealing loans, and our bank deposits. We then use that money to purchase airplanes from Airbus and Boeing, which we have to order years in advance. \n\nOur originations team spends those years working with airlines (anywhere from Delta to AirAsia or Golden Myanmar) to lease out that plane. A leasing contract is developed and the plane is delivered to a pre-determined location, usually a major airport where the airline operates.\n\nLeases are usually for 7-10 years, as the main life of our aircraft is 15-25 years we try to get two leases out of it and then salvage it or sell it to another leaser or an airline that will take an older plane but for cheap. The airline pays us monthly through our Operations Department, and they also have a maintenance reserves fund that we hold. The airline gets the plane regularly repaired and serviced and submits a request to access the maintenance reserves where we release those funds to reimburse the airline for any service done to the plane.\n\nBefore and after each lease the plane is taken to our warehouse in Ireland where it is thoroughly inspected and millions of dollars worth of adjustments are made: seats are rearranged, paint color, interior color, and of course the airline logo and name are added on. All of these changes ensure that you never even really know that the plane isn't owned by the airline and that we're in the background leasing it.",
"A lot of these aircraft's you'll find are leased to airlines from various investment companies. Doric is a good example they buy Airbuses then rent to several different major airline companies: _URL_0_",
"Since the '80s the majority of airlines have been leasing their aircraft. One exception is old school American which has kept on buying theirs. I'm not sure if this is part of the reason they ended up in bankruptcy in 2012, but it is surely one of the reasons that USAirways found them such a bargain buy out of bankruptcy, that they had so many millions in equity in those relatively new 757s and all the others. \n\nYes they make monthly payments.",
"Hey, Boeing employee here. Most big airline companies (think Delta, AA, etc.) will place an order, then pay in increments from the time they placed the order until the day it is delivered. I can't speak for other planes, but the one I work with (737), the back order time is around seven years. If a smaller airliner wants to buy one, but doesn't have the money cash in hand, they can either go through Boeing capital (which helps with financing) or go through a regional leasing company.",
"Coming from a student taking aeronautical engineering...\n\nWhat I understand is that airlines purchase order planes from the supplier or distributor and pay them back by an installment plan. Eg. Qatar may have many airbus A380s in their fleet, but in reality they only owned one at one point simply because purchasing a large plane in one lump sum is ludicrously expensive. You can check Wikipedia for how much say, a single A380 costs.\n\nThis installment payment is required regardless of whether the plane is operating or not. That's why flight delays, reschedules, unexpected maintenance etc cost the airlines a lot of money. The same applies even if the plane does not even exist anymore, in the event of an accident or a \"disappearance\", so long as the airline has not paid off the agreed cost of the plane in full.",
"Airlines generally lease all of their airplanes, as they don't always have lump sums of cash to throw at purchasing airplanes.\n\nAirplanes are generally leased under certain conditions as well for accounting reasons. Not to get technical, but there's a few criteria that would require an airline to put the liability of a lease over the lease's life on their balance sheet, and airlines will make sure they sidestep that to not make their financials look worse.",
"All responses extremely helpful, if I could make it rain gold, I would haha..virtual gold for everyone"
] |
How do Native American nations function within the US? | [
"The US government basically lets them have their own pseudo nations with their own police, land (no taxes on it), casinos among other things.",
"They get a limited amount of control over their own 'nation' (not full sovereignty, though). They have a limited ability to exercise their own judicial system (imposing up to a year in jail and a $5,000 fine on Native Americans for crimes on their land).\n\nBasically, the way the United States' relationship with Native Americans is formed is that the tribes are seen as having any sovereign power a normal nation would have - unless explicitly removed by the US government (which it has the power to do).\n\nA lot of the clashing comes from individual states trying to regulate Native Americans in their state. The Constitution treats Native American tribes as independent nations, and grants the Federal government the right to negotiate with them as it would any other nation. But states often try to impose their own restrictions (on things like resource use, fishing, hunting, etc.). So far the Supreme Court has upheld the notion that state governments cannot regulate Native American land.\n\nIt should be noted, though, that even if you have a tribal affiliation, if you also have US citizenship, you are still held accountable to US laws.",
"My next question would be: what are the differences between the Native American nations in the US and the territories in Canada?"
] |
What's actually happening in an electromagnetic wave? Does something move up and down the way EM waves are depicted in illustrations? | [
"Nothing is moving up and down the way EM waves are typically depicted in illustrations.\n\nElectromagnetic waves a very different from waves we're more used to seeing. A wave on a spring, whether it is an up and down (transverse) wave or a back and forth (longitudinal) wave requires the bits of the spring to move from one point to another and back again. The propagating distortion is the wave, and many people probably see waves like this in their heads. It's how I see them, but EM waves are not at all like this.\n\nAn EM wave is a change in the strength of the electric and magnetic fields that propagates through space. No matter (mass, charge, whatever) has to be at the point where the fields are changing strength, so there isn't anything there to move. One major stumbling block students have (even up to early graduate school) is that the field vector we draw at one point in space is meant to describe the field strength and direction *at that point only.* At the very next point, the field can have a different strength and different direction. The vector does not show how far away from the starting point the field extends. It only represents how strong the field is. So, if we want to illustrate a propagating change in the field, we can draw a series of arrows that smoothly vary in size and direction. What we mean, though, is that the field is just getting stronger and weaker and changing directions.\n\nDoes that help?",
"What is moving up and down is the amount of electric/magnetic force as a function of time. Let me explain. \n \nImagine two electrons separated by some distance. They exert a repulsive force on each other, since they are both negatively charged. The amount of force depends on their distance. We describe that force as an electric field. (Fields are forces that depend on x,y, and z spatial relationships.) \n \nIf you take one of those electrons and move it back and forth, the force it exerts on the other electron will change, increasing when they get closer, reducing when they move farther apart. That doesn't happen instantly. It emanates from the moving electron in a \"wave\" which moves at the speed of light. (That wave induces a similar magnetic wave that moves with it.) \n \nWhen we plot the amplitude (strength) of the force on a plot with time as the x axis and force on the y axis, it makes a wave diagram like the ones you've seen.\n \nThe wave is a real thing, but it isn't like a water wave or a sound wave. Those show movement in a physical medium. EM waves are a force acting at a distance, but they aren't movement in any physical medium."
] |
Why are there no drugs to help fight the common cold, only drugs to block the symptoms? | [
"The common cold is really hundreds of different things, so you'd need hundreds of different drugs and have to match the right drug to the right cold.",
"The cold is a rapidly mutating group of hundreds of different viruses.\n\nYou can in theory produce a vaccine for a specific strain of the cold virus, but the hundreds of others can still get you and the one you stopped will mutate again by next year.\n\nSince the cold viruses aren't particularly aggressive (a good virus leaves its host healthy and mobile for maximum contagiousness) there hasn't been much serious effort into trying to devise a way to protect against all strains."
] |
Why do countries dispute uninhabited, useless territory? | [
"Islands are great to own, because they give you ownership of all the water around them for many kilometers, including all the fish, oil, or whatever else might be down there.\n\nMountains are great to own, because they provide military defenses, and because they often contain minerals you can mine.\n\nI don't know what cural banks are.",
"The most important defining characteristic of a sovereign nation is the ability to enforce their borders. If they let somebody take a worthless remote island, somebody else might think they can take a slightly less worthless island and so on until people are actually trying to move inside your main borders.\n\nThey obviously wanted the land in the first place or they never would have claimed it.",
"In addition to what others have said:\n\nAlthough there are plenty of minor territorial disputes in the West (e.g. [these US/Canada disputes](_URL_0_)), many relatively minor disputes in East Asia are then exploited by the ruling government and turned into major disputes, so as to create a bogey man so that the populace will focus on an outside bogeyman and not on domestic governmental corruption (e.g. ROK treatment of [Dokdo/Takeshima](_URL_1_)).",
"Usually because of International law of the Sea.\n\nUnder UNCLOS (and customary international law), countries get territorial sea rights related to the lands they own. The most valuable right is probably the 200-mile Exclusive Economic zone.\n\nSo if you get sovereignty over random island, you possibly get access to a ~600 sqmi patch of ocean to exploit resources from.",
"There is not really such a thing as useless territory. It may have strategic importance for battle, it may have natural resources, it may have interesting wildlife, it may be naturally beautiful and attract tourists, it may simply add to the area of the nation."
] |
peak oil and fossil fuels. Why are we supposedly running out of oil when the earth can create fossil fuels? | [
"Cheers to you for asking this question! It's in everyone's best interest to understand it, but too few people do!\n\nI'm going to elaborate on what dracoleo said by explaining a little about about how fossil fuels form, so you understand why it takes so long.\n\n**TL;DR:** Fossil fuels form on a geologic timescale, which is full of slow-moving factors like plate tectonics. They require very specific combinations of geologic forces, and those forces are not uniform all over the world. We use fossil fuels more or less uniformly all over the world, and on a human timescale. That's why we're running out.\n\nLet's start with oil. Oil is essentially the cooked remains of billions and billions of dead sea-dwelling critters known as plankton. Plankton are thick in the oceans. When they die, their little bodies fall to the seafloor like rain. Over millions and millions of years, they build up into very thick layers. (You've heard of the White Cliffs of Dover? They're chalk, which is basically uncountable numbers of plankton shells.) They get compressed under their own weight and, depending on local conditions, sometimes under the weight off sediments (mostly sand and silt) flowing in off the continents. They get buried, and the deeper you go into the Earth, the warmer it gets. Eventually, they're brought up to about the temperature of a fresh pot of coffee. If they're held at that temperature long enough, they get turned into oil.\n\nYou have to understand that it takes millions and millions of years for enough plankton to accumulate, get buried, and find the temperature \"sweet spot,\" and then they have to stay there long enough to turn into oil.\n\nBut that's not the end of the story. Oil's buoyant and tends to float upward, and it can rise up through rock just as it rises up through water. But it takes a *long* time to make its way to a depth where we can drill for it. It also has to be in precisely the right sort of rock with precisely the right sort of geological structures. Basically, it needs rock permeable enough to move through and bent upward in just the right way to make the right sort of reservoir for it. That bending generally happens in the dance of the tectonic plates, when one continent bangs into another and folds the rock like a throw rug on a wooden floor.\n\nNow take coal. Coal is dead plant life, generally the remains of an ancient swamp that's been crushed and buried under the weight of its own organic material and possibly some sediments shed off some nearby mountains. All that organic matter gets compressed under that weight into something called peat, which is a fuel. If the peat's compressed, it turns into lignite, a harder substance which is also a fuel. Compressing lignite gives you bituminous coal, a true coal, which is, of course, another fuel. Finally, compressing bituminous coal gives you anthracite, a hard, brittle, high-grade, relatively clean-burning coal. The kind of compression which ends in anthracite also results from continents banging together. The east coast of the U.S. has lots of anthracite because it banged into a lot of landmasses, most notably what is now Africa, in a process which took about 200 million years.\n\nNow, to give you an idea of how slow these processes are: plankton accumulate on the seafloor at a rate of a few millimeters per year. (That's a gross oversimplification, but you get the idea.) The Atlantic Ocean is slowly widening because the two plates underlying it are moving apart at about the rate at which your fingernails grow.\n\nSo, yes. Earth is always engaged in creating fossil fuels, but it simply cannot generate them at anything like the speed with which we're using them. That's why we need to turn to renewable resources, where \"renewable\" means \"can be replenished on a human timescale, within the average human lifetime,\" or to inexhaustible (on a human timescale) sources like solar power.",
"Because it takes millions and millions of years to make fossil fuels and hundreds of years to deplete them."
] |
What's P < 0.05 mean and why does it make everybody feel so confident? | [
"In statistics, you're usually doing something called *hypothesis testing*, which relies on something called a *null hypothesis*. For example, after flipping a coin a few times and getting heads each time, you might wonder if the coin is loaded. Your null hypothesis is the *opposite* of what you're trying to prove - if you're interested in showing whether the coin is loaded, your null hypothesis is \"the coin is fair\".\n\nAfter you develop this hypothesis, you flip the coin 10 times, and get 7 heads. You want to know whether this gives you any evidence against the null hypothesis (and thus, *for* your original supposition that the coin is loaded). Obviously, not every 10 flips of a fair coin will come up with 5 heads, so the fact that you got more heads than tails doesn't necessarily tell you the coin is loaded.\n\nA *p-value* - which is what the 'p' in your question is referring to - is the chance of getting the results you got *if the null hypothesis had been true*. In this example, it's the chance of getting 7 heads out of 10 flips if the coin were fair. It turns out it's a little less than 12%, which isn't *that* unlikely, so you don't have very good evidence to say the coin is loaded. On the other hand, the chance of flipping *nine* heads out of ten on a fair coin is less than 1%, so if you'd observed that instead, you'd have very good evidence to disprove your null hypothesis (i.e., evidence against the coin being fair).\n\nLower p-values, which correspond to lower chances of getting your given result if your null hypothesis (remember, this is the opposite of what you're trying to prove) had been true, provide stronger evidence. In academic writing, a p-value of less than 0.05 (that is, less than a 5% chance) is an arbitrary cutoff that is usually seen as the most generous threshold of evidence. Lower p-values, like those less than 1%, less than 0.1%, or even lower than that, provide progressively stronger evidence.",
"A P-value is a way of quantifing statistical significance. It's the probability that you would have got the same result by chance. For example, if you're trying to tell whether a coin is biased, you could flip it 10 times and get heads 8 times. If the coin was fair, the probability that you would see more than 8 heads or more than 8 tails by chance is about 0.02148, so you would say this result is significant at the p < 0.05 level.\n\nThe choice of significance level is arbitrary but 0.05 is a common choice. Decreasing this threshold means you are less likely to falsely conclude that a result is significant but you're also more likely to miss an effect that is in fact real. If your significance level is 0.05, then you would expect 1 in 20 experiments to [falsely detect a correlation where there is none](_URL_0_).",
"P stands for probability and P < 0.05 refers to the probability of an event occurrence to be less than 5% of the time. If you had 1000 apples and there is a 90% chance that less than 20 apples are rotten, it gives you a pretty decent judgement that your apples generally pass the quality assessment. Due to the fact that there is no complete certainty for things such as crop yield to produce 100% fresh and healthy products, having a more than 95% yield efficiency is deemed as good. For a P < 0.05 model, it calculates the chance of your sample yield to uphold the certain quality standards. If your yield has a 90% chance of upholding that standard, it is deemed as acceptable. Due to the sheer amount of produce, it is impossible to do a proper quality check on every single produce thus a sample is extracted. With the sample surpassing the quality standards, it would be sufficient to assume that the whole batch is also up to the standards.",
"0.05 = 5% = chance of the variable being unrelated.\n\nIt is the probability that you'll reject the null hypothesis (variable and results are unrelated). In other words, a 5% chance you're wrong.\n\n5% is arbitrary and generally accepted for stats and tables in books are drawn up using that instead of 6% or 7%. It's dependent on academic discipline as well. In economics it was common to use 0.10 or higher depending on the study and data available.",
"[It means that the probability of getting results at least as extreme as the ones you observed, given that the null hypothesis is correct is 5%](_URL_1_)\n\nIt doesn't make everybody feel confident. P-values have lots of criticism, not the least of which is what level we should be looking for.",
"Actual ELI5 answer:\n\n0.05 is another way to write 5%. P < 0.05 means that the probability of being wrong is about less than 5%, so we can be pretty sure we aren't wrong. Why 5%? We just chose it because we thought it was a pretty good number; it's not too certain but not too uncertain."
] |
How much "power" does the president of the United States have? | [
"The president's power is kept in check by the Legislative and Judicial Branch of the government. \nThe president can create executive orders to implement things rapidly, though these can be struck down by the Legislative or Judicial Branch. \nThe president cannot author laws, but his position as the leader of his party lets him use the \"bully pulpit\" to pressure congress to pass law in his agenda. \nThe president can also nominate supreme court judges. \n \nSo in theory, the most power president would be a president elected along with his party having majorities in both the house and senate while there was a vacancy on the supreme court. \n \nAs long as he had his party in tow, he could pretty much pursue his agenda.",
"The power in the US is divided into three branches. Congress have the power to write laws including the budget, limiting the debt and start wars. The president is in charge of managing the country according to the laws set by the congress. This is mostly done by appointing people to manage the different agencies and government secretaries and the occasional direct order. The third branch is managed by the supreme court and is the ones who actually make sure everyone is following the laws. They do not manage the police only the justice system as those have very different roles. They can rule laws unconstitutional if they want and interpret laws.\n\nIn addition there are ways of the branches to get in each others ways. Some positions in the government have to be recommended by the president and nominated by the congress. This includes ambassadors and supreme court judges. In addition laws that congress have decided on have to be signed off by the president. He can veto any law if he wants to.\n\nThen to the specifics of things that have been promised by Trump. He can build a wall towards Mexico if he gets money from the congress to do so. Currently there is no money allocated to this project and the president can not overrule the budget. Trump can deport illegals. He is in control of a lot of police forces and they have a budget that the president is free to use as he wish as long as he follows the laws. Trump can not lower the taxes as this is set by congress. Trump can lower the national debt if he manages to spend less money that congress have appointed him. However this is quite limited as congress is often very specific about what they want to be done. Trump can start a war as he is in control of the military but need help from congress to win the war as wars are expensive. That is unless he starts a nuclear war in which case the war will likely be over before the congress have anything to say. Trump have some limited control over the economy. In theory he have very little control over it but since he have so much control he can do a lot of things even without the ability to set the laws."
] |
in baseball, Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak of 56 consecutive games is one of the most notable records in the sport and is considered "unbreakable." Why is this? | [
"The trick is that hits are hard to get (harder than just getting on base) and that even great hitters don't get hits that often. \n\nIt's easier to understand with an example. So, let's say that a person is batting .400---meaning they get a hit four times every 10 at bats. being a .400 or above hitter is all-time best level hitting, so we're already talking about an incredible player. \n\nNow, since they're such a great hitter, they probably bat early in the line up. This means that they get, maybe, 5 at bats a game. Let's say that, since they're such a great hitter, they're probably going to get walked one of those times, which doesn't count, so we'll say 4 at bats a game. \n\nSo, 4 at bats in a game. That means that the odds that they get a hit in the game are about 1–(1– 0.400)^4 = 87%. Seems pretty high per game, as you'd expect. But now, you have to do it for 56 games in a row. So the odds that you do that are---to simplify a lot---1-(.87^56) = 0.0004. \n\n.0004, on the other hand, is not very high. So our incredible, once in a generation hitter averaging 400 is only going to get 56 consecutive hits 4 times out of every 10,000 sets of 56 games. Given that a person might only be at the peak of their game for 5 or 6 years, and only has 140 or so games to play, that's not many chances to get that 4 out of 10,000. \n\nA much more indepth analysis can be found here: _URL_0_"
] |
How do sewer systems and, afterwards, water treatment facilities work, from the moment I flush the toilet? | [
"it really depends on where you are, what is your legislation and the kind of treatments.\n\nAnyway usually toilet flushes (with any sink flush) got collected (sometimes into piping, sometimes into \"buried\" water streams) and goes into treatment facilities which try to \"clean\" the water.\n\n* floating objects and big debries are removed with grids \n* most of the oils are removed (oil float and there are many ways to remove it, e.g. overflow )\n* bacteria are used so that nitrogen compounds are transformed into gas and leave the water as N2(urea is a nitrogen compound)\n* other kind of bacteria are used to oxidize organic content so that it leave water as CO2 or a volatile compound anyway.\n* large and shallow pools are used to let little debries sediment \n\nthe point is to use every system possible to remove most of the content of the dirty water, using physical (grid and filters), and biological/chemical (using bacteria/chemical) ways"
] |
Why does water cause electronic devices (I.e. cellphones) to malfunction even after said devices have completely dried? | [
"Unless it's distilled water, water is actually pretty dirty. It's full of little particles and sediment. Take a really close look at a glass of unfiltered drinking water and you might probably see some. \n\nAnyway, when a device gets wet those particles settle on the microchips shorting out some of the connections (creating paths for electricity to go where it shouldn't).\n\nThat's why people say to soak a phone in distilled water then leave it on rice. The distilled water washes away the sediment and the dryness of the rice pulls the water out of the phone, like a tissue dipped into a cup of water.\n\nI hope this is all accurate and simple enough, feel free to tell me if any of that is wrong or if there are better analogies. :)",
"If, while the device is submerged in water, the water causes the phone to short-circuit badly enough, it will cause permanent damage to the phone that no amount of rice can fix. \n\nIf that happens, I suggest that you cook the rice and eat it. Think of it as a consolation prize.",
"Unless you whipped the battery out pretty darn quickly, the damage probably occurred fairly quickly after the device hit the water. \n\nWater is only a problem because impurities in it cause electricity to go places it shouldn't. If there's no electricity then usually drying things out is fine. \n\nIf the thing was killed within a moment of it being submerged though, it doesn't matter if it's drier than desert dust when you power it back up, it'll still be dead."
] |
How does air humidity percentage work and how are we still able to breathe when it's 100%? | [
"100% relative humidity means the air has as much moisture as its temperature allows (since the amount of water vapor that can be in the air depends on the temperature - warmer air can hold more moisture). This means if you sweat, it won't be able to evaporate since the air is fully saturated with water vapor. So you will feel much warmer, since you're not able to easily lose body heat.\n\nIt doesn't mean that the air is 100% water."
] |
Why are vision problems more common than problems of other senses (ie. hearing, smell, etc.) | [
"Eyes require their exact shape to work. Vision is done by a reciever (rods and cones) that needs a focused light on it. That light comes from the front of the eye and gets put through the lens, which can be adjusted, and the iris (which opens and closes to allow more or less light as needed.)\n\nContrast that to an ear or the nose or touch. Hearing, smell, and touch are all 'fixed' things, for the most part. The nose either smells or it doesn't, there's no adjustments that can be made. Ditto with touch. \n\nHearing requires a bit of mechanical things to get done, with the tympanic membrane, and the small bones connected to it and the cochlea, plus the hairs in the cochlea, the shape of the chochlea, and the fluid in there, all have to be in working *order*... but they do not adjust. Once it's built, it kinda stays that way... then deteroirates slower as we get older, unless acted upon by extreme pressures, or over used in a way that causes damage.\n\nThe eyes, though, those are constantly being adjusted and played around with. This causes more wear and tear. Also, fluid pressures can cause problems with the eyes shape, and therefore cause the focus to be out of whack.\n\nBecause it's a more complex system than any other form of senses, it's the one that's more likely to break down during a person's life. At the very least, one will need reading glasses before they expire from this plane of existence, and those who don't? Extremely lucky, or adjusting to the fuzziness.",
"Your assumption may not be correct. Hearing problems are pretty [common](_URL_1_) as are problems with [sense of smell](_URL_0_) especially as you age. Vision problems might seem more common because the problems they cause can be more life altering."
] |
Can someone explain to me what exactly constitutes an illegal hit in rugby? | [
"Anything above the shoulder or where a player is lifted off the ground and not brought down 'safely' as deemed by the ref. Basically don't drop people on their heads.",
"You have to wrap your arm around the guy you're tackling. No arms = illegal tackle.",
"Tackling:\n\n- Nothing above the shoulders.\n- Tackled player cannot be dropped on their head.\n- Can't lift tackled player off of their feet.\n- Tackler must wrap the tackled player with their arms.\n- Tackler must go down with the tackled player.\n\nThe last rule is what seperates tackling in Rugby from tackling in American Football most distincly. You can't \"check\" someone like you can in American Football or Hockey, you have to wrap them, and bring them down."
] |
Please explain to me the relationship between Reddit and Imgur. | [
"Imgur was created specifically for Reddit, by a redditor. [Here's the post he made when it was released.](_URL_0_) Here is [his follow-up AMA.](_URL_1_)"
] |
Why do countries want to take people in for asylum? | [
"I could be wrong but I think it's a matter of humanitarian motivation. They take them in because they support their cause/protection for whatever reason and feel it's the right thing to do.\n\nAgain, there may be many examples where this is not the case.",
"Humanitarian reasons, such as not letting people die needlessly or suffer horribly, are the primary reasons for granting asylum. \nFrom a more pragmatic standpoint though, it's the same reason as allowing immigration. Asylum seekers may provide labor or in many cases skilled labor to a host country. The difference between immigration and asylum seeking is just the status of the country when they left. This may lead to more persons with valuable skills leaving a country.",
"It can be both humanitarian and political reasons. For example, if a country has an inner war, the neighbour countries will be the first safe destiny. Some of them will accept them and protect them, with the help of the UN. \n\nNow, Snowden's case. He was persecuted by the US. Russia, as many anti-US countries, offered him asylum for political reasons, to show the opposition to Washington."
] |
Why did most of the mammals from the Ice Age go extinct? | [
"The Pleistocene overkill hypothesis suggests that the time frame of the extinction of Pleistocene vertebrates matches the spread of humans through North America. Although this theory is mostly based on North American human expansion it could possibly be correlated to the rest of the worlds situation as well.",
"It got warmer, and so species better adapted to warmer flourished and those adapted to the Ice Age conditions died off. It's no big deal or conspiracy, climate change has life-threatening impacts on creatures that don't have spaceships and other planets to move to."
] |
What does an Apple computer do better then a (Windows) PC? | [
"Mac owner here: Nothing, really.\n\nThat being said, I like the fact that I don't need to deal with drivers, have a nice GUI on top of UNIX (BSD), and I can still boot into windows to play those \"Windows Only\" games.",
"Back in the day, Macs were a lot better for things like video editing, sound recording, film production, graphic design, and the software and hardware was optimised for it.\n\nIn addition, lot of the software used for those purposes was originally only available for Mac (most notably all of the Adobe stuff, such as PhotoShop).\n\nOver time, this difference has largely disappeared. The software is now available on multiple platforms, and even the Windows operating system has changed over time to become more like Mac OS - hell the original incarnation of Windows was a deadset copy and paste of Apple's point and click graphic user interface.",
"I have used both, and I can safely say: absolutely nothing. It's just a matter of preference."
] |
What is the difference between men's and women's razors? | [
"Good question! The biggest difference is the angle of the blades themselves. Men's razors tend to have a greater angle, which aids in cutting down thick beard hair, but can also mean a stronger shave with leg hair. The downside to a more aggressive angle, though, is a higher tendency for razor burn and cuts if you've not done the appropriate prep-work on the area being shaved. \n\nI strongly suggest checking out /r/wicked_edge, the subreddit dedicated to the art of shaving. It's mostly about beards, but the lessons about how to shave undoubtedly apply to shaving other parts of the body, including armpits and pegs.",
"Women's razors have a curved head because they shave their body compared to a men's razor which is straighter because the face is more straightforward. As a former swimmer who shaved his armpits, a men's razor couldn't reach the all the hairs because the head design. I switched to a women's razor and it wasn't a problem. \n\nLegs can use either a men's or women's razor, the curved head is mostly for the armpit. \n\nUsing a men's razor as woman might cause less irratation because you simply aren't getting the hairs you typically would. \n\nI can't speak for the groin as I use clippers for that, but a men's razor doesn't seem effective to me for that.",
"I think the difference is a male's razor is best designed to fit facial shaving whereas a female's razor could be designed more for leg shaving.",
"Women's razors are more expensive and don't seem to last as long. As a woman, I've noticed this and buy only men's razors now =)"
] |
What is wire fraud in the US? | [
"Any crime in which the defendant voluntarily and intentionally devised or participated in a scheme to defraud another out of money; the defendant did so with the intent to defraud; it was reasonably foreseeable that interstate wire communications would be used; and interstate wire communications were in fact used.",
"*Fraud* is when you deceive someone else in order to swindle them out of their property, or their money, or (in the US, for wire and mail fraud) to deprive them out of the right to honest services (meaning that you get them to put you in a position of trust and responsibility, and use it for personal gain).\n\nFraud is normally no concern of the federal government, since they can only regulate *interstate* activity (for the most part). However, they can regulate fraud that involves multiple states; one way they do this is by saying that if you use pretty much any means of electronic communication and the data goes from your state to any other state or country at any point, then that interstate communication to further a fraud is a federal crime. The same applies if you send something from one state to another via FedEx or UPS or similar service, or send anything whatsoever at any point of the fraud by mail (the feds can regulate use of the US mail even within a state).\n\nTo some degree this is a jurisdictional technicality; almost any even slightly complex fraud will fall under federal law because it'll involve mail or interstate wire communication."
] |
When film earnings are being calculated, especially big releases that break all sorts of "biggest opening weekend" and such, is inflation taken into account when comparing these numbers to older films? | [
"The only reason that films keep breaking records all the time is because ticket prices have been going up over the last few decades. If you look at how many people went to see 'Gone With The Wind', you'll see newer films won't come close to selling that many tickets, even though they make more money.\n\nBoxOfficeMojo estimates that Gone With the Wind sold 202 million tickets domestically, while Avatar sold 97 million.\n\nBest-selling movies in America adjusted for inflation: _URL_0_\nSadly couldn't find a worldwide version.",
"It depends on what source you're looking at.\n\nUsually when they're comparing box office sales for movies, they'll peg them to dollars in the same year so they're meaningful. \n\nBut you could be reading an article that said \"Star Wars opened with $X, more than any other film that year\", and that context doesn't require a conversion because it's not really comparing the given number to one from a different year."
] |
Why does food taste so much better when you’re drunk/high? | [
"So I don't have the exact science but basically when you're high, everything that you like the taste of becomes even better tasting. Additionally, the THC interacts with brain chemistry so that you can't feel as full. Add this to the fact that if you're smoking (anything), you have dry mouth. Eating/drinking is very satisfying. \n\nWhen drunk, you're body is trying to adjust the balance in your stomach, so having carbs will fill your stomach. Your brain rewards that behavior and so you feel more satisfied by it."
] |
Why do the Japanese care about blood groups? | [
"There was an Japanese person who wrote a best-selling book in the 1920s or 30s on personality being determined by blood group. They were successful in convincing people it was scientific, since it was based on a biological testable characteristic. In other words, the writer made it seem like a scientific fact, even though it's total pseudoscience. The kicker is that the book was written before the Rh factor was known, so that's not even included in the book. Meaning that there are only 4 personality types (A, B, O, AB), even though you can divide blood types into many categories. \n\nThen, the issue fell by the wayside until the book was rediscovered in the 1970s. It was written about in lots of newspapers and magazines as something deceptively simple yet deep, and the more you hear something repeated, the more you believe it, even with no evidence. Here's a secret: most people don't know what they're doing. They look for advice on how to do things right. Some turn to psychologists, others to self-help books, religion, or expensive seminars by Tony Robbins. In France, they put a lot of import in handwriting analysis. In Japan, blood type was integrated into the toolkit of how to find good employees and set up effective teams, and then it really did matter in a concrete way, since employers started asking applicants' blood type. That turned it into something important, and like \"The Emperor's New Clothes\", no one wanted to be the one to contradict the \"experts\". So it perpetuates. I think it's tangentially related to the genre of nihonjinron--books that focus on an aspect of Japan or Japanese culture, art, language, geography, or biology, to show how the Japanese are unique and special. While blood typing doesn't do that, it is similar in being a highly reductivist view of the world that simplifies complex issues into a small box, using pseudoscience and fallacies of logic in lieu of science and concrete data."
] |
Why is size of an animal such a good estimate of its strength, but size of a brain is not a good estimate of intelligence? | [
"The answer by /u/Doktor_Wunderbar is a good one (and increased surface area is a big deal in intelligence, especially in humans), but it misses out a critical factor - the EQ\n\n_URL_0_\n\nAt a simple level, this says \"based on what you look like, your brain should be about this big. How big is it really?\". So as a general rule, bigger animals have bigger brains. Lots of reasons for this, but as a basic rule more body = more to control = more brain (its a lot more complex than this, but it works well as a crude measure). However, compared to this average requirement, an animal can have either more or less brain. \n\nThis appears to be a huge deal in intelligence - nobody would expect spiders to have a huge brain, but certain types (jumping spiders) have a huuuuge brain for a spider, and this seems to have a massive impact on their displayed level of intelligence. This isn't necessarily because bigger brain = better, but because it tends to indicate a high level of selective pressure on intelligence based activities, which has led to a productive growth in brain size.",
"Intelligence doesn't increase linearly with brain mass or volume, but instead seems to have a lot to do with surface area and neural connectivity. Simply put, the wrinkles in our brain (sulci and gyri) are why we have more intelligence than an animal that might have an equally large brain, or a similar brain/body ratio. That, and the number of synaptic connections between different parts of the brain."
] |
Why can't telescopes work like magnifying glasses? | [
"Microscopes and magnifying glasses take light from a small area and spread it out. Telescopes take light from a wide area and bring it together."
] |
Why is that even though I've been waking up early for school for years at pretty much the exact same time, my body is always tired and never seems to get used to it. | [
"There's more than one reason this happens, I'll try to explain 2 of the most important/accepted ones.\n\n1. Teenagers and adolescents (which I assume you are?) generally go to sleep at later times because they have more academic and social obligations than children. This basically means they have to study more and more and they have to build a social circle and therefore have less time to sleep. This leads to teenagers and adolescents sleeping less than the recommended 8 hours, which in turn leads to sleep deficit.\n\n2. In 1996, a certain Dr. Carskadon published the results of a decade-long study on this topic. She found that our 'biological clock' changes as we go through puberty. \nThere's a certain hormone in our body called 'melatonin' that regulates our biological clock. When our body feels like it's time to sleep, it releases more and more melatonin until we actually go to sleep. In children and young teenagers, this process usually starts around 9:30 p.m. or 21:30 (Depends pretty heavily on the person in question but it's generally correct). As puberty progresses however, the onset of this process is pushed forward by about one hour (to about 10:30 p.m. or 22:30). \nThis also means that the several stages of sleep are pushed forward by one hour aswell, most importantly: REM sleep. When you wake up, your REM sleep stage should be completely finished, that's when you'll feel awake and refreshed. But because of the changes in our biological clock that happen in puberty, this is often not the case in older teenagers and adolescents. (Partially) missing REM sleep is what causes the grogginess you feel in the morning.",
"how much sleep are you getting per night? it could be you're getting too little, maybe go to bed earlier when it's possible. or it could even be too much sleep. I'm kinda with you though, it seems like no matter how little or much I sleep or how good the sleep is, I'm just slow waking up, especially the earlier it gets. when I have to work at 7am I'm brain dead until about 830. anyway I'm hanging around this thread for some more educated answers.",
"go to sleep earlier the day before and make sure you dont eat anything 3 hrs before you sleep nothing heavy.",
"*Prepare* for bed, do something mellow and relaxing for an hour or two before you go to bed...(eg don't play exciting games or watch action movies). People who have problems letting go of stress will have a harder time falling to sleep.\n\nCut carbs(your body uses this for energy) and stimulants(eg caffeine) the earlier in the day for these the better, you use them more efficiently.\n\nGo to sleep sooner. When I work a dayshift, sometimes I'm in bed by 7pm(and then asleep by 8) and got up at 4 am. Establish a routine and don't stray from it(not even on weekends, or at least not by much).\n\nExercise more, body and mind, this will not only tire you out but heighten metabolism to healthier levels which influences your sleep cycles.\n\nYes, these some of these are just instructions, but you can deduce the answer's that would spawn them relatively easy.",
"Well, that is also going to depend on how early you go to bed and how you are timing your sleep cycles. If you consistently get too little sleep, you will always feel tired waking up, no matter if you have done it for 10 years. Similarly, waking up in the middle of a sleep cycle will make you feel more tired than waking up at the natural end of one, regardless of what time you do it at.",
"The school board that tortured me from age 4-18 has recently made high school start at 9:30 instead of 8:45. Lunch is shorter and students finish at the same time as before."
] |
What is a Workers Union and what do they do? | [
"A union is basically an organization of workers that will collectively bargain in order to ensure that wages and working conditions are good, using the resources of the collective crowd that could not be attained by the individual.\n\nThe good thing about this is that it ended practices such as child labor, horrendous factory and mining conditions, long work hours with fewer days off, and low wages that were seen in the early 1900s.\n\nThe bad thing is that unions have in modern times taken that idea and pushed it far enough to where workers are overpaid, spoiled, and almost impossible to fire. A unionized janitor can be paid as much as 10 non-union janitors for doing the same job, and there are people that put on tires for 30 dollars an hour. The fact that you are put into a tenured position is also problematic because it means that you don't have to worry about quality or even doing a good job. Teachers are heavily unionized, and the ones who are tenured show a visible lack in quality.\n\nLike any system, it proves that too much of a good thing can be a bad thing.",
"A union is an organization of workers. Normally in the workplace, the boss has all the power, the boss decides pay, hours, conditions, and can fire you for any reason. When you have a union, you can negotiate with your boss. If the boss is unfair or unreasonable, then the union goes on strike, which is where all the workers refuse to work until their demands are met.",
"There are different kinds of unions and how they operate is very differently.\n\nThe classic is the \"trade union.\" This is a professional union that requires special skills, membership, and training to get into a given profession. These trade unions control 100% of who can get in and maintain supply and demand for that profession.\n\nA first early union is the Worshipful Company of Barbers. At the time surgeons were in very very low demand whereas barbers (modern sense hair cutters) were in high demand. So a union formed in which all members have to be both barbers and surgeons (hence a term emerged called barber surgeon) who were capable of doing all things. Membership was limited to keep the demand high for these services.\n\nThe trade union would work with businesses and with people to try and accommodate the needs of industry while also keeping their membership in the blue. The Union of Operating Engineers is a union of heavy equipment operators in which you need to be part of the union to get on a site that the union is on. The union works to enact safety policy, but also looks to provide a lot of the training that would typically be carried out by a company (like orientation, safety training, benefits and what not).\n\nThis can be compared with a collective bargaining union in which people don't necessarily share any common skills or training. This union rarely ever offers services and usually only exists for collective bargaining purposes.\n\nThe earliest example is the American teacher's union which was a group of women getting together for civil rights and for collective bargaining.\n\nUnions are good and they are bad. It's not a tell all situation. Teacher's unions for example are bad for education because they block the way in creating a competitive atmosphere for teachers that is proven to improve student's performance. Because of this a private system has emerged successfully with federal funding to try and undermine the teacher's union.\n\nTrade unions means that sites are going to be locked out from newer employers and that the start of getting in any trade or profession is going to be higher specifically because they're trying to keep people out. It means that the chances of going directly from high school to a trade is slim to none. It means higher investment costs. Even someone like a scaffolder often has to be part of a carpenter's union.\n\nOn the plus side wages are higher, work sites are safer, people are more protected, people have benefits, and quality of life is higher. You're going to find a negative in just about anything in life."
] |
Why do military ship names begin with USS, HMS, etc.? | [
"They signify what country's military they represent. \n\nUSS = United States Ship\n\nHMS = Her/His Magesty's Ship, meaning UK.\n\nHMCS = Her Majesty's Canadian Ship",
"USS = United States Ship\n\nHMS = Her Majesty's Ship\n\nThese prefixes are part of naval tradition and vary from navy to navy."
] |
How do paleontologists know anything about the behavior and diets of any dinosaur? | [
"The shape of the teeth tells you what it ate. The shape of it's skeleton tells you how it moved. From that, you can deduce a lot of things.\n\nThere is some speculation involved of course, but it's a very educated guess."
] |
why are people with autism/asperger's sensitive to various environments. | [
"Because autism is a processing disorder. It means we process things, everything, differently from other people. Either more, or less, but usually more. You see a bright like and your brain processes it as a bright light. We see a bright light and our brain doesn't know how to process it, so it processes it as thid huge, intense scary orb of blinding light instead. It's overwhelming to be surrounded by those. You know how when you squint your eyes at a light, you can see little rays of light coming off of it? Well, we have those all the time. They get in the way of driving, of walking, etc- we can't always see through them. Imagine the descriptions of light, but for everything. Every sense.\n\nOur brains try to makeup for the disordered processing by shutting down (where we lose our senses) or melting down, where our bodies move beyond our control in an effort to get our processing going where it has stopped.",
"Because the human brain is subjected to thousands upon thousands of bits of information per second. For most neuro-typical people, filtering the non-important sounds, sights, smells, tastes, and 'feels' is something that their brain does automatically, and they are able to more easily understand and cope with things going on around them. For us, however, those filtering functions are impaired: our brains give us a lot more of the 'irrelevant' information at once. We can't cope with thousands and thousands of tiny irrelevant sights, sounds, etc., so it makes us uncomfortable (at best) in environments that neurotypical people are okay with. So, we get 'tunnel vision' that makes everything seem bigger and scarier than it really is, and our brains freak out because *shit, all this stuff is going on at once*. At least that's how I understand it.\n\nTL;DR Our brains don't filter senses as well as everyone else's do."
] |
Black holes suck in light, so why are they black? | [
"We call them black because we believe that they suck in light and don't let it out.\n\nIt's outgoing light we can see, you can't see light that's being absorbed only light that is being sent out or reflected.",
"Black is the label we apply to an absence of light. You can't make a flashlight that projects black. Since the BH absorbs light, it you could look at it you would see no light. That condition is labeled \"black\"."
] |
How to radio stations know how many listeners listen at a certain time of the day? | [
"Here's one way. I wore one of these for about two years: \n\n_URL_0_",
"Terrestrial radio stations just survey people. I don't know about satellite.",
"There is a lot of guess work on this. Radio has used the Arbitron ratings system for a while. Not all stations subscribe to this but most in mid to large metro markets will. Arbitron makes their numbers based on input from listener surveys. \n_URL_1_\n\nI worked in radio stations for 8 years and now run a software company catering to radio stations - we get paid a lot on barter (airtime vs cash) so Arbitron ratings come up a lot in contract negations."
] |
Why does it seem that no one "drops dead" from cancer? | [
"Cancer doesn't grow that suddenly. You have time to be sick from it before the day it kills you — typically for months.",
"Cancer generally gives warning signs, though sometimes they come to late to treat the cancer.\n\nBut my girlfriends grandmother slipped one day. Her spine completely dislocated because a cancer had eaten through one of her vertebrae. She passed away about two days later"
] |
If something were to break the sound barrier in space, how would it differ from here on earth? | [
"The speed of sound depends on several variables even here on earth - humidity, air pressure, etc. Thus there is no \"speed of sound\" anywhere sound can't travel, such as in space.",
"There is no sound barrier in space - because it means the speed of sound in air and there's no air for there to be a speed of sound in.\n\nThat said, the vacuum of space isn't a vacuum, there are still atoms of (mostly) hydrogen floating about, but because they're so far apart they don't really behave like a gas in the ordinary sense. You will get a tiny reaction force against the front of your spaceship, which will increase the faster you go, but the atoms are largely free to just bounce off into...er...space.",
"The speed of sound is really the speed of force through a medium. The reason it's important in air is because 1) it's pretty fast, and 2) it causes changes in flight behavior because your aircraft is pretty much moving faster than the air wants to get out of the way.\n\nSpace isn't a perfect vacuum but it's close enough for the purpose of speed of sound. Without a medium (gas) for the force to travel through, speed of sound is pretty much meaningless. It doesn't really affect anything.\n\nAnd pretty much all objects in space travel way, way faster than the speed of sound in earth atmosphere already.",
"Sound does not travel is space, therefore there is no sound barrier. Sound travels through a medium, and the vacuum of space doesn't provide one. Its bumping against that medium that is \"the sound barrier\".",
"To put it in perspective, the 'sound barrier' is registered as around 343 meters per second (it varies based on numerous local atmospheric conditions, but not by enough to write home about.)\n\nEscape velocity, that is, the speed a craft has to be moving to escape Earth's orbit and thus be in space for longer than a brief trip is 11200 meters per second (with some variance based on local gravity strength, but again, nothing to shout over), almost *32 times the speed of sound*. Or, as XKCD put it, space isn't about going up and stopping, it's about going sideways *really really fast*. Stopping is usually a bad idea unless you've decided not to go to space today.\n\nOf course, spacecraft can't reach this speed in earth's atmosphere: They already have enough trouble re-entering it. You know how the spaceship gets really really hot when it comes back? That's because it's going 7820 meters a second - it starts out really really fast because there's nothing in the way in space, but as it hits the air, the air starts resisting it and it slows down considerably. Hitting 11200 meters a second in earth's atmosphere would probably burn the shuttle to a crisp! That's why the initial stage of any space launch is to go up high, where the air is thinner and doesn't resist so much, before turning and going sideways.\n\nSo, spacecraft are already breaking the sound barrier in space, almost 30 times over in fact. Contrary to other answers, however, going the speed of sound **in orbit** WOULD differ from doing so on Earth: An aircraft going 350m/s still has wings and an atmosphere around it to give it lift and keep it flying; an average fighter jet's stall (fall to earth) speed is around 40m/s. A space craft trying to orbit at 350m/s would be moving too slow to fight Earth's gravity, and would quickly stop being a *space* craft and start becoming a particularly panicked glider. \n\nIn deep space, devoid of gravity wells, the answer becomes easier: With no air in the way (or micrometeoroids, or macrometeroids, or asteroids the size of small moons), speed is no issue. You can accelerate to the speed of sound, or slow down to a 'stop' if you can wrap your head around what frame of reference you are stopping against. You can throw the engines on full and just keep building up speed until something gets in the way, be it a surface or a lack of fuel or mechanical fault or wibbly wobbly 'speed of light is impossible' problems. The speed of sound becomes a mere reference point, like measuring your speed in knots or in human walking paces - trivia."
] |
when I drink water, does my body still try to digest it as if it were food? | [
"Yes and no. It goes down the same path and is absorbed in a similar way. But your body doesn't \"try\" things on various chemicals ingested, it just sort of happens when exposed.",
"Water goes through your digestive tract with the food. Whereas food is digested and vitamins/nutrients are absorbed in the small intestine, water isn't absorbed until the large intestine, leaving behind solid waste (feces)."
] |
a hunger strike | [
"They often work. Usually the point is not really to change the other's opinion - it's to take the only thing you have control over (whether you eat) and use it to get media attention. Someone so passionate about their beliefs they are willing to risk *death by starvation* for them is often newsworthy, and being the dick who is pushing someone to that position through unwillingness to negotiate is a bad look that few people are willing to wear in public.\n\nLike a lot of passive resistance/protest techniques, it's really about getting the attention and support of moderate/undecided people by taking the \"moral high ground\". And it often works."
] |
why do some people love food that other people find disgusting? | [
"Humans may have the same types of taste buds but the concentrations of taste buds may differ. For example, [supertasters](_URL_0_) have a very high concentration of a certain taste bud so they experience very strong reactions to specific tastes.\n\nFurthermore, these taste buds are connected to our brain which may reinterpret the signals coming from your taste buds. \"Acquired tastes\" are tastes that reprogram your brain to enjoy foods that initially may taste bad the first few times. Your brain will ignore the initial repulsive sense (bitterness, stinkiness, etc.) to enjoy the other flavors of the dish."
] |
Why is that military personnel can't open fire against anyone until they have been fired upon or lethal threats are obvious but US police officers can pretty much shoot at will? | [
"I can't answer this with certainty, but I think it is just the fact that the Military personal are extremely well trained, police are not. There are many military personal in the news commenting on the inappropriate behavior of the police. Such as a soldier of any sort will never raise their weapon or point it at somebody unless there is a direct and obvious threat... but police are constantly aiming their weapons at people escalating the situations. (There is a link to this somewhere i'll search for it later)\n\nEDIT: found the video\n_URL_0_\nIf you have time, the whole video is a good watch, but I started it near where the points I mention begin, there are some comments from military personnel in there.",
"Policing is very different from military action.\n\nIn a military action, you are given explicit orders to carry out a specific task. If it isn't part of your mission brief, it isn't your responsibility - even if it might be an unlawful action.\n\nWith law enforcement, police have a proactive responsibility to engage and stop criminals whenever crime occurs. They are forced to engage by the nature of their job.\n\nNor is it a matter of 'shoot at will'. All law enforcement agencies have policies on acceptable use of force. Normally police officers are only allowed to use their firearms to protect either themselves or the public, or if a felon is escaping and might prove potentially harmful if let free."
] |
why do we find blood so.... disturbing? | [
"Not everybody does. \n\nBut in short, a lot of people do simply because its an easy way to tell that somebody is injured and possibly dying."
] |
Why does being Hispanic categorize you so differently? | [
"Your ethnicity (where you are from) can have an affect on what diseases you are more or less susceptible to or likely to have."
] |
Why is ocean water naturally salty while lake and river water is relatively pure? | [
"River water is, generally speaking, rain. Oceans, on the other hand are places where salt can collect. \n\nBasically, water falls from the sky, runs over/through the ground, and ends up flooding the lowest possible area, which becomes the river. The water in the clouds starts basically pure---since it's evaporated water---and picks up some stuff when it runs over/through the land, but it's constantly moving and being replaced, so those materials don't have much chance to build up. \n\nBut the Oceans are effectively giant pools. Water evaporates from the surface of the ocean, leaving the salt behind. But unlike in a river, there's nowhere for that salt to go. As a result, it builds up and makes the ocean salty."
] |
why is there a lag after putting my hands in scalding water before the pain registers? | [
"I'm not really sure what you mean by that -- I feel both in what seems to be the same time. But I'll see if I can do an explanation:\n\nA cut severs part of the nerves, causing an immediate chemical reaction that triggers the electrical impulses which inform the brain.\n\nHeat has to transfer through the layers of skin (which requires lots of high-energy particles to bump into each other), getting hotter and hotter until it triggers proteins around the nerve to open channels which allow ions to move, generating a signal.",
"It takes a good second or so for Pain to be received and processed and reacted upon by the brain itself. \n\nMost of knee-jerk reactions - like putting a hand on the burner on accident, then yanking your hand back and only feeling /actual pain/ moments later is because of your spinal cord. \n\nYou see, your spinal nerves actually have super rudimentary pain-reaction processing power, and will do anything it needs to do to get you out of pain. Higher thought can override this, but when it comes to sudden and surprising pain the nerve impulses actually go to your spine and back to the site of the injury at the same time the nerve impulse is heading up toward you brain to be processed. \n\nSo your spine can receive a message of 'pain! save yourself!' and start you moving out of danger before your Actual brain has even finished processing the information and what they should do about it. (synapses vs interneurons)\n\nThink of a 'Knee-Jerk Reaction'\n\nThe term came from a way of testing nerves - taping the ligament in your knee with a little hammer- there's no real pain from hitting it, but it causes your leg to twitch. Your brain receives the 'tap' as just a pressure touch on your skin, while your spine receives it as a 'time to move' touch and acts accordingly. [That nerve is part of what helps us stand upright and keep balanced without conscious thought .](_URL_0_)\n\nHowever - this is mostly the case in surprise pain. \n\nIf you just stab yourself with a knife, your brain is already expecting pain, and concentrating on the area.\n\nSo if you were expecting the stab, then your reaction to it *feels* more immediate, as your brain is already coming up with an appropriate reaction to what it just SAW, not what it is FEELING, because it still takes a hot second for the message of 'pain' to travel up to your brain. \n\nWater in and of itself may not register as 'painful' because we interact with water all the time - so we have to wait for the actual neural input to reach the brain. \n\nBut a stabbing instinctively registers as 'painful' when you see it. \n\nTLDR; Your body has at least 2 sets of wiring. 1 goes straight to the spine and is superfast + only contains basic messages. The other goes to your brain and is slower because it contains more complex feelings. People often 'react' before they feel 'pain' because they saw something 'painful' happen, but they're not actually *feeling* pain just yet."
] |
Why do we still use steel if many synthetic materials claim to be X times stronger than steel | [
"When you talk about strength of a material from an engineering perspective, there are many different types that are used. You have tensile and compressive strengths, and things like strength to weight ratio, which most people have heard of. But you also have definitions like yield, ultimate, and fracture strengths. On top of that, these can vary depending if you are talking about the true strength or a simplified version that doesn't take into account deformation of the material. Something would only have to be \"stronger\" than steel in one of these aspects to make a legitimate claim.",
"Because strength is often not the only desired characteristic. Steels are jot only strong (resistant to deformation) but are also tough (resistant to fracture) and easy to manufacture from. These qualities make steel better than other materials for things like buildings and guns.\n\nSource: I'm a mechanical engineer.",
"Steel has the infrastructure to be strong and still affordable. While some synthetic materials may be lighter and stronger, they aren't cheap to manufacture."
] |
What makes pee burn when you're dehydrated? | [
"Uh, that's not normal. You might want to go talk to a doctor if it burns when you pee. Good luck with that and remember, \"No glove, no love.\"",
"Pee is your body getting rid of toxins that dissolve in water.\n\nIf there isn't enough water to dissolve them all, these toxins interact with your urinary tract more than your tract was designed to take; which hurts.",
"Well I can see from a lot of these answers that these people dont play sports and have never been this kind of dehydrated. As someone who does and has been dehydrated to the point of slightly painful urination an uncountable amount of times, I would have to say its because of the elevated percentage of amonia and other chemicals in your urine as compared to water. Hydrated pee is a much higher percentage water, so you dont feel burning like when you are super dehydrated",
"I believe what causes it to burn is urea and uric acid, which cannot be kept in the blood stream and must be expelled in the urine. The fact that there is a lack of water to dissolve those chemicals makes it painful to pee. \nIn case of infection, the pain comes from the bacterial action over the urine, that transformed it in ammonia. Ammonia is irritating to the skin (as you might know from using certain detergents) and so it causes pain during miction.",
"You don't have an STD. It's just that your body is extremely dehydrated. Others probably haven't experienced this before, but it's painful. The pain will linger for a couple days, but take that pain as a reminder to drink enough water.",
"It's kinda like drinking straight cordial concentrate with little to no water. Except in this case, your urethra is ' tasting' this highly concentrated urine and as such it burns."
] |
Why is the US in so much debt, and what caused it to be so high? | [
"Basically, there are two streams of cash: coming in and going out. What comes in is taxes. The government collects taxes every year to pay for the things it wants/needs to do. \n\n What goes out is spending. Every year (kinda), Congress passes a law that lays out exactly what is going to be spent on what, and it's called the budget. So Congress passes the federal budget, and it becomes federal law which has to be carried out. (There hasn't been a new budget passed in a few years because politics, but they have passed what's called a continuing resolution ever year which essentially says \"All right, just keep all the spending at last year's levels\")\n\n What's caused it to be so high is that we pass the budget/continuing resolution for the fiscal year before we know how much money is going to come in. Add to it that we've cut taxes while increasing spending, which causes an even bigger gap between what we have and what we need. So we borrow money to make up the difference, and that becomes the debt. The reason it keeps going up on the big scary clocks is because interest keeps accumulating on it. But we've never missed a payment (though the \"debt ceiling\" fight you hear about so often has caused us to come pretty close)\n\n Edit: Forgot about interest.",
"It's all about borrowing money. The US is much like a business; it collects income and provides services. Much of the time its income doesn't meet the amount of services it has to provide for, or chooses to provide for, and so you have to borrow money. The money then progressively collects more and more, until you have the trillions of dollars of debt the US has now. \n\nA few factors for the debt include: \n\n* War in Iraq\n* War in Afghanistan\n* First Gulf War\n\n\nThe debt really picked up when Bush took office, when spending increased 33% in his first term. Through his 8 years in office the nation's debt increased by 86%. I'm not saying it's all Bush's fault, but he played a role in it. Obama fared no better, and 10 trillion turned into 17 trillion. It's all about borrowing money."
] |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.