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How hard is it for a horse to carry a human? And what would be the equivalent for a human? | [
"From what I've found (this site: _URL_0_) it looks like an average horse can easily carry about 240 pounds. It can carry up to around 360 pounds with some effort, and over that only with considerable strain.\n\nSo a horse carrying an average-sized person would be within that easy weight.\n\nAnother quick search shows that around the maximum recommended backpacking weight for humans is around 1/3 of body weight. Which is around where the horses really start to struggle.\n\nSo for the comparison, just imagine a very heavy backpack as about the maximum a horse could take (around 360 pounds for the horse, or around 50 pounds for a person). An easy weight to just walk around would be around around 200 pounds for a horse, or around 30 pounds for a person."
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Google acquiring Motorola Mobility. | [
"There may be real implications, but current consensus in the tech and business communities is that this is just another salvo in the ongoing patent \"war\" between the major tech giants.\n\nCompanies like Google, Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and a few others are snatching up patents left and right, and paying lots of money for them. The idea is that, by controlling certain patents, one company can prevent the rest from using that technology. Moreover, if they do use it, they can be sued for patent infringement. There are currently many such lawsuits in various stages between Apple, HTC, Google, Nokia, and a couple other companies. The stakes are pretty high - we're talking billions of dollars. One could even argue that these patent purchases are investments, because if you win a lawsuit with them then you get a lot of money.\n\nIt's basically a massive land grab, but with intellectual property.\n\nEdit - ELI5 addendum: A **patent** is when you come up with a new idea or product, and you tell the government about it. The government will guarantee you that no one else is allowed to copy your idea for a certain amount of time. This is so you can be rewarded for your great new idea.\n\nIf you came up with a new recipe for lemonade that was twice as delicious, you wouldn't want every kid on the block setting up a lemonade stand with your new recipe, would you?"
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what is a kardashev civilization? | [
"Kardashev created a (very) loose scale to describe hypothetical civilizations based on how much energy they could harness, as energy harnessed roughly translates to work that can be achieved and people that can be supported.\n\nA Kardashev-1 (K1) civilization is capuring the full energy potential of their planet.\n\nA K2 civilization is capturing the full energy potential of their solar system (think Dyson Sphere)\n\nA K3 civilization is capturing the full energy potential of their galaxy.",
"It comes from the **Kardashev scale**, which was created by a soviet astronomer named Nikolai Kardashev for rating the technological progress of hypothetic advanced civilizations.\n\nA type 1 Kardashev civilisation would be one that was able to harvest all the solar energy reaching its planet from the star\\(s\\) it orbit, for use in powering stuff. The earth is heated up by sunlight for example, but a lot of this light is just reflected back into space.\n\nIf we could create some way of preventing any light from leaving the earth's atmosphere once it enters it, and turn it into usable power, we'd be a type 1 civilisation \\(and possibly make the earth appear like a uniformly black sphere to outside observers in the process, since there's no reflected light for them to observe.\\)\n\nThe same concept is repeated as one goes up the scale, just bigger. A type 2 civilisation is able to trap and use all the light from a star, not just the light hitting a single planet. This would likely involve completely enclosing the solar system in a \"Dyson sphere\" so that no light can escape it.\n\nA type 3 civilization is the same concept, only expanded to an entire galaxy.\n\nThe scale is mainly used in science fiction, since even becoming a type 1 civilisation is an engineering challenge far beyond the current capability of humanity.",
"If you have ever seen the manga Blame!, that is an example of a K1 bordering on K2 civilizeation"
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if the body of a car is the ground for its (DC) circuit, what factors prevent us from being electrocuted? Furthermore, what about utility workers on a hot (AC) pole? | [
"Circuit means loop. If you touch the body of the car, but nowhere else, it doesn't make a loop. Since there's no circuit, the electricity can't flow. You'll just get enough electricity to bring the car to the same voltage as the earth, which is very little."
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Why did the Roman Empire get divided? | [
"The first split came in CE 285 when the emperor Diocletian decided that the Roman empire had become too large to be effectively ruled by one man. He split the empire into West and East, keeping the eastern part for himself because it was richer in goods and trade. In the western part he appointed Maximian, who was in theory equal to Diocletian but in reality subject still to Diocletian. \n\nAfter a civil war across both parts of the empire that started in 306. In 314, Constantine claimed ultimate victory and reunited the Empire under a single ruler. He did however move the capitol to Constantinople [modern day Istanbul, Turkey] in the eastern part. \n\nIn 337 Constantine died and civil war erupted between his three sons, who divided the empire into three different parts. Valentinian emerged as victor and single leader in 364. He immediately divided the empire again, giving the eastern half to his brother Valens. Succession rebellions in the west eventually forced the Eastern emperor Theodosius I to quell the rebellions and become a single ruler of a unified Roman empire again. He was however the last emperor to rule both East and West. After his death in 395, his two sons inherited the East and West respectively. This was the final and permanent division of the Roman empire. The Western half wouldn't last long, finally falling in 476 with the sack of Rome. The Eastern half would exist another 1000 years, becoming known as the Byzantine empire.\n\nSo it was too big to be ruled by 1 man."
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How supplements are not drugs and drugs are not supplements | [
"It entirely depends upon whether that particular substance has been put through the rigorous multi-year testing required by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prove that said substance does actually help or cure the condition the company claims it does (and won't kill anybody in the process). That process is Hella fucking expensive, and if a company can avoid it, it does, because prefer to make as much dough as possible, without being bothered by pesky things like prosecution for wrongful deaths. So if a company sells a substance (like Echinacea or St Johns Wort) as a supplement, they ain't gotta do any testing. This doesn't save them from prosecution if people die, though. And if enough people complain, the FDA will get 'em on false advertising anyway (As is currently happening with the weight loss product Garcinia Cambogia)",
"Im just guessing here (not a nutritionist or pharmacist), but as far as i understand it the chemicals in drugs change the way your body functions (not doing what it would naturally) , whereas supplements just give you body more of something you'd already have \n\n\nExample- paracetamol is a drug because it changes the way your body deals with pain and inflammation. \n\nVitamin C supplements aren't drugs because you would already be intaking the vitamins, it just gives your body an excess so you definitely dont run out? \n\n\nAgain, this is just my basic understanding of biology here so go easy if im completely wrong."
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Can someone explain the carbon tax to me, like im five? | [
"To fully understand the policy in depth would take a fair bit of reading. A good place to start would be: _URL_1_. I spent quite a bit of time trying to understand it, I hold no strong allegiances to any of the political parties. Basically what is happening is that Labor/Greens are introducing a tax on the carbon emmitted by the top 500 companies in Australia. The companies pay the tax, not the people. However, some of the costs will be passed down to consumers. Low-income households which can't afford the extra costs (estimated to be around $10 per week) will be compensated through welfare and tax cuts. Higher income households face $300-$500 increase in cost of living per year. The rise in cost of living increase however is estimated to be much less than that of the GST. The money raised will go to fund a $10B clean energy finance corporation which will provide financial help to projects in the renewable sector. This corporation will be run by a corporate board and not the politicians. All profits made will be re-invested in renewables. Another $3.2B will be used for research into renewables directly. Also, because there is a cost on emitting carbon now, the companies will aim to become carbon neutral (for example NAB has already gone carbon neutral). Another long term benefit is a large number of clean, sustainable jobs in the renewable sector. A sector which is growing fast around the world. CSIRO has supported this policy: _URL_0_. Majority of economists support this policy: _URL_2_ The opposition have had a lot of criticism for this policy, most of which is claimed to be inaccurate and false by Labor. The opposition however hasn't been able to explain how they will fund their own \"Direct Action\" policy if not by taxing the people directly.",
"Emitting carbon is bad for our enviroment. But people still do it because there's currently no penalty for doing it and by emitting carbon you can make cool things like trucks and bikes.\n\nHowever it'd prob be better for everyone if we didn't emitt so much carbon, so the idea is that the government charges you some money for every bit of carbon you release. That means that trucks and bikes will be more expensive because the manufacturer will have to pay for the carbon emitted in making those, but hopefully it will also lead to less carbon being emitted overall as people realise they don't really need three trucks, and one will do. \n\nAnother thing is that as carbon emitting currently has no cost, there's no motivation to work out ways to emitt less of it. But if it costs money, then it might be worthwhile to develop a way of making trucks that emits less carbon, because its cheaper over all."
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Why was the Irish potato famine such a big deal? Didn't they have other foods they could eat? | [
"Ireland produced enough food during the famine, but it was seized by/owed to the English. \n\nThe potato famine was less of a natural famine, and more of a genocide. Similar things happened to the Ukrainians at the hands of the Soviets during the Holodomor.",
"Most of Ireland was incredibly poor and engaged in subsistence farming (farming on whatever land they had access to grow enough food for themselves to eat). The potato was by far the best way to do this for a few reasons. First, potatoes could easily be grown in small patches like in a small yard. Second, potatoes can be eaten without much preparation, unlike something such as wheat, which has to be milled first. Third, potatoes are calorie-rich. You can get about three times as many calories per acre out of potatoes than you can wheat and about 50% more than you can from corn. All of this adds up to make potatoes by far the easiest thing to grow for poor Irish peasants. When those potatoes started dying and there was literally no other source of food, people either had to flee or starve.\n\nEdit: /u/evange is also correct. The reason poor Irish peasants were so poor and had to rely on subsistence farming potatoes is due to British land seizures and unfair economic policy. So Ireland had enough food for everyone, but potatoes were the only food accessible to a large portion of the population because of British policies.",
"A large part of it was that that single strain of potato made up a third of the national crop, but a bigger part was english colonial laws. Even though there was a massive famine, the British still forced the Irish to export millions of tons of food. While that at least had an economic component to it, the English also banned any and all food donations to the Irish, because the English hated the Irish and just felt like there were too many Irishmen in the world. I don't like labeling anything as good or evil, but that policy was hitler-evil.",
"Basically, there'd been a big problem called subdivision of land, where every farming man would parcel out a little bit of his land to each of his sons to use when he died. That way, everybody got some land to farm and it was meant to be fair.\nHowever, this means that each household had a tiny amount of land, and needed a high-yield crop (potatoes) to feed their family. Nothing else could be grown in sufficient quantities on so little land.\nThen the blight came, fucked up all the potatoes, loads of people starved because no food.\n\nAlso, quite a bit of food was being taken away in taxes, the British government basically refused to help much at all (They did supply corn at one point, but not enough of it). There's still some resentment about that fact even today, with some people even going so far as to suggest the idea was to kill off all the Irish people to replace them with English people who would be less likely to rebel or complain."
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If many states have no laws regarding age of tattoo with parental constant. How is it not considered child endangerment/neglect to allow your 6 year old to get a tattoo? | [
"The same way it is not considered child endangerment/neglect to allow your 6 year old to see a rated R movie.\n\nJust because something has an age range does not make its particularly dangerous for people under that age..."
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How is it possible to completely shut down a country's internet? | [
"It is a web of interconnected servers, but they have to be connected. If you control the points where your internet crosses the border to connect to other internet infrastructures, and/or you control all the ISPs within your country you can take your country down.",
"connected servers are still operated by private enterprises who typically want to remain law abiding. if the gov tells you to shut down, you do it or risk the company being seized and shut down and you going to jail. most people want to stay out of jail.",
"> I always thought of the internet as a web of interconnected servers accessed through a number of ISPs. How is it possible for a person/government to throw a killswitch and completely take an entire system offline?\n\nThat's basically the right idea (on an extremely limited scale). To make the answer more clear, imagine the internet as a dozen computers in a single office, all connected to each other by a bunch of Ethernet cords. If you're familiar with network topologies, imagine these computers are connected in a mesh topology. That is, every computer in the \"internet\" is connect directly to each other by a distinct Ethernet cable. This isn't *exactly* how it works, but this is a small scale analogy, so we'll run with it.\n\nNow, let's say in this analogy that one of your coworkers (we'll call him \"Jim\") starts to really piss off everyone else. Then Jim gets fired, but he still shows up every day and sits on his computer and messes around on the \"internet\". How do you kick him off the \"internet\"? Well, aside from calling the police, everyone in the office would go through and physically disconnect themselves from his computer. If one person does this, Jim could (reasonably) either physically reconnect, or could just use the redundancy of the mesh topology to access that computer anyways. But all other 11 devices? You cannot patch that fast enough.\n\nSo, that's basically the idea: yes, the internet can be thought of as a massive series of servers (and other network devices, like databases, mainframes, and network connected computers, phones, and printers), but if everyone who has those physical devices and their cables all decides \"nope, fuck this country in particular\", they could (in theory) remove those connections. They own the servers, who's going to stop them? The disconnected country could attempt a huge variety of things to get into the internet anyways though, such as having some spy in a different country purchase some server space and give access to the homeland, but (again) that would turn into a shell game, where the broader internet could identify the lone connection and remove it, but the disconnected country could set up somewhere else, and on and on and on.",
"To shut down a countries internet shouldn't be about about focusing on key, critical infrastructure. The internet is a vastly complex ecosystem with multitudes of redundancy. Instead, the easiest way to shut down a countries internet would be an EMP attack / pulse. Granted, the side effect of this would be everything else electronic also going down.",
"In smaller countries there may be only a small number of ISPs that are either directly controlled, or are heavily regulated, by the government. in that scenario shutting off access is easy to do.",
"Backbone optical cables connecting continents/countries , either cut them or shut the final routers behind them. And then you ve got satellites. Take care of them too"
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How dry ice is made | [
"Once you cool Carbon Dioxide, a gas at room temperature, enough, it becomes a liquid, and, after even more cooling, it becomes a solid, which is basically just dry ice. When the dry ice warms up enough, it returns to the natural gas state, but there's a certain temperature where it's a mist. That's the fog that comes off the ice itself, it's the gas form of carbon dioxide, at a cold enough temperature to still be visible.",
"To make liquids or gasses into solids the basic needs are to lower the temperature and/or increasing the pressure. There may be various different ways that it is made utilizing pressure and temperature changes.\n\nYou know when you see fire extinguishers discharged and there is that kind of \"snow\" that ends up on the ground for a little while, this is bits of solid CO2, or dry ice. The fire extinguisher contains liquid CO2 under high pressure, when it is introduced into the atmosphere the pressure drops and the temperature also drops, enough to turn some of that liquid into a solid. \n\nOne method of making dry ice is basically, in theory, using a giant fire extinguisher. Liquid CO2 is stored under pressure and then is discharged into a sealed low pressure container. The \"snow\" is then collected and compressed into blocks to make dry ice. The CO2 that was released and did not form \"snow\" is collected and reused in the same process."
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If Muslims do not believe Jesus died on the cross, what exactly happened to the man? | [
"My Arabic teacher explained it to me that some Arabs believe that Jesus was a dude and that Christ was a spirit that inhabited him and right before Jesus died Christ left him and went to heaven. And that is why he shouted \"why have you forsaken me?\" Because he didn't expect Christ to leave him. So Jesus did die on the cross, but the thing/spirit that we think of as \"JESUS\" didn't.\n\nOr something to that effect. But that is definitely not my expertise.",
"I'm not sure what their stance is on the crucifixion. I'm an atheist and while I dunno that it's 100% proven, it seems reasonable to think that Jesus was indeed crucified - we know the man existed, that there was a semi-uprising in Judea around that time, and crucifixion was a common execution method. Not believing he was divine doesn't mean he wasn't crucified.",
"Because your post isn't asking a simplified conceptual explanation, but rather for an answer, it has been removed. \n\nYou should try /r/answers, /r/askreddit or even one of the more specialized answers subreddits like /r/askhistorians, /r/askscience or others too numerous and varied to mention. \n\nRest assured this doesn't make your question *bad*, it just makes it more appropriate for another subreddit. Good luck!"
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Why did the Japanese side with the Germans in WWII? | [
"I think even the most optimistic of the Germans at the onset of WWII realized that Germany wasn't a big enough country to conquer the entire world. \n\nHad Germany won in Russia and western Europe, and Japan not been defeated and eventually secured much of eastern Europe, sure, there's probably a decent chance they would've eventually had some conflict, but sometimes you just need to try and solve the more immediate problems. \n\nI would argue that from Japan's point of view, their relationship with Germany helped them pretty significantly in WWII. It made the case for the United States' leadership to focus first on defeating Germany, which gave Japan a couple extra years to try and solidify their position in the pacific. \n\nOtherwise, after Pearl Harbor, Japan very well could've been facing the might of the US entirely alone.",
"My history teacher explained it like this:\nIn 1930 Germany the nazis had the opinion that you were a better human being if you were, as the Germans called it, \"arisch\" or \"Herrenrasse\" which means something like Master race. That means blonde hair and blue eyes. They saw the Northern Europeans (for example Sweden) as perfected \"arisch\". \nThe Japanese apparently hat a similar opinion. They saw them self as the Master race of Asia and are said to agree with a lot of the Nazis opinions. Because of that and because they expected the nazis to be the winning side they decided against siding with the allies."
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why do muscles get better the more you use them | [
"It's efficient. A pound of muscle burns a dozen or so calories a day, just to sustain itself. By only building the muscles needed for your particular lifestyle, you save a lot of calories that can then be put toward reproduction or not starving. A fisher needs mostly upper body strength, a [persistence hunter](_URL_0_)) needs calves of steel, but if everybody got both, they'd waste lot of calories maintaining useless meat. Over a lifetime, a few dozen calories a day can really add up - 77,000 calories gets you an entire extra child (well, plus 3-500/day for breastfeeding).",
"You've probably learned to cook with them better, or you may have just grown accustomed to their taste. Many foods that taste awful to others taste of comfort and home when used more often.",
"Because your body builds more muscle fiber in response of muscle stimulation. The more you have, generally, the stronger you are. Thus better."
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Why were the the bodies of those who died of a fatal dose of radiation at the Chernobyl disaster still considered toxic and buried in Zinc lined coffins? | [
"Two things.\n\nFirst, they probably got radioactive material from the accident site all over themselves. It's not just radiation that's escaping, it's also actual physical radioactive material that can contaminate body and clothes. This what they mean by nuclear fallout. So it's not like a bullet-riddled body, but more like a gun-riddled body, and those guns still shoot occasionally.\n\nSecond, one specific kind of radiation, neutron radiation, can actually make materials it hits radioactive. Neutron radiation is produced in nuclear reactors, and although it's hard to say whether it'd be still produced after the meltdown, it depends, it's possible that they were exposed to it. Then it'd be more like bullet fragments inside a body growing into loaded guns.\n\nThose analogies were unexpectedly gross.",
"Radioactive fallout \n\nWhen Chernobyl exploded it not only sent out massive amounts of radiation but also massive amounts of radioactive material (fallout) which landed in the surrounding area rendering everything it touched (including human bodies) radioactive.",
"1. Their skin was contaminated by fallout\n\n2. They may have inhaled radioactive material which will continue to decay\n\n3. Neutron bombardment can cause materials that were not previously radioactive to become radioactive."
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Why do certain policies work in countries such as Sweden and Germany, yet they "apparently" differ in America? | [
"Yes these systems do work, but it is not possible for america to just switch from private health care is public. It would be like getting England to switch the sides of the road they drive on. It would be unimaginably expensive. Also, many (but not all) americans think that anything socialized is bad and needs to not happen.",
"Because, implementing those program would require dramatically raising taxation. And that is something which is not exactly popular."
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How are planes able to fly vertically. | [
"Most planes can't fly straight vertically for any length of time without stalling (losing their forward momentum and plummeting). \n\nThe ones that can have *extremely* powerful engines relative to their size, like in fighter jets, which provide so much thrust on their own that they don't need the lift from their wings to maintain their upward momentum.",
"Planes that can fly vertically for any length of time, ie. stunt planes or military fighters, can produce their weight in thrust. They're powerful enough to stay aloft, or even climb, without needing any lift from the wings. Now if they're flying straight up, then yes, air will flow over the wings and cause them to create lift and cause the plane to drift a bit. First of all, when flying straight up, the speed of air flowing over the wing will tend to be low, meaning that drift force will be small. Second, if you wanted to fly straight up, you would pitch your plane forward a bit so that the angle of attack (the angle of the air hitting the wings) is such that the wing isn't generating much force. The plane will be pitched a bit forward, but it's path of travel will be straight up. Or you could pitch the plane straight up, and just accept a small bit of drift. Depends what it is that you're actually trying to do.",
"They could have a thrust to weight ratio greater than one, which is the case for many fighter planes, especially if theyre not full of fuel, which can be ~30-50% of total mass. \n\nIn vertical flight, plane will have two forces. Thrust and weight. Engines are generally on the longitudinal axis of the plane, so assume all thrust is opposed to lift. \n\nExample - f 22 has 2x35000 lbs T engines. Max takeoff is 83000 (65000 plane +18000 fuel)\n\nPut the bare minimum of fuel in there, and you can sustain vertical flight quite easily. \n\nAlso you can just look at it from a bad angle, and 70 degrees can look like 90 deg\n\n\nBasically you are asking when a plane becomes a rocket. Its the same force simplication if a plane goes vertical flight"
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Why do you get startled/feel a rush of a adrenaline if you catch yourself falling asleep? | [
"Are you talking about hypnic jerk (sometimes called hypnagogic jerk)? That feeling where you jerk suddenly back awake sometimes when you're falling asleep? The prevailing theory is this is an evolutionary holdover from our earlier primate days, and is a danger response so our ancestors didn't accidentally fall out of trees."
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Why do delivery truck drivers wear high visibility jackets? | [
"I would assume it has to do with Health & Safety regulations and legislation, I'm not sure about South Africa but in the UK, Health & Safety dictates that employees working in certain professions need to take certain precautions in their job, one of which could be the need for protective or high visibility clothing.\n\nI would imagine truck drivers wear high visibility jackets so that other drivers can see them clearly, being in truck yards and delivery depots, they walk around large vehicles with many blind spots, so to minimize the risk of getting run over they wear clothing that makes them as visible as possible :)",
"They wear them as a precaution. Your employer is responsible for anything that happen to you while you are working, so any sensible employer would avoid the hassle of having a driver hit by another truck by at the very least ensure that they are easier to see.\nGive them a jacket, because it is such an easy thing to do that make their job a lot safer.\n\nMany countries have regulations on high visibility clothes for roadworks and some industrial complexes have high visibility clothes as a requirement along with a safety helmet.\n\nConsidering what you achieve with just a jacket, it's really a very cheap life insurance.",
"I work at a shipping and receiving warehouse and it's company policy that anybody entering the facility needs high visibility clothing on, due to the towmotors driving around and such. This rule also extends to outside our dock area where there's other semi trucks driving around. It's just because as a truck driver your typically going to be in situations where you want to be visible and not ran over by something",
"Most transport truck drivers do out of safety.\n\nThe area where trucks are stored, they load and unload goods, and the sides of roads where they might need to make emergency stops are not often well-lit. Because of this they wear high visibility safety vests so no one accidentally runs them over.",
"to decrease the risk of an accident while they are walking around in parking lots etc and there are other drivers driving trucks."
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How can a sample of 2200 people represent the opinions of 315 million. | [
"Imagine you have a massive jar of M & Ms filled with thousands of pieces. Now if I were to ask you what percentage of them were blue, yellow, brown, and red how do you do it most efficiently? You can dump all of it out and count them one by one but it would take forever. Or you can shake the jar until everything is randomly mixed up and dump out the first one hundred. There's a very good chance, if everything is randomly mixed up, that the percentage of M & Ms in the first hundred has the same distribution as the rest of the thousands of M & Ms. That's essentially how polls are done everywhere.\n\nThe most difficult part of all this is making sure the sample size is completely random and accurately reflect the rest of the sample.",
"As long as it is a random sample, the probability of the sample having a different opinion than the population drops off very fast with the size of the sample. With 2200 randomly selected people the chance of a significant difference is extremely small (usually less than 5%) for essentially any population size. \n\nGood polls will tell you the margin of error (plus minus so many %) and the confidence interval (usually 95 or 99 times out of 100). This is a measure of how far, and how likely, the population might be from the sample. Surveying more people makes these values better but you hit diminishing returns pretty rapidly."
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Why does the amount of daylight increase the fastest around the Spring Equinox, rather than increasing at a constant rate from December to June? | [
"In general, the length of a day varies throughout the year, and depends upon latitude. This variation is caused by the tilt of the Earth's axis of rotation with respect to the ecliptic plane of the Earth around the sun. At the solstice occurring about June 20–22, the north pole is tilted toward the sun, and therefore the northern hemisphere has days ranging in duration from just over 12 hours in the southern portion of the Tropic of Cancer to 24 hours in the Arctic Circle, while the southern hemisphere has days ranging in duration from just under 12 hours in the northern portion of the Tropic of Capricorn to zero in the Antarctic Circle. At the equinox occurring about September 22–23, the poles are neither tilted toward nor away from the sun, and the duration of a day is generally about 12 hours all over the Earth. At the solstice occurring about December 20–22, the south pole is tilted toward the sun, and therefore the southern hemisphere has days ranging in duration from just over 12 hours in the northern portion of the Tropic of Capricorn to 24 hours in the Antarctic Circle, whereas the northern hemisphere has days ranging in duration from just under 12 hours in the southern portion of the Tropic of Cancer to zero in the Arctic Circle. At the equinox occurring about March 19–21, the poles are again aligned so that the duration of a day is generally about 12 hours all over the Earth.\n\nIn each hemisphere, the higher the latitude, the shorter the day during winter. Between winter and summer solstice, the day's duration increases, and the rate of increase is larger the higher the latitude. A fast increase of day length is what allows a very short day on winter solstice at 60 degrees latitude (either north or south) to reach about 12 hours by the spring equinox, while a slower increase is required for a much longer day on winter solstice at 20 degrees latitude (again, either north or south) to reach 12 hours by the spring equinox. The rate of change of day duration is generally fastest at the equinoxes, although at high latitudes the change is similar for several weeks before and after the equinoxes. The rate of change of day duration at each solstice is zero as the change goes from positive to negative, or vice versa.\n\nSome interesting facts are as follows:\n\n On the Equator, the duration of daylight is not exactly 12 hours all the year round, but rather — because of atmospheric refraction and the size of the Sun — exceeds 12 hours by about 7 minutes each day;\n Because the sun is north of the equator for almost 4 days more than half the year, because of the eccentricity of Earth's orbit, the duration of the average day at a given latitude in the northern hemisphere exceeds the duration of the average day at the same latitude in the southern hemisphere by a few minutes;\n During a few days around the equinoxes—about March 19–22 and September 21–24—both poles experience simultaneously 24 hours of daytime, mainly because of atmospheric refraction.\n Each pole has only one sunrise and one sunset per year, around the time of the equinoxes. Each pole’s sunrise is nearly coincident with the other's sunset, with minor differences mainly resulting from atmospheric refraction.\n\nAll info is here: _URL_0_"
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How does cutting tinfoil with scissors sharpen them? | [
"This works by cutting several pieces of folded foil.\n\nAs you cut the top layer of foil that layer is \"pushed\" sideways by the angle of the blade and rubs along the blade. \n\nAs you cut more layers the combined pressure of the sheets means the blade is not able to \"push\" the next layer as sideways, so the next layer presses more firmly against the blade\n\nThis means that each layer is a little closer to the blade, in a kind of V shape. All these edges scrape up the side of the scissors and scratch away a tiny layer of the metal right up to the edge of the blade.\n\nWhen we remove this tiny layer, we make the blade sharper, like in this diagram:\n\n_URL_0_"
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- why some materials are more flammable than others. | [
"In short, yes! When we talk about things \"burning\", what we actually mean is that the material is combining with oxygen (in a chemical bond), and releasing heat in the process.\n\nSome materials can combine with oxygen easier than others, and usually that is because of their molecular configuration and how their electrons are organized."
] |
Is there a biological reason why men don't appear as frightened as woman during dangerous situations? | [
"Men have a lower level of fear response and suffer fewer long-term fear effects than women. [Survey](_URL_0_)\n\nFrom a purely sociological standpoint, men further conceal their fear response because it is socially damaging to them in a way that it isn't for women.\n\nIf you don't display fear, you tend to engender trust in others that you can handle the situation.\n\nIf you do display fear, you tend to either be disregarded or treated protectively.\n\nMen are far more likely to fall into the 'disregarded and disposable' category while women tend to fall into the 'treated protectively' category. As a result, displaying fear is almost never advantageous for men while it can be for women.\n\nAs to why these distinctions exist, there's some speculation that women evolved to be more timid and risk averse because their loss - especially if they're pregnant - is a greater loss than the loss of a man. If 90% of the men of your tribe are eaten by wildebeests and none of the women are, your tribe will recover in the next generation. If 90% of the women are so eaten, your tribe will suffer a demographic catastrophe.",
"I don't think men appear less frightened. Have you ever seen pictures taken at haunted houses? The men react just as badly as the women in most cases. If they do react less strongly, it would be because they were socialized to believe that equates to strength and attractiveness. Nothing to do with evolution.",
"I think the difference is that women tend to admit to being frightened after the fact and will discuss it, while men tend to pretend it didn't happen.\n\nI'm not sure if this is a social thing, a brain thing, or a combination. It could have something to do with women's (in general) more advanced socialization.",
"There's the possibility that higher testosterone levels in men contribute to a seeming lower level of fear shown by men. Higher testosterone often equates to higher levels of aggression (positive as well as negative). Higher positive aggression levels may appear to be lower levels of fear."
] |
how does vaping vegtable glycerine, propylene glycol, and flavor concentrates (electronic cigarette juice) effect cilia trying to restore itself from cigarette smoke? | [
"We don't know for sure yet because vaping is so new there aren't any long term studies. \n\nThere have been studies about fog machines, however, which use similar glycol or glycerine based fluids. \n\n_URL_0_\n\nIt's a long section, but tl;dr exposure to glycol fog has been associated with negative respiratory effects by a number of studies.",
"While we don't know what the long term effects are, we do know that switching to vaping does allow the lungs to begin to heal and improves lung function almost as well as quitting cold turkey. However, nobody who vapes (except a few idiots, probably) believes that vaping is \"healthy\". The correct term is \"healthier\" (than smoking). \n\nIf the FDA doesn't screw it totally up, vaping will probably emerge as the most effective cessation method, if not only for the fact that it's super easy to decrease the nicotine content gradually over time, while still vaping the same amount.\n\nBreathing just air > vaping > smoking."
] |
How does Moore's law work. | [
"They don't. It's not a law.\n\nHe basically observed that:\n > the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years. *([Source] (_URL_0_))*\n\nNot that it **has** to, but that it **seems** to do this when he made the statement, and is likely to continue to do so.\n\nHe also said every 2 years, Intel revised this to 18 months.\n\n*****\n\nOf course, there's the issue of beginning to reach the physical limits of our current methods, so we'll have to look into quantum computing but.. that's all the future, and not too relevant to the question. :)",
"They don't *have* to double.\n\nMoore's Law only describes a trend, it's not a law to determine what will happen in the future.\n\nIf it rained everyday this week, and you say \"It has rained everyday this week\", it's a very different thing from saying \"It has rained everyday this week, therefore it will rain every day next week\".\n\nMoore's Law describes a trend, but it's not a universal physical law or anything of that sort."
] |
why will the sun burn something through a magnifying glass but if the sun hits eye glasses it wont burn your eyes? | [
"Because glasses don't so much magnify as distort the light going through them to focus it where the eye needs it. You can create a heat spot with some lenses but you have to aim them directly at the sun and angle them just right so generally it's not an issue.",
"Actually, you can burn your eyes if you look at the sun for too long, whether or not you wear glasses. But you're probably asking a slightly different question, which is why don't glasses focus sunlight into a hot pinpoint the way a magnifying glass can? Mainly it's because your eyeglasses are designed to correct any distortion in your own eye's lens, which means they won't be focusing light into a tiny pinpoint; instead they will be changing it in whatever way compensates for the distortion in your eye."
] |
Why seemingly every country is in debt? | [
"At any given time there is a lot of money not getting spent. If all of that money were sitting around under people's mattresses it would mean that a huge amount of resources aren't getting used.\n\nDebt is just the agreement that people with resources who don't currently have a better use for them to lend those resources to those that do, often to be paid back with interest. \n\nGovernments are pretty trusted as borrowers go, so lenders are willing to lend them money at very low interest rates. When you can borrow money at low interest rates, it makes other forms of income (e.g. taxes) look more expensive by comparison. If the government wants to fund something, it is often cheaper to do so with borrowing than with taxation.",
"Many countries are in debt. However it's a kind of \"I owe Jim and Joe $5 who owe Kevin $10 who owes Jim and Katie $5\" kind of deal. For established countries with reputable credit (e.g. Germany), loans come cheap from other countries since there's a very good chance that Germany can pay it back at any time. The money comes at a low interest rate, say 1%, getting Germany a good amount of money for them to put into the economy to facilitate economic growth (increase GDP, the amount of money a country produces due to goods and services). The idea is, take out a big loan and grow your GDP to a point where the debt is no longer a problem. If I take out a loan that's 80% my GDP, and it'll grow my GDP in 5 years where the debt will only be 30% my GDP, I make a profit, and so does the country loaning the money to me. Not all countries can do this though, since some countries (e.g. Greece) take out money that is way beyond their GDP, and doesn't have economic growth to show for it, giving them a bad credit rating. It's just worth more to put the money back into the economy than pay it back, since paying it back wouldn't really do anything for the country unless the interest rates become higher than the loan is worth. Ergo, most countries will have debt, since debt is actually sort of good for the economy, until it becomes more than 100% the GDP. Does that make sense?",
"> Is there more debt than there is money out there?\n\nI mean, someone owns every dime of it. In a few cases, countries are holding each others' bonds as reserves but for the most part, bonds are held by investors of one kind or another. It's usually recommended that people near retirement, for example, keep most of their savings in bonds (some of which are loans to countries, others to corporations). For example, I own a few hundred dollars of [BNDX](_URL_0_), a fund that holds [these bonds](_URL_1_) on my behalf."
] |
What is the difference between a muffler, a suppressor, and a silencer If there are only at all. | [
"a silencer is a made up thing movies use. a suppressor is a real thing that actually makes a gun sort of quieter but not even remotely silent or even quiet. A muffler is a car part.",
"A muffler goes on your car. Both the Silencer and the Suppressor are two terms for the same device.",
"A suppressor and a silencer are the same thing. However, \"Suppressor\" is the accurate term. \"Silencer\" is the more commonly used term for people who don't know a lot about guns. It is also inaccurate, as they do not silence the gunshot.\n\nA bullet fires when a firing pin strikes the primer of the casing. This causes a small explosion inside the chamber which forces the bullet out of the end of the barrel.\n\nA suppressor basically collects this expanding gas and diverts it into a a metal cylinder at the end of the barrel.\n\nThe result is a smaller flash and quiet*er* gunshot.\n\nIt does *not* make the gun silent and stealthy. The soft \"*pfft*\" sound you hear in movies and video games is pure Hollywood fiction.\n\nA suppressor can quiet a gunshot to hearing safe levels, but it will still be very loud.\n\nA muffler is a car part. It's basically a suppressor for your exhaust pipe."
] |
Why does Paper make such loud noises when I rip it? | [
"It is made up of a lot of strands with their own tension, when you rip paper you are breaking a lot of strands at once. Its like a rapid fire popping sound of that tension being released."
] |
Don't franchises suck the money out of local economies? Say a small town with 13 of the same coffee shop franchises. Also strangling local independent businesses? | [
"Franchises are owned by the owner of the franchise, not the corporation. It is a locally owned business, just not \"independent\"\n\nBut its not really any different than an independent shop who buys their good to sell from outside the local area. Thats all a franchise is doing too, buying their good to sell from someone else.\n\nThis might surprise you, but actually a lot of franchise locations like to have a connection with their local communities are make an effort to buy goods they can locally, as well as doing what they can to align their stores to the local area. In fact some companies that people can franchise, as a condition of their franchise, the company mandates that they do get local goods and such.\n\nFranchise isn't some dirty word. It's just someone that saw a business model with proven success and said \"hey, I want to start a business, here's one that works, I'll do that\". Nothing wrong there, risk is low, reward is solid, its hard to argue with it not being a good business decision to open franchise you think will succeed. Independent businesses are crazy risky and hard. Franchises have way less risk and are well known how to run."
] |
How long do you have to be dead before you're stopped being referred to as " the late"?. For example the late Margaret Thatcher sounds fine but the late Shakespear does not. | [
"That's an interesting observation.\n\nThis seems like it's likely a vague thing with hazy boundaries that no firm definition will suffice for. With that said, though, I'd say a good general rule might be something along the lines of \"Margaret Thatcher was alive during the living memory of the vast majority of people who are currently alive\", whereas Shakespeare was not.\n\nI say \"vague and hazy\" because obviously somewhere in between two extreme cases like Margaret Thatcher and Shakespeare, there is, say, Jimi Hendrix. Is it reasonable to refer to him as \"the late Jimi Hendrix\"? I think you'll find that different people have different opinions on that. And I think it's reasonable for them to have different opinions on it."
] |
How do animals have multiple births at a time and humans(most of the time) only have one | [
"It all revolves around our brain and development. Humans have adapted to give birth to highly developed offspring with big heads to house our complex brains. Brain development, big heads, and organs capable of supporting the brain take a lot of time to develop from a single cell (9 months). There are also a lot of resources needed for development. Humans get around these problems by devoting time and resources to a limited number of babies to insure their survival to maturity. It is not advantageous to waste resources during pregnancy or childhood on many offspring that will not survive. \n\nOther species have offspring that do not require as much resources or time from the parents. This allows them to produce offspring in large numbers more quickly because it does not cost as much and insures that at least some of the offspring will probably survive to maturity. \n\nThere is no perfect system. Evolution has just produced different systems that work for different species.",
"The number of live young typical in any species is tuned (by evolution) to give the best outcomes. Some species adopt the strategy of having a huge number of young but provide little or no care for them so that only a few survive. Mammals tend to provide more care so the numbers come down to how many young it's practical to care for. Human children require a huge amount of care to be successful so a very low number per pregnancy is preferred. Another factor relates to the size and maturity of the young. Human babies are limited by the size of the head that can fit through their mother's pelvis at birth. It seems there's selection for babies having the largest possible brains at birth. This is a problem for twins, triplets, etc., which result in more premature births with lower birth weight."
] |
why do we need coin currency? Why not set prices to a flat dollar amount? | [
"The fractal amounts are still meaningful in many transactions. For example, if gasoline could only be sold for $4/gallon or $5/gallon would make a huge difference to the vendor and the consumer alike. Also, some industries live off those fractions. Credit cards, for example, charge the vendor a small fraction of the charge. Each charge isn't that much, but when multiplied by the millions of transactions every day, they add up.",
"It doesn't matter, really. Moving the smallest unit to the dollar, one dollar items would now cost one hundred dollars, fifty cent items would cost fifty dollars, etc. It doesn't change the value of the item, we're just changing units. The dollar would be the equivalent of the penny in such a system. You'd effectively be buying everything in pennies, and calling your unit the dollar. Instead of figuring cost and value in terms of dollars and fractional dollars, you now are figuring in large whole values. While it's conceptually simpler, humans are terrible at reasoning about very large numbers.\n\nAnd coins are good in that they're far more durable than paper money. A coin is expensive to manufacture up front but it will last decades or centuries, whereas the $1 bill lasts about a month in circulation. People don't like them because they're heavy and bulky, though, but from the mint's standpoint, it's economic.",
"Coins last much longer, and so are more cost effective than low denomination paper bills. If everything gets rounded to the nearest dollar in the US, I'll just about guarantee that $1 and $2 coins will shortly follow, and probably $5 as well. \n\nHere in Canada, the entire reason we have $1 and $2 denominations as coins instead of bills is that it's cheaper."
] |
What is the ethical justification(s) behind being pescetarian? | [
"I knew a girl once who was an outspoken PETA member and pescetarian. I think she just wanted to reap the moral superiority behind being a vegetarian, but liked fish too much. \n\nNot to make fun of Nonmeat-eaters. I know a very lovely Vegan women.",
"Some people don't like eating meat due to the inhumane conditions in which they are raised. Since fish are not subject to the same methods, there's no problem."
] |
Why do my hands sometimes feel like they "fell asleep"? | [
"When you put enough pressure on a nerve or set of nerves they stop functioning correctly and your brain interprets that as pins and needles, pain or numbness. \n\nFrom the [National Institute of Neuroligacal disorderds and Storke](_URL_0_):\n\n > What is Pinched Nerve?\n\n > The term \"pinched nerve\" is a colloquial term and not a true medical term. It is used to describe one type of damage or injury to a nerve or set of nerves. The injury may result from compression, constriction, or stretching. Symptoms include numbness, \"pins and needles\" or burning sensations, and pain radiating outward from the injured area. One of the most common examples of a single compressed nerve is the feeling of having a foot or hand \"fall asleep.\"",
"Many people believe that it's because you cut off blood circulation to your extremity, by, say, falling asleep on your arm and waking up to find it numb.\n\nThis is not correct. It's not a function of blood flow. It's a function of compression of the nerves in that extremity. When you put pressure on a nerve, that nerve doesn't conduct electrochemical signals the way it's supposed to. Put enough pressure on it for long enough, and it will take it a few minutes to recover. As the nerve is settling back into its normal state, it fires off spurious electrochemical signals that give you the \"pins and needles\" feeling (which is properly called *paresthesia,* if you were wondering.)"
] |
Why can't everyone be nice to each other? | [
"I'd say for two main reasons. Humans love to break into tribes. With a clear divide between Us and Them. Typically that creates some sort of feeling of superiority or resentment. \nAnd also, treating someone like crap actually makes you feel good. It makes you feel powerful and important. It's why we like sarcasm and a good comeback. And those little micro-rewards in your brain create long term behavior patterns.",
"They're some people out in the world who just like to be rude and irritating, that passed onto others and basically you know",
"Not everyone deserves to be treated nicely. Everyone knows this.\n\nThe issue is we can't agree on who those undeserving individuals are. This causes injustice.\n\nConsider the opposite question: why can't everyone be mean to each other? Same answer: not everyone deserves to be treated meanly. \n\nTL;DR: we know and understand the benefits of being nice; we just fuck it up rather quickly.",
"Because without the bad, how would you recognize and appreciate the good?",
"I'm sure someone will come up with a much more elegant answer. Simply, a few million years of competing for resources (food, mates, territory) is tough to break away from."
] |
How does diplomatic immunity work and why do we have it? | [
"There have been cases in which the other country will forfeit diplomatic immunity. There was a famous case in D.C. where a drunk Russian diplomat plowed down some people in Georgetown, and the Russians eventually waived his immunity and extradited him back to the U.S. (He'd long since fled home.)\n\nBut they didn't *have to.*",
"Yes they could, but the State Department would contact the country and ask them to forfeit the immunity. It's done because some laws in other countries are extremely easy to break for people who are not highly familiar, and diplomats carrying vital security information constantly being detained would lead to constant international\ncrisis and potentially war.",
"Well, think about how it works the other way.\n\nLet's say we have a guy who represents the USA to the United Arab Emirates. \n\nHe kisses his wife at a restaurant. \n\nThis is against the law there. \n\nIt would greatly strain relations if the UAE kept him there in jail, so instead they send him back to the USA and he's punished how the US sees fit.\n\n > Can one commit murder and still claim diplomatic immunity? \n\nIn such a situation, the diplomat's home country would probably waive immunity and allow prosecution *or* they would be expelled from the host country and prosecuted.",
"[Here](_URL_0_) is a fun article about it (spoiler: #1 is murder)."
] |
Do animals actually understand us when we speak or is it just anthropomorphism? | [
"They do understand body language and tone. And depending on the animal and breed, they can learn between 30-90 words (more for mimicking species like parrots).\n\nNow, thinking that an animal understands you when you say something like \"Good morning fluffy, you ready for a ride to the vet?\" In most cases the only thing they will pick up is their name and your tone (as well as body language).\n\nBut if a dog perks up because you say the word \"walk\" then they probably learned that word and have some association with it (like walking with their owner).\n\nThis is just and adaptation of normal behavior in the wild. Animals need to be able to recognize patterns in order to accurately assess how risky a situation is. Normally, the cues are visual and some audible, but not language. A rattle snake doesn't say, \"bad dog\" but the rattle is a noise that an animal must learn to survive, right?",
"Anecdotal evidence, not scientific, but I train dogs. Currently I have a large mastiff-lab mix. Two specific words we train him on are:\n\n*Stop* - originally used for border training. In the specific context as trained, it meant \"Stop walking, do not walk off the curb and into the street.\" He generalized the meaning, and now responds to \"stop\" as though trained to the general English language verb. On stop, he will stop licking something, stop running, stop chewing something.\n\nYou're not convinced? Fair enough. This next one still sends chills down my spine.\n\n*Watch Baby* - originally used to reinforce natural behavior. I used it indoors, to convey the specific context \"Stay here, next to the baby, while I leave the room for a moment.\" I still use it, the same way, but 'the baby' is now four.\n\nOne day, we were having dinner with some friends, who have a three-year-old. The kids and I finish eating before the rest of the families do. There is a park a few hundred yards away, and I set off with both kids and the dog.\n\nWe are walking along a wide sidewalk next to a major road (speed limit 35, two lanes each direction). Facing the park, the road is on the left, and to the right is a baseball field, past which is undeveloped canyon (scrub, with rattlesnakes, poison oak, small cliff drop-off, running water). The kids are holding hands in front of me, the dog is on leash to my right.\n\nThe kids start running ahead of me, laughing, headed to the park, when, to my horror, they split up. My child veers towards the busy street; the other child veers off across the baseball field.\n\nI broke into a run, told the dog, \"watch baby,\" and dropped his leash.\n\nHe was jogging at my pace, and looking at me, with confusion clear in his eyes: \"Whatchya talkin' about, boss, that's not ...\" I'm breaking left towards our child, and he's on my right, so I point towards the other child and repeated \"watch baby!\" \n\nYou could see in his eyes, the moment of \"Oh! GOT IT!\" He looked forward and took off towards her at full speed. \n\nI corralled my child (still safe on the sidewalk), and circled back to find him between the other kid and the canyon, no more than three feet from her side. They'd stopped at a water fountain.\n\nI don't expect him to understand Nietzsche, but he understood me when it counted, in a situation that I hadn't specifically trained him for.",
"It depends on the animal. As you can imagine, given the very wide range of animal species in the world, there is also a very wide range of animal intelligence. Studies suggest that certain species *are* capable of learning limited amounts of human language - they can be taught that words have meaning and have shown the ability to rearrange words to create self-aware thoughts, rather than simply repeating what they're told. Other animals can be trained to react to words or phrases, but don't necessarily understand the linguistic meaning of that word - they simply know to act a certain way when they hear it. Others may react just to the sound out of instinct and we interpret those reactions as meaningful when they're not."
] |
How do hotel comparision websites earn money? | [
"Yes, they earn commissions. All of these online travel sites, whether for hotels or flights or whatever, are just travel agencies with a web-based storefront. Like traditional travel agencies, they earn a commission from the airline/hotel when they make a booking."
] |
How come when you step into the cold you always feel like you have to pee? | [
"So your pee has to stay at a constant temperature at above average body temp. So you're body needs to put extra effort to keeping your pee at the proper temperature. When you go outside the rest of your body feels colder because you are using more energy to preserve your urine temp. If you pee, your core temp will rise and is actually one of the things you should be aware of if you ever get stuck in a cold situation."
] |
Is there s reason we refer to sales prices and wages/salaries by their untaxed amount? Wouldn't it save time, frustration, and resentful remarks about Uncle Sam if we did the calculations ahead of time and used the practical number? | [
"Not american, but IIRC Sales tax varies from state to state, So I'd guess companies just use the base price for simplicity (it makes no difference to the company how much tax is applied)\n\nAs regards Wages/salaries the untaxed amount is constant, If I take a 20K job and somebody with 2 kids* takes the same job, they will pay less tax than me.\n\n Or any other variable that changes your tax decuctions *",
"We actually just talked about this in my behavioural economics class. There have been studies showing that if stores show post-tax prices, people buy about 10% less than if they show pre-tax prices. \nThat is a lot of money that a store would miss out on, so most stores in America just add the tax on at the end. It tricks our mind into thinking we are paying less than we actually are.",
"Swede who immigrated from the US checking in. Swedes factor in the tax into the price which is convenient for obvious reasons. Some people here scratch their heads at the way this is done in the US but I for one think that it's easy to completely lose site of how much tax we are paying when it's factored into the price. I think most of my countrymen in Sweden would freak out if they were aware of how much tax they are paying everytime an item is paid for. Screw the inconvenience, I want my government transparent and accountable.",
"They do in Europe. It's soooo nice. If a shirt says €20 guess how much you pay? €20! \n\nThe other thing is that grocery psychology where if something costs $xx.99 your mind rounds it down.",
"The resentful remarks about uncle Sam is the exact reason we don't do this. You need to know how much you are being taxed and should pay attention to where that tax money is going. Making you think less about taxes is how the government gets more of your money. Why do you think we have random taxes like sales tax or bonus taxes on alcohol, cigarettes and gas? It is for the same reason we have a convoluted income tax system. If the government just said \"we are taking 25% from everyone regardless of income or status or donations made it would make a whole lot more sense. Flat tax = transparency but government hates that so they try to sneak taxes in all over the place in tiny amounts to keep people from complaining about the massive amounts of money being taxed from them. \n\nTL:DR Pay MORE attention to your taxes, not less.",
"Something I haven't seen mentioned (though to be fair I only skimmed) is that you can walk into your boss's office and change how much you pay in taxes. Swapping some 1's and 0's on your ~~W2~~ W4 changes your withholding and it's up to you and the government to pay each other accordingly on April 15th. \n\nPlus, there's no way for your employer to know how much you're going to be deducting from your taxes due to new house or car purchases, daycare expenses, etc. PLUS they don't have insight into how much your spouse makes which will adjust your tax bracket.",
"Short answer, businesses don't want to do that. Aside from the nominal effort it would require (though less nominal than one might assume, with different jurisdictions having different tax rates), it means they would have to mark the prices up. That might detract from impulse buying, or make it more difficult for \"dollar stores\" to sell anything.\n\nMost countries include the tax in prices.",
"To annoy foreigners.\n\nCertainly worked when I visited.",
"I've always said...If salaried or hourly people (W-2 earners) were paid in FULL and then had to write a check each quarter to pay their taxes... THERE WOULD BE A REVOLT!!! \n\n(Because the government takes everything out beforehand, no one feels the real sting.) \n\nWant to feel the sting? Be self-employed! (I HATE government waste!!!)",
"No, because it would be impossible. Your income tax depends on a huge number of variables, including dependent claims, potential itemized deductions, retirement account contributions, etc. \n\nSales prices I guess you could, potentially, but why bother when you can just tack on a % at the POS? Makes it easier to perform pricing analysis in store and apply discounts, etc.",
"I see this posted over and over again, with mostly the same arguments going on. I'm going to ignore the wages/salaries part, because there are multiple reasons this wouldn't work with the current US tax system, but I'm going to address something with the sales tax portion that I haven't seen addressed before.\n\nTaxes change. Whenever the state/local/other government decides they want to change the tax rate, they do. Sometimes they do this on specific items (exempting something from tax, or making something taxable). If stores put the after-tax price on labels, all the labels in the store would have to change every time the tax changed. This is a huge investment even for single-location non-corporate stores. Especially for those in locations where there are multiple taxing authorities.\n\nIn the same vein, some place have what are called \"tax holidays\". These are days where sales tax (on some or all items) is not charged, as a way of helping out lower-income families. The ones I've seen the most of are at the beginning of school season, to reduce the price paid by parents with children who are buying school supplies. If all the labels in the store were post-tax, the labels on the affected (possibly all) items, would have to be changed for a few *days*, then changed back.\n\nThe current system allows a few things (software in the registers) to be changed when taxes change, without requiring entire sections of a store to be re-labeled, saving tremendous amounts of time and energy.",
"Outside of America there are places where sales tax is factored in. The same idea you are proposing here could also be said about the metric system. The reality is that culturally it's a settled issue that would require substantial effort to change, or a paradigm shift in the population. \n\nAlso, that number wouldn't help us much, as the cost of living is a bigger factor. For example 100k is pretty typical where I live for \"middle class living,\" (Suffolk County NY.) However in many parts of the country 50k will have the same over all quality of life. \n\nLastly is it really not a practical number? We use gross sales all the time in business. It's a very practical number. There are so many different brackets, exemptions, etc. that the gross salary really is the practical way to talk about things. \n\nHowever it would be nice to have sales tax factored into store prices, but eh, that little bit of math is probably good for us.",
"California List of Taxes\n\nAlcoholic Beverage Tax\nCalifornia Tire Fee\nChildhood Lead Poisoning Prevention Fee\nCigarette and Tobacco Products Licensing Act\nCigarette and Tobacco Products Tax\nElectronic Waste Recycling Fee\nEmergency Telephone Users Surcharge\nEnergy Resources Surcharge (Electrical)\nFire Prevention Fee\nFuel Taxes\nAircraft Jet Fuel\nDiesel Fuel Tax\nInternational Fuel Tax Agreement (IFTA) including CA Interstate User Diesel Fuel Tax (DI) Program\nMotor Vehicle Fuel License Tax (Operative Through December 31, 2001)\nMotor Vehicle Fuel Tax (Operative On or After January 1, 2002)\nTax & Fees Included in the Retail Price of a Gallon of Motor Fuel\nUse Fuel Tax\nHazardous Substance Taxes\nGenerator Fee\nDisposal Fee\nFacility Fee\nActivity Fee\nEnvironmental Fee\nIntegrated Waste Management Fee (Solid Waste)\nInsurance Tax (Tax on Insurers)\nMarine Invasive Species Fee (Ballast Water)\nNatural Gas Surcharge\nOccupational Lead Poisoning Prevention Fee\nOil Spill Response, Prevention, and Administration Fee\nWater Rights Fee\nUnderground Storage Tank Maintenance Fee",
"Combination of business owners hating taxes and companies trying to undercut everyone else's price. Example, let's say they add a 10% hotel tax for your city. Mr. Fawlty hates having to raise his price because of the government, so he puts a little asterisk *(+10% tax, thank our government) and thanks to tight competition it become a standard practice for the advertised price, making the prices look about the same as the hotels a few miles away outside of that city. It's not even taxes, all sorts of fees get added the same way, from higher minimum wages to higher fuel costs.",
"Australia does don't they? I seem to recall that this was one of the refreshing things I experienced while visiting Australia.",
"TIL somewhere in the world, prices are displayed taxfree.",
"In the UK, that is how it works. Tax is already applied. If you walk into a shop and buy something priced at £5, that's exactly how much you hand over. It confused the hell out of me when I visited the states for the first time.\n\nThe reason it works that way in the US is because tax rate varies from state to state. Don't ask me why the governement doesn't just determine a single fixed percentage for the entire country. That'd be far too logical.",
"I think it's a good thing for people to know how much their government takes from them.",
"I would argue that paying taxes should take time, be frustrating, and inspire remarks about uncle Sam. That is your money they are taking, the process should make it obvious what you are paying. I don't even like withholdings, I think it disquises what you pay.\n\nThat being said, the reason we don't is because its very complicated, involves rounding, and can very from person to person and place to place.",
"I don't understand why its such a 'HUGE' issue, you literally take the final price at till and print the label at that price. You can still advertise at 5.99 + Tax, and the label just has the Final Price i.e = 6.58 (5.99 + 0.59). Its super simple, requires little extra things and would make it so much simpler for the people shopping.",
"Sales tax literally depends on what city you live in. It would be almost impractical for a company that operates in more than one city to make a million ads to satisfy the change in sales tax in each city.",
"Because you'd instantly know how deep Uncle Sam is f****ng you in the bumhole.",
"Depending on what you claim in your W4, the amounts can be greatly different in your take home even if you make the same amount as someone else.\n\nThere is also an issue with Benefits deductions being different from one person to another at a similar salary range. Pay Garnishments could make it differ as well.\n\nIt seems those that complain about taxes the most are the ones that need the services provided by said taxes the most.",
"No because 2 people both making $50,000 a year, same job, same town, will both take home different amounts after tax. A single guy will pay a different amount of tax than a married guy with children would. Also, different people can claim different deductions based on various things like work expenses, insurance, etc.",
"Taxes are left off prices for marketing purposes. We like to get more for our money, thus getting something for $199.99 is palatable than $213.98. If for some reason things changed, prices or markups would change to accommodate that.",
"Sure, there's a reason. We want salaries to be listed high, and prices to be listed low. There is absolutely no benefit to companies to artificially change that to their detriment.",
"In New Zealand, all taxes are already added and you pay exactly what the price tag says. It's very convenient.",
"I think we need the reminder about just how much taxes and monies are collected by the government. I think some places in the world would be up in arms if they knew how much their government takes in taxes/tariffs/fees. ie Many Europeans are astounded that the marked price is not \"with tax\" in the US. They think it is easier to have everything pre-calculated with VAT for them. But some of the people who were appalled at the state sales tax of 10-15% in the US don't seem to realize their own countries VAT is at 20% or even higher. ( The minimum VAT in the EU is 15%) People are okay with higher taxes if they aren't reminded how high they really are *every* purchase.\n\nFor instance many, many people find the profits of the oil companies outrageous. But on the other, hand they only make about 4-5 cents per gallon of gas in profit. The lowest gas tax in the US is Alaska at $0.297 per gallon, the highest Penn State (the original Quaker state at $0.689 per gallon. With the Feds coming at $0.184 per gallon. With gas averaging $2.42 a gallon and taxes in the US averaging $0.49 a gallon, 20% of the average fill up is taxes and 2% is profits for the gas company. So the government takes on average 10 times as much as the oil company. And then they still tax the profits of the oil companies, the gas distributor and the gas station itself. So fuel taxes are very lucrative for governments. In the Netherlands 68.8% of the price of every gallon/liter/bucket (whatever unit you use) is taxes. (Recent price point: Netherlands is at 9.09 a gallon, partially explains the biking there.) \n\nI think we should push to keep how much of a cut the state and federal government take an open thing. It is very easy in many places to point the finger of blame for rising prices on corporations and businesses when prices may be even going down, but taxes are going up. \n\nFor instance the government realizes that since we really were willing to pay almost $4 a gallon and we are now down to $2.50 they could raise gas taxes by $1.50 and we would still be willing to pay it. AND more than likely blame the greed of the oil companies for the price increase, especially in when prices start to rise again. \n\nA little convenience in not having to do math is worth knowing what your government is taxing and at what rate. \n\n\nThe real question is why would a government tell businesses to *NOT* show the people how much in taxes is being collected?",
"Too many comments to see if anyone else has suggested this but I personally think it's because US consumers are far more sensitive to rates of tax than other nations. In the UK and Europe, VAT is essentially hidden so a consumer doesn't realize that they're being gouged on tax. This is also true of tax on petrol and diesel. \n\nBy not separating out tax from the \"end price\", a government masks how much they're taxing their citizens on every day items. \n\nImagine the uproar in the United States if the Federal Government implemented a 22% sales tax! Well, what if they told us but didn't actually break it out for every purchase like we have now for State and local taxes? I'd suggest people would become conditioned to it, just as the good citizens of Europe are. \n\nThe tax is silently absorbed and people become conditioned to it over time, like the UK and Ireland have for VAT, petrol etc... \n\nIf the U.S. Government implemented a 60% tax on gas, and consumers saw it every time they filled up?",
"Wages/salaries would be impossible to reference post-tax, since the amount of tax you pay varies based on many, many variables. It's not even legal for your employer to know all those variables (privacy laws), and it certainly not worth the effort to try to figure them out in advance just for them to quote you a number.\n\nAs for sale prices - stores easily could (and arguably *should*) list post-tax prices on their merchandise. That's how it's done in most countries. But the US doesn't require it because they think that it's \"bad for business\". They think people will be less likely to buy something if they see the higher post-tax price. This is patently absurd, since if it were the law, *everybody* would be listing the higher price and it's not like people will just not buy things.",
"Australian here: This is one thing that REALLY bugged me about the US, everywhere I went there were different taxes and tipping amounts (how am I supposed to know how much to tip a hairdresser!). \n\nIn Australia, the advertised price, is the the actual price AND IT'S FLIPPING GREAT. Anything else is misleading and results in a great big fine for businesses that try it (I've never experienced one that has tried). Fix your shit, we're a land of convicts and even we realized how silly that system of pricing is.",
"In Poland it's simple. You must sell an item for the price you wrote on a label.\nI dont get it. Why didnt capitalism change it in America? If one shop tells me the true prices and the other one lowered prices, I'd chose the \"honest\" one. Shopping would become easier and I wouldn't feel cheated.",
"In the US people are going to pay different tax rates on different amounts based on all different factors such as do they make money somewhere else? How many people are in their family? If they're married at all. So there is no standard way of calculating what someones after tax pay would be.",
"For perspective, in Japan when you see the price for an item, that's the price you pay. Period. It's freaking amazing being able to prepare the amount you'll pay as you are going up to the register. Put that money down. And have a happy transaction. Bonus, paying with your train card.",
"Because the tax system relies on subtlety and not being in your face every second of the day.\n\nFor example, if you realized that you pay the police officer to raid your house at 2AM, shoot your dog, flash bang your sleeping child, drag you into the street screaming, kidnap your husband to put him in a cell with subhuman treatment you might be annoyed when they write you a ticket, forfeit your assets or charge you with a crime when you defend yourself at any point during their assault on your home and family.\n\nGotta keep people thinking their tax dollars goes to social welfare. \n\nSeriously, if we cut all taxes right now everyone would experience a 20-30% raise on a whole, probably more. Oh shit, but we wouldn't be able to bomb foreigners with a different skin color. \n\nFuck, better print more dollars then. Because that's not a tax...",
"More than anything it's a matter of too many variables. For wages, two people in the same office making the same salary might have markedly different taxes based on household size, other income within the household, and pre-tax benefits such as health insurance.\n\nFor goods, it's even more complex, at least for chain stores: you pay to as many as four different jurisdictions (state, county, city, special districts) and possibly a \"public improvement fee\" in some locations; plus, there may be rules that vary from one place to another as to which items are subject to which taxes. If you're a big chain like Walmart who's trying to keep pricing consistent across locations, you're either going to have real problems calculating profit margin or you're just going to charge tax on top of the advertised price to make your corporate books run a whole lot smoother.",
"This seems to be one of those \"everywhere in the world except America\" things - throughout Australia since the GST came in, all across Europe with various VATs, prices listed are inclusive of taxes.\n\nIt's near on impossible to get countries or states to change the way they're used to, and always come up with some kind of argument as to why their way is \"better\".\n\nI recently got caught out with a business purchase for some software which listed a price *in US dollars*, but then went and added the 10% Australian GST after. Honestly, what the fuck!?!? That's fine if you're listing the price in AUD, but don't charge me in USD then add an Australian tax on top!",
"It would make sense for sales tax in local stores, but not for wages.\n\nI would be in favor of a law that created a VAT instead of sales tax and requires all prices to include any taxes paid.\n\nFor wages/salaries, it depends on other factors, so you can't quote an after-tax amount. If you get paid $20 and hour, it really could be $22, or it could be $12, depending on other sources of income, deductions, tax credits, etc.",
"It would add some complications to how employee benefits are figured. For my company, as a full time employee I could get on their health insurance and opt in for a 401k plan, life insurance, even a savings funds (health savings plan, etc)\n\nNow I'm not sure how other businesses do it, but with the health savings plans and insurance, it is divided up among all 26 annual pay periods and the money is deducted from my paychecks *before* tax.",
"Here in Mexico it's done exactly that way, everything is shown taxed, and it works wonders, it really made me go crazy when I went to the USA for vacations, I could never afford what I wanted cause I didn't know to add the tax, so I brought just below the required money.\n\nThen again, here we have a country-wide tax of 16% for everything that's taxed, except border cities, which have 11%.",
"Yes, I see these comments here stating sales tax per city, county, state. But they should make it easier for the customer, not for them.\n\nI have had a similar issue where you go to buy a car at it is $13,000. Then you go inside and the next thing you know it is $15,900. Just put the damn price on the product so I know how much it is going to cost.",
"In most other countries, that's how they do it. In NZ, for example, it's illegal to advertise a price without the sales tax already included.\n\nIn the US, don;t you have different levels of sales tax per state though, and some times state and federal taxes added on top etc? Seems like that would make things complicated.",
"Even if taxes were all the same across the board everywhere, companies still wouldn't advertise the after tax price because they know the average person is fairly bad/lazy at math and people tend to spend more when they are estimating/unsure of their total rather than having and exact knowledge of current expenditure.",
"Might be because the tax rate isn't the same for everyone? Depending on how much you earn and some other factors you pay different rates on your salary.\n\n(assuming it works the same way in whatever country you're from)\n\nEDIT: Sales prices though, do they not include tax in the US?",
"Not American either, but let me get this straight - does OPs post imply that, in the US at least, you see the price in the shop, get to the till and they will charge you more than the pricing sign said?\nThis seems ludicrous to me as a Dane.",
"It takes the burden off the company to name a standard price (McDonald's dollar menu) to really calculate the State's sales tax, or whatever tax the state may have.\n\nIn South Korea, since it is so small, most prices are just rounded to the nearest 100 won.",
"As someone who lives in a country that incorporates the taxes in the price, I dream of the day where taxes get charged after the sale, so people can understand to what level they are being robbed by the government..",
"Just a random for instance situation: Our city just passed a SPLOST. Every store in our city would have to go back and re-price every single item up by 1% if we showed after taxes pricing on all sold goods.",
"It helps to remind you how much money the government takes from you. If there was no recognition of taxes at all then the government would just tax everyone at 80% and no one would seem to notice.",
"As an ex-Australian, this is what people do in Australia. We just get given the final price. In fact, all the countries I've been to (Admittedly not that many - Australia, NZ, HK, China, Thailand) do this.",
"Places like Korea have tax added to the sales tags, so when you see something worth 2000 won, you're going to pay 2000 won. This makes things a lot easier and makes small change less necessary.",
"As an employer you'd want to say the big number to be more attractive, and as a retailer you'd want to say the small number to make the sale, so I can't see this ever happening.",
"People can be taxed differently. Say you have two jobs, they both make 20K each, Your total income is 40K you will be taxed differently than someone who only has one job that is 20K.",
"You can't do that because everyone pays different taxes. Your income, location, marital status, number of dependents, property and asset ownership, medical expenses, etc. all affect the amount of taxes you pay.",
"If one company posts the price of an object with tax built in, and another does not, the second company would apear to have a cheaper price, drawing in more customers.",
"Australian here. I went to the U.S. Over the Christmas holidays and was extremely confused when the guy in TekServe quoted a price 20% higher than the labelled one.",
"In my country of origin , chile . Everything we buy already has tax added onto it so that those questions don't come about",
"This is why I love living in Oregon. The price of things is actually the price of things.",
"as with most of the questions about the silly things America does, the easiest answer is \"cause 'Murica\"",
"Basically, tax is complicated. And we try to pretend it doesn't exist as much as possible.",
"Aaaaand chiming in from Montana, we only pay what we see marked. No sales tax. Yeeyee!",
"Because we are fucking idiots here in the U.S. and refuse to do basic math.",
"Also because $9.95 is way less (in our mind) than the taxed amount (over $10.00)",
"If you have other sources of income the taxed amount will be different as well.",
"Because the taxes vary on all of these things for many different reasons.",
"Welcome to Australia. The price is the price. Done.",
"surprise, surprise, almost every country exept 'Murica does it!",
"The UK already includes sales taxes in prices."
] |
Why doesn't the US or any other country use napalm/chemical warfare in modern day wars like in Vietnam? | [
"188 countries have signed the Chemical Weapons Convention which is an arms control agreement that outlaws the production, stockpiling and use of chemical weapons.",
"Napalm got a lot of bad press during vietnam, so now the army uses [white phosphorus](_URL_0_)"
] |
Where do metals originate from? | [
"the coolest thing about all matter is that it comes from the stars - literally. Everything you see and everything you are made of is from an exploded star.\n\nMetals are fairly complex elements and so they come from only certain kinds of spent stars.",
"They came from the same place that every other element on Earth heavier than hydrogen came from: They were fused from lighter elements (ultimately from hydrogen) in the earlier generations of stars that eventually went supernova and spread their material out into space only to have it coalesce into a new star (the sun) and its planets (including Earth). All of the carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc. on Earth was formed the same way."
] |
What happens to the sound on my headphones when they're not plugged in all the way? | [
"\"Getting half a stereo feed\" is exactly what you're hearing. Headphones are what we call Stereo, or Left/Right. Only one feed or side of that stereo is what we call Mono. On your headphone plug you'll see it is stereo because there are 3 conductors on it. The tip, the ring, and the sleeve. On a mono plug it would only have the tip and the sleeve. When you plug your headphones in, all 3 conductors make the connection and you hear the full stereo image. If you plug it in halfway, only 2 of the 3 connect and you only hear half the stereo image. \n Now, the reason it sounds weird is from the way modern day music is mixed. Modern day music is all about \"how loud can we get this without sounding like crap?\" To achieve this they separate the different \"voices\" or instruments between the stereo image to get certain elements louder than others. If you put all the sounds of the music at he same volume in both channels it will distort at the loud volumes we record music in. So if you separate them, you can get more volume without sounding like crap. Hope that answers your question."
] |
Why do other countries (outside of the US) have little or no commercial breaks on TV? | [
"As an example, I believe England has their stations technically run by the government, kind of like PBS here\n\nThe US on the other hand leases out different bands to companies (nbc, cbs, etc) so they have to pay for their costs",
"You may want to be more specific as many countries have just as many commercials on TV as the US does.",
"Turkey has 2 hour long shows with 1 hour advertisement. They usually take 7 to 10 minute breaks every 15 minutes."
] |
Why are dogs not intimidated when a human snarls and shows their teeth? | [
"Dogs are hard wired to recognize the body behavior of other dogs, not humans (they do come closer than any other animal at recognizing and taking cues from humans but it still isn't as good as their ability to do so from other dogs). Also, there is a lot of other body language going on (ear position, tail position, arch of the shoulders and back, etc) besides just the noise and teeth baring at work that humans are physically incapable of reproducing.\n\nEdit: holy crap, make a quick half added paying and 24 hours later it explodes.\n\n1. I did not mean to imply that dogs are incapable of reading human visual and auditory cues. What I meant was simple snarling and barring if teeth is likely to subtle fur the dog to recognize unless they have been trained to recognize it. And remember, not all training is deliberate. For those of you where just snarling and barring teeth work you probably trained then to recognize it at some point, maybe by using more recognizable cues the first few times such as aggressively approaching, hitting, etc.\n\n2. Yes, other animals can recognize aggression in other animals. But the signs are always a lot more involved than just noise and facial expression. Physical posture, smell, movement (I.e. coming forward rather than backing up) all contribute to signaling aggression. Unless humans are truly being aggressive and subconsciously exhibiting these same cues, the dog is unlikely to recognize it.\n\n3. Yes, dogs are the best animal at recognizing human cues. Maybe cats too but cats don't care where dogs are hard wired to please humans. But they still have to be trained to understand what we mean. Unless trained (again, not all training is conscious and deliberate) they have no idea what we mean when we try to mimic their behavior.",
"Intention and consequence. A snarling human won't get much response from a dog until they snarl first, then show teeth, then start biting and chasing the dog. \n\nDogs are adapted to our body language and we don't snarl. However, if we get angry, the dog will pick up on it. If you're anxious, the dog will pick up on it. If you're fearful, the dog will pick up on it. \n\nYet if you smile with your teeth showing, the dog doesn't get the wrong meaning. If you cough, the dog doesn't get the wrong meaning. If you look the dog in the eye, it doesn't get the wrong meaning and these are all things and sounds that would show dominance or aggression coming from another dog. \n\nSome things do translate though like crouching down looking the dog intently in the eye, you're playful or am about to do something with the dog and dogs also get low and maintain eye contact when they are playing around. We don't have tails and our ears don't move so a lot of dog expressions don't work with us. \n\nI would imagine we are pretty funny looking to dogs. We stand upright. Our eyes are bright white and you can easily see where we are looking which is dazzling and an intense gaze. We don't have the right body language and we move our mouths and eyebrows and hands, instead of our ears and tail.",
"I'll add that a lot of other commenters are bringing up the whole \"alpha dog\" theory of dog behavior which has [been debunked](_URL_0_) and was based on the observation of gorups of unrelated captive wolves artifically broght together in close quarters and extrapolated this aberrant behavior to apply towards all canids. Not even wild wolves behave this way, let alone domesticated dogs. Sorry so called Dog Whisperer, alpha dog theory is bunk.\n\nEdit: if I have time I'll find some real studies Monday and post them here for posterity.\n\n1. Yes, all social animals will establish some sort of hierarchy. But the alpha dog theory assumes that all canids do so through fear and intimidation. This is the part that is bunk.\n\n2. Ceasar's approach to training does work. However it works through fear and intimidation and in extreme situations is less reliable than positive reinforcement based training. So why terrorize your dog if there is another way that works better.\n\n3. Police and guard dogs may be a special case because they are trained to be dangerous. I don't know if positive reinforcement alone is enough to train a dog to attack. I'm mainly referring to pets.\n\n4. To train out negative behavior you go into training mode, introduce a situation where the dog will do the negative behavior and reward then for not doing it. Repeat, gradually rewarding for longer periods of not doing the bad behavior. I successfully trained food aggression out of my dog this way. Post to /r/dogtraining for more advise. A positive reinforcement trained dog will immediately start trying things as soon as you get the clicker out because they know you are training for new behavior. I saw a rescue trained to stand in a box on command after two sessions with clicker training. This is also the technique used to train dolphins and whales and it works with cats too. \n\n5. One general comment. With any training technique, you have to reward (or punish) within the seconds of the behavior or the dog will not make the connection.\n\n6. Generic studies of wild wolf packs have shown that it is not just the alphas that breed.",
"It is about intent. A dog knows when you mean business and when you are bluffing. They are like us in that they don't want to be hurt and if you can make them believe that you are going to do more damage to them than they can do to you, the dog will back down.\n\nYour son probably doesn't have the ability to show intent behind his actions yet. It's like the difference between walking up to your dog and saying \"get on your bed\" and actually meaning it in such a way that the dog knows that if it doesn't listen, shit is gunna fly.",
"*sigh* Okay. I have two labs and a beagle. The beagle is a little shit. Like straight up walks under happy lab's nose and eats his food. Happy Lab needs his food. He's skinny. And he's my bro. So, swatting shit beagle's snout is ineffective, putting her in a submissive position doesn't work. Spraying water doesn't work. Shrieking like pee wee Herman doesn't wotk. Snarling and showing my teeth.....works. leaves Happy Lab alone while he eats.",
"all these answer are wrong. they do. I used to work at a kennel, dogs will react to that if they don't know you. I've had dogs get mad at me for doing that to them, some dont care, some do.",
"The dogs understand perfectly well that your son is not serious and does not mean business.\n\nHumans can and do intimidate dogs.",
"They actually freak out and jingle away when someone can do a really convincing growl/snarl/bark combo. But shown teeth--no. Probably because humans can't tear them to shreds with them unless they're on bath salts.",
"try it with a cat, hiss, yowl and make spitting sounds...it freaks them right out. Different wiring?",
"As a child I used to growl while walking on all fours circling our family rottweilers. They always appeared intimidated. Now, when our dog begs me while I'm eating I will growl at him. He'll turn the other way but watch me from his corner of his eye. If I keep growling he'll go away.",
"Probably because the teeth do not look in the slightest bit menacing. Dogs are probably laughing at the silly human pup. \n\nHow old is your son, by the way? You probably already know and do this, but you should encourage him to avoid simulating aggressive behaviour to dogs.",
"Because they understand human behavior quite well, actually. What would you think of a human who did that to you? You'd think they'd look playful, or confused, right? Your dog probably thinks the same thing. Now if you started flexing your muscles, sighing loudly, and speaking with a frustrated, angst filled, or angry tone, they will pick up immediately.\n\nYour dog probably also isn't as intimidated by your son as it would be of a fully grown adult male, depending on how old your son is.",
"I was so stoked to get my dog as a puppy and whenever I'd see him I would smile with a huge grin of teeth. \n\nLater, he started mimicking this whenever he'd get excited meeting anyone. People were often tentative because he'd be showing his teeth, but I would have to explain that he was just smiling, and happy to see them...",
"Its not the dogs, its you.\n\nYou need to owork on your form. \n\nTry practicing on babies when their mother is distracted. \n\nGood luck!!",
"My Shiba does, I wouldn't use the word intimidated and he won't do anything if you just snarl at him randomly. The trick is you lock eyes with him when he's really chippy, ready to play energy. You can't show your hand too soon, stay locked with his eyes. Then pull the corner of your upper lip up just a little, almost so little someone looking at you wouldn't notice, then put it down. Furrow your eyebrows a bit, give him just a flash of a snarl again, then stop. Twitch your upper right lip like you're about to snarl is the sweet spot. \n\nThe whole idea is anticipation, if you hop right into trying to act like a dog and show your teeth/growling he won't do anything. But if you're really subtle and build a little bit more and more over a minute or two eventually he'll start showing his teeth, and if you keep doing it eventually he'll start barking at you and do his breakdance I want to play stance.",
"If I do a low growl to my dog she stops whatever behaviour she's displaying and quickly retreats to her cage. As did the male I had before her. Both South African Mastiiffs so big powerful dogs. \n\nIt's all about action and consequence. You can easily teach them that you mean business too. \n\n(and just to avoid misunderstanding, none of this was accomplished by beating the crap out of either of them) \n\nHow old is your son? If he's still young they see him as a pup and don't take him serous. This is a good thing. If he's older you should teach him to not randomly show dominant behaviour to the dogs and if he does make sure he follows through and they accept his higher place in the pack. I'm happy. To elaborate how we accomplish this with out kids if you're interested.",
"I suspect a human showing its teeth to a dog will trigger a similar thought pattern in dogs equivalent to Dundee's \"That's not a knife\" scene",
"Top comment is incorrect. \n\nDogs evolved TO understand human body language. We had a symbiotic relationship in evolution. Your dog sees your son not as a threat because he isn't actually displaying the body language of something the dog should fear.\n\nIf your son genuinely was angry at the dog. Yelled at him and postured himself properly as if he would punish the dog then it would respond more submissively. Your son doesn't want to actually punish the dog though and it shows in body language.",
"i'm a courier and sometimes i have to intimidate aggressive dogs so i can get to the front door to leave the package. For what my experience is worth, 99 percent of dogs, even the ones that seem aggressive, will turn tail and run when a human doesnt give in to their tactics, and instead rushes them.",
"Seriously? I'm pretty sure humans can intimidate a dog this way, but you need the right, aggressive body language. You have to act like you mean it. Are you sure your son was acting in a way that presented something a dog would recognize as serious?",
"They can be. I was chased by a dog once, and just barked at it and scared him off. You've got to really mean it though, or they aren't fooled. I doubt your son is convincing the dogs.",
"How old is your son? Puppies growl at each other when play fighting, it's possible that your dogs are just recognizing that the youngest pack member is trying out his growling skills. Dogs seem to treat children differently.",
"Speaking from experience from when I was a teen, if you get face to face with a dog and start growling with teeth showing, you may get bit in the face.",
"I think it's more that your dog knows your son and doesn't take him as a threat. Would you take a young family member snarling at you seriously?",
"I'm real late here but sometimes I make owl noises out my window and watch my chickens go on lookout.",
"They've evolved alongside us for tens of thousands of years, and have learned to recognize our facial expressions.",
"I've looked through the top comments, and haven't seen one I would rely on. Dogs have a very keen sense of social order, and are one of, if not the only, animals that can fit in with human families. Cats I suppose, but they really only tolerate human families.\n\nBaring teeth between dogs is a challenge, but it can be part of play as well. I have two large dogs, and they can play struggle over a toy and you would think they were ready to tear each other's throat out. I would never worry about reaching in between them though.\n\nDifferent dogs and dog breeds react differently to humans they don't know and I would never growl and show my teeth to a dog I didn't know. That can be interpreted as a threat and they can react defensively.",
"Puppies snarl and bare their teeth during play too, my 1 year old dogs play that way all the time. So dog body language is a little more complicated than that. \nThat being said, dogs can learn several different human ques and words. \nFor instance, a dog may know that a furrowed brow and serious tone from their owner means they're in trouble. Or jump when you say 'walk'. Dogs recognize our body language by our actions associated with them.",
"dogs are highly reactive to their environment and the energy around them. i think they are very keen at picking up intent based on human actions. depending on the situation i think a dog would definitely pick up on a human bearing their teeth at them. the human would probably also have to display other traits of physical dominance that are common in the animal world. basically they know your son isn't posing any kind of threat",
"Dogs can recognize facial expressions of humans, they just view different categories of people differently. For example, my dog DOES respond to adults snarling, but not young kids under say, 7. They can recognize the facial cues, but only recognize larger kids and adults as superior, and the kids as inferior / not scary. If yourr an adult and have a big dog, your dog may only be intimidated by say, a snarling body builder.",
"Dogs can get genuinely scared of us, but not if we try to imitate their behaviour. If you've ever seen one of those Youtube videos where the owner is showing the dog what its done wrong and uses a really accusatory tone of voice, you often see the dog baring its teeth and trying to turn away. It recognises this tone of voice as a hostile form of human behaviour",
"Yeah, my cousin's three-year-old did that to my mom's rescue Pomeranian, and got bitten in the face. Don't let your kid growl at dogs.\n\nHe was fine, by the way, just a tiny red mark on his cheek and crocodile tears. We'd told him repeatedly to stop harassing the dog, and he ignored us, so he got no sympathy from us.",
"I did this to my dog with one of her toys a couple of times. The first two times I did it she took off terrified and confused (I'm assuming). It doesn't have an impact anymore. I'm guess that I don't give off enough of the other signals or confuse other body language enough that it doesn't effect her anymore.",
"Yeah I tried growling at my dog, he just looks at me like wtf are you doing. He understands when I am mad, but he doesn't understand when I am mad so I try to portray that by acting like a mad dog. I guess he understands humans and dogs but not humans acting like dogs.",
"dogs are extremely good at reading body language. they can very easily tell if you're faking or authentic. they're also experienced enough with humans to understand that humans don't normally snarl and growl. they expect human behavior from humans and know that humans imitating dog behavior is just a show and not an authentic gesture.",
"Well, humans are the only ones who smile when they're happy and other animals only bare their teeth to show anger. So I think dogs have gotten use to us doing it while we're happy, making them think you're amused by whatever they were doing.",
"I agree with the posts referencing body posture and implied intent. If you make a quick snarl/growl at your dog while also exhibiting the correct posturing, they will know something is wrong and often assume a minimally submissive position (usually sitting).",
"He's not doing it right. It's not just the sound and the visual of teeth. It's the body language, pheromones, unyielding movement. Your son probably came off as a kid with a toy gun yelling, \"BANG!\" to the dog.",
"I've read that you're never supposed to smile at a dog that you are trying to get to leave you alone, because they see teeth (even in humans) as a sign of aggression.",
"I don't know what you're talking about. Dogs that know you (pets and such) aren't going to attack. But try it with one who has never seen you before then watch out.",
"Why aren't dogs intimidated? No idea. I can tell you that monkeys are DEFINITELY intimidated. Source: I laughed in front of a Rhesus Macaque in India and it attacked me...",
"They are, if you're an intimidating human and sound like you mean it. They can tell when it's just a pup playing at it, even when it's a human pup",
"You have to commit to the entire body language of it.\n\nAlso, dogs are pretty good about ignoring puppy aggression in much the same way they ignore your child.",
"Um, they are. I've sure as hell intimidated several dogs by doing so. Have you considered that your son is just not intimidating?",
"What age is your son? Your dogs probably know he's just a baby and pups tend to do that playfully.",
"Sometimes my tummy growls, and peanut, my 3 month old chihuahua, gets nervous and hides underneath the coffee table.",
"My dogs are definitely intimidated by this. Maybe it's not intimidated because your son is small and not intimidating.",
"I growl at my dogs when they misbehave and they absolutely react appropriately. They know I'm the alpha.",
"Dogs are domesticated, which means they know way more about human body language than you think they do.",
"Explain it like you're five? Because we are not dogs."
] |
what is my body doing in the "Aaaah, AAAAAAH-" moment of a sneeze? Why does it vary in length? | [
"When you start to sneeze, it's because of some sort of irritation in your nose to release histamines. When histamines reach the nerve cells in your nose, it tells the brain to start what I'll call the Sneeze Sequence.\n\nThe \"Ah\" sound you make is due to your body reflexively taking a large breath. During this time, the muscles in your throat and nose expand, creating an opening that allows large amounts of air to pass through. Then, your chest muscles rapidly contract, forcing the air out of your lungs and through your nose. \n\nThe variation in length is based on personal anatomy and how your brain handles the Sneeze Sequence. It's different from person to person.",
"Your body is preparing the expulsion of air, to clear the airways, by forcing you to breathe in, the \"ah\" part. The duration varies due to the volume of air currently in your lungs, and your own biology. Everyone reacts differently."
] |
When a song gets "leaked", where does it come from? | [
"When a band is recording a song or album, there are many people involved from the time they start recording until the media is sent out for sale. Any one of the people who are involved in that process can get a copy of the song or album and leak it. So, once the music is recorded and mixed, copies of that music are sent to various groups. Anyone that touches the media has a chance to make a copy.\n\nSome artist actually put some sort of unique signature on the different files that they provide to different parts of the process. This way, if they happen to find a version of their song released on the Internet, they can much more easily track down who stole the song and released it."
] |
How Come Harry Called Snape "The Bravest Man He Ever Knew"? | [
"because he was the bravest. He was in love with Lily and remorse drove him to protect harry, and he carried on working at hogwarts, waiting for LV to return, when he did he reported it to Dumbledore, then went back to him. Then when he did he had to explain why Harry had been under his noise for 4 years and hadn't done anything to kill him, including protecting against Quirrel. So he had to go back and explain what he doing, and the fact he had turned traitor and had been helping Dumbledore. Then proceed to be a double agent working for Dumbledore, against one of the greatest dark wizards ever, who is a leglimens and able to pull thoughts from most peoples heads. \n\nSo then he had to do everything he did, kill dumbledore, take over the school and be hated by everyone (jinxing georges ear off for instance, all of the order thinking him a traitor), then ended up dying etc etc. But still pretend to be LVs guy, all the while working to help Harry (giving him the sword, then later the memories). All through this Snape had to trust Dumbledores judgement, find out that what he was doing in protecting Lilys son was all for nothing as he would have to die anyway, and still continue doing it. \n\nThere is a line that dumbledore tells snape, its along the lines of he accepts how dangerous it is, the job he has gotten snape to do. He then says how he knows that only Snape could do the job, \n\n Dumbledore: \"I prefer not to put all my secrets in one basket, particularly not a basket that spends so much time dangling on the arm of Lord Voldemort.\"\n Snape: \"Which I do on your orders!\"\n Dumbledore: \"And you do it extremely well. Do not think that I underestimate the constant danger in which you place yourself, Severus. To give Voldemort what appears to be valuable information while withholding the essentials is a job I would entrust to nobody but you.\"\n\nIs the full quote, and its highlighted especially in the part with the multiple harrys, snape allowed the plan to work, but kept the multiple harrys part back and its stuff like that that shows how hard the job it is. Snape is showing he is in the know, without fucking it up for them, to one of the best wizards of the age. \nAnd it is, sure others were nicer to harry, but without Snape there's no way Harry and Dumbledore would have managed anything. Because of him Dumbledore knew what was happening and was able to arrange everything. \n\n\nTL:DR - Essentially he is the bravest, he spend years feeding information and playing double agent, among a incredibly dangerous lot of people. He was a dick, but despite hating Harry he still worked to protect him and died for it. Just because he was a prick, doesn't mean what he did wasn't the bravest thing that Harry had seen.",
"You can still be a prick and also be brave. The two are not mutually exclusive. He had many heroic moments, not the least of which was to raise his wand against Dumbledore, his friend and confidante at his behest, to secure his place as a spy, but also to protect Draco Malfoy's soul from the agony of killing, and to end the suffering of said friend. He spent the next year, in secret, helping those who hated every fiber of his being for something about which they were intentionally mislead. Then to allow himself to be killed, again, to mislead Voldemort about the true master of the Elder Wand (because, he's not stupid. He knew the whole time.) That takes a lot of guts."
] |
Why is it that the brain remembers seemingly unimportant events and encounters but not information that can considered more useful? | [
"I think it is the wrong question, because the brain *does* remember useful information. Just not every time. \nSo the question is rather: why is the brain not *perfect* at distinguishing out what to store safely? \n\nIf you accept \"why expect perfection from humans?\" as an ELI5 answer, then good. Otherwise ... my, this could be a tough one."
] |
What causes small droplets of saliva to be launched out of your mouth sometimes when you open it. | [
"I think you are refering to gleeking. In general, gleeking occurs when an accumulation of saliva in the submandibular gland is propelled out in a stream when the gland is compressed by the tongue. The stream of saliva is released in the general direction of the front of the mouth. If the mouth is open the jet may project several feet. Some people can do this on command by pushing/ramming their tongue against the the back part of their front upper teeth. I can lol lightly biting my tongue in different areas to stimulate salivation helps do it repeatly."
] |
Why is there a ringing in your ears in total silence? | [
"Assuming there isn't anything in your parents house that actually emits that sound (like an electronic device, or electrical wiring in the walls), then the sound is \"imagined\" by your brain, it's not actually there. It all comes down to your brain not receiving a signal for certain frequencies. This can have many causes , most common probably being damaged hair cells (they vibrate to soundwaves which your brain picks up and interprets as sound). \nYour brain expects a signal, but there is none or it's too low, so it basically cranks up the sensitivity. Imagine trying to get a radio signal, you can't receiving anything so you increase the amplitude, but since there is no signal to begin with you just hear louder static noise. \n\nIt's always there, if you're in the city it just gets drowned out by the background noise so you don't notice.",
"Could be that you have [tinnitus](_URL_0_).\n\n > Tinnitus is the hearing of sound when no external sound is present. While often described as a ringing, it may also sound like a clicking, hiss or roaring. Rarely, unclear voices or music are heard. The sound may be soft or loud, low pitched or high pitched and appear to be coming from one ear or both. Most of the time, it comes on gradually. In some people, the sound causes depression or anxiety and can interfere with concentration.\n\nBrowse around /r/tinnitus a bit to see if anything there seems familiar."
] |
How do dogs decide where to use the restroom? | [
"Dogs may circle their chosen bathroom site as a way to stomp down grass and weeds in order to have a place to poop. Originally, wild dog ancestors may have lived in areas with long or tall vegetation and they developed this instinctual behavior to maintain their hygiene while defecating.\n\nAnother explanation could be that since dogs are vulnerable to attack by predators or other dogs while squatting, they may circle in order to be able to spot any potential threats and make sure their \"toilet\" is safe and secure before going to the bathroom. If they find a threat, such as a predator lurking nearby, they may leave to a safer location before going to the bathroom.\n\nMost animals (except humans) use excretory products (urine, feces) as chemical signaling. They \"mark\" their territory this way. Dogs sniff to find out who else has marked the territory, before leaving. Although since it's your backyard, this probably isn't the case here if it's fenced in."
] |
Why does it feel so much better to get a massage than when we rub our own shoulders or feet, etc? | [
"Because you are not relaxed when you are working on your body and focusing. When someone else does it for you you can relax and physically and mentally shut down."
] |
Why do Catholics pray to Mary and the Saints? | [
"Catholics believe that the saints and Mary are very close to Jesus and God. They don't pay directly to saints and Mary, but rather they pray that they intercede for them. Meaning that the saints pray to God on their behalf, and since they are so close to God to put in a good word"
] |
How come Google can search the entirety of the internet instantly but when I search my C: drive through the Windows Start Menu it takes forever? | [
"It's because of indexes.\n\nWhen I want to find something in a textbook, I go to the index first. That helps me find the right page.\n\nIf there was no index, I'd have to read every page until I found the right one. That could take a long time.\n\nYour C: drive probably doesn't have an index. It is possible to create an index, but it's quite a basic one.\n\nGoogle has lots of extremely advanced indexes to help it find the information quickly.\n\n(Plus, it uses lots of different computers to spread the work around too.)"
] |
How do fans work if all they do is warm the air? | [
"While, technically, heat is the result of molecules moving faster, in practice you need to make air move hundreds of miles per hour for it to become measurably warmer. The little 10mph breeze from a fan is basically an immeasurable increase in the energy of that air. \n\nOur bodies are hot so the air around us heats up. A fan blows that hot air away so we radiate more heat into the outside air. It also helps our sweat evaporate a bit faster, cooling us down further.\n\nWhen this naturally occurs outside, we call it \"wind chill\"."
] |
Why are churches tax exempt? | [
"It has nothing to do with the separation of church and state regarding their tax status.\n\nChurches are eligible for 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization. They do have to abide by the restricts such as they cannot endorse a political candidate.\n\nThe question to ask is why are some organizations allowed to be tax-exempt? The first thing is they are not in it for an owner to make a profit (the organization may make a profit but it can be taken as the owner of a for-profit would). The second is they provide value to the community.\n\nIt would make sense that churches should not take a profit (although some do try to skirt the issue). They provide value to the community in that it is a community group for people. Some churches provide other services such as charity work and providing free meeting places for other community groups.",
"It ultimately comes from the \"free exercise\" clause of the First Amendment to the US Constitution. If the government were allowed to levy taxes against churches, and a church was unable to pay, it could operate to inhibit the free exercise of religion. See the Supreme Court opinion in Waltz v. Tax Commission _URL_0_",
"It's mostly due to churches being funded by donations in the first place, as far as I'm aware that's how they stay in operation, by donations etc",
"Romans 13:1-7\n\n13 Let every soul be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and the authorities that exist are appointed by God. 2 Therefore whoever resists the authority resists the ordinance of God, and those who resist will bring judgment on themselves. 3 For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to evil. Do you want to be unafraid of the authority? Do what is good, and you will have praise from the same. 4 For he is God’s minister to you for good. But if you do evil, be afraid; for he does not bear the sword in vain; for he is God’s minister, an avenger to execute wrath on him who practices evil. 5 Therefore you must be subject, not only because of wrath but also for conscience’ sake. 6 For because of this you also pay taxes, for they are God’s ministers attending continually to this very thing. 7 Render therefore to all their due: taxes to whom taxes are due, customs to whom customs, fear to whom fear, honor to whom honor."
] |
Why Gravity/General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics don't fit togeather | [
"There's something physicists do in quantum field theory (an extension of quantum mechanics) called renormalization.\n\nBasically, you often end up with values that are infinity, but you can \"renormalize\" them by subtracting another infinity of the same \"size.\" This is mathematically and logically weird, but it turns out to work. With the electromagnetic, strong, and weak forces, you can use renormalization.\n\nWith gravity, though, you can't. There are lots of rules from general relativity that a theory of gravity has to follow, and those rules make it impossible to renormalize the equations. Thus, you end up with values that are infinity, negative infinity, whatever. That's not good, because it's clearly not the correct answer.\n\nOne of the proposed solutions to the problem is string theory, which you can look into by using the ELI5 search function (it gets asked about a lot). Basically, when you start trying to turn quantum mechanics into a relativistic theory, you get stuck at a \"fork in the road.\" You can \"demote position,\" which is how you go down the quantum field theory road, or you can \"promote time,\" which leads to string theory.\n\nQuantum field theory is easier to work with for a lot of reasons, so physics spent a lot of time going down that road hoping things would work. It seems not to, though, so now a lot of theoretical physicists are checking out the string theory side."
] |
Why is "they are" correct grammatically, while "everyone are" is incorrect, when they are both used as singular pronouns? | [
"Think of 'everyone' as 'each and every one'. 'One is', singular.\n\n'They' is used when there is a plurality of people *or* when there are plural options for addressing someone and you don't know which to use. 'They are', plural.",
"\"They are\" is plural. It's the fallback for when I don't know if a person is a he or a she, so I use they, but I'm still talking in a plural form.\n\n\"Every*one* is\" is singular."
] |
Aristotle's Poetics | [
"Aristotle’s Poetics from the 4th century B.C. aims to give a short study of storytelling. It discusses things like unity of plot, reversal of situation, and character in the context of Greek tragedy, comedy and epic poetry. But it still applies today. It is especially popular with screenwriters as seen in many script gurus’ how-to books.\n(Summary by Robert Foster)\n\n[**Download or Stream online**](_URL_0_)"
] |
the consequences of not bailing out the big banks and companies | [
"When a company of that size goes under it's not isolated. You have to understand that our money is built on debt and the expectation that that debt will mostly get paid.\n\nGenerally what happened is you own stock in Company A. A own stock or debt in B and B in c and c in d. Now D fails. This brings down c to a as well. So now you have lost a lot of value. So you don't buy that TV. Because of that company Sony loses money. Which then company t goes down in value. Also some stock or debt you own. Now you've lost more money and aren't going to fix the broken pipe. Everyone starts hoarding their $$$ because everyone knows tomorrow is going to be worse than today. \n\nBanks are now not loaning any fiat because they can't be sure they'll be repaid and small company Z cannot get a loan to cover operating expenses until it gets paid from company T and needs to lay off workers. We'll now you've lost your job so you aren't buying a whole gallon of milk. Small business T and Z is also foreclosed on. Selling off its assets. But of course no one has money so the assets are sold off at 90% of their original value. The bank (of which you own stock or debt of) now just lost a lot of money. \n\nThis isn't exactly what happened but is representative of what we were facing. Our system is based on tomorrow being better than today. When that doesn't happen then the game is over.",
"Around 1990, the economy collapsed in both Sweden and Japan taking down the banks with bad loans. They dealt with it in opposite ways. Sweden ripped the band-aid off, i.e. they fired the CEOs, made the bank stocks worthless, wrote off and auctioned the bad assets and sold the banks back to the public when they became profitable again, they recovered within five years.\n\nJapan, never forced the banks to write down the bad assets, change management or anything. So these banks just kept existing too broke to meet the loan requirements of Japans businesses. They have NEVER recovered and it's been nearly a quarter century!\n\nFor the record, because of the powerful banking lobby, we have basically followed the Japanese model, so much for learning from history.\n\n**TL;DR The economy needs access to capital which banks can't provide if they collapse, but we did it all wrong.**",
"If we did not bail out the banks housing prices would have gone to normal levels. Housing prices are still over priced because there was no correction due the the bailout."
] |
The dialects of the Chinese language. | [
"They are two completely different languages, with different grammar, vocabulary, sentence structure, the lot. \nHowever, Chinese characters each denote an entire word as a whole concept and not letters or syllables, so speaking any Chinese dialect is not necessary to be able to read and understand Chinese writing. Two people can read the same text and understand each in radically different languages - including non-Chinese ones. \nThus, when China's government wishes to announce something to all Chinese, they simply announce it in writing and every one who can read it can understand it.",
"1. Cantonese and Mandarin are in fact separate (sister) languages. Most non-Mandarin Chinese languages are usually called \"dialects\" only because of sociocultural and historical reasons. Overall, Cantonese and Mandarin are at least as different as Spanish is from Portuguese. There are a lot of similarities between Cantonese and Mandarin and other Chinese languages/dialects (because they descended from the same proto-language, just as Spanish, Portuguese, French, etc. descended from Latin), but there are a lot of differences as well, in terms of phonology, vocabulary, syntax, and so on.\n\n2. Standard written Chinese is based on Mandarin grammar, so everyone who learns and uses written Chinese is in fact learning written Mandarin. Everyone in China who goes to public school nowadays learns Mandarin and standard written Chinese, including Hong Kong and Macau (although many people in Hong Kong and Macau are still not very proficient in spoken Mandarin). I don't know about Macau, but the Hong Kong government makes announcements in English and standard written Chinese (unless spoken, such as on TV/radio, which is 80-90% of the time in Cantonese because most programming is in Cantonese).\n\n3. Yes, most if not all Chinese characters can be pronounced in different Chinese languages/dialects. That's because Chinese characters have a long history, since before today's Chinese languages/dialects split. However, if you read standard written Chinese (which is grammatically based on Mandarin) in a non-Mandarin language/dialect, it will sound bookish. Cantonese may be the only major exception (as a \"dialect\") in having a popularly used, semi-established though not officially standardized written form (which still uses Chinese characters, although some of the characters may be newly invented, and others are considered archaic because they are not used in the standard written Chinese but nonetheless can be found in old dictionaries).\n\n4. Traditional characters (used in Hong Kong and Taiwan) vs. simplified characters (used in mainland China and Singapore) is a superficial difference. All simplified characters have a an original traditional form. You may think of it as print vs. cursive (and in fact, many simplified characters were developed from cursive forms in calligraphy). The Chinese government introduced/promoted simplified characters in early to mid 20th century with the goal of bringing public education to the masses as much as possible, and eliminating the barrier to education that might be caused by the more complicated traditional characters that are harder to memorize.",
"Mandarin and Cantonese are two completely different vocal languages that share the same written language. these are just the two biggest dialects. Shanghai has its own dialect, several actually. There are other dialects in the Hong Kong region. Each dialect is pretty much completely distinct from other dialects. Some dialects are related. Others are completely unintelligible. A Mandarin speaker will not understand Shanghai dialect, nor Cantonese dialect, nor Fujian dialect.\n\nWritten language is the same for all regions of China. Federal government announcements are in written form so everyone can read it. it's just how you pronounce the word that's different. Additionally, local government officials are typically fluent in both Mandarin and the local dialect. \n\nimagine an american pronouncing the word \"jose\" like the name 'josey'. pretty sure a person from mexico would not understand that to mean the name José . but written down, both people understand what it is.",
"Most Chinese dialects can share the same characters. From what I understand, however, Cantonese is different enough from Mandarin to make reading difficult as well.\n\nAn additional layer of complication is that Cantonese typically uses traditional characters, instead of the simplified characters typically used in the mainland. Or at least the areas that use traditional characters (which, strangely enough, do not conform to the HK - mainland border, even though the switch was entirely political, top-down in nature) are also the same areas that speak Cantonese.\n\nBesides this point, however, I understand that Hong Kong does have separate publications in (traditional character) Mandarin and (traditional character) local dialect."
] |
Why are most company head quarters in California? | [
"California is the most populous state and it's been a major tech hub for several decades now. But there are plenty of major companies that aren't headquartered there- financial firms are more likely to be based out of New York or Chicago, defense companies are more likely to be based out of Washington DC or nearby in Maryland and Virginia. There's lots of advanced tech research like robotics and langauge processing based out of Boston. Washington and Texas also have a large number of tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft in the Seattle area and Dell just outside of Austin."
] |
Why American toilets don't have a half-flush feature? | [
"It hasn't really caught on as the standard yet in North America because – compared to Australia – the United States and Canada have very large sources of fresh water (including the \"Great Lakes\" totaling over 244,000 km^2 in area). North America also tends to have a lot more precipitation, so rainwater is helping to replenish fresh water sources all the time.\n\nBasically there is no danger of North America running out of fresh water sources. There are particular areas in the United States (such as the state of California) that are prone to droughts and where water restrictions are sometimes put in place. In general though, there isn't the same concern for \"wasting water\" in North America because, for the most of the continent, the fresh water supply is basically unlimited and it wouldn't be possible to use up even if we were trying to.\n\nAustralia is in a much worse off position because access to fresh water is very limited and, although seawater is in abundance, it's extremely expensive to desalinate (remove salt from) seawater. \n\nTherefore, wasting fresh tap/toilet water becomes a major problem in Australia since it potentially impacts the amount of fresh water available that other people have to rely on for drinking, cooking food, and hygiene.\n\nThere is an effort to introduce half-flush toilets in North America though, and it is possible to buy them in stores. They just haven't yet taken over as the default standard in most bathrooms yet."
] |
Why does saliva sometimes spray out of your mouth like a shower when you yawn? | [
"It's caused by accidently putting pressure on the saliva gland (sublingual) under your tongue. The slang term for this is 'Gleeking' (so you can google it).",
"Ok I feel like a freak now, I do this all the time. You can control it by kind of folding your tongue back under you front teeth, so the underside i pointing out, then press your jaws down on each other, putting pressure on the tongue. To reset just close your mouth for a second and do it again, fun for all the family.",
"If you know that you do this, can you guys please not yawn or suddenly speak while your head is pointed at other people please? Start your sentences while facing your head a few degrees away from me and then turn to talk to me. It's so awkward to be spat on I never know if I should acknowledge it or just pretend that I didn't notice. But then when you reveal with your reaction that you noticed it then that just makes it doubly awkward."
] |
Why does ice sink in warm grease but float in cold? | [
"Like most things, grease expands as it heats up. As a result, cold grease is denser than warm grease, so I've can float in it."
] |
How the street names of New York are organised e.g. 30 & 5th. | [
"The roads are set up like a grid. \n\nThere will be a Central St/Ave tha is where the numbering starts. One direction will 1st Ave North, 2nd Ave North, 3rd Ave north, etc. The other will be 1st Ave South, 2nd Ave South, 3rd Ave South. \n\nTheir cross roads will often be be the opposite 1st St, 2nd St, 3rd St. The \"St\" will often start in an area close to the edge of town so that only one direction will have the North/South aditive to avoid confusion.",
"Streets run east and west in Manhattan and Avenues run north and south. Since manhattan is kind of long and skinny, you have more streets than avenues. Avenues run from 1 to 11 and streets run from 1st st. to 110th st. after that your in Harlem not Manhattan, even though you're still on the island of Manhattan.",
"Much of Manhattan is gridded. Avenues go north and south. Streets go east and west. The avenues only go to 11th. So if someone were to say 30 and 5th you'd know it was the corner of 30th St and 5th Ave which is actually a lame couple blocks to be at. Don't go there.",
"It's a grid system. The streets and avenues are all numbered. So to go from 4th and 17th to 5th and 19th you go one block up and 2 over."
] |
Why does cannibalism have negative side effects? | [
"Any disease that the person who died has is obviously capable of infecting other humans. And societies tend to look down on eating their own, because it would be seen as encouraging murder.\n\nBut otherwise, yes, meat is meat. It is said to taste a lot like pork.",
"Cannibalism is a great way to transmit protein based diseases like kuru, depending on the part you eat.",
"There are two negative side effects of cannibalism that we see from history:\n\n1. Diseases such as kuru. New Guinea cannibals were prone to this disease which is very similar to \"mad cow disease\", drives you mad and then kills you. Is a nasty way to die.\n\n2. Fear and loathing from other human societies. Since many human societies seem to have a strong taboo against cannibalism, they tend to sub-humanise those who practice it, and work hard to wipe them out. For example, the Spanish Conquistadors in Mexico felt that the Aztec practices of human sacrifice and cannibalism were so horrific and evil that almost any measures were justified in trying to extinguish them. They succeeded.",
"Eating the brain led to degenerative disease in the Fore people of Papua New Guinea (_URL_0_). The meat would be fine, but I imagine you would have to take precautions like you would with any other meat - no visible cysts/parasites etc. Also, eating the liver of certain animals can kill you due to the high Vitamin A content. Indigenous groups in the Arctic avoid the liver of polar bears because of this."
] |
What is the difference between shaving using a trimming machine , a razor or waxing besides the physical method and why is one preferred over the other | [
"A trimmer leaves the hair partially there and is merely cutting it down to a certain length. You use this when you want to keep your beard but groom it, and trimmers are often used when doing normal haircuts for the areas that are going to be relatively short.\n\nA razor cuts much closer, shaving off almost all of the exposed hair and leaving skin that looks smooth.\n\nWaxing coats the skin and solidifies, binding the wax to the exposed hair. Placing a sticky strip on the wax and quickly removing it then rips the hair out of the follicle down to the root, resulting in a lack of hair until it can grow from the root again, which should last 1-6 weeks or so depending on the person."
] |
Taxes (I am 20 years old and I want to know how to take care of myself) | [
"I'm going to assume you understand the basic principles of taxes, which has been explained elsewhere here, so I'm going to focus on how the mechanics of income tax work in the USA.\n\n\n\nIncome taxes are the ones you're probably talking about. In the U.S. (and in most other countries) there's a system of \"marginal tax rates\" using what are called \"tax brackets.\" \n\n\n\nTo make this simpler, let's pretend we have a really simple tax system with two income \"brackets\":\n\n\n10% from $0-$100,000\n\n50% for $100,001 and up\n\n\nSo if you make $10k a year, you pay $1,000 to the gov't. If you make $50,000 you pay $5,000. Clear enough. If you make $100,001, how much do you pay? Well, $100,001 times 50%, right? $50,000.05?\n\n\nNO! This is what a ton of people don't understand. You only pay 50% of every dollar you earn at $100,000 or over. So what you'd actually pay would be:\n\n10% of $100,000 = $10,000 PLUS\n\n50% of $1 = 0.50\n\n=$10,000.50\n\n\nThis seems weird, but it's to make sure that people (in this system) don't go from paying around $10,000 in taxes a year to paying around $50,000 just because they earned one extra dollar.\n\n\nOkay, got the simple version? Now here's the actual tax bracket structure of the U.S: _URL_0_\n\n\nLet's say you make $50,000 a year. You owe:\n\n\n10% of your first $8,500 ($850) PLUS\n\n15% of your next $26,000 ($3,900) PLUS\n\n25% of your next $15,550 ($3,875).\n\n= $8,625, which is 17.25% of your total income\n\n\nHere's the next piece of this puzzle: you've already paid your taxes. Every month, your employer takes 17.25% off your paycheck and gives it to the gov't. What you do in April is essentially double-check their math. There are two things that happen then:\n\n\n1. You had a lot of income that the gov't didn't see because it was from investments/a business you own yourself/anything else that's not a paycheck. This means you owe the gov't extra tax for that income and you need to send them a check.\n\n\n2. You have a lot of deductions or tax credits (I'll explain these shortly), meaning you paid more than than you actually owe the gov't. In this case, they send you a refund of some of your money.\n\n\nNext up: deductions and tax credits!",
"A tax *deduction* is something that allows you to pretend your taxable income was less than it was. So, going back to the $50,000...you might have a tax deduction worth $10,000. This would make the actual income the government says you need to pay taxes on only $40,000. There are tons of different tax deductions you can take, and that's something you're going to have to research on your own.\n\n\nA tax *credit* is a bit different: it allows you to take money off the taxes you actually owe, as opposed to the income used to calculate it. So if you had a $1000 tax credit, your bill to the gov't would only actually be $7,625 instead of $8,625. You'd put this on your tax forms, and the gov't would send you a check if they agreed you did the math right. There are two kinds of credits:\n\n\n* Non-refundable tax credits, which can only reduce your taxes to $0. So if you got a $10k non-refundable tax credit, your tax bill would be $0 and the gov't would refund you all the $8,625 you paid over the year.\n\n\n* Refundable tax credits, which can take as much money off your taxes as you have. If you got a $10k refundable tax credit, your tax bill would be -$1,375...meaning the gov't would send you a check back refunding your $8,625 PLUS an additional $1,375 that they're basically paying you.\n\nNow the way you actually \"do your taxes\" is by filling out a 1040 form from the IRS. You can find a link here, at the bottom of the page:\n\n_URL_1_\n\nNow, since you're 20 and probably don't have any deductions and other things to worry about, I'd use the 1040EZ form (on the same page). It's a lot simpler. A brief rundown of the form:\n\n* Lines 1-6 allow you to calculate your taxable income. Lines 1-4 calculate your gross income (without deductions). This includes pay from your work, which is shown on your W2, interest from savings, and a few other random things. Line 5 exists because the gov't has decided that any income under $9350/year won't be taxed at all, so you just subtract that from your total. You add/subtract it all up and line 6 is your \"taxable income\"...that is, what the gov't is going to use to calculate how much you owe in taxes.\n\n* Lines 7-11 are for putting down the amount you've already paid to the gov't as it was withheld from your paycheck (shown in your W2 form), any tax credits you have, and the actual tax you owe on your income. It's worth reading into the earned income credit mentioned on 9a, since that can help a lot of people owe less money.\n\n* Line 12 is if you the tax you owe is less than the tax you paid. You're getting a check from the gov't! Congratulations!\n\n* Line 13 is if the tax you owe is more than the tax you paid. You're gonna have to send a check out. Sorry, buddy.\n\nThe non-EZ 1040 is exactly the same thing, only there are more boxes with different types of credits and types of income and whatever.\n\nHopefully this all made it a bit less intimidating for you!",
"Conceptually a tax return is pretty simple. You:\n\n* 1.) Determine your filing status (one of five options, which will affect some things down the line)\n* 2.) Determine the number of exemptions you will claim for yourself and any dependents (eventually used to reduce your tax liability)\n* 3.) Add up all of your taxable income\n* 4.) Subtract off any of the various tax-exempt adjustments you might have (student loan interest, IRA contributions, etc). At this point you have what's called Adjusted Gross Income (AGI), which is used to calculate a number of the credits that are coming up\n* 5.) Reduce your AGI by either a Standard Deduction based on your filing status, or an Itemized Deduction consisting of actual documented expenses. Also reduce your AGI by the number of exemptions you claimed in step 2 multiplied by $3650. This leaves you with Taxable Income\n* 6.) Take your taxable income and look up/calculate the tax on that amount using the table/worksheet provided by the IRS, giving your your actual Tax\n* 7.) Reduce your tax by the amount of any credits available to you, and any withholding or estimated taxes you paid during the year. If Credits + Withholding > Tax, you get a refund. If not, you have to pay the rest of your tax.\n\nAlso on a practical note: If you're 20 and a college student, odds are you're still a dependent of your parents (they can claim you until you're 24 as long as you're still in school full time), so don't rush out and do a tax return, because you're liable to screw your parents out of thousands of dollars in tax benefits.\n\nEdit: if you want the more detailed version, read the [Form 1040 Instructions](_URL_2_) and [IRS Publication 17](_URL_3_)\n\nEdit 2: I feel like it's actually fairly important to understand the tax system, because it helps you cut through the bullshit on flat tax plans and the like. If you take say... a family of four making $50,000 a year. They'll nominally be in the 15% tax bracket, but in reality they'll pay virtually no federal income tax, because they'll reduce that $50,000 by (at minimum) a standard deduction of $11,400, and exemptions of $3650 x 4 = $14600, leaving them with a taxable income of only $24,000. On that $24,000 they'll be liable for a tax of $2766, but they will be eligible for a child tax credit of $2000, leaving they paying (at worst) $766 of federal income tax, or **1.5%**. Suddenly a 9% flat tax starts sounding like a really shitty deal."
] |
How do aquired tastes work? | [
"It doesn't smell any different to you as it does to me. You have created associations in your brain between the smell, the taste, and the effect. You enjoy the effect, so you start to enjoy the smell because you anticipate the result. It still has the same smell though chemically to your smell receptors in your nose. \n\nYou can use this to create small Pavlov situations. You may hate broccoli on its own. But if you start to put broccoli in things you enjoy to eat, you slowly create the same associations. Over time with enough positive associations, broccoli on its own becomes good to you, because you think about everything else as well.",
"I’m no expert but if I had to think about it I would say it’s just trying it. With the weed example some people think it’s horrid but if they try it their opinion may change. Same goes for music. Genres like deathcore and metalcore aren’t for someone who likes country or pop. It’s a matter is trying and then going from them."
] |
why does milk taste so good after eating something with syrup or peanut butter? | [
"**Likes disolve likes. Polar substances like water disolve polar substances like sugar. Non-polars like oil, fat, and gasoline dissolve non-polars. We've all seen this, oil doesn't mix with water. Chocolate and peanut butter have fat which don't disolve well or at all in water, but do in milk because milk has fat.**"
] |
Why do we get blisters when wearing new shoes for the first time? | [
"The average foot is covered with fairly soft and scrapeable skin. That skin wears away when it's rubbed or tugged against something over and over again. If the constant pulling action is along the surface of the skin and it's in short quick jerks, it can actually separate the top layer of your skin from the bottom. Fluid fills the middle and you get a blister. \n\nSo take that foot and jam it into a shoe that doesn't fit properly and you create a number of pinch points. As you walk and your weight shifts that foot around a little in your shoe over and over again in the same way, the conditions near the shoe's pinch-points can be perfect for this tugging action to occur, resulting in blisters.\n\nIf the shoe is a \"near fit\" and you continue to walk in it over time, it softens due to the repeated stretching, some of the seams wear down a tiny bit from friction, and its leather or other content molds and stretches to accommodate your foot better. This reduces the pulling action because it's no longer pressing against your skin in the same way, so you don't get the blisters any more.",
"Because you are less than amazing at buying shoes from the get go. This issue arrives from buying cheep shoes and trying to cram a foot that is the wrong shape for the shoe.\n\nLPT, put on super thick socks and run a hair drier over the shoe. It will help shape it quicker if there is a shoe you must absolutely have"
] |
The Difference between a Mechanic, Technician, Engineer, etc. I hear the terms used (seemingly) interchangeably. | [
"Mechanic generally only means someone working on engines. Technicians are doing practical work with something at least vaguely technical. You could call a mechanic an auto-mobile technician or something if you want to.\n\nAn engineer generally mean a university-trained professional that designs new systems; they often leave the actual act of installing things to technicians. An engineer designs a plane, a technician/mechanic actually puts it together and makes sure it's going according to plan.",
"A mechanic often times works solely on things that are already made, but broken, and focuses mainly on mechanical operations, such as engines, motors, etc. For instance, an auto mechanic doesn't design my car, he just fixes it.\n\nA technician more often is used for systems, and is someone who is skilled with the technicalities of something. There are automotive technicians, who specialize in the computer system, but while mechanic is almost exclusive to cars and machinery, technicians exist in almost all fields. A radiology technician, a veterinary technician, a computer technician, etc.\n\nAnd an engineer is someone who engineers, they are the people skilled in the designed and construction of something. Or there are railroad engineers, people who work on and run the locomotive.\n\nSo, it's like this. An Engineer designs the car. Once the car is made, a mechanic will service it, if there is a specialized problem with a certain part, a technician might be called in to look at it."
] |
Can electric appliances cause WIFI disturbance? | [
"Motors with brushes have some arcing associated with them. The arcing emits a very wide range of frequencies which can interfere with any consumer radio system. \n\n_URL_0_",
"WiFi is an electric signal using a wavelength. I doubt the vacuum motors induced magnetic field would be strong enough to alter the WiFi signal. But there is a form of disturbance on the power side of router caused by motors and transformers called magnetic resonance. Induced voltage caused by AC motors can distort the AC wave form. Some engineers and electricians call this “dirty power”. This causes extreme problems in electronic systems like routers. There are RC filters built into most equipment but sometimes they are not stout enough to deal with larger distortions. The best solution is to invest in a really good surge suppressor. They have robust RC filters built in and should clear the problem. The other method involves knowing which phase each receptacle is on and gets a little complicated.",
"Depends on the appliance. As the others have mentioned, motors can cause some signal interference, and this is typically reduced by making the enclosure of the appliance out of metal, and grounding it, in order to form a [faraday cage](_URL_1_). \n\nModern vacuum cleaners are made of plastics, so that's a problem. On the other hand, something like a clothes washing or drying machine, with its metal enclosure, will likely cause much less EM interference, despite also having motors inside."
] |
Why do we chill when we are actually burning with fever? | [
"There's a part of your brain that controls your temperature called the hypothalamus. When you get a fever, your immune system makes your hypothalamus change your desired temperature higher. Your body basically wants to get warmer, so it makes you feel cold. When you feel cold, you try to get warmer yourself and you shiver to move your body to create warmth. Your body forces you to feel cold because it wants you to get warm. If you felt hot, you would try and cool yourself down, which is the opposite of what your body is trying to do."
] |
Why do televisions often cut the end off of recorded programs, even if space is available? | [
"They often have a schedule for advertisers and later programming, and the program was \"fudged\" in that time slot. Sometimes programs, especially live broadcasts, go over or under time by a few minutes, but shows later in the day have to be on at a certain time. Since everything is set to run in the same time intervals, the gap moves on down the line thriving the day so they often prefer to cut some time from somewhere else to make it work."
] |
How honey, agave syrup, etc. is "healthier" than white sugar. | [
"the short answer is that they aren't. it's all marketing. if they can slap \"natural\" or \"organic\" on something then they can sell it for more and have people breaking down the door to get it. \n\nthe caveat to that is, natural agave and honey from your local area can serve to build up your immune system and help with allergies. it's not a cure all, and it's not total immunity but theoretically it is better than white sugar. also real honey tastes better than the stuff at the supermarket, and all honey tastes better than white sugar in cereal and tea and stuff imo.",
"Sugar isn't always the same as other sugars, to begin with. Your body reacts to fructose and glucose differently. But you aren't eating pure sugar often anyways, you're eating sugary substances, and the differences between these substances are often what is or isn't more or less healthy.\n\nHoney has a lot of properties and ingredients that pure white cane sugar doesn't have.\n\nThat said, if you are becoming unhealthy for having a high calorie diet, then eating 500 extra calories of agave syrup in your drinks isn't some magical healthy cure all for eating 500 extra calories of High Fructose Corn Syrup in them.\n\nAnd eating a 'healthier' sugar isn't a good excuse for continuing to overeat sugary substances or to eat more of it.\n\nAnd you also have to make sure you're getting the real product because a lot of 'honey' they sell in supermarkets is like.. cut with corn syrup and water. So you ain't even getting the 'better' sugar anyways.\n\nA lot of people will go \"Oh, this sugar is healthier so I can eat a 3 thousand calorie diet\", and they're still going to gain weight and stuff.\n\nLike honey has a lot of properties that makes it useful, but you can't just eat nothing but candy and candied water (soda) and change the sugar in it and make it into a health food.\n\nI mean, small amounts of wine every couple days can help with the immune system, but you'd still be an alcoholic if you replaced every drink with wine, you know?\n\nUnfortunately that's how some people will see things, like they'll be like \"I'm eating healthier because I changed my corn sugar to bee sugar, so I'm gonna still eat 3 pounds of caramel.\", or they'll be like \"I burned 500 calories running, so I'm going to reward myself with 500+ calories of cookies\".\n\nSo at the end of the day, it's healthier to just eat.. less sweet things in general, than to just switch up which sugar you're eating.",
"The healthy aspect is moderate intake of sugars, whatever the source. Beyond that, there is some thinking about \"glycemic index\" issues, but to say that the \"science\" is less than rigorous would be a serious understatement.",
"Most of the sugar we buy in the grocery store has been bleached white. It also goes through more processing when it's white unless its pure white cane sugar. The processing also removes most nutrients/fiber found in a natural cane or beet plant. The less processing the sugar goes through the more fiber that is retained. Which makes the body process the sugar slower, no sugar crashes or anything like that."
] |
What does "meta" actually mean? | [
"Meta means \"viewing things at the next higher conceptual level\". \n\nFor example, an analysis might study the effectiveness of a particular drug. A meta-analysis studies multiple analyses.\n\nMeta can **sometimes** result in self-reference, like a TV show making a joke about being a TV show. But saying meta is the same as self-reference completely misunderstands what is actually means.",
"\"Meta\" means \"self-referential\" or \"referring to the thing itself\". One common usage in neuroscience is the concept of meta-cognition, or \"thinking about the process of thinking\".\n\nIn the Internet, it's commonly used to discuss self-referential humor, and leads to things like: \"I'm so meta, even this acronym\", where, if you convert that sentence into an acronym, it spells \"is meta\"."
] |
How were the 'adult' ages of 18/21 established in the western world for things like voting, drinking, legal liability, etc.? | [
"21 was first for voting decided at the framing of the US. It was figured that you were likely married and might start owning land that young. It likely also flowed from the British system. Eventually states started making drinking (generally 16-18) and legal adulthood laws(generally 18-21). The military started bringing up their minimum recruitment age to 17 with parental consent and 18 without. Prohibition made alcohol legally banned so when it came back, the rules were generally stricter than before with most states setting it at 18 for purchase. During the Vietnam war many 18-21 y/os were serving, but missed out on the election. Massive protests and activism led to the 26th amendment bringing the age of voting to 18. Shortly after it applied to all local votes too. Mothers Against Drunk Driving started a campaign to reduce fatalities and lobbied individual states and the federal government to raise the drinking age to 21. Many states did so on their own, but once the federal highway act funding required the 21 limit it was pretty much set in stone.",
"Arbitrarily. Almost. \n\nThere had to be a line drawn somewhere, for legal purposes, that a person will not be considered a child anymore. That was picked to be 18/21 for different things. It might as well have been 17/22 or 19/20 or any nearby numbers really. \n\nThe law makers, decided 18 would be appropriate enough and here we have it.",
"These ages aren't set at 18/21 for the 'western world', but for America. These ages vary considerably across Europe, and there is no unifying reason for where they are set. A mix of past laws and customs, local culture and as a response to campaigning or social events.\n\nFor example, in many European countries there is no minimum drinking age, or it is low (ie in England it is 5 yo as long as it is not in public and is supervised). Then the age for buying varies again based mainly off local culture. The UK has a buying age of 18, whilst in Germany you can buy wine and beer at 14.\n\nThis variation goes for most 'adult' ages including the age of legal responsibility, age of consent, ect",
"As far as the drinking age goes, States can lower it, but if they do, they no longer receive funding for highways from the National Government.",
"I believe it was more or less chosen based on the Education system that was in place. 18 was the age people were when they completed their education. I think it was changed to 21 because prohibition failed.",
"This goes back to inherincy law. the question was how old must a person be to take cotrole of land wealth and power. that age differed place to place and over time. English commen law eventaly settled on 21. that became the bases for all legel contracts and as old voting systems were based on owner ship of land 21 also became the voting age. and so it stayed until military conscription came along. The age of conscription was set to 18 around the WWI. that led to the case were you could be old enough to be made to fight and die but not old enough to vote. that struck many people as unfair. so they changeg voting age to 18 and contract law followed. the drinking age is its own rabbit hole\n\nps I not a lawyer so i could be wrong",
"In Rome the legal adult was defined as 18 years old. (You were required to pay a drachma tax if you were an adult) We take pretty much every idea of ours from Rome and Greece.",
"18 to go to war and 21 to drink, they changed voting age to 18 in America because men were going off to die for a country that they couldn't elect officials for.",
"The earliest rule I know of in America was called the [Rule of Sevens](_URL_0_).\n\nIt went that a child younger than seven, as a matter of law, was said to lack cognitive abilities necessary for a finding of criminal liability. From the age of 7 up to 14 there was a rebuttable presumption that a child who acted unlawfully did not possess criminal intent. Between 14 and 21 there was a rebuttable presumption that the person has cognitive capabilities such that he should be held legally and criminally accountable for his actions. After the age of 21 the defense of lack of informed assent did not exist except perhaps for defendants who were mentally disabled, although I'm not sure how that was handled back then. \n\nI'm not sure where 18 came from for serving in the army. 21 used to be the voting age until the 26th Amendment, probably to give the right to vote to the men who were old enough to be drafted to fight in wars.\n\nMy guess is that making 18 the age where men could fight in war was to split the difference between 14 and 21, the ages when a man could have, and was (rebuttably) presumed to have, an adult mind.",
"Cassius Dio, a Roman Historian, attributes Agrippa as saying that the Emperor, when considering \"...eligibility for office, now, we should put men on the roll of knights when they are eighteen years old, for at that age their physical soundness and their mental fitness can best be discerned; but we should not enrol them in the senate until they are twenty-five years old.\" [Book 52.20.1]\n\nThough modern states may have other reasoning behind their choice of 18 as the age of majority, I think this shows there is a history of opinion that 18 is an appropriate age of maturity, for whatever reasons.",
"Not sure of why 18 was selected, but the reasoning behind picking 21 as the drinking age for the states was a study that shows your brain is 100% developed by the time you reach 21. I'll see if I can find a link to it.",
"I imagine with lots of arguing and compromises."
] |
Student debt is making it harder for millennials to buy houses in stead of renting. What effect will this have on the economy? | [
"Student debt is not just dragging down the housing market, it's dragging down the entire economy. Reducing the discretionary spending power of the currently largest demographic block in the US is obviously detrimental to the entire economy. Part of why the US's growth rate in the past 10 years has been less than stellar is partially because student debt has curtailed millenial spending. Reducing discretionary spending reduces functional demand, reduces economic growth. \n\nIf we really want to free up the economy, we must address the student debt problem. \n\nSpecifically, for housing, this will reduce appreciation and likely harm the retirements of boomers who were counting on the profits from real estate appreciation. It will also slow down family creation and marriage rates, both of which should slow the economy as well.",
"If student loans collapses like the housing market did, we're looking at another recession that'll probably hit harder. There's a substantial amount of bad debt and many banks engaged in less than noble lending practices."
] |
Why do we need car dealerships? | [
"Same reason we need any store, some people like to try things out before they buy it.",
"As I recall, the \"car dealership\" model was put in place to prevent Ford from having a monopoly on the car selling industry. A new car manufacturer wouldn't have to compete with the entirety of Ford, it would have to compete with a number of local dealerships who are also competing among eachother.",
"Dealerships also act as a distributor of genuine parts and an authorized repair facility. In theory dealership mechanics are experts on the specific systems of a particular brand of car.",
"It is much easier to do business with a local owner than try and do business with a disinterested party thousands of miles away."
] |
How is it possibly true that "the Girl Scout Cookie Program is the largest girl-led business in the United States" - is it really led by girls? | [
"I believe that almost all the upper level management of the Girls Scouts is also female.\nTheir CEO is currently Anna Maria Chávez, and if you look at their [list of past leaders](_URL_0_), it's pretty much entirely females.\n\nSo yes, it's a very large business that's led almost entirely by women. I'd say their material checks out."
] |
Where have all the college-student jobs gone? | [
"Well, for starters, in 1979 you could pay for an entire semester of college by working for two weeks at minimum wage. In 1993, you could pay for a week of school with 20 hours of minimum wage work a week. Now, you have to work 48 hours a week of minimum wage to pay for school.\n\nSo, it makes more sense to take out a student loan and actually have time to go to school than to work while going to school.\n\n[Source](_URL_0_)"
] |
Why is it always so cold in the hospital? | [
"Bacteria and viruses don't survive as long on cold surfaces. Making it a bit chilly saves lives from infection.",
"Hospitals and other healthcare facilities have high air change rates, sometimes up to 25 air changes per hour for an operating room. So every hour the entire volume of air in that space is being supplied and exhausted almost every 2 minutes. Paired with some beefy filters, bacteria and any other airborne particulates are exhausted out of the room before they can settle on anything. Since generally, air is supplied to a space around 55 degrees when in cooling mode, a facility with high air change rates, such as a hospital or lab, tend to be cooler."
] |
home come drinking salt water makes you vomit, but having something like chicken broth doesn’t? Even though it has water and salt in it | [
"Pretty sure there's way more salt proportionally in ocean water (and other stuff) than even the saltiest chicken broth.",
"Salt water? 🤔 Like drinking water from the ocean?"
] |
What are the pros and cons of upgrading from Windows 7 to Windows 10? | [
"This is going to be mostly personal preference. But I can give you my opinion for what it's worth. I work as an IT Specialist, whatever that means, for a company consisting of about 300 users. Most are on Windows 7, but the president and a few others have windows 10, so I do have experience with both. So, here it goes...\n\nWindows 7 has been through rigorous testing, it has been pushed to homes and businesses for years and has proven itself. If you have used windows before, you are pretty well familiar with the main functions of this os. My one qualm with 7 is that if you use dual screen, you need a third party application to utilize the task bar on both screens, unless somebody knows something I do not? \n\nIf you are upgrading to 10, there are often issues which occur. Sometimes 10 will miss drivers, which can cause certain programs or even hardware to not work properly. One issue I have seen is that 10 will sometimes miss the network adapter driver, which can only be resolved by downloading this driver from the internet, meaning you will need a second working system. 10 has also gotten rid of Internet Explorer and now uses Edge, which is different but similar. The start menu of 10 contains advertisements, which drive me crazy but can possibly be removed. It also opens windows as 8 did, by pretty much bringing every page full screen. But it also brings forth many features which 7 does not, such as facial recognition and cortana, the siri of windows. Windows 10 looks brilliant, and works similarly to 8 and 7 at the same time. It is different, but can be exciting to explore. \n\nNow personally, I play games, do research, watch videos, and mostly work on computers all day every day. I do more than an average user, and I feel it is easier for me to complete these tasks on a Windows 7 machine. Not one of my personal devices use Windows 10, but that is not to say I don't like it. But for my purpose, it is not so efficient. If you try it and do not like it, it is possible to restore the system back to 7. It takes some time but I have had to do so for multiple employees, so maybe 10 is worth a try for you? It depends on what you are looking to do, what's important to you in your os, and how comfortable you are with change. \n\nIf you have any specific questions or concerns feel free to dm me. I'm happy to help if I can. I hope this was informative for you.",
"I switched 3 devices form 7 to 10. I strongly prefer multi monitor window management in windows 10, this is something I do quite a lot of with my job so it's really important to me. \n\nAll 3 upgrades were 100% hassle free. One of them had an issue, but it was my fault (I upgraded early by way of an insider build (beta), and forgot to remove myself from the insider program). Even with the beta, there was zero issues upgrading.\n\nI upgraded 1 desktop that I'd built myself, 1 HP desktop that had been significantly upgraded and 1 stock laptop. All of the hardware is several years old, so nothing cutting edge. \n\nI don't use egde (the new Internet Explorer) so I can't speak to that. I use Cortana a little, but generally only for voice commands. In general I find 10 to be just as fast.\n\nThe Windows 8 computer I use at work is a dumpster fire, do not recommend.",
"I switched to 10 and had to switch back to 7. The only thing Windows 10 has going for it is a new direct x that nothing uses yet, besides that the changes are too much of a headache for me. Windows 10 doesn't do much that Windows 7 can't, and there's no need for an update unless you're bored of the user interface and want a new Internet explorer",
"I upgraded to 10 and it works so far. I did not experience any driver issues but I waited for my device to be certified. Fairly easy to google your hardware and make sure it is compatiable. I reccomened reading all the default options MS tries to shove down your throat. \n\nPro \nClean modern ui \nBetter search \nFaster boot time \nHybrid device friendly \nVirtual desktop \nSecurity updates ;)\nFree (for now)\n\nCon \nMS spyware (disable it)\nCortana (disable it)\nTiles ( disable them)\nMS store (not required)\nHates desktop shortcuts\n\n\nI disabled all of them I think. I do not like cortana. Google now serves as an effiecient digital assistant. I also do not like the MS store. Actually I hate it. It has poor app management features and ui design. The apps installed with MS store do not live inside your program files directories. Idk where they actually go. Which bothers me. Thankfully it's use is not needed. My main apps that I run daily are Chrome, Steam, Plex Media server, VLC, telegram (chat/file share), Calibre (ebook manager) and Transmission (bittorrent client). I have had zero issues installing and running these apps. Features I love include the new ui theme. Win 10 has a simple modern design that pleases my eye. Virtual desktop baked in. Huge plus for me. Taskbar search that works. I dont use the start menu anymore. I pin common apps to the taskbar. This does bring up an important issue. Win 10 does not like desktop shortcuts. You can make them but you have to find the exe in file manager then right click to create shortcut. I don't use them because I like a clutter free desktop. I use search for uncommon apps. I did customize search results to only show apps and documents and shrunk it down to minimal interface, no tiles. I love the new file manager. Better search. Folder pinning that makes sense. Clean UI. Task management is fluid. I use win+x command for easy access to admin tools. The virtual command line even got a mini overhaul. The new notification center took some getting used to but I'm ok with it. The old one was useless imo. I also use a hybrid laptop and like the options to change ui for tablet mode. The edge browser works great in this mode for reading news although I rarely use it. That's about all I can think of at this moment.",
"What I like on 10 :\n* notifications like on a smartphone\n* know well what to do when I connect / disconnect my 2nd screen\n* clickable icons on the windows bar\n* obvious choice if you have a tactile able computer\n\nWhat I hate on 10, that 7 does not do :\n* update without asking me. Had to go far into the options so that it doesn't go out of sleep and update a few minutes after I go to sleep, or get out of sleep mode alone, and staying on power why I'm not there\n\nIn a few words :\n10 is more like a smartphone ; easier but with less choices. If you don't want that stay on 7.",
"Idk much about the cons, but the fact is if you don't upgrade to Windows 10 by the time they're still offering a free upgrade, then you'll have to pay for a new copy of Windows at some point in the future. However, if you do upgrade to Windows 10 it is most likely that they'll keep giving free upgrades for later updates."
] |
Why does the hair on your head need to be cut continuously but the hair on the rest of your body knows when to stop? | [
"All hair have a certain lifespan, your eyebrow and eyelashes can only grow for a month or two before they die and fall off. Your hair on the other hand can grow for about 7 years (this is why very few people can grow their hair past their butt).",
"The hair on your head also has a terminate length. It is just much longer than body hair.",
"If you let your head hair grow normally, it would stop at a certain point too."
] |
Why do I crave something specific when I'm hungry and some times I don't know what I want? What is happening in my body? | [
"Sometimes (pregnant women especially experience this) your body will be lacking so kind of mineral/nutrient, so it will direct you towards foods containing that nutrient. It could also just be dependent on sensory cues."
] |
Why do most rappers say "uh, yeah" before a song? | [
"It's just a way for rappers to find their rhythm and get into the song. It's the equivalent of bobbing your head to the beat or something."
] |
Why do bubbles have that strange rainbow kinda color? | [
"Very thin films take on a sharp color. This is due to light reflecting off of both surfaces of the film and interfering with itself. \n \nThis happens with a bubble, but the film is not uniform in thickness. So instead of getting one very distinct color, [you get rainbow patterns](_URL_0_)."
] |
What are the current Problems with nuclear Fusion? | [
"You are creating something as hot as a star. No physical material we have is strong enough to withstand that kind of heat and pressure. Any metals, ceramics, even carbon nanotubes would melt and rupture instantly. \n\nSo the reaction is contained by floating it inside of a magnetic field so it doesn't actually touch anything. This field has to be very strong to contain the energy being created, and so it takes a lot of energy to keep the field up. Currently we can create fusion reactions, but we always end up putting more energy into them than we get out of them. \n\nWe either need to find a way to generate more energy in the reaction without needing additional energy to contain it, or we need to increase the efficiency of the magnetic torus that contains the reaction so it doesn't take so much energy to maintain. \n\nThis is why cold fusion is so sought after, because without all of the heat then you don't need high energy toruses to contain the reaction.",
"We currently have no way of creating more energy with fusion than it takes to get fusion to happen.\n\nFor fusion to happen, you have to overcome incredibly powerful fundamental forces. Right now, the best we can do is suspend incredibly hot plasma in a magnetic torus (or laser suspension) and encourage hydrogen atoms to slam into each other fast enough to fuse. \n\nThe basic problem is really we just don't know how to do this without expending enormous amounts of energy on heating things up.",
"A friend of mine who is a plasma physicist used this analogy for me once: \n\nImagine you are sitting in your bathtub, and you want to push all of the water into one small corner of the tub with your hands. What's going to happen? You're not going to get very far.\n\nOK, you're resourceful. You get some big pieces of waterproof cardboard. Can you do it now? Not really: if there are _any_ gaps in your \"wall,\" the water will find a way out. \n\nOK, you're not going to be discouraged. You've got custom-molded plastic barriers that are perfectly fit to the tub. It cost a hell of a lot of money, but damn it, you're not to be discouraged. You push it into the corner... and it spouts up the top from the compression. $* & # & #!\n\nOK, now you've got a really complex system that can deal with high-compression and not let it out and... yeah. Anyway, that's the end of the analogy. The thing here is that the water here is the heat of the fusion plasma the attempts to push it into useful places are the confinement attempts. If the heat \"leaks\" out the reaction loses energy and stops reacting (and maybe damages your apparatus if it is hot enough). And like the water, if there is _any_ weak spot in your containment system, the hot plasma will find it. \n\nMost efforts at hot fusion involve finding ways to avoid leakage of heat, either through magnetic confinement (hold the plasma in a magnetic \"bottle\" of some sort, so it doesn't touch anything) or inertial confinement (squeeze it with such force that it instantly turns into a tiny sun). Both are easy to imagine on paper (\"just make a magnetic bottle!\"), both are really hard to pull off effectively in practice. The bulk of the expenditure of current efforts involve scaling everything up with the idea that the confinement will work better and little inefficiencies won't matter as much. There are smaller-scale efforts that try to do novel means of containment (the guy who gave me the bathtub analogy was trying to do something where you would levitate the containment torus with a magnet, or something like that). Every little breakthrough ends up typically exposing new problems and difficulties. We know it _should_ be possible — hot fusion takes place on large-scales in stars and in hydrogen bombs — but there are many practical difficulties and a few theoretical ones to scaling it down to something more human-scale.",
"It takes alot of Hot or alot of Push, or alot of Hot and Push to make it happen. We can do that, and the Fusion generates some Hot and Push, but not enough to make it worth it.\n\nWe want to find a way to efficiently use Hot and Push to start fusion which makes even more Hot and Push. Then we can use some of the Hot and Push to keep the fusion going while we collect the rest to fuel out other machines that like Hot and Push.",
"It's hot as fuck. Need magnets.\n\nHard to control. Because you need magnets.\n\nHave to input a shit ton of energy into it. Need to get something out.",
"Fusion energy, simply, is the exact opposite of fission energy, which comes from splitting an atom and is widely used to power nuclear plants and weapons. Fusion occurs constantly on our sun, which produces most of its energy via the nuclear fusion of hydrogen into helium. When nuclei fuse, they create a heavier nucleus and produce a little leftover energy in the process.\n\nFusion doesn't produce runaway chain reactions the way fission can, so there's no need to worry about meltdowns. Nor do fusion reactions produce the large amounts of dangerous radioactive waste that fission reactions do. That's why it's such a dreamy source of energy.\n\nSo why do we have fission power, but not fusion power? The answer is pretty simple, and very frustrating to a lot of physicists out there: For fusion to occur on Earth, you need a temperature of at least 100 million degrees Celsius—six times hotter than the core of the sun. The sun is a natural fusion reactor which makes up for its measly 15 million degrees with the intense pressure created by its core's gravity. Currently, here on Earth the amount of energy you'd need to put in to produce that kind of heat or pressure is much, much higher than what you get out in usable energy.\n\nThat's where the term cold fusion, the hope that fusion reactions can occur at relatively low temperatures, comes in. Once a promising theoretical goal, the field was largely written off as pseudoscience the late 1980s, when electrochemists Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann reported that their room-temperature electrolysis experiment had produced so much excess heat—as well as nuclear by-products like tritium—that only a nuclear reaction could be blamed. The attention led to a massive wave of cold-fusion experimenting, but no one was able to replicate their heat anomaly. A Department of Energy review panel debunked the evidence, and met again in 2004 to draw the same conclusion.\n\nThat doesn't mean scientists aren't still working on making (hot) fusion a viable energy source. In a New York Times op-ed in November, Stewart C. Prager of the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory called the process of creating viable energy from fusion \"a grand scientific challenge.\"",
"The inertial containment is a barrier.\n\nAs the fusion unleashes a lot of energy, enough to blow apart whatever we're fusing. As soon as we lose critical mass, we lose the chain reaction.\n\nFission has this barrier too, but it's been mostly solved. It is why you'll sometimes see on TIL that a nuclear weapon only utilizes X% of fuel.\n\nAnyway, we keep the critical mass by using magnets or lasers, which take a lot of power to run. More power than we can harness from the resulting fusion. (And it's not possible to perfectly capture the energy, never will be)"
] |
How are denial of service attacks still possible? | [
"Same reason McDonalds can't do anything about one guy coming in an ordering 30 large fries and holding up the entire store for a half hour.\n\nThat's basically what a DDoS attack is. There are counter measures that these companies take, but ultimately there is little they can do that would not also negatively effect their business.\n\nBest solution for Lizard Squad is to get the FBI involved and have the lot of them arrested. A couple years in prison with \"Horse Cock\" Charlie should straighten them out."
] |
Why are simple antibiotics not available without a prescription? | [
"Because antibiotic resistance is a huge problem. People overuse antibiotics for things that sometimes don't even need them, like the flu which is a virus and not bacterial. If the general public were able to purchase antibiotics off the bat then resistance would go up massively.\n\nPlus, there are so many different types of antibiotics that the general public wouldn't even know which ones treat what illnesses. The ABX for UTIs tend to be different than that of strep, or staph, or STIs etc...\n\nSource: I'm a medical professional",
"Because people would overuse them which obviously creates antibiotic resistance, a big threat to world health currently. Additionally they would use them for the wrong thing. Antibiotics won't help you with a cold or the flu but there are millions of people who would take them thinking that they do help which just increases problem with the first part of this answer. Then there are multiple types of antibiotic meds so you would need to know which to treat the issue you have.",
"Excessive and unregulated use of antibiotics is a danger to both individual and public health. For you, long-term use can be dangerous, since you rely on bacteria in the intestines for proper digestion. For the public, poor use of antibiotics encourages the development of antibiotic-resistant bacteria.\n\nFor these reasons, you should only use them strictly in accordance with a doctor's prescription. The reality is, you *don't need* them for many commonplace bacterial infections; that is what your immune system is for!"
] |
This difference between running inside and running outside | [
"ELi5 isn't really for questions about personal health so this has been removed. If serious ask a doctor."
] |
What is the difference between emotional infidelity and a close friendship? | [
"There is no big book of relationship regulations. Discuss relationship expectations with your partner. \n\nBut personally if my partner expected me not to be close with my friends, I would not accept that."
] |
Why don't laptops have a slot to clean fan dirt? | [
"The more user-servicable you make a piece of electronics, the bulkier and less reliable it will be. People generally make their purchasing decision based on aesthetics or specs and not on the ease of maintenance. This is the same reason that iPhones don't have removable batteries."
] |
How does communism work? Does everyone get the same share of national revenue, regardless of profession? What about those in the sciences, politics, business, and other "highly paid" professions? | [
"There are so many forms and interpretations of communism that this is hard to answer. But, if we look at the classic \"academic communism\" based on marx then, no...if well done there should be no social class. Since all people are doing are things that benefit society, differentiating the value of one brink in the wall from another is impossible. It's only our capitalism that equates the \"value\" of medicine with money and resultant social class, to the communist the job that isn't needed is the job that isn't done and other jobs are bricks in societies wall. In it's ideal, money doesn't exist.\n\nIn practice, no country got to \"communism\" they were all communistic in government structure (or tried to be) and socialist (a gateway economic structure) in economic organization."
] |
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