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4f91h6 | why are electric cars considered to be so green, if most power plants that produce the electricity to power said cars are still using fossil fuels? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4f91h6/eli5_why_are_electric_cars_considered_to_be_so/ | {
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"Power plants that use fossil fuels are a lot more efficient than internal combustion engines. They produce fewer pollutants per unit of energy produced, and are thus cleaner than gas-powered cars."
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1va5pi | how the digestive system adapt to certain foods that it initially has trouble with? | The first time I drank a kale shake it was like the poo dam had burst. The second time it was normal.
What happened to cause this change? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1va5pi/eli5_how_the_digestive_system_adapt_to_certain/ | {
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"I'm not sure, but I'd like to know AND to ask why the opposite is true. When I first went vegan I had the worst farts...I wasn't fit to be around (I was surprised because I had already been vegetarian for 6 months, so I didn't think it would be that different). That settled down eventually, which is in keeping wit OP's question. Now, after 11 years, if I have any dairy products at all I get stomach sick and very gassy - I used to love dairy back in the day - how did I make myself lactose intolerant?"
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31qucq | when the default search is sorted by "relevance", why/how does it think it knows what is relevant to me? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/31qucq/eli5_when_the_default_search_is_sorted_by/ | {
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"\"Relevance\" doesn't mean \"relevant to you\". It mean \"best matches the search terms, with some weight function applied based on the submission's popularity\"."
]
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1vpbil | when i was younger, i would eat bananas all the time. now i'm allergic to them. how did that happen? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vpbil/eli5_when_i_was_younger_i_would_eat_bananas_all/ | {
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"First off, allergies are not well understood. They appear to be our immune systems just going absolutely insane over something that doesn't seem to matter, such as a nut protein. Why this reaction is occurring is not really understood, except that it activates some rather dramatic reactions from immune cells.\n\nHowever, when you were younger, your immune system was entirely different. Why you developed this alergy is hard to determine, but likely at some point, some immune cell went rogue and decided that the bananas you ate were the enemy. This cell set off a wave of biological signals where now your entire immune system believes this cry of 'wolf' and will readily burn its house down."
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cculg3 | how are large-scale, intricate construction sites organized so that every worker knows exactly what and when to do? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cculg3/eli5_how_are_largescale_intricate_construction/ | {
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"It’s like the military. You have crews run by crew foremen managed by site foremen governed by project planners. \n\nConsider the offices of any large corporation - how does each individual know what they should be doing? A hierarchy of superiors.",
"Generally a single company is hired to do the overall site management. They set the schedule, organize the sub-contractors, manage deliveries of materials, and do everything else it takes to make sure construction proceeds. Each individual sub-contracting company will have their piece of the project schedule and plans provided to them, and then they break that out into individual tasks for their teams of workers. So when you show up to the site with your tools you know what your job is for that day/week, but you don't need to know the entire project plan.",
"These other posts are basically right, but also the other thing is that they're also often complete shitshows -- poor communication, finger pointing, covering for other guys fuckups, etc. These factors all waste time and money. Big developers often assess HUGE penalties to the coordinator for delivering the project late - like 15k per day. Projects running behind will often authorize huge overtime bc it will cost them less than being late."
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5huz3i | in spite of living in very cold climates, why do the inuit have relatively dark skin? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5huz3i/eli5_in_spite_of_living_in_very_cold_climates_why/ | {
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"The only reason to have really pale skin is to get vitamin D from the sun in places where the sun can be scarce. But in North America the people living in the far north got plenty of vitamin D from their ocean-heavy diet. So there was no evolutionary pressure for pale skin."
]
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1ytt9f | why do people think the "mind-body problem" hasn't been solved yet? | I did the neurosciences in undergrad and am kinda focusing on that in grad school before going on with another degree...but that being said:
I don't get it
Are people just moving the goalposts and is there a desire to reject the notion that you're nothing more than neurons reacting to stimuli?
Are there still great mysteries about how the brain works in relation to "consciousness" and what not, or is it people who are just louder than they need to be, who aren't educated enough about what they're debating? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ytt9f/eli5_why_do_people_think_the_mindbody_problem/ | {
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" > Are people just moving the goalposts and is there a desire to reject the notion that you're nothing more than neurons reacting to stimuli?\n\nPretty much. We have a sense that mind is in some qualitative way distinct from body, and that we are in some sense greater than the sum of our parts. I agree with you that that sense is probably incorrect, but this comes with some rather intuitively bizarre consequences - for example, that a brain could in principle be copied.",
"also centuries of religious oppression limited scientific discovery tremendously but now we're trying to get back on track. Imagine if Christinity never existed. I bet the Earth would have been totally Jetson status by now if it wasn't for them damn fanatics"
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57yndt | why is it that we throw farther when we use one hand than when we use both? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/57yndt/eli5_why_is_it_that_we_throw_farther_when_we_use/ | {
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"Well it's not necessarily true for EVERYTHING, there sure are things that you'll get further by using two hands. It's all about the throw, so I assume you mean things like baseball or a rock or whatever.\n\nI'd actually flair it as an Engineering question, it's a bit bio-mechanicky. It's about joint types and configuration space.\nImagine you can draw in mid-air, with your hand. Take your throwing hand, straighten it out and \"draw\" all the points you can reach as far as the shoulder allows you. It'll have the shape of a partial sphere, or spheroid, with a nice little span forth and back and to the sides, up and down, until it hits your hips/head. This is the configuration space for your single hand, where you can stretch the shoulder back to get some nice momentum around it.\nNow join your hands and \"draw\" the same space with them joined.\nYou'll see that most of it is in the front, in a shape of another partial sphere, much smaller. This lack of freedom prevents a lot of muscles from working on the task, leaving you basically with the elbows.\nThat's why olympic hammer throwers get all that nice momentum from spinning around while throwing with two hands, to utilise MORE of their body to the task."
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jzwzv | positivism and interpretivism | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/jzwzv/eli5_positivism_and_interpretivism/ | {
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"Basically, positivists try to express everything in numbers that can be measured, and think that you can only learn things by making statements that can either be true or false. In interpretive sociology, however, they think that some things, like religion, culture and tradition, can't really be put into numbers, but instead only in words, where things aren't necessarily true or false, but rather meaningful and meaningless (and even then only in degrees and dependent on context).",
"Basically, positivists try to express everything in numbers that can be measured, and think that you can only learn things by making statements that can either be true or false. In interpretive sociology, however, they think that some things, like religion, culture and tradition, can't really be put into numbers, but instead only in words, where things aren't necessarily true or false, but rather meaningful and meaningless (and even then only in degrees and dependent on context)."
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3fkcq0 | why doesn't someone like tiger woods get progressively better at his short game? | He's put in countless hours of practice, yet the Tiger we see today is not as good on or around the greens as his 21 year old self. Injuries aside, why doesn't the average pro golfer just get better at his short game with each passing year? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fkcq0/eli5why_doesnt_someone_like_tiger_woods_get/ | {
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"So much of golf is played in the mind. It's not easy, but doable, to practice again and again to improve on consistency and reads. However, all that could get untracked by a brief lack of focus, which causes a mistake, then a loss of confidence, etc. You'd have to be a perfect, unphaseable person with 100% control over your thoughts to be able to put that practice to use again and again.\n\nIt works the other way too -- I'm usually a poor golfer, but I've had moments where my short game looked really good compared to my level of practice, because I happened to be in a zone where I felt I couldn't make a mistake.",
"Because while practice helps, people just arent good at some things, plus there is focus, and since he hasnt been good at his short game in the past, he now thinks he isnt, so he plays worse. ",
"Why don't you get better at urinating after 20 years? You reach a plateau and outside factors can have effects on your performance. "
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e07g7h | why is the black of a tv not on a channel or in between programmes not as dark as a tv turned off? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e07g7h/eli5_why_is_the_black_of_a_tv_not_on_a_channel_or/ | {
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"Depends on what type of screen you have but many modern TVs have a backlight. The screen then blocks the light to produce a dark area most would consider to be black. The blockage is not 100% effective, so it is brighter than when the backlight is off."
]
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5x3l1u | why is it such a big deal, that any of the american politicians have been in (or not in) touch with russian politicians? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5x3l1u/eli5_why_is_it_such_a_big_deal_that_any_of_the/ | {
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"American diplomats talk with Russian diplomats all the time and negotiate deals between the two countries. However it is illegal for private citizens to do the same. These laws are in place to prevent spies and foreign supported revolutions from being effective. If for example someone were to negotiate with Russia to lift sanctions if they get elected in return for support during the election then it would be considered treason. Russia might for instance be able to use their spy network to get access to secret campaign documents from the adversaries. So there is no need to send in your own spies to get the documents like the Nixon reelection campaign did.\n\nThere is a defense for citizens who are already elected into power but have not yet been inaugurated. It would still be illegal but not as serious. It might even be considered a positive thing as they are able to hit the ground running. However when confronted with the allegations you can not start lying about it. Especially to your own people. It is better to let the people you trust and the officials investigating it know the truth and get some help explaining your actions to the public with a positive spin.",
"The issue isn't that they've been in contact with russians - It's that people who were not authorized to speak to the Russians in an official capacity were having conversations with them about foreign policy, and they lied under oath (a crime) about it.",
"It's not bad that designated American diplomats are talking to their Russian counterparts. It's a little bad when other Americans start their own, independent foreign policy discussions with the Russians, particularly folks that are saying \"I'm really good friends with the President-elect.\" It's really bad when the nominee for Attorney General, the guy in charge of enforcing laws, lies in his confirmation hearings about meetings he's had with Russians prior to the presidential inauguration.\n\nThe US has only one official foreign policy at a time, and undermining that is a bad thing. Having a meeting in your Senate Office and then later saying the meeting didn't happen is simply a checkable lie.",
"In 1968, during peace talks between North and South Vietnam and the United States, then-private-citizen and Republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon made his own diplomatic communications to South Vietnam and told them to refuse a peace deal with North Vietnam, offering to get them even better terms when he gets into office than current President Lyndon Johnson was.\n\nHe did this with the intention of causing the peace negotiations to fall apart, embarrassing the Democratic administration during an immensely unpopular war.\n\nThousands of American soldiers would die from continued engagement in the Vietnam War because of this. But it allowed Nixon to win the presidency.\n\nThis is why we don't want people making under-the-table deals with foreign governments.",
"1) There is a widespread and well-founded suspicion that the President may be placing the interests of Russia (a country extremely hostile to the US and its interests) ahead of our NATO allies and Americans themselves. Therefore, any contact they had with Russia before the election deserves investigation. If the investigation reveals that they are innocent, then they have nothing to fear.\n\n2) Sessions and Flynn both lied about their contact with Russians while under oath. Lying under oath is a crime and can be punished by imprisonment. Now that we know they lied, we must investigate why they lied. And to discover why they lied, I refer you back to point 1."
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7hnl67 | why do balloons heat up when stretched and cool down when relaxed again? | For example, if you hold a balloon against a part of your body sensitive to heat (I use my upper lip) and stretch it, you can feel heat, and when you let it compress again it rapidly cools. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7hnl67/eli5_why_do_balloons_heat_up_when_stretched_and/ | {
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"You are breaking inter-molecular bonds when you stretch a polymer like latex, and reforming them when you release it. Breaking them lets out energy, and reforming them absorbs energy. Thats it really.",
"Actually it has to do with Boyle’s law and the way Gas molecules interact when it is cold and when it is hot, more energy (heat) the molecules are bumping into each other and the walls of the balloon with more force causing it to expand and the opposite happens when you remove the energy (cool it down) the molecules slow down and don’t exert as much of an outward force on the balloon so it shrivels\n\nPV=nRT",
"Its origin is in entropy. [Entropy](_URL_0_) is a measurement of disorder.\n\nNow consider that a rubber is composed of a bunch of polymer strands (looking like a bowl of cooked spaghetti). When stretched the polymer strands should be more aligned and straighten out along the direction of the stretching. So when you relax it the strands go in all directions, or become more disordered. \n\nEntropy is related to heat, and during relaxation the entropy is increased. So if the system (aka balloon) heat is positive, heat must go into the strands of polymer. If the heat goes into the rubber, where does it come from? The heat comes from the environment - the balloon feels cold. [Source.](_URL_1_)\n\nAnd when you stretch it, the reverse thing happens."
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"https://depts.washington.edu/chem/facilserv/lecturedemo/EntropyofRubber-UWDept.ofChemistry.html"
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1toztf | why is it that in english there are no diacritics, collations or ligatures as there are in other languages that use the latin script for writing? | Such as in the Scandinavian or Romance Languages that help with pronunciation and help differentiate homophones? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1toztf/eli5_why_is_it_that_in_english_there_are_no/ | {
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"Actually there have been. For instance, before we were cooperating or co-operating, one might have cöoperated.\n\nOther than that, I've been wracking my brain and I can't come up with examples that aren't obvious loan words like café and naïve...\n\n(Edit for missing accent.)",
"1) Diacritical marks are an attempt to simplify orthography (which literally means 'correct writing') and 2) not all languages develop orthography in a cohesive or logical manner. English is definitely one of these.\n\nThis is partly due to the [strange development of the English language](_URL_0_), where a bunch of words were imported from French by the upper class and then slowly 'naturalized' into the Middle English spoken by everyone else, and the [awkward transition to Modern English](_URL_2_), where people who were educated on the Continent and spoke/wrote French and Latin [struggled](_URL_1_) to capture an accurate writing system. For the most part, they had an insufficient understanding of English as it was spoken, thus the great ambiguity in spelling. Just about every word in English can be spelled in different ways but still be pronounced correctly, and conversely sometimes the same cluster of letters is pronounced differently."
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"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_Modern_English"
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6gogkc | is there a fixed amount of total money in the world or is it changing (if so then how does that even work)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6gogkc/eli5_is_there_a_fixed_amount_of_total_money_in/ | {
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"It is always changing. Most countries have either a standardized or fiat currency.\n\nCurrencies on a Standard (usually a Gold Standard) say their unit of money is worth a specific amount of gold in their reserve. But that amount can fluctuate based on changes in the value of gold compared to other currencies or commodities, if the price goes up, they can print more money to make up the difference.\n\nFiat currencies have no Standard. They are worth a simple number and goods and services are bought with them without gold. It means that the price of gold can go up without affecting the price of water or food. It also means that if the government feels more money is needed in the economy, they can just print more.\n\nThe most extreme example is the Weimar Republic, which had economic troubles so bad that you needed a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy bread, and modern Greece, which tried to print enough money to pay off it's debts.",
"The amount of \"total money\" (which can be defined as simply cash, cash and cash equivalents (securities), and cash, its equivalents, and credit) changes every second.\n\nConsider for example your paycheck. You work a hard 80 hours per pay period and in return you get $2000. Like the studious and responsible citizen you are, you deposit that paycheck in a bank account. In the financial world this is called and asset (it is something you own), and it is considered equity (it is not owed to anyone). The benefit of a bank account is that you can \"call\" that money at any time, and the bank absolutely has to give it back to you. \n\nThe bank will also list your $2000 deposit as an asset and the bank is free to invest that how they please (with literal books of exceptions, rules, regulations, methods, etc.). However, the bank cannot list your money as equity, it has to be listed as a liability, meaning that because you can withdraw (I prefer to think of this transaction as \"calling\" a bond, but that's a different eli5) the bank technically is in debt to you $2000 dollars. \n\nImagine then, you walk into that same bank and sign papers that you would like a loan for $2000 (for simplicity, we'll imagine that the FDIC exists, but fractional reserve banking doesn't). The bank will loan you out that $2000 dollars, and thanks to double entry accounting you now have $4000 dollars, 2000 of which is equity, and 2000 of which is a liability. In this method a single deposit of $2000 becomes $4000 the instant someone borrows your deposit for the bank. \n\nA quick aside for those interested:\n\nWith fractional reserve banking (the law in the US) the bank by law can only loan out 90% of all deposits on their books. This is because the bank has many deposits and withdrawals daily and must still be able to provide cash to those withdrawing. \"Money\" in a banking sense is separate from cash, but in any economy the exchange ratio of money/cash is 1, if only because they are both in the same denomination. Banking is not like in Harry Potter where each bank has vaults full of cash with the owners name over the door. Instead the banks keep track of deposits in writing (electronically now) and only keep enough cash to satisfy in-cash withdrawals (which are relatively few). If however the bank doesn't have enough cash on hand it can borrow from another bank, and the interest rates the banks charge each other are the rates the Federal Reserve tries to regulate (but not recently, it seems). ",
"_URL_0_\nThis Video from Vsauce explains the answer to your question very well!"
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66w1r4 | how can acid eat through metal, but not a glass/plastic cup? | How do the acid like [this](_URL_0_) gif not melt everything else if it can do THAT to a spoon? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/66w1r4/eli5_how_can_acid_eat_through_metal_but_not_a/ | {
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"I'm not sure about the exact solution they are using, but I'm going to use aqua regia as an example. \n\nSolid metals are composed of metallic atoms arranged in a metallic lattice, with metallic bonds connecting them NOT chemical bonds. These are much weaker and can be sheared with less energy. \n\nGold, as we know, is very unreactive to most things (one reason why it's used in coins and jewelry). However, aqua regia (3:1 mix of hydrochloric acid and nitric acid) is a special mixture that produces extremely reactive atomic oxygen. This mixture reacts with the gold and forms chloroauric acid that is soluble in water. \n\nOn the other hand, glass is a very stable material and tightly bonded, which prevents most chemicals from breaking the bonds inside it and causing cracking. One exception is hydrofluoric acid, which is used to etch glass and must be stored in even more unreactive polymeric containers, like polyethenes and such.",
"In that gif it is not an actual acid being used, if you watch the video it explains it is actually mountain dew, its just that the spoon is made of a gallium-aluminium alloy which effectively disintegrates in the water"
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2jip7b | what social factors caused austin, a liberal hipster enclave, to develop in the middle of a highly conservative state? | It's something I've thought about fairly often lately. The idea of the 'blueberry in the tomato soup' is a bit hard to understand when you really get down to it. I love sociology and I've got some ideas of how this could have developed, but I'm still learning and I haven't managed to piece this one together on my own so far. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jip7b/eli5_what_social_factors_caused_austin_a_liberal/ | {
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"A small population of liberals (as compared to the surrounding conservatives) attracted more and more liberals. \n\nPeople don't like to be surrounded by others with dissimilar values so they move to places more friendly. Once rooted, they raise their children with their values and a cycle develops. This attracts more and more like minded people. \n\nAreas shift all the time. Brooklyn is now considered a hipster paradise, where it was once a grimy gangster hotspot. For some places there is a tipping point where a given shift is pushed to a more permanent trend. ",
"Until the mid 90s, Texas was a Democrat state. ",
"I suppose the short answer would be that it's where the University of Texas is located.\n\nFrom my experience, Universty-aged students tend to be more Liberal in the United States.\n\nFrom there, you get other \"hipsters\" moving toward the city (or not moving back to the outside) to be around like-minded people, and more conservative people move out to not be near them, concentrating liberals into one place more and more as time passes.\n\nBasically, the more and more sure and prevalent a culture becomes--such as extreme Christian conservatism in Texas--the more reason there is for anyone who disagrees to congregate in a single place to get away from that.\n\nI would actually argue that \"Blueberry in tomato soup,\" (or its opposite) is actually a very natural response: if a place isn't allowed to be \"purple\" for whatever reason, all the \"minority\" colors will flee towards the easiest access like grouping.",
"Because the state university is there. That often happens when there are a ton of young, mostly middle-class people in one area; their own hipster-esque culture develops. Madison, Wisconsin and Columbia, Missouri are other examples of this. ",
"Believe it or not, there are a lot of liberals in Texas...in the current gubernatorial race, Wendy Davis is polling 35-40%...not great, but in a state of 26 million, that's a lot of liberal leaning people.\n\nSo you have Austin, a university town with a progressive music scene, already skewing aware from conservative. If you are a liberal but like Texas, where else are you going to go? And the more liberals who move there, the more appealing it is going to be to other liberals.",
"Texas is conservative, but it isn't as conservative as it is gerrymandered and procedurally glacial. \n\n45% of the voting base is likely to vote democrat, but the legislature redrew districts to minimize the voting power of democrats. On top of that, they have a legislature that only meets a couple months every two years, so even if there was enough of a presence, the part-time legislature itself makes things very slow to change. For example, this year Rick Perry vetoed a bill that passed unanimously and the veto will stand because the legislature will not be back in session soon enough to override it. The governor also has a line-item veto (may veto parts of a bill rather than being forced to take it or leave it) that the President doesn't have.\n"
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43tgik | if hemp produces paper and and other products cheaper, which means more profit, why hasn't the tree cutting (logging?) industry pushed for legalization? | I don't understand why all the small-folks have to fight for legalization, wouldn't it make more sense for the folks that have the money and the motive to push legislation to make it legal, so that they can cultivate and produce products faster, cleaner, and cheaper? I'm sure there's something I'm missing, but that's why I'm here. Thanks!
> Hemp is viewed by many to be one of the world's most perfect products. The plant's fiber produces rope and cloth which is strong and resilient. Hemp makes pulp and other paper products cheaper, cleaner and more efficiently than wood. Hemp pulp can be used as a biomass fuel, with much less negative side effects such as air pollution, and could some day replace petroleum as the primary (and importantly, a home-grown) source of fuel in the US. Hemp may also be consumed as a cheap source of protein and is believed to have many medical applications.
[Click here for Source: TED Case Study: Hemp - American University](_URL_0_) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43tgik/eli5_if_hemp_produces_paper_and_and_other/ | {
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"I think you mean the pulp and paper industry, which is separate from the timber industry. \n\nThe simple answer is that, despite the hype from hemp enthusiasts, it simply isn't as economically viable as other materials for paper making. It does grow very quickly and produces useful fibers, but it has major drawbacks. \n\nFirst, hemp is seasonal but paper demand and production are year-round. When hemp is harvested, it has to be stored in climate controlled warehouses to prevent it from rotting before it can be used. That burns an awful lot of power and money. Wood can be harvested in any season and does not rot quickly. \n\n~~Second, hemp fibers require more bleaching than wood fibres, which have implications for both cost and the environment.~~\n\nThat's not to say that the paper/pulp industries haven't been looking for wood alternatives. There are plenty of other likely sources such as agricultural waste (wheat/rice stalks, sugarcane pulp, etc.), kenaf (a grassy plant), recycled cotton, linen, bamboo, and, of course, recycled pulp. Hemp, however, is just not the best option.\n\n**EDIT:** Contrary to the commonly repeated conspiracy theories (found in this thread), there is little reason to believe that Hearst, Dupont, the timber industry, or other industrialists conspired to ban hemp to protect their business interests. You can read debunkings of that theory [here](_URL_0_) or [here](_URL_1_).\n\n**EDIT 2:** My memory is failing me. Hemp requires *less* bleaching than most wood pulps. I know there was another issue with it but I can't recall correctly what it was. The main point still stands though: other fibres are simply better, more economical options than hemp. If hemp really were better, paper companies would use it. The fact that it doesn't get used that much even where it is legal is proof enough.",
"Hemp isn't illegal, hemp is not marijuana. While they look similar, there are major differences in their genetics and THC/CBD content. It's like comparing a crab apple to a gala apple, while they are both apples, they are completely different.\n\nIf hemp was as cost effective as claimed, it would be used/grown much more than it is. \n\n_URL_0_\n",
"Simple answer - it's not that great.\n\nHemp is actually cultivated in many countries. France and China especially. It's useful but the advocates would have you believe that it is practically a magical material. It's really not. "
]
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"http://www1.american.edu/ted/hemp.htm"
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"https://skeptoid.com/episodes/4401"
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"http://www.leafscience.com/2014/09/16/5-differences-hemp-marijuana/"
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apuinf | how come one hand/arm/leg is stronger and easier to use than the other? | Why is it so hard to use your left hand when your right handed? How does being right/left handed even work and what dictates left or right? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/apuinf/elif_how_come_one_handarmleg_is_stronger_and/ | {
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"The left side of your brain controls the movement of your right hand, and is also responsible for speech and language. This is a trait that humans have developed over time. Since the left side is responsible for communication, the human body has naturally evolved to use the right hand for writing, therefore making it the dominat hand. Thats why more people are right handed.\n\nNow as for how our dominant hand is chosen is a bit of a mystery that scientists are still trying to figure out. I believe around 80% of the population is right handed while the other 20% is left handed, not including people that can use both. I believe it has something to do with the genes that are passed down from our parents. The gene that makes us right handed is more dominant than the one that makes us left handed."
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ep8gpw | why would continuous sprinting make a person a faster runner? | I dont feel like its obvious that sprinting a lot would make someone faster, in the same way that lifting weights would make someone stronger. I know that the mechanism for strength development in weight-lifting is hypertrophy: where your muscles tear and become larger when they heal themselves, but seeing as a person's speed seems more to do with less-obvious genetic factors rather than having big muscles, would someone be able to explain to me why sprinting would increase a persons speed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ep8gpw/eli5_why_would_continuous_sprinting_make_a_person/ | {
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"* Running Economy - your mechanics tend to improve the more you run at a very fast pace. The downside is you can reinforce bad habits that can increase injury risk. A certain amount of speed work is recommended for people training for basically any distance.\n\n* Strength - Actually, true sprinting is an anaerobic activity that is very strength based. Basically you want to maximize two things: your turnover (steps per minute) and the force you can impart on the ground with your foot strike. In most situations, a sprint heavy regime will inevitably increase leg/core strength. (Stride length starts to factor in as well, but not for \"casuals\" just looking to incorporate speed workouts into their overall fitness regime).\n\nEdit: Saw your edit about hypertrophy with respect to weight lifting. I'm an ultra marathoner that supplements with powerlifting. So I'm running alot and doing heavy deadlift/squat workouts. Despite that, a true sprint workout will roast my legs for a couple days. I try to get at least one sprint workout a month while training for ultras and 3-4/month if I'm focusing on a race at a shorter distance.",
"This is a really interesting question. As others here have already addressed, sprint speed is a function of stride length and frequency. \n\nFrequency can be increased through a few mechanisms, the most obvious being muscle power production. The others may account for smaller increases in speed overall, an example could be tendon stiffness. Tendons tend to get stiffer when they are challenged by large forces, as is the case with plyometric training. When the tendon is stiffer (more deposits of collagen, the better alignment of tensile fibres) more of the force the a muscle produces is going to be transferred through the kinetic chain. AKA the more force the athlete would be able to put into the ground, thus propelling them forward faster. There are other factors like training of the nervous system that repeated sprint training has, on both muscle force production and coordination, but to a lesser degree than overall strength/force production. Kinda wordy, non-ELI5, but hopefully that helps a little.\nTLDR: stiffer tendons = ability to produce more force = faster sprinting."
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5y8wts | how do fidget spinners work? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5y8wts/eli5_how_do_fidget_spinners_work/ | {
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"They spin around a center ring of small metal or ceramic bearings. The bearings allow it to spin smoothly."
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9rbtaz | why does diamond conduct heat better than graphite? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9rbtaz/eli5_why_does_diamond_conduct_heat_better_than/ | {
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"Heat in solids is primarily transferred by atoms vibrating the atoms around them. Diamond is significantly closer packed than graphite so an atom vibrating has more of an influence on the atoms around it and therefore heat transfers faster.",
"Regular solids conduct heat by vibration. Metals conduct heat better because the electron cloud transfers the heat. Diamonds conduct heat with [phonons](_URL_0_).",
"In the plane where the carbon atoms have the same bonding as diamond atoms have, the thermal conductivity can be very good. Going through vertically through the vertical sheets the atoms are not bonded in the same way. The sheets can slide against each other. So the thermal vibrations called phonons can’t travel efficiently vertical and the thermal conductivity is much lower in that direction. If you are careful you can make large pieces of this pyrolytic graphite. \n\nIf you want to make graphene ( a single layer of carbon atoms bonded together like diamond) you can take a piece of scotch tape and pull off one single layer since the adhesion by the tape is stronger than the bonding the single layers of carbon atoms that are bonded in the 2d plane in the same way as diamond. \n\nIn ordinary graphite you have a lot of very little sheets that slide against each other, but the little piles of sheets are jumbled together and the thermal conductivity isn’t that great in any direction.",
"Diamonds have a [three dimensional covenant bond between atoms](_URL_0_), this allows heat to be easily transferred through phonons (vibrational waves through the crystal), basically, if you jiggle one atom it causes the atoms next to it to jiggle too. \n\nGraphite on the the other hand forms [two dimensional sheets stacked on top of each other.](_URL_1_) (graphene is a single isolated one of these sheets). Since graphite has no direct bonds between sheets, it is not very efficient at transferring these phonons in the vertical direction. This causes it to be a much worse heat conductor that diamond.",
"Fun fact: diamond is a good conductor of heat but a poor conductor of electricity. Graphite is just the other way around. Both are only made of carbon.",
"Graphite is like lots of people standing in queues next to each other. Diamond is like a full room of people squashed together. \n\nIf you push someone over in a very crowded room, people will bump quickly into each other as they all fall over. \n\nIf people are standing in queues that are a little separated then the motion won’t pass as quickly through people as you push someone over. \n\nDiamond vs graphite !",
"If I remember correctly it has to do with the more 3D structure of diamond, graphene consists of flat 2D sheets stacked so the one axis where they are stacked is weakly bound by comparison and doesn't transfer heat as well. While diamond is a 3D structure and can transfer heat in all directions of the material more easily.",
"Diamond exhibits omnidirectional thermal conductivity, because of its tetrahedral structure.\n\nGraphite exhibits well, asymmetrical thermal (and electrical) conductivity because of its layered structure.\n\noh wait. this is ELI5..\n\nDiamond is closely packed, denser than graphite, so it conducts heat pretty good.\n\ngraphite however, is layered, like lasagne. But with more layers. like millefeulle. probably more. but point is, the layers are in one direction, not like diamond. heat and electricity conducts in the direction of those layers, and not very well going through all the layers.\n\nSomeone will have to go do some googling to compare the best heat conductivity in graphite vs. that of diamond to compare which is actually better."
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"http://som.web.cmu.edu/structures/S022-C-graphite_web.jpg"
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6qrdz6 | why do our necks creak? | It's something I've only really noticed when I have headphones on and nothing's playing but despite googling it, I have no idea what it is or why it happens. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qrdz6/eli5_why_do_our_necks_creak/ | {
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"As part of your spine, your neck's vertebrae are surrounded by a set of synovial (that is, flexible and fluid-filled) joints called facet joints. These separate and guide the motions of the bones they surround, and they're filled with synovial joint fluid, which cushions your bones from each other. When you crack your neck, you put pressure on the fluid in these joints, which in turn changes the distribution of air in the joints. The bubbles that form/burst due to these changes produce the distinctive 'popping' sound that occur when you crack your neck, just like when you crack any other synovial joint. (Note, though, that this hasn't been definitively proven--it's just the explanation with the most evidence at present.)"
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[]
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2ltb4a | mobile game leaderboards. how are the scores so high? | Why are the top scores on mobile game leaderboards seemingly impossibly high? There will often be a sudden spike near the top, from very good but conceivable scores to ridiculous ones.
Are these bots? If so: who, how, and why? And why are they not removed by the game's developers?
Or are these test scores from the developers? Or something else?
Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ltb4a/eli5_mobile_game_leaderboards_how_are_the_scores/ | {
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"Ridiculous scores are often compromised by modifying source code of the game to put out enormous values regardless of the outcome. You could see them where developers didn't included some kind of score confirmation or give a shit about leaderboards.",
"Sorry for the delayed response. Game developer here. /u/edkisin has about the right of it, if you prefer the tl;dr explanation.\n\nTo give you detailed answers:\n\nWhy? Because *cheaters*.\n\nIn the industry, we deride them as \"cheaterboards\", but the community seems to expect them (*via negative reviews for lack of*).\n\nAre these bots? In some games, yes. In other games, no.\n\nWho? Depends. There are some independent developers who write and sell bots to other players, usually for the purpose of earning any long-term rewards, badges, or achievements rather than for a single-game high score. The better-playing bots will typically come from computer-science students who become enamored of a game and decide to develop an artificial intelligence to play it, just for fun. The ridiculous to impossible scores will come from non-bot sources.\n\nHow? For a bot, you can write code to do just about anything. Here is an example, specifically set up to teach a programming language (ruby) through the experience of writing an AI to solve problems. [Ruby Warrior](_URL_0_).\n\nHow #2: The alternative is simply to mis-report your scores. The easiest implementation of a leaderboard is, when your game determines that the game has ended, report the player and score to a central server which tracks them all in a database of scores. \n\nAs /u/edkisin state, if there is no form of confirmation on that network traffic, you could send anything there. So, if you have any form of \"watching\" your network traffic, you could figure out that maybe it sends the following \"message\" after a score:\n\n {\"player\":\"boysenberries\",\"score\":123}\n\n\"Wait, really?\" our hacker might think. \"Can't be that easy.\" So he grabs a program that will send arbitrary traffic over a network, and sends:\n\n {\"player\":\"hacker5\", \"score\":6969696969}\n\n\"Woah, dude, it totally worked! Now I have the high score!\"\n\nWhy? Explained in who, either for selling to other players (profit), for the fun of writing an AI, or for the lulz of putting your name atop the scoreboard.\n\nWhy does this work?\n\nBecause just about anybody can write an app. Very few of the app developers have any real notion of security, or experience with battling them. \n\nA \"proper\" security approach to this is the following model: the server generates the starting board and sends it to the client (the app). The app sends back individual moves to the server. The server validates that the move is legal, and sends an acknowledgement. At the end of the game, *the server* knows the game is over, and reports the score to the database. \n\nSo, why isn't that done?\n\nForemost, because it changes the game from something you can play anywhere, to something you have to be online to play. Secondly, because it is much more expensive to develop, requiring an almost equal level of work on the server side as on the client. Thirdly, because the benefit is small, for a single-player game: the rewards, if any, are virtual, your name atop a leaderboard, or some images (badges). \n\nFinally, why don't the developers remove them?\n\nBecause it requires the ability to recognize and identify them. For a small single-person app developer, is it worth more to purge your leaderboard, or work on a new feature or a new game? \n\nAlso, because it creates an arms-race of ever-more sophisticated cheat-bot-detection vs cheat-bot-developer. When I worked for one of the large companies in the space, we had several sophisticated algorithms for detecting the differences between the way a \"bot\" played and the way a \"human\" played, but we didn't want to \"tip our hand\" and let the cheaters know we were \"on to them\", so we wouldn't automatically boot them, purge them from leaderboards, or freeze accounts ... but should they ever win any kind of cash or material reward, we would notify them that they were not eligible for prizes due to their use of cheat tools.\n\nHope that helps."
]
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"https://www.bloc.io/ruby-warrior/#/"
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fchsng | heart ablasion surgical procedure | I have to have heart ablasion done to my heart, and the doctor explained using big technical terms. Explain the procedure to me like I’m 5. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fchsng/eli5_heart_ablasion_surgical_procedure/ | {
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"Basically there are little spots in your heart that control the rhythm of your heartbeat (electrical nodes). Sometimes they get scar tissue or act up, so they put a small probe (catheter) next to them and zap it to get rid of the part that is causing the misfire.",
"The heart uses electricity to beat in a co-ordinated fashion. This electrical symphony is controlled by a \"conductor\" called the *sinus node* or sometimes the *sinoatrial node*. It is very important for the heart that only the sinus node is allowed to tell the rest of the heart when to beat. If other places get this priviliege, they make the heart beat too fast, too slow or irregularly, all of which can lead to disease.\n\nSometimes, however, there is a problem with the heart where a group of cells outside the sinus node take it upon themselves to become the conductor. They overpower the electrical signals from the sinus node, and simply hijack the whole orchestra, resulting in a very unpleasant symphony. Most often they will make the heart beat very fast and/or irregularly.\n\n*Ablation* comes from the Latin \"to remove or destroy\", and in a medical context it means to destroy something by burning it. Cardiac ablation is a medical procedure where a doctor will use an electrical wire and make a teeny tiny burn on that little group of insubordinate cells. These cells then die and are replaced by scar tissue. Because they are dead and obviously unable to disturb the rest of the heart, the sinus node can resume it's function as conductor, and the orchestra get back to playing the beatiful symphony they were meant to."
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2o61i1 | difference between rifle, assault rifle, carbine, and other relevant terms if any. | By other relevant terms, I mean stuff like machine gun, light machine gun, sniper rifle, scout rifle, clip, magazine, and maybe different pronunciations (car-bean, car-bine).
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2o61i1/eli5_difference_between_rifle_assault_rifle/ | {
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"This is actually different from country to country, as specific laws can vary as to how guns are classified. Here is a broad set of guidelines, though:\n\n* Rifle: Gun with a shoulder stock firing a full-power rifle caliber round\n* Assault Rifle: Gun with a shoulder stock firing an intermediate-power rifle caliber round, usually select-fire (full auto or burst fire along with semi auto)\n* Carbine: Gun of any caliber with a shoulder stock, but with a shorter barrel than those of rifles (a rifle in .223 might have a 20\" barrel normally, but is cut down to 14.5\" to be more easily handled, thus converting it to a carbine)\n\nAdditional types of weapons:\n\n* Submachine Gun: Gun with or without a shoulder stock firing a pistol-calber round, usually select fire (full auto or burst fire along with semi auto)\n* Machine Gun: Any gun with full-auto mode may be called a machine gun, but this most often refers to belt-fed, open-bolt guns",
"Rifle: long gun that fires bullets from a rifled barrel. Rifling consists of a series of twists carved into the barrel that stabilize the bullet through rotational motion. When the bullet is fired, the soft lead deforms to fit (and therefore engage) the rifling, causing it to spin and be stabilized.\n\nCarbine: shortened rifle.\n\nAssault rifle: specific type of rifle that is fed with a detachable magazine, chambered in an intermediate cartridge, with select-fire capability. Intermediate cartridges are between full-power (such as .308, used for hunting and related to the full-power rounds used in wars such as WWI and WWII) and low-power (such as .22 LR) rounds. Select-fire is the ability to choose between firing in a semi-automatic and fully-automatic mode. \n\nSemi-automatic is when one round is fired per trigger pull; the gun automatically ejects and loads a round, but does not fire it until another trigger cycle occurs. Fully-automatic is when the gun automatically loads and fires rounds as long as the trigger is pulled until it is empty.",
"A rifle is a weapon with a stock that fires a single projectile from each cartridge. It is distinguished by the grooves inside the barrel that impart spin to the bullet, which is called rifling. \n\nA carbine is similar, although they tend to be shorter in barrel length for ease of carry and manuever. Most fire rifle cartridges, although there are many who fire pistol cartridges. \n\nBullpup configuration weapons blur the line by moving the receiver closer to the shoulder of the shooter, allowing a full rifle-length barrel in a carbine or shorter overall platform. \n\nShotguns are weapons that fire a spray of multiple projectiles from a single cartridge. They come in a wide variety of configurations, and are extremely popular. \n\nRifle-like weapons that lack rifling tend to be classified as muskets, with the carbine version being called a musketoon. You don't see very many modern versions, as the rifle has superior characteristics in nearly every category. \n\nAn \"Assault Rifle\" is a loosely defined idea, generally being accepted as a rifle or carbine that is capable of fully automatic fire (holding down the trigger causes the gun to fire until it's ammunition is exhausted or it suffers a stoppage) or burst fire (one squeeze of the trigger fires a number of rounds, usually three). Modern AR-pattern rifles are often mistakenly given this classification despite being semi-automatic (one squeeze of the trigger fires a single round) only. \n\nSniper rifles are designed for long-range precision targeting, and come in a lot of forms. For much of modern times this has meant a heavier caliber bolt action weapon mounted with a telescopic sight, although with the improvements to modern semi-automatic weapons there are also a number of semi-automatic sniper weapon systems. The general use of heavier caliber rounds and scopes is still nearly ubitquitous, as the heavier rounds carry farther and deliver more force on target, and the scopes increase the range at which a marskman can acquire and aim at a target. \n\nA scout rifle is something that's harder to explain. In general it's easiest to explain as a sniper rifle/carbine hybrid. A medium bore round, usually in a bolt-action rifle with a carbine length barrel, mounted with a medium-power optic, to give a good balance of power, accuracy, and maneuverability while not excelling at any given thing. \n\nMachine guns, in general, are fully-automatic weapons firing from a belt of ammunition, although some designs do accept magazines. Light machine guns are generally chambered in standard rifle calibers (usually .223 or 7.62 for NATO forces), while heavy machine guns are in heavier antimateriel calibers like .50 BMG. Antimateriel refers to a round that is inteded for shooting and destroying things (vehicles, buildings, gear) rather than people, although they do a spectacular job when they hit do hit people.\n\nA clip is a holder for ammunition before it is loaded. A magazine is a device or component that holds ammunition after the weapon is loaded, and from which the weapon draws ammunition as it is fired. Some are detachable, such as those of AR and AK style rifles, while some are integral to the weapon, such as a the tube magazine on pump-action shotguns. \n\nLet's see. Submachine guns are very small, fully-automatic or burst fire weapons that are most commonly chambered in a pistol cartridge. Machine pistols are handuns that are capable or full auto or burst fire. Grenade launchers are weapons that fire a warhead from a large cartridge. Bazookas are a man-portable, shoulder fired anti-tank rocket launcher from World War Two and are not in use anymore. Don't call a modern rocket launcher a Bazooka, because you'll sound like an idiot. \n\nPronounce carbine either way. It's kind of like Caribean. ",
"To a gun pro, you sound ignorant if you get clip/magazine mixed up, though they know what you mean. \n\nClip - belt fed string of rounds, *clipped* together, often fed from a larger box\n\nMagazine - set of individual rounds that can be quickly ejected/reloaded into the weapon"
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1f494d | something that might be helpful if asking questions about a specific topic: simple wikipedia! | ["Simple"](http://_URL_0_/) is language Wikipedia uses to denote articles that are explain more simply, at perhaps a more ELI5 level. Check it out next time you have a question about a specific topic! Maybe your question can be answered, reducing clutter in this sub, or maybe you have some extra info that can help someone explain stuff to you.
[_URL_0_](http://_URL_0_/) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1f494d/something_that_might_be_helpful_if_asking/ | {
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2h789h | why do we breathe differently when we sleep? it goes from a mostly silent process to an audible and pronounced inhalation. | Certain animals do this as well. What is going on psychologically or physiologically to induce this "heavier" breathing? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2h789h/eli5_why_do_we_breathe_differently_when_we_sleep/ | {
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"Your throat and palate relax when you're asleep, and can restrict airflow. In more severe cases, it causes snoring and apnea."
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3cymz6 | why do all phones and computer scenes in movies look completely unrealistic? | I realize they can't just film an actual screen and someone using it, but it always looks like someone's super direct about clicking on things like they couldn't computer generate something more life-like. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cymz6/eli5_why_do_all_phones_and_computer_scenes_in/ | {
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"They don't all look unrealistic. When Trinity hacks the [power station in the Matrix](_URL_0_) using nmap.. this is pretty darn realistic for a screen. \n\nThe rest - maybe they just don't know any better, don't care, or intentionally don't want to get sued for using a real website (or close to real) in a movie and not paying for using that brand. \n",
"Real interfaces wouldn't really work for movies because they're very boring to look at and text/buttons would be too small.\n\nA real database search may involve a tiny progress bar, or a little counter in the corner saying '3892/83948 (5%)', so instead when searching for finger prints or mug shots, they have all of them flashing on the screen so it looks like the computer is actually doing something. That little counter in the real application isn't nearly impressive enough.\n\nAs far as the size of text and buttons is concerned, you'd normally sit directly in front of a 24\" or so monitor, so small text is fine for a real interface. When watching something on TV, people may be looking at a 26\" screen while sitting 10 ft away from it, so if they're supposed to see what's going on, the movie interface needs to use like font size 72.",
"Sometimes this is to avoid product placement and licensing as well as other legal concerns.\n\nIf a hacker in a film is seen to be hacking a windows PC then it gives the impression windows is insecure and hackable.\n\nFor non hacking reasons they simply might not have permission to display windows screens.",
"There are actually graphic design professionals who specialize in making fake computer visuals for movies. \n\nMainly they are trying to help an audience see in *very little time* what the person is doing on the computer, because realistic screens are usually full of stuff that the audience would have to sit and read -- which would be boring.\n\nSecondarily they are also trying to make it look cool, like these people have better computer systems than ordinary people do."
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4e065c | why is nicotine bad. cigarettes get a bad wrap, but surely pure nicotine (no tar, no tobacco) isn't any worse than caffeine or sugar. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4e065c/eli5_why_is_nicotine_bad_cigarettes_get_a_bad/ | {
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"Only if you consider a substance that's more toxic than cyanide to be \"less harmful\". \n\nNicotine is *extremely* toxic and *extremely* addictive. It is far more dangerous and deadly than either sugar or caffeine. The concentration of it in a cigarette aren't enough to kill out outright, but you need less nicotine to kill you than you'd need cyanide or arsenic. ",
"Nicotine is a neurotoxin. About 50-60mg is sufficient to be fatal for a human. That's way more toxic than caffeine, which has an estimated ld50 of ~~100-200 mg.~~ 11430 mg, or about 11.4 grams. ",
"Well, Nicotine is an alkaloid with a rather low LD50 dosage (around 3 mg/kg for mice).\nCompare this to caffeine(127 mg/kg) you can see nicotine is, as a poison, worse(well, acually better, but you get the idea) for mammals.\n\nThat all being said, yes, you are healthier if you buy 150mL bottles of nicotine and drop it on your skin(another thing why nicotine is dangerous, it can penetrate your skin directly in your bloodstream, so don't fill your supersoaker with the stuff) than smoking.\n\nI'm not a biologist, so I can't tell you which of the alkoloids(nicotine and caffeine both are) are a worse strain on your body. But from a toxicology point of view, nicotine is worse than caffeine.\n\nSide note: 1 cigarette can contain up to 20mg of nicotine. The advertised 1mg on the packet relates to the amount of nicotine taken up by your body. The bulk of nicotine is just burnt to ashes while you are smoking, or not taken up by your body. It's an inefficient way of nicotine consumption\n\n"
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5jciqp | how to chug a drink in one gulp | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jciqp/eli5_how_to_chug_a_drink_in_one_gulp/ | {
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"You have to learn to manually close your epiglottis(the flap that closes your wind pipe when you swallow) to allow the liquid direct travel to your stomach.\n\nMy older cousin(female, she was fun) taught me how to do it when I was a kid for great burps(you always see people gulp in air repeatedly, but it's more fun to do what i call the Dragon growl before burping on cue)\n\nIt's a lot harder to do with liquids though. Only done it once successfully.\n\nEDIT: basically, when you swallow, try to get used to how it feels for the flap to close. Then try doing it on purpose and suck in some air for a burp(be a bit careful as you can get a lot of air in quickly and once you do it, it can feel weird). Then you can try it with liquids when you're confident, but it can be tricky practicing it without choking a bit(hence my only doing it successfully once, though I didn't practice it much since I wasn't that interested in weolfing down my drinks) so be careful with it if you choose to learn how to do it."
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3sh5gt | why does a chicken flock around with his head cut off when there isn't any signals being sent from the brain to make the body respond in the manor it does, (frantic) ? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3sh5gt/eli5_why_does_a_chicken_flock_around_with_his/ | {
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"Headless chickens only run around when they've been improperly beheaded. The base motor, biological and instinctual functions of the body are controlled by the brain stem, higher thought is in the cerebellum. This is true even for chickens.\n\nWhen you don't cut low enough, a good part of the brain stem in the chicken remains. That allows for motor control to the rest of the body, at least temporarily, from which we see the frantic running effect."
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9nf96l | how can fish survive so long outside of water before dying, yet people drown in water really quickly. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9nf96l/eli5_how_can_fish_survive_so_long_outside_of/ | {
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"Fish can survive so long as their gills remain moist, so they can use the oxygen from the water.\n\nHumans drown because the water gets into their lungs making them unable to breathe. Also if you’re in very cold water, your body goes into shock constricting your breathing making drowning quicker."
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573r44 | why does a photograph of a face look like it's looking back at you, even when you change the viewing angle? | The same is not observed when you look at 3D structures, like idols, statues etc. So, why do the eyes of an *image-face* follow you? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/573r44/eli5_why_does_a_photograph_of_a_face_look_like/ | {
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"Because the picture isn't 3D. When you rotate it, it's still a 2D capture of a face looking straight at the camera, therefore straight at the viewer. Moving the 2D image can't introduce 3D perspective shifts to the face, so it still \"looks at you\""
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fyj8uc | how do we know how many dwarf planets there are, and why are only 5 named? | My 8 year old daughter is doing her reading homeschool work and found a fact that says: "The Solar System includes at least 1000 dwarf planets but just 5 have been named so far." She asked me how do we know there are 1000 dwarf planets, and why have we only named 5.
Can anybody help us out? I'm not sure if we have physically observed that many dwarf planets or if it's an estimation? How do we estimate? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/fyj8uc/eli5_how_do_we_know_how_many_dwarf_planets_there/ | {
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"It's an estimate. Only 5 is named because it's the only 5 that is officially recognized.\n\n\nThere are 5 officially recognised dwarf planets in our solar system, they are Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris. With the exception of Ceres, which is located in the asteroid belt, the other dwarf planets are found in the outer solar system. There are another 6 objects in our solar system that are almost certainly dwarf planets and there may as many as 10,000. Of the dwarf planets only 2 have been visited by space probes, in 2015 NASA’s Dawn and New Horizons missions reached Ceres and Pluto respectively.",
"Out past Neptune there's a vast cloud of frozen planetary garbage. It's hard to spot anything out there because it's cold, dark, slow, and small.\n\nPluto was located by accident because it happened to pass through a part of the sky being surveyed for much larger planets. Decades later more powerful telescopes started spotting more of these iceballs and astronomers were forced to create the \"dwarf planet\" designation for them rather than christen a dozen more shitty planets.\n\nWe have postively identified a few dozen candidates in Pluto-like orbits, but the sun's gravitational influence extends an immense distance out into space. There's no good data about what sort of debris is way out there in 800-year orbits, some estimates put the total number of large-ish objects in the thousands.",
"They are detected with very sensitive telescopes attached to a camera, either film or digital. You can also do this by drawing a picture on successive nights, this was especially useful before photography was able to capture telescope images. The telescope operator uses a star as a reference point, and takes a picture of the same spot in the sky (using the star as a reference) every few nights, then they look for spots that move.\n\nWhere the 1,000 comes in is with math. The astronomer's working on these sort of questions consider how many pictures they've taken, and what percent of the sky they've captured with this particular quality/sensitivity. Then they consider how many dwarf planets they've found, calculate how many they may have missed, and do the math to add up how many more might be undetected in areas where they haven't looked yet.\n\nOrbit estimations for comets, dwarf planets, and planetoids. You watch the new object for days, weeks, months, and you chart its route across the background stars, estimate distance (which can be a bit complicated, but very doable). You calculate the rest of the orbit based on the portion you do know and using the known gravity of other objects they may encounter.\n\nThere are a few good lectures on the topic or something related.\n\nThis one is a short, interesting look at historical plates and a brief overview: [_URL_0_](_URL_0_)\n\nThis one is timestamped to the part where he explains how Pluto was discovered using photography, let it run about 5-10 minutes if you don't want to watch the whole thing: [_URL_4_](_URL_4_)\n\nThis one is longer and goes into theoretical astronomy in a friendly way with real-life examples: [_URL_3_](_URL_1_)\n\nAlso longer: talking about how our understanding of the Solar System has evolved: [_URL_2_](_URL_2_)"
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33aeif | if i pay for a service such a nhl gamecenter, why am i not allowed to watch my local team's games due to tv blackout? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/33aeif/eli5_if_i_pay_for_a_service_such_a_nhl_gamecenter/ | {
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"Because the contracts NHL teams signs with local television stations stipulates that they will have exclusive rights to broadcast the games in their local markets. The local television stations that pay them a lot of money don't want the NHL to be competing with them by offering streaming access to local games because that takes money away from them. If people could can get the games without paying for cable then the stations get less money from cable subscription fees. Because the local stations are a lot more important to the NHL than you are, the areas effected by each teams blackouts tend to be really broad to make them happy.\n\nBut the NHL would still love to take your money for the GameCenter app so they're not going to put much effort into stopping people from using VPNs. Only a small portion of the population is likely to even know they can use a VPN to bypass. \n\nHowever, if the tv stations ever start thinking their losing significant amounts of money because people are using VPNs, I would expect the NHL to stop letting use VPNs to access GameCenter.\n\nAnd it's really not a Catch-22, you have the option of getting cable and access to the games.\n\n\n"
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3jd6ao | what is a class in programming? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3jd6ao/eli5_what_is_a_class_in_programming/ | {
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"Object-oriented programming (OOP) is a programming language model organized around objects rather than \"actions\" and data rather than logic. Historically, a program has been viewed as a logical procedure that takes input data, processes it, and produces output data.\n\nThe programming challenge was seen as how to write the logic, not how to define the data. Object-oriented programming takes the view that what we really care about are the objects we want to manipulate rather than the logic required to manipulate them. Examples of objects range from human beings (described by name, address, and so forth) to buildings and floors (whose properties can be described and managed) down to the little widgets on a computer desktop (such as buttons and scroll bars).\n\nA class is a definition of an object in a given programming language. An instance is an instantiation of an object.",
"A class defines a type of \"object.\" What's an object? An object is a piece of memory with some attributes that store values and/or some associated functions that operate on the stored attributes. \n\nA classic example is a list. A list object will have some memory backing it (either an array or a node with the first element, depending on implementation) and some functions like add, remove, get, contains, etc. that do things with the backing memory. \n\nObjects are useful for a few reasons. First, it provides abstraction. If I have a list, I don't need to care how it works under the hood; as long as the add, remove, etc. do what they say, I can just use them. Furthermore, for the most part, I can trust that the operation won't have side-effects that affect anything the object doesn't have access to. Second, it allows for subclassing. Say I want a FriendlyList that prints \"hi\" every time someone adds an element. I can have it be a subclass of my list, which automatically tells it to behave exactly like a normal list unless told otherwise. Then I can override the add function to say, \"print hi, then call your normal function.\" I'll automatically be able to make a FriendlyList anywhere I could normally make a list, and the language can just figure out the right thing to do. \n\nThere are other benefits (and downsides) to object-oriented programming, and it takes practice to get the hang of the concepts, but that's a decent bit of it. "
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6f46p2 | why does a simple atom like hydrogen have multiple absorption lines on spectroscopy | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6f46p2/eli5why_does_a_simple_atom_like_hydrogen_have/ | {
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"The hydrogen atom has infinitely many bound energy levels, and you can have transitions between any two of them, as long as no conservation laws are violated."
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2beg3n | do skyscrapers have 'expiration' dates, where they would no longer be safe? and if so, how is such a thing determined? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2beg3n/eli5_do_skyscrapers_have_expiration_dates_where/ | {
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"I've never heard of an expiration date on any permanent structure. How it's determined to be safe is via inspection by structural engineers, who determine if any damage or degradation of the structure is causing a potential safety issue, and whether it can be repaired or not.",
"That is a good question. I am a climber and rigger of cell and radio towers. Comm towers do have limits but then we just beef it up with new steel. Skyscrapers I do not know but I am going to look into it. ",
"No building really has a hard expiration date. However, there is an expected life of the materials in your building. Skyscrapers are under constant inspection for rusting and other degradation of materials and are replaced as needed. Typically, there isn't a single point of failure on a building, so most everything can be replaced, but at a certain point, the cost to repair the building may exceed the cost to continually renovate the building, making it more worthwhile to knock it down and start over. "
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4rz6w2 | why would the implementation of basic income cause a rise in the "shadow economy"? | _URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rz6w2/eli5_why_would_the_implementation_of_basic_income/ | {
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"The argument is that, since UBI relies on increased taxes, it would increase people's motivation to make transactions under the table to dodge those taxes.\n\n[Here's a thread from /r/basicincome](_URL_0_) talking about it in more detail.",
"Basically, any system that involves transferring wealth from Person A to Person B will eventually lead to Person A trying to hide some of that wealth to prevent it from being taken.\n\nThe two main taxes used to fund national governments (the people that would be paying the UBI) are income/payroll taxes and consumption/sales taxes. Avoiding those taxes means buying and selling products, labor, and services illicitly without reporting it to the government; hence, a \"shadow economy\"."
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7xvmkp | how does the french healthcare system work and why is it rated as one of the best in the world? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7xvmkp/eli5_how_does_the_french_healthcare_system_work/ | {
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"Well apart from the guy below memeing about American healthcare my hypothesis is this (it is quite hard to put a single reason on its success)\n\n- the French have had a semi-socialist popular uprising against a monarchy in their recent history, so they have always had a big culture of liberty and egalitarianism. I think that they differ from America in this regard as America went the way of thought of \"You should only focus on your own interests, and should not be held back or bound by anyone else\". France has a much stronger concept of doing something for the greater good of everyone.\n\n- apart from that France has always had a very strong socialist streak, a lot of european (and british-commonwealth) countries have but France has a very strong influence in particular.\n\n- i think that the emphasis on access to healthcare is something that has really taken off since ~the spanish flu, something france was hit REALLY hard by. Having to deal with so many sick people would have highlighted the importance of having numerous, effective hospitals. \n\n- the fact that they have only really come into stability (relatively speaking) since German occupation was thrown off, having their puppet government destroyed has given them a lot more flexibility to build from the ground up - without as much traditionalism to contend with.",
"It is all about being a mutual care system.\nYou don t pay when you need it and you don t benefit when you want.\n\nSee this like road work.\nAre you paying when you use a road ? \nIs it cheaper to construct a road for everyone or that each people construct its own road.\nWould you consider pay for your army, police when you need it?\n\nI don't understand all the rage about tax. The French system cost less to the community, rich or poor.\n\nStop thinking you ll always be healthy you have no idea.\nIf you prefer gamble, don t forget the house always win. ( And consider that in fact you can t stop playing ....)",
"Totally not an expert, but Im an American who recently interacted with the medical system in France. \n\nI have twins who had poor health as babies. In the US, every ER visit costs $500, even with our excellent insurance. The facilities are pristine and very child friendly. Our child interacts with 15 different professionals on their way in and out, but the interaction with the Dr is pretty limited. \n\nOn a visit to family, one of our babies got sick in a small town in France. Our aunt took him to the hospital with us, to help translate. Compared to our hospital at home, this place was old and dingy. Broken trashcan. Nothing like our shiny hospitals in the US. No 15 professionals, just one nurse and one Dr. (Nurse checked us in and took some information, but had no clue how to bill us because of our lack of French citizenship) We were there less than an hour. \n\nSo, some of these differences might be big city in US vs small town in France, but it was an extremely different experience. Our French bill, with no insurance coverage and no French citizenship, was $63 euros. \n\nIf I had to chose between C- facilities but more direct care and a bill that's not worth a weeks take home pay, I would take that every. Flipping. Time.\n",
"Well,every month you pay tax for your healthcare and your company pays a small percentage too. Taxes are quite high in France when you have employees. Like when you pay someone 1400$ (you give back to the government 45% the last time I've checked). And on that, the employee also has taxes to pay at the end of the month+a big check to give to the tax institution at the end of the year (if he earns \"too much\")\n\nThat money is also used to build public schools, roads and for your retirement etc \n\nIf you don't work/are unemployed everything is completely free for you. Most people also pay for a private healthcare since the public stuff doesn't cover everything. You have access to free medication but you have a budget and the private healthcare pays for the balance . Like with the free healthcare you only get basic glasses with a plain frame. \n\nEdit1: a few of you asked how we feel about it. Well, I guess we roll with it. It's frustrating when you see the difference at the end of your payslip but most of us are happy to have access to free university( we have private stuff too), free healthcare etc and to be able to retire around 60. It's far from being perfect and the government cut off their budget so hospitals are crowded, nurses work crazy hours etc. But it's still better than nothing and I'm personally happy to know that I don't need to worry too much about that stuff if I'm sick etc\n\n\nEdit2: someone here attached an example of a French payslip \n_URL_0_\n\n\nSource: I'm French ",
"French boy here :\nI'm not an expert but I'll try my best to explain.\nIf I'm not wrong, we have 2 things that help us with Healthcare costs.\nThe first one is called \"sécurité sociale\" (social security) which refund you a specific amount of what you pay for your healthcare (something like 30% to 40%)\nThis is free and for every one.\nThe second one are Healthcare insurances that basically complete the first one to go up to 100% refund. Of course it depend of your subscription. But most people here have the 100%.\nThose refunds works for almost every healthcare cost, from a simple influenza diagnostic to a cancer or HIV.\nVeterinarian and some dentist costs aren't refunded.\nDrugs are also mostly refunded when they are prescribed by your doctor.\nWe pay for the insurance like any other, and for the social security I guess we pay it with tax.\nFrance is know to have a lot of taxes, isn't it?\nI'm not 100% sure of every thing because I didn't do specific researchs, I gave a basic explanation. If I'm wrong or if you want more informations, feel free to tell me.\nEdit : those are not taxes but mostly salary charges. ",
"When I moved there it was, like register your trade and pick an insurance company for the add ons.\n\nLike - if you go to a doctor you have your health card, which he scans in his office. It gives him your complete medical record. It identifies you and compensates the doctor for your visit. It also costs you twenty one euros per visit. Unless you are exempt from this by being too poor or too old (receiving social benefits for age or income) which is a tiny barrier to just using a doc for putting on a band aid.\n\nThe medical procedures in hospitals are all free. But hospital stays are on a per diem which you get paid for by your insurance. There are a short list of insurance companies to select from and they all offer different coverages and they all must take all applicants, so you get to pick the premium and the amount of coverage.\n\nMy experience was super good with easy access, and easy access to hospitals and clinics for dentistry, eye care, psyco consultations, and cardiac care.\n\nThe overall costs come from the tax budget and every citizen and tax payer is covered.\n\nThe doctors make much less than American docs do but they still make a hell of a lot. One of mine had a small airplane to fly around in as a hobby, for example. Just a country doc.\n\nAnd the wine often costs less than the water in the restaurant at lunch time. A great and sunny place is the south of France.",
"Related question: to what degree does population density aid in providing healthcare in European countries versus North America?\n\nI'm a Canadian and our socialized healthcare is far from perfect, but a major issue is healthcare in rural areas (I've read America also has issue with getting doctors to less-urban populations); is healthcare always going to be a major issue in North America due to geographical and population density-related concerns?",
"I think another reason why France healthcare is cheaper is that healthcare insurance (that people take on top of social security) are “mutuelles” and mutuelles are not supposed to make profit. All profit must be reinjected in the mutuelle and that’s how monthly costs are never too high (I used to pay €40 for a couple by month on top of taxes for social security).\n\nAlso, heard that US doctors have so much to pay in lawyers / insurance for liability in case they get sued that it’s a reason why everything is much more expensive. But that is to be confirmed by someone who knows better the American system.\n\nTo illustrate: a visit to the pediatric ER or dentist in France without any insurance nor social security is about the price of the co-pay in California... \n\nSource: French",
"Social security (CPAM) covers 70% of all healthcare expenses that it considers ‘suitable’. \n\nFor example if a doctor prescribes you antibiotics, social security will pay 70% of the consultation and 70% of the antibiotics. \n\nHowever, if your doctor prescribes you Diosmine, a medication that is not considered ´good enough’ to be refunded, the CPAM will refund 70% of the consultation but it won’t refund any percent of the medication. \n\nThe remaining 30% are paid by the patient. The patient can choose to buy a « mutuelle », which is a private insurance company, that pays these remaining costs.\n\nPatients with chronic diseases/illnesses are considered « ALD30 » which means the CPAM pays 100% of medical costs.\n\nThe government controls the price of medication and the price of mutuelles.\n\nThe CPAM is funded by taxes, which are more important than taxes in the USA, especially for indépendants. \n\nSource: French doctor \n\nÉdit: People’s comments below are correct that I did not mention a few things:\n\nA specific Mutuelle is sometimes obligatory with your job, in this case you can terminate your current mutuelle and join the one paid by your employer. Depending on the employer a certain amount is deducted from your salary. Most of the time this deal is advantageous.\n\nFor people who have no salary or earn very little. They can apply for CMU (couverture maladie universelle) which garantes 100% cover by the government. ",
"Lived there for 8 years, the healthcare system was a marvel to behold. Anecdotally, here are some of the bigger differences I noticed:\n\n* *System seemed insanely well funded*. Well staffed, very modern facilities and treatments. Never felt like you were lacking for anything.\n* *Doctors that do home visits*. I'd call a number and a doc would show up to my front door in a small car. Think the surcharge was about $100 cash. Of course they could issue prescriptions on the spot. I had a really bad flu on a Sunday and you can probably imagine the relief of not having to make a trip to the hospital to wait for hours in the emergency room.\n* *They take labor protections very seriously*. I talked with the doctors and the nurses about it and it turns out they work very strictly controlled hours. No overtime allowed (so always home in time for dinner) and 6 weeks vacation a year... so staff stress levels seemed much lower than in NA.\n* *Very integrated infrastructure*. Your \"carte vitale\", the card that gets you access to all of the services, includes your complete medical and pharmaceutical history. So when you're dealing with any new professional or institution, you don't need to give them your interpretation of your medical history, they have access to it immediately. This includes ambulances, and I can't help but imagine it helps saves lives.\n* *Big focus on investing in preventative care*. You have the right to a full physical once every five years.. and by full I mean you go to a specialized facility that includes running on treadmills. Another example, if you're a diabetic, they will pay for you to do a weekend retreat in the mountains where you learn how to cook and live a healthier lifestyle. Amazing, and lord knows what other examples I don't know about.\n* *Very closely followed process for expectant mothers*. I had a friend give birth there and the number of appointments and different types of midwives and professionals she had available was incredible. \n\nI was very impressed. For various reasons, I also tried out the systems in the UK, Italy, USA, Canada, Singapore... but nothing came close to France. USA was pretty much my worst experience.... the delightful moment of being intercepted by the insurance lady before you see a doctor and then getting heavily over tested/prescribed, was not the way I wanted to be treated.\n\nEDIT: Also, /u/Radulno reminded me of the \"Thermal Cures\". Basically, if your doctor determines that you're too stressed, they can prescribe a few days at a government resort that has hot mineral springs. You spend the weekend there relaxing, getting fed and frequently taking saunas or a bath, all paid for by the healthcare system.... and it even counts as work leave! I think this service has old historical roots, but never had the chance to try it out myself.",
"Something very important is Medical Act are regulated as well, unless your doctor is located in a «rich people area» they cannot have the fee they want per act they have to work more and make more acts, fees are impose by state. This allows the healthcare system to limit cash demands from doctors and allow to have a cheap healthcare. In compliment on what has been said by others.",
"someone making $10k a year will have the same treatment, drugs, care, compensated time off as someone making $500k a year. They will go to the same ER & see the same doctor, they will both know that because they chose to live in a country that implements mandatory taxation on businesses & people, whatever happens to them they won't go bankrupt. For people to be happy about this they have to believe that healthcare can't be treated as a business. The equivalent of premiums in France in order for care to have 0 additional cost to a sick person never exceed $50 a month, that's because the French equivalent for HMOs aren't made for profit, think of it as business healthcare plans meant to attract people for hire, except they can't turn a profit, it's like having a fancy free coffee machine in the rest area of your business. If you google \"French mutuelle\" you'll probably find a clearer explanation.",
" Very simple: we all pay for it (taxes, scales with income, you don’t even notice it), we all benefit from it: everything is pretty much free, we don’t live in fear of falling sick, we don’t need emergency funds. You might think: but what if I’m never sick! Don’t fool yourself, unless you die hit by a bus at 3, over the course of your life you will be sick many times or break a bone or need glasses or an abortion or new teeth, and if you ever make it past 70-80 years old you will save way more than you will have ever paid in taxes.\n\nA no brainer really. Same for education.\nEdit: no brainer, not no brained.",
"We have a thing call Social Security. It covers some social risks like unemployment, workplace accident...and illness.\nEveryone contributes to social security by paying taxes and social contribution. Taxes and social contributions are high in France (something like 45% of France's GDP).\nIn exchange everyone is covered by social security. When you are needed medical care social security pays most of it. Except for serious disease like cancer (in this case you pay nothing at all) there is something left for the patient to pay. That's where the private insurers comes into play. By law, every company has to present a health plan to their employees. The medium cost of private health insurance in France for a family of 4 for example is 1083.12 euros (1 357 USD) a year. \n\nFor example when you go see your doctor for a cold you only have to pay 1 euro from your pocket. The rest is payed by social security and your insurer. ",
"French here. The top post by the French doctor explains well. I wanted to add:\n \n- I see a lot of comments about how the taxes must be really high. It's not the case; they can seem high but they pay for everything, while in the US on top of taxes (that pay for... military?) you have to get a very expensive health insurance, that will try to fuck you anyways. \n\n- Hospital and emergency visits are, in my experience, completely covered. My dad got a bypass surgery, no bill. My mom got eye surgery, she got a 13.2 euros bill because of the special status of the surgeon or something. A friend of the family got a vessel bursting in her brain. She got transported by helicopter in the best neurology department of the area at no cost. Saved her life too by how quick they were. \n\n- Mutuelles cover 100 % and are not that expensive; also they are really cheap for students (even if student mutuelles have their problems, I paid maybe 100 euros for a year, and poor students don't pay at all. With the mutuelle, cost of tuition was 500 euros for the year)\n\n- When it comes to healthcare, government control is good and I don't get American's allergies to it. Why do you have a government at all if not to organise stuff like healthcare? They decide drugs prices, which keeps them reasonable, doctor's wages, which are rightfully high, etc. Economy of scale keeps everything reasonable. \n\n- More general: not having to think about healthcare is such a relief? I don't know how you guys do it. You can lose everything with one accident (or by being shot, looking at you, Vegas victims). You all must be so stressed. \n\n- I'm happy to pay taxes so that my fellow citizens are more healthy (and educated). Who the fuck wants to live in a country of sick and dying people? The US baffles me sometimes. For all your patriotism, a lot of Americans don't care at all about others. ",
"Before we come to how it works, please allow me to briefly recall whence it came from. It originates from community chests, set up and controled by trade unions, in factories in the 19^th century. See below why this is important.\n\nWhen talking about French healthcare, the behemoth in the room is the [Sécurité Sociale](_URL_0_). This is a giant, one-of-a-kind, not-for-profit, *private* corporation. It handles as much money as all the deparments of the French government *combined* (~ € 350 000 000 000 per year).\n\nThat money comes from a taxe paid on salaries (which is technically not a taxe since not collected by the state). This tax is *big* : for each € you take home, your employer pays another € to the Sécurité Sociale.\n\nThis big rig is obviously heavily regulated and under constant public and legal scrutiny.\n\nThis Sécurité Sociale has four branches :\n\n* healthcare proper (aka *Assurance Maladie*)\n\n* retirement and pensions\n\n* nearly universal \"food stamps\" for every kid\n\n* care for disabled people who can't live independantly\n\nHold on, there is more, and as you can guess, it's getting complicated.\n\nAll of this concerns only workers and their dependants. If you lose your job, you keep the benefits for something like one year. If you are not employed, the state will provide for survival amounts of healthcare.\n\nNow, the *healthcare* envisionned here is purely monetary. The medical care proper is delivered by a wide array of institutions.\n\nFirst, city doctors are, most of the time, independant professionnals who work for their own profit. Pharmacists too. When you visit, you usually pay the full price (which is capped by law), you hand your dedicated chip card, and a few days later, about 75 % of the amount is credited to your bank account. (make it 100% if chronic and life-threatening condition). At most pharmcies, and some doctors' offices, this chip card effectively functions as a debit card, so you actually pay only very little out of pocket. The same apply to all doctor-prescribed medical paraphernalia, from RMI to wheelchairs.\n\nThere are several kinds of hospitals. Some are private businesses, either for-profit or non-profit. The big and serious hospitals are state-owned, state-run and staffed by civil servants. They do issue bills, that are sent to, and paid by, the Sécurité Sociale. What remains on the bill presented to the patient is a symbolic contribution, plus the price of elective amenities. \n\nEmergency ambulances are split between specialised departments of said hospitals and the fire departments. I don't know how the cost is handled, but this is never ever a concern for the patient or the victim. If need be, such ambulances carry a doctor, and firemen have the capabilities to erect field hospitals real quick. A few of those ambulances are actually helicopters.\n\nAnd what about the few € I still owe to my doctor ? Bear with me. Most employee subscribe, willy-nilly, to a complementary program from private insurance companies (some for-profit, some charities). With a good plan, you can spend the rest of your days in a hospital and never see a bill. I say *willy-nilly* because such plans are usually established at corporate level, and if you sign-up for the job, you sign up for the plan, no way out. It is illegal for such companies to decline an individual application, no matter what.\n\nRemember the earlier part about community chests and trade unions ? Here it comes back. This giant corporation, the Sécurité Sociale, totally owns itself and is managed by the main trade unions (including employers' unions) with little interference from the state. It has its own convoluted electoral process. This is increasingly problematic as long-term unemployment encroaches in the landscape. It is financed by a tax on *salaries* only, and the part of salaries in the national economy is structurally dwindling. Unemployed people can't vote here (tbh, most *employed* people don't even care to vote) and lose benefits within a year or too of losing their jobs, which puts a strain on the afformentioned, distinct, separate and state-run program for the destitutes.",
"Everyone explains why it's free, but why is it considered one of the best in the world? Becoming a doctor in France is freakin' hard. Only a small percent manage to pass the first few years and it takes a good 10 years to become a doctor.",
"tbf it's not the \"French\" healthcare system that is one of the best in the world, it's \"Every single developed countries except USA\".\n\nThe Canadian, Italian, Netherland etc. ones are as good as the French. They all share this same idea of socializing the cost via taxes so anyone, even the poorest, have \"free\" healthcare, even for expensive diseases like cancer or heavy surgery.\n\nIt's not rocket science, really: are you injured? Don't worry, we're a civilized society and you're a member of it. We will take care of everything! This system was first [invented by Germany 150 years ago](_URL_0_) by the way.",
"Well.\n\nThe sécurité sociale, at its creation, was a system of worker solidarity that is detached from the state. At first, it was led by elected workers (this has already been destroyed by the government).\n\nIt works by collecting a part of every salaries, called a cotisation sociale (note that it is different from a tax, it is not collected by the state, but put in common by the workers, it is taken on your salaries, well, pretty much everything that your boss touches is taken from what you produce anyways...) and putting it in common and use this money to pay for hospitals and health workers, and healthcare acts. There is a certain push in some parts to apply this system to every sector of the economy, through the idea of salaire à vie. To learn more about this and the sécurité sociale, you should try to check Bernard Friot and the réseau salariat, if you can find something in your language. \n\nIt is to note that we were able to obtain such a strong and powerful institution because after the war was something called the conseil national de la résistance, who issued a program containing many very advanced social policies and was pushed by communists and anarchists from the résistance (it is to note that the communist party, at this time, was still armed to the teeth from its fight against the fascists all over Europe and made a strong 24% in polls, at this time the French thought that the communists won the war over fascism, not the allies). It is a perfect exemple of socialism working, all of the health sector of our economy is considered outside of capitalism economics, although it has been attacked every year from its creation by the bourgeois politicians, leading to a certain decay over time. ",
"I can explain how Italian healthcare system works. It’s different from France, but cheaper for the State.\nIn fact if France have the best healthcare systems, Italy has the most efficient one (efficiency=quality/cost). In Italy there is still a [good](_URL_0_) healthcare system, spending a lot less than Germany and France.\nItaly spends 112,2billions every year for healthcare (2466€ pro capita; 9% of GDP; Italy spends 830 billions every year, so the healthcare is 13,5% of total expenditure). \nGermany spends 351b (4229€ pro capita) and France 245b (3657€ pro capita).\n\nIn Italy, every single person has what we call a “family’s doctor”. When you born you are automatically assigned to a general pediatrician and at the age of 14 you are automatically switched to a family’s doctor.\nThis is a doctor, paid by the state, who can have maximum 1300 patients. He is available all the day 7/7days, usually he visits patients in his own office (you simply have to go there, no need of booking or reservation), but he **must** visit you at your home if you can’t go in his own office (for example old people).\nHe is the only person who can give you a particular document to use the free healthcare. It’s like a prescription, but it’s done on a special paper with a barcode (we call it “red prescription” because it was made on a [red paper](_URL_1_) ; a couple of years ago it changed, because now it’s done all through internet and computers, but we still use that name!).\nIn fact he is not a specialist, but he can give you prescriptions for free medicines, for free exams and for free specialist doctors.\n\nSo, basically for a patient who has a simple question, the situation can be solved directly by this family’s doctor (for example: “doctor I have vomit, what can I do?” Doctor: “here’s your medicine, bye”). \nWho needs more can go to a specialist, but the great thing, for not wasting public money, is that it’s not you, but a real doctor that decide when you really need of using the free healthcare, which obviously is a **huge** cost for the state. \n\nAnyway there is also a private healthcare. In fact if you want to do something without the document of your doctor, you can do it in private laboratories and clinics, where you pay with your own money (anyway it’s not expensive like in the USA, because prices must be competitive, otherwise nobody would use private healthcare).\n\n\nWhat I described is valid for normal medical problems. When you are really bad and you need hospitalization, you don’t need of the document by your doctor. You can go to the emergency room (for free), and the doctors there can decide if you will be hospitalized, so they will give you a bed. \n\n\nThe last thing that I don’t say is that actually healthcare is not totally free. Usually when you use the prescription of your doctor **for specialist and exams** you pay a tax (called with the English word “ticket”) of 30-40€, it’s different among regions (but the maximum by law is 40€). Instead, **for medicines**, you pay 2€ for the prescription + 1,50€ for each medicine on the prescription (for example: if you buy 1 medicine you pay 3,50, if you buy 2 medicines you pay 5€, 3 medicines 6,50€ etc.).\nThis tax was introduced because a lot of patients abused of the totally free healthcare, asking to their doctors for useless prescriptions. \nActually there are patients for which everything is totally free. For example patients with cancer or diabetes have to pay 0€ for everything (specialist, exams and medicine).\nThose are only 2 examples; actually a lot of chronic diseases give you the right to totally free healthcare. Why? Because a chronic patient needs really often of the healthcare, so he would pay a lot of tickets and it wouldn’t be right. \nAs said, the ticket **is not a payment for the healthcare** (also because it’s a ridiculous amount of money), but a little tax to prevent useless access to it (for example an anxoious who want to ask for the same thing to 10 doctors).\nIn fact when this tax was introduced the quality of the system grew up.\n\nFinally, for **all** emergency room, hospitalization, the 10 mandatory vaccines and all screening exams are totally free. \nScreening exams are decided by international guideline, so they’re the same in Italy and in the USA (for example mammography after 50 yo, Pap test etc.)",
"I'll try to cover the basics : the rationale behind the system, how it works and how much it costs.\n\n**Rationale** : \n\nFundamentally, accidents and diseases are considered to be random events. Your lifefstyle and personnal history matters obviously, but not so much that you can say \"it's YOUR responsibilty, you're on your own\". And I'm not even talking about children with leukemia or car accidents, but the simple fact that \"lower risk factor\" does not mean no risk.\n\nThis means that healthcare is a society problem, not simply an individual problem. \n\nAs a society, we also decided that no one should suffer from sickness if we can prevent it, irrespective of their means. A lot of people seems to conflate it with welfare for unemployment, but these are two separate issues, and the consensus on the underlying principle of universal healtcare is basically unanimous. \n\n*This is also true in the US, I think, since you ultimately accept all desperate case in the ER, even if you bill them into bankruptcy after. No one is ready to let someone die , or make parents chose which one of their children they want to save.* \n\n**How it works**\n\nSo France set up a large Fund called \"Sécurité Sociale\", which is funded by everyone and pay most of the healthbills for everyone. (NB It's much more complex, and there's a lot of fringe cases, but it's the general principle).\n\nThe Social Security :\n\n* Reimburses 70% of standard healthcare\n\n* Reimburses 100% for critical / LT healthcare (In France, \"Breaking Bad\" would have been a 10 min short. So, yay for US Healthcare, I guess ?)\n\n* Negotiate with pharmaceutical companies to fix prices on medicines / etc\n\n* Set the Standard Price (\"Tarif Conventionné\") for doctors appointment. Doctors can go over it, but the Sécurité Sociale won't cover the overcharge.\n\n* Is funded by a tax on payrolls (initially, it covered only people with a job, but was extended later)\n\nThere's always a debate on what is / is not standard healthcare, and what should be covered: \n\n* Boob Job ? No\n\n* Boob Job post masectomy ? Yes\n\n* Boobjob because you are clinically depressed by your body ? Hmm Maybe ?\n\nFor things that are not covered by the Sécurité Sociale ( the remaining 30% for standard care, overcharges etc), they are private \"mutuelles\" insurance companies that provide it. Almost all employers are required to provide one to their employees.\n\n**How much it costs :**\n\nLet's talk about doctors for one second: In France, they are not employee of the state, but independent professionals .\n\nA big difference with the US is that French doctors do not have huge amount of student debt to repay. University fees are a few hundred € (quick check ~350€/year for Paris) and some might spend ~1000€ in preparatory school to pass the dreaded first year admission test. So they don't HAVE to repay it by squeezing you for all your worth. \nWhat they COST to the state in formation is estimated to be ~11k€ per year for the first 7 years, so ~80k€ per doctor. I don't know how it compares with average medical student debt in the US.\n\nIn the end, the total healtcare costs are (source worldbank):\n \n* France : 4959 $/capita (78% Public Founded)\n\n* Germany: 5411 $/capita (77% Public Founded)\n\n* UK : 3935$/capita (83% Public Founded)\n\n* USA: **9403$/capita** (48% Public Founded)\n\nSo the USA spends almost twice as much on healthcare. I don't know all the reasons, but some comes to mind :\n\n * inefficiencies created by having multiple small healtcare providers (lower scale effect, lower bargaining power, Higher SG & A and marketing costs)\n\n * For Profit business model in a market with a non elastic demand which creates natural monopolies. (ie, you can't bargain when you're in pain)\n\nAs for the ranking of the Healthcare systems, it is obviously a controversial topic, since it depends of who is doing the ranking and what they are ranking, exactly. \n\nI think the famous \"France #1\" comes from a WHO study.\nThey typically covered quality / ease of access / efficiency /costs , both in the average result achieved and its distribution (ie. inequality)\n\n\n\n\n",
"How are doctors paid? Are there bonuses or rewards for higher quality care? Do doctors have medical school debt? Are doctors paid differently based on their medical school education? Do doctors have any incentives to keep costs low or can they have patients take every test in the book?\n",
"Socialism. \n\nIt's the French method and in America you only need to say \"Socialism,\" to scare the crap out of people. \n\nOdd thing is the \"Socialism\" boogey man is Russia to the States, yet now they fucking love Russia, or they don't, but ya they do. It's all kind of confusing. \n\nIt's possible the States is having a tad bit of a crisis. \n\nPs the British system handed down to Canada (thanks to Tommy D we got it figured out) we are well looked after as well. Not as well as the French though ;)",
"Always makes me laugh knowing that after my car accident, if it had been in America, they definitly wouldn't have bothered to save my left arm and would have probably cut it off.\n\nBoy I love being in a country that doesn't care about your insurance to decide if you are worth it or not :o",
"Another thing that few if any comments have been covering here: paid sick leave, which is a very big part of making a healthcare system good.\n\nIf you're too sick to work, your doctor will prescribe sick leave. It's a right, and your employer cannot refuse to let you stay home. Then depending on your situation you either keep your salary and your employer is compensated by the social security system, or you stop being paid but are directly compensated by the social security. There is a maximum amount you can receive monthly, though, which might be lower than what you usually make. By law, you can't be fired during sick leave. And when you come back, your employer has to offer you the same job or an equivalent one. Maternity leave works the same and gives you the same rights. Employers usually know better than trying to cheat and pressure employees into coming back from sick leave too early, because it would be a clear cut case for labor courts and the employee would win every time. \n\nYou won't see people having to work while fighting cancer or another serious disease in Europe. It's so cruel that many have to choose between jeopardizing their income or their recovery in the US. ",
"Here's my understanding of the differences between both systems, and if I'm wrong, please let me know.\n\nIn the US, you pay a lower level of taxes but you pay for your own healthcare costs. Since you're not forced to pay for a standard plan and have the choice to select whatever plan you want, many people end up not getting health insurance early on and only get insured later in life or they get sick and get into trouble. It's great if you never get sick, get into an accident, etc. You get to keep the money you make if you're not insured or pay a small penalty, if that's still a thing.\n\nIn socialized countries, the second you hit a certain wage mark, you begin to pay into the healthcare system through your regular taxes but you're covered from even before you're born. The main difference is that you get taxed upfront but the health insurance is guaranteed and is regulated to a certain extent. This ensures you get to see a normal physician for free (bulk billing) or go get a medical procedure you need also for free.\n\nAs far as I know socialist governments allow some doctors to charge more than what's paid by the system if a patient wants to get the services sooner or if the doctor simply wants more money, so there are always some specialists that charge you what in the US feels like a co-pay but it's just a bit higher. For example, if you go see an eye doctor for a recurring thing, they'll charge you $100 and the socialist government will pay another $100. They call this a GAP.\n\nNow, you can get a health insurance that pays for that GAP, allows you to go to private hospitals, get some extra benefits like gym paid for, dental, massages, exercise classes, get faster service, etc.\n\nIn Australia, if you make about $100k, you'll get taxed at about 40% flat. The deductions are not as great as in the US and if you have dependents, it doesn't matter. You get taxed regardless at the same rate. You can buy a private health insurance that gives you all sorts of benefits for $100 to $300/mo. I have the $600 for a family, which comes down to $450USD or so. This allows me to get up thousands back on dental services, any hospital stay fully paid in a private room, braces up to $4000 in the lifetime of the policy, $2500 towards exercise programs, $1000 towards therapeutic massages, etc. I probably paid about 3 months' worth last year and piled on about $20,000 of benefits out of it because I had planned to go to the hospital for a pre-existing thing but that doesn't matter at all. They don't care if you're already sick.\n\nOh yeah, and the government pays for about 25% of the policy if you sign up within 5 years of becoming an adult, I believe.",
"Just chiming in from New Zealand, the French system sounds similar to ours but slightly better. Personal example below.\n\nOne of my kids once ended up with a minor staph infection, developed to be almost lethal when he went in to septic shock at the hospital. He received a ridiculous level of care - 3 days of 24/7 nurse in the room with minute by minute observation, multiple MRIs, full life support for 5 days, head of the intensive care unit spending loads of time trying to figure it all out. After about a full month in hospital we walked out with a grand total bill of $0, I cant imagine what that would have cost.\n\nOf my total income i pay about 23% tax and I do so without question. I can honestly say I would never want to live in America, ever, it all just sounds so selfish and heartless, poor country has lost its care for people.",
"Anecdotally, the swiss people tend to look down on the french healthcare as mediocre at best.\n\nGranted, this might be due to the fact that 1) it is almost cultural for us to look down on the French for pretty much everything and 2) it's mandatory for us to pay a minimum of 300$ per month on healthcare insurance, which could explain the difference in standards.",
"Here is an ELI(almost)5 with 5 easy steps:\n\n1/ Make (medical) studies free so you won't have to pay the doctor as much\n\n2/ Study what it costs to perform every and any medical act and negotiate national prices for every drugs. Then make a national price list.\n\n3/ Create a national medical insurance for which the premiums are solely based on your income.\n\n4/ Refine your system (supplementary insurance, 100% coverage for chronic diseases...)\n\n5/ Keep the system in check, make sure the national insurance does not loose money (that is where France lacks)",
"Uh, I thought Spain was supposed to be the best... Its always been said here, in Spain.\n\nJust checked on internet and France is first and Spain is 7th.\n\nThe system is the same tho.",
"Could not imagine living in the USA, I’d probably be dead now from an untreated medical condition\n\nLast Friday my wife got up and went to the ED at 9am at 13:30 they operated to remove a small growth she spent the night in hospital and was sent home the following day, since then every day a nurse has attended our home to re dress and repack the wound\n\nTotal cost $0\n\nShe has an eye problem and sees a neuro ophthalmologist once every 6 weeks\n\nTotal cost $0\n\nOur family doctor $0, we see him monthly \n\n\nI also have private health insurance \n\nI had a left knee arthroscopy and partial meniscectomy in a private hospital \n\nTotal cost $500 including follow up appointments with the orthopaedic surgeon\n\nCould have been free if I went on the public waiting list\n\nAustralia...",
"France is a very socialist leaning country which makes basics such as universal healthcare a basic right rather than a privelege",
"The US is terribly wrong at considering high taxes and highly regulated markets as communism.\n\nWhen you have billions in taxes and tightly control the cost of healthcare, all of a sudden EVERYONE has access to great healthcare for a fraction of the cost.\n\nThe US GAMBLES with the health and happiness of its citizens, and you swallow that like a goose.",
"By what rating scale? I haven't heard this (that it's one of the best in the world). Where did you hear that? It can be difficult to compare different health care systems so I'd be interested if there was a reliable rating scale.\n\nAre you from the US? If so maybe you should reverse the question. The real issue is *why is the US system so poor considering that you spend more on healthcare (18% of GDP) than other countries*? It's because health care costs in the US are really high compared to almost any other country, eg, France.",
"It works how most social insurance schemes work. Everybody pays a little even if they are not sick so people who get cancer don't have to cook meth.",
"If you're referring to the popular rankings that go around, it's because the US doesn't provide unlimited access to all people. Not because the quality of healthcare for those who can afford it is actually poor, because it is not. In many areas we lead the world, and we're in the top rankings for almost every type of procedure. But some people are excluded from some procedures in some cases.",
"If your job pay you 60,000$ per year, about 28,000$ goes to our Health Care system and you are left with 32k. \n\nThere is this \"net salary\" and what we actually get. People often overlook this, we have super high tax rate (the highest in the world IIRC or like top 3)",
"Fun fact - you can have Mutuelle from France even if you are working oversea (Mutuelle is named humanis). They cover pretty much any country.... except the US.",
"What about provider and RN pay? I assume one of the very few things that the US system has going for it is that the very best providers and nurses make a killing on their pay. Does the French system incentive high quality talent inflow?",
"I asked what the tax rate was, again a simple question, you responded pretending to have some intellectual higher ground but also threw in the_donald bit, so I literally went point by point responding to what you said.\n\nYou pissed me off with your the_donald comment. It's tired practice and the tide is turning, just because someone is pro \"[Insert your or their country] First\" doesn't make them racist or anything negative. You didn't directly say that but come on... I know what you meant, trying to dismiss my perspective because I check out the_donald.",
"My daughter was just in Paris, came down with the flu (the US version, apparently Europe has a different strain than ours and it’s mild in comparison) she called a Dr., they were there within an hour and she was assessed and given prescriptions that I think saved her life as she had a raging fever and bronchitis. It was 90 Euros. I am forever grateful for the care she received in France. Btw, she’s home now and has fully recovered.",
"Free, universal healthcare is always the best option.\n\nIt's absolutely sickening what the Tories are doing to the NHS. They're absolute scum.",
"In my country, Peru, they give you free medication and free consultation. In big hospitals you can wait a lot of months, but in smaller ones is faster.",
"Didn't know about this system, and it looks awesome. \nDo you have public dentistry?\n\nI'm a dentist in Spain. Here we only have public service of teeth extractions, and very few kids treatments.\n\nIn Spain , healthcare is for free, but that it's a very important problem, because you have all the bored elder people every day in the doctor.\n",
"Just chiming in - I am very pleasantly impressed by the level of accuracy and details provided in the answers, excellent work mesdames & messieurs! 👍\n\nWanted to make sure everything important was mentioned: independents and employers contribution, CPAM coverage %, standardized pricing (for procedures and medications), the mutuelles system, sector 1 & 2 pricing, medical deserts and telemedicine... but I see that even the *Maisons Médicales* were mentioned! \n\nHaving nothing to add, I can only congratulate the french redditors for their excellent work here! 👏",
"THE biggest difference is that there is not a huge corporation squatting between the doctor and the patient, squeezing money out of every possible location to increase their profits margins",
"I haven't seen anyone mention this specifically so I thought I'd chime in.\n\nIn France, infertility treatment is also covered.\n\nYou get 6 inseminations and 4 rounds of ivf covered 100% \n\nA round of ivf only counts if they transfer an embryo. If you don't get that far (not enough eggs, no embryos, no egg retrieval etc) then it doesn't count and you still have your 4 rounds.\n\nThe count is also reset to 4 after birth. So say you used 3 rounds of ivf to get pregnant and have a baby, once you decide you want a second baby, you have 4 new rounds covered 100%\n\nMedication and technical acts are also covered 100% (hormone meds, injection supplies, blood work, scans, egg retrieval etc)\n\nDonor eggs and donor sperm is also free, you don't pay for someones eggs or sperm. (This is probably the only disadvantage, since it means the waiting list for egg donation especially, is long) ",
"My Wife became ill on our last three days in Paris in '06. A doctor 'showed up at the hotel' and charged €50 to diagnose her recommending a hospital visit. An ambulance came to take us to the hospital. She wound up having a disease rarely suffered in France so a little difficult to pinpoint for them. It seems diverticulitis is a disease prolific in countries with excessive processed food. Fast forward three weeks of antibiotics bed rest in-hospital and she was ready to fly home. American Airlines wanted nothing to do with her without express written okay from a doctor. The hospital waived off any requirement for payment and didn't even ask for proof of insurance. They did take the insurance info the last day and sent us a $250 bill for the deductible a month later. I never asked what the total was but I'd bet it was much lower than the States would've charged. Oh, and it was a private room.",
"Used to be an 'expert' on these things. When official foreign delegations visited us (in London!) we had interesting debates on 'best' systems, and French always rated highly. The real killer was 'How would you START a system like country x's?' Most have evolved with a culturally sensitive public/private mix, each has its own problems and each forever plans 'reforms'. No good answer to that, but it was part of my job to read Mrs Clinton's proposals for the US (remember?) and my advice was that it might be a good way to go. (I also liked HMOs and Kaiser P., but so much has changed since then I wouldn't know now).",
"Could or would the same health care system work in The U.S.? What reasons would prevent it from being a success?",
"The French healthcare system is great, but it still revolves around money, having your own insurance etc. I’m a Brit so I’m going to try to indoctrinate you into our system:\n\nIf you work, you’re taxed. Some of those taxes go towards healthcare. \n\nIf you’re sick, you go to the doctor/hospital/etc. Money is never discussed. You never choose an insurance provider, you never see a bill. If you’re discharged from hospital and don’t have transport, the hospital pay for your taxi home. \n\nThe NHS is the single most successful experiment in communism in history. \n\nI know this thread is about France, but Americans: if you’re going to dream higher than the healthcare joke you currently have, shoot for the moon. ",
"After reading some of these comments, France is very far off from being the best in the world. \n\nIn Portugal almost every med is paid by the government in rates of 90% to 95%. \n\nConsultations are free. ER is free (to most of the population), unless if you have some means, then you pay something like 20€ (to avoid flooding the system). \n\nYou can stay in the hospital for months and it's free.\n\nShit, I can't fathom living anywhere else and actually pay for shit when I get sick.",
"US:\"Health Care is such a mystery\"\n\nEurope:\"We have figured out lots of good working systems check them out if you want too\"\n\nUS:\"So complex, how can one even come up with such concept and make it work\"\n\nEurope:\"No seriously a lot of the stuff we have would work in your economy, trust me\"\n\nUS:\"I guess it must be impossible. Oh well it is a communist concept and who needs it anyway. Better I just throw it out now without a replacement\"\n\nEurope:\"For the love of God\"",
"This is obviously only anecdotal but my parents were traveling in France two years ago and are Americans. My father's back was hurting pretty bad but he ignored it because he was on vacation. Then one day he literally couldn't get out of bed the pain was so excruciating. My mom was freaking out. She's in another country, doesn't speak the language, has no idea how the healthcare system works, and she can't even get my dad out of bed to get him to a doctor. She asks the hotel for help and they tell her not to worry and gave her a number for a doctor to call. Apparently house calls there are totally normal so they just sent a doctor to the hotel for him. The doctor was able to prescribe him pain killers and bring him a cane to help him walk. As Americans my parents expected a huge bill for this. I believe the total for everything came out to be something like $40. \n\nSince they didn't get charged an arm and a leg they could afford to change their flight and got my dad home as soon as they could while he was on enough pain killers that he could at least get up. It turns out that he had lymphoma and a tumor was growing out of his spinal cord. Had they not gotten such great service when they did and at such a great price he would not have been able to go home when they did. If he had waited any longer he would have been unable to fly home. I am so grateful that we were able to get him home in time to start chemo here instead of having him half a world away.",
"God I love being French. The system may have a lot of flaws, but I was a week in a hospital, with one minor surgery and another one with complete anesthesia, seen doctors and all. The cost of all this was 10K€.\n\nI paid 11€. ",
"I'm in agreement with lots of what is being posted on here, but there's notable lack of citations and discussion on the French reimbursement system here. [NCBI citation](_URL_0_) regarding lessons for the US based on the French system\n\nSpecifically the French government has the ability to negotiate as a single purchaser for healthcare. Whether it is medicines, devices or otherwise. This is a consequence of a single payer system, but can be realized in what's known as an 'all-payer system' where a single entity is setting prices. E.g. imagine the CMS setting reimbursement rates for all insurers, not just themselves. As it stands, in the US reimbursement rates to pharma, device companies etc are set by CMS and private insurers usually pay at rates higher than CMS but use them as guidelines. \n\nIn contrast, these prices in France are set by a commission that includes representatives from the Ministries of Health, Finance, and Industry.\n\nI have a degree in healthcare policy and work in Healthcare administration for what it's worth. ",
"A major reason for medical costs being high in the U.S. is due to medical malpractice premiums for Doctors. We are a very litigious society (thanks lawyers) and they pass those extremely high costs to patients. Also, HCPs have gotten into a practice of over-billing b/c it's the game they play with insurance companies who then cover up to certain amount of the claim but not as much as the bill states. It's a crazy game. Plus, gotta pay for all the admin costs and two different nurses who checked you into the office chair. They aren't cheap, then the battery of tests they want to perform. I know it sounds like I'm against Docs, here, but they want to make money and get paid, too. Test are expensive.",
"for your viewing pleasure a YouTube playlist that give a brief overview of how different developed countries systems work.\n\nInternational Health Care Systems: _URL_0_",
"Ive been saying for so long in America that I wish we had non-profit health insurance system. When are we going to make it work... Our biggest problem is how much damn money we spend in military and useless things... Our military is extremely stout obviously but we are getting screwed internally.",
"It's amazing what can be accomplished when the population isn't terrified of the word \"taxes\" and the dollars are actually spent in an attempt to reduce the overall cost of healthcare, rather than an attempt to line the pockets of pharmaceutical/insurance corporations and hospitals.",
"I quite like New Zealand's healthcare system, but it seems about 10% of my patients don't agree with paying 5$ per medicine per 3 months. Oi vey.",
"I have to quit reading this thread or I'm going to have a stroke (one I won't be able to afford)...\n\nI have piles of medical debt I don't know how I will ever be able to pay due to mental health issues. I need extensive dental work of which I will likely never be able to afford and will likely lose most of my teeth by the time I hit my 40's, not including the mountains of previous emergency dental work I've needed done that I also can't imagine how I'll ever be able to pay for.\n\nIf France has a commercial dive industry and is accepting U.S. immigrants please point me in the direction of where to go to get out of this hell❤️"
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dnan28 | . how do they make fat in sausages not go putrid but it's such a concern in jerky? | Sausage goes way back before modern preservatives, same as jerky. I make jerky pretty often and having too much fat while making it is an extreme concern. While fat in sausage is almost a must. What is the difference? What makes the fat in say hard salami (my favorite lunch meat) not a concern while aging? Please let me know if that wasn't ELIF enough and I can rephrase. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/dnan28/elif_how_do_they_make_fat_in_sausages_not_go/ | {
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"The type of sausage that you can store at room temperature is generally fermented, jerky is not fermented. The fermentation raises the acidity to a level not suitable for most harmful bacteria. Smoking can also work, it prevents the surface fat from going rancid and helps seal up the interior. Meanwhile, salt-curing prevents the growth of bacteria on the inside."
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65kktq | when did we develop "polite greetings" (hello, good morning, goodbye, farewell...) and how is it possible that now virtually every existing language has their own set? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/65kktq/eli5_when_did_we_develop_polite_greetings_hello/ | {
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"What is the alternative? \n\nDo you imagine that people would walk up to one another and say \"I am going to begin speaking or otherwise interacting with you\". To which the response might be \"I acknowledge your intent to do so\".\n\n\"I am finished with our engagement and will now disengage.\" \"I also feel like our interaction has reached a logical conclusion.\"\n\nGreetings and pleasantries like you describe are a fundamental part of communication. \n\nEven your computer did it when you opened this page. You called on the server, announced yourself and it replied in kind. ",
"If all languages share one, it's likely it was also within early languages. It makes sense that it would be, social animals understand pecking order / hierarchy.",
"I'm paraphrasing Stephen Pinker (loosely) here, but languages are coded into to us genetically, to some degree. If you analyse them closely you find common traits between all of them. For example, almost every language uses mixtures of consonants and vowels because this allows for a larger configuration of distinct sounds in a short amount of time, and thus is more efficient.\n\nAnother example would be Zipf's law for natural language utterances. This states that, in a given body of text for a given language, there is a linear relation between the frequency of word usage and rank of usage. So the second most common word is used exactly half as often as the first, the third most common word is used a third as often as the first, etxc. Choose any book you want and it will, within some statistical error, demonstrate this amazing property. There have been experiments to test this is interesting ways. If you give someone ten jibberish words and ask them to write a story with these words, the words will fall also into this statistical distribution.\n\nSo I haven't really answered your question because I don't know speficially. But what I am trying to get at is that analysis of language demonstrates that human genetics play a huge role in the development of our languages. I suspect that universal greetings fall under that umbrella too."
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6b1b6k | why do. american cities lack the tram and subway systems that are prevalent in europe? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6b1b6k/eli5_why_do_american_cities_lack_the_tram_and/ | {
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"Major cities have subway, bus, rail, and ferry systems where applicable - e.g., Boston, NYC, Chicago, LA, DC, etc.\n\nHowever there are *so many cities* in the US, and the US is massive. It does not make logistical sense to have subway systems in a city that does not have the same level of population as some of those cities. \n\nThe cost of running the system has to be offset by the rider usage. If there aren't enough riders - like in many rural area cities, where most everyone has a car - it would not be cost effective.",
"Well our highway, interstates, and roads are basically everywhere and its easy to go with about 10 different ways to get there.\n\nAlso big oil had a lot to do with it. Thats why trains are used a lot on the east coast and basically used purely for frieght out west despite the size of California and the benefits it would gain from a subway.",
"A very large number of American cities were built (or expanded into cities from being towns) after the invention of the Car. As such they were designed for people to use cars to navigate them, not for them to be walked on foot. When most people have and use cars there is very little that you can do to justify spending tax money on a public transit system, and very little motivation for a private company to provide it. ",
"US was built in the car era.\n\nThe government provided big subsidies for motorway systems, and happily drove them through downtown (European cities tend to have a ring road out beyond the suburbs).\n\nAt the same time new zoning laws required plenty of parking for all those cars, prevented densification of existing suburbs (driving growth out with new suburbs) and city councils encouraged things like very wide roads (which are both convenient for drivers and difficult to cross for pedestrians). \n\nHouston is a good example of this. Built on a massive motorway network, development laws requiring huge plots even for single homes, minimum parking requirements, etc.\n\nThe result of all this is US cities are overwhelming car centric. They can't support transit ridership the way European and Asian cities can without completely changing their geography.",
"**lots** of reasons \n\nThe American rail system is focused on shipping freight which it does very well.\n\nWestward expansion took over a century which meant it was difficult to plan where new population centers would be cropping up in relation to the older cities.\n\nLobbying and scheming by motor companies to make America based around the car, the documentary *Taken for a Ride* does a good job covering this.\n\nMany states are mostly rural areas which negates the usefulness of light rail somewhat.\n\nAnd finally I think that many people just prefer the freedom and independence afforded by using automobiles.",
"The main plot of Who Framed Rodger Rabbit happened for real.\n_URL_0_\n\nAlthough, my hometown city, San Diego, still had a really good public transit system (trolleys and buses) when I lived there, and I have been to and used public transit in Boston, New York, Chicago and Washington D.C., with little to no complaints, except for the smell, and sometimes the heat.",
"A lot of it really has to do when cities were developed. \n\nMajor cities like SF, NY, Chicago have solid public transit. But once you get outside of the centers its a lot of open space. \n\nA good example would be San Jose California. 3rd largest city in California. More people than San Francisco. Public transit in San Jose isn't that great and the reality is you need a car. The reason why is it was mostly orchids and stuff like that 50 years ago. Then the tech boom hit and it grew rapidly. Well most people really weren't trying to move into cities so suburbs happened. Having a home with a yard was all part of that American dream. \n\n\n\n",
"Mainly because those systems are only profitable in very densely populated areas, particularly when several very dense cities are located very close to each other. Most of the cities in the US just aren't as dense as European cities, and they tend to spread out more.\n\nOf course, the really dense American cities -- New York, Chicago, etc. -- do have subway systems.",
"The daily ridership of the NY subway is 5 million+. This exceeds the ridership of any rapid transit system in Europe, other than Moscow's.\n",
"People use cars for pretty much any journey in the US. When I went there on business, I was asked by a colleague what I was doing for lunch and I said I'd probably pick up a sandwich from the supermarket which was less than 200 yards away across the office car park. He asked me how I was getting there and I said walking and he was having none of that insisted on driving me there, all 20 seconds of the journey. He seemed oblivious to the fact that it might be nice to get some fresh air.\n\nAnother day I thought about visiting a store which was about three miles away. I do a lot of walking/hiking so it's a distance I walk regularly and I figured there'd be a route I could take to it and it would make a nice walk after being sat in an office all day. Not a chance in hell. I'd have to take a car to get there because of the road systems.",
"Wealth in European cities is concentrated in the city center, but wealth in American cities is concentrated in the suburbs. City metros & subways in Europe are much more profitable compared to America due to the higher traffic",
"In addition to the other things mentioned here there's a general stigma surrounding public transport which causes a lack of support for creating public transport that would remove said stigma. ",
"How do American (from southern US) deal with the lack of consistency of their \"transport\" policies ? One one hand it seems they do everything to prevent you to take the car (toll road, expensive parking like $20 a day) but on the other hand there is no/few public transportation (I think I saw one Tram line in Dallas downtown, and one \"monorail\" in Jacksonville Downtown to name some place) and I don't talk about the lack of pedestrian sidewalks... \n\n\nI understand that most of the US cities are extended and have low density area which make hard to build efficient public transportation network. But If I compare (for example) to Paris suburb, in low density place you have a big parking near the urban train station which allow people to drive only the 2-5 km from their house to the station and avoid the traffic by taking the train. \n\n",
"In addition to its massive bus system, New York City has a massive subway system, a massive Metro-North commuter rail, a PATH rail system to New Jersey, Amtrak rail, a Staten Island Railway, tram to Roosevelt Island, a ferry system between Staten Island and Manhattan Island, an expansive highway, bridge and tunnel system, a port, and two major airports.",
"Trains are too expensive for what you get. (Both long distance and local). Trains in the city, your with a crowd of people in an enclose area and it cost around the same for a ride share app that is more convenient by dropping you off at a specific location. Long distance train fares are outrageous you might as well get an airline ticket.",
"Many cities did. It was systematically killed off and purchased by companies like General Motors to sell cars. \n\nThere's a good documentary on it on YouTube. \n\n_URL_0_",
"My guess would be that that's because trams are an outdated and expensive system to set up from scratch when compared to busses and the like.\nAs for the subway - it's an extremely costly, yet relatively non-invasive thing to implement.\nYou'd only really do it for really big metropolises that are congested because of having a crappy layout unable to accomodate modern transportation requirements. American cities are, for the most part, not old enough to have that problem - they're much better laid out.",
"After reading many of these comments I am surprised no one mentioned oil industry lobbyists. ",
"A related question for Americans: How do you do when you go out and grab a beer or ten? That is the #1 reason I'm so happy to have a good underground train system. ",
"There are a lot of factors listed here. One in cities like Houston, Texas is that it is massive and spread out. Houston is the 4th most populated city in the US and is a little larger than London at 1630 sq km, but has 25% of the population. People work far from where they live and have to commute all over the city. Light rail trains, buses, and high occupancy vehicle lanes cut down on the amount of vehicles on the road, but some drive distances/locations are not practical without allowing 2+ hours commute each way daily. \n\nDowntown Houston is only about 50 feet above sea level, so underground subway systems are not practical. \n\nHere is a quick guide to why the US sucks at public Transportation. \n\nLargest cities in the world ranked by land area in sqKm \n1. NY metro 8683 \n2. Tokyo 6993 \n3. Chicago 5,498\n4. Atlanta 5,083\n5. Philadelphia 4,661\n6. Boston 4,497\n7. Los Angeles\t 4,320\n8. Dallas/Fort Worth 3,644\n9. Houston 3,355\n10. Detroit 3,267\n11. Washington DC 2,996\n12. Miami 2,891\n \nYou have to get to 13th to find the 2nd city not in the US. \n\nWe are the 3rd most populated country in the world but the 179th in population density. \n\nTLDR. We are really freaking big and spread out.\n\n\n\n",
"All the answers aren't wrong, but the real reason and nail in the coffin, was General Motors buying out all the tram companies in effort to sell more busses. Kind of backfired as The 60s oil crisis happened. \n\n\n\nNYC actually had a tram system. You can still see the metal rails under some city blocks. And there are frequent buildings where they were serviced. ",
"Because, to be honest, cars are better than public transit. You can litterally go wherever you want, it's truly freedom. You can certainly have both mass transit and great highway systems like in Boston or NY, but without that kind if population density, it's sort of one or the other from a cost standpoint, and as I said, cars give you more flexibility and freedom.",
"Hey, do you know how European cities have these amazing, elaborate tram and subway systems in the first place? \nWe had the \"opportunity\" to completely restructre our cities, oh, about 70 odd years ago. Turns out, when pretty much all your city is obliterated after WW2, and you have to rebuild anyways, there is a lot of free space where you can stick those transportation systems. \nBasically, you did the demolition for us. All the building and zoneing people had to do was clear the rubble and now we have parks in inner cities, zoos near the city centres, and relatively broad roadways. Plus, the space-consumeing railways. \nAmerican cities were, for the most part, never destroyed that completely. You had to integrate public transport into living cities, which is almost impossible to do. Construction takes that much longer and is therefore that much more expensive because you can only do it in increments. \nPlus, shutting down certain parts of the city can become nigh-impossible because they are major traffic arteries. And there is the matter of aquiring the property you need to do construction on or underneath. If anyone gets wind of the project the prices are going to rocket sky high. \nPlus, what good is it to maintain old tram systems, even when they are profitable, when they're just going to be stuck in the traffic created by the cars? The more cars became prelevant, the less useful the tram becomes. Therefore, you need either subway systems (tunneling) or some sort of monorail / a bridge system to get your tram around. \nAnd those are way more expensive to build than tram systems on the ground. See also: The problem of aquiring the land in a city that is already completely owned by a hundred thousand different people. Even those support beams have to stand on somebody's land. \nAnd every time you attempt to do these project, the prices are going to go up. Plus, no-one is happy to live next to the subway, right? Those property prices are going to plummet because of noise polution. So you always have the big-construction-problem of groups forming to protest your new railway plans. Possibly to the point of stonewaling you and voting you out of office before you can make significant progress."
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1gxket | why do charges like shoplifting make you pay a fine to the state instead of the owner? | I've been wondering this lately. Shoplifting doesn't monetarily hurt the state only the store owner. I am sure that the store owner would rather have that money sent to them. So why does the state receive all of the money (minus whatever restitution you have to pay to the owner)
This seems like plain extortion to me. I can see why you have to pay fines for things like a DUI etc but not shoplifting or anything like that. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1gxket/eli5_why_do_charges_like_shoplifting_make_you_pay/ | {
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"In the US, if you shoplift you have \"broken the law\" in two different ways. You have committed a crime, and you have committed a tort. \n\nCriminal law is intended to punish people for offenses against society as a whole: when you steal, it breaks our social rules, and our society punishes you for that. When a court orders a criminal fine, it isn't thinking at all about getting the shopkeeper's money back, or the fact that society at large wasn't financially harmed. Rather, the court is only thinking about ways to punish you in order to keep you and other people from shoplifting in the in the future. Where the money goes is secondary; the more important goal in a criminal fine is that it hurts you.\n\nTort law (or civil law) generally doesn't care about punishment. It's concerned with making sure people get and keep what is theirs, and when bad things happen, the person who pays for it is the person who ought to pay for it. This is the law that applies if the shop owner wants his money back. Whether or not you are criminally fined, the shop owner can bring a lawsuit to force you to give the item (or its cash value) back. \n\nTo use another example, you could look at OJ Simpson: he was charged with murder and acquitted. A court determined there was no crime. However, Nicole Brown's family brought a civil lawsuit for wrongful death, and won. OJ was made to pay her family for the loss he caused in killing her--even though he wasn't criminally punished for killing her.\n\nThis gets a little blurry in practice, as sometimes civil courts can order punitive damages to punish someone who is particularly bad, and sometimes a criminal sentence will include restitution, but those are exceptions to the general rules above.",
" > Shoplifting doesn't monetarily hurt the state only the store owner.\n\nIn the eyes of the state, a crime against anyone is a crime against *everyone*. If your crime was successful, the store would have lost money. They have to raise prices to cover the loss, and maybe the hire more security, raising the prices more. \n\n*Everyone* pays for the crime you committed, so it is in everyone's interest to see you punished, deterring you and others from committing more crime."
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3fov35 | are any of our units of measure universal? | If we met an alien race of a similar technology level, we'd obviously have to figure out how to convert grams, meters, liters, and degrees C into their units of measure, but would any units be universal? Like hertz, amp, watt, volt? Would any units be the same no matter who discovered them or where/when? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3fov35/eli5_are_any_of_our_units_of_measure_universal/ | {
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"Some units are physical or mathematical constants. The speed of light and Planck's constant are physical constants. Pi and Euler's number are mathematical constants. These things would likely be the same for us and any alien species that experienced the universe in a similar way to humans.",
"I believe that none of the ones you listed are universal. The alien race would very likely keep track of days and years just like us, but they'd be different lengths of time on their planet than on earth.\n\nThere are some fundamental units that would be identical though - off the top of my head the electron-volt (eV) comes to mind. And also the speed of light c. And they might well use radians the same way we do to measure angles, because they are a fundamental unit based on the ratio of pi which the aliens would also be aware of."
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1sm3kk | how to encrypt files/folders | So I did some googling, but I'm honestly horrible at anything with a computer. So, like my question says, how the heck do you Encrypt stuff? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1sm3kk/eli5how_to_encrypt_filesfolders/ | {
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"On mac, the process is a little more lengthy; however, let me know if that's what you want. On windows, all you would need to do is right click on a file, on the General tab and down by Attributes, click Advanced. You will then see a check box in which you can encrypt the file. "
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3894i8 | church and taxes. do church owners not pay property taxes for the land the church is on, or do people just want some sort of church tax to be payed. i don't understand | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3894i8/eli5_church_and_taxes_do_church_owners_not_pay/ | {
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"Churches do not have to pay property tax in the US if they have applied for a tax exemption and been approved. It's pretty easy to do in most cases. States determine the property tax laws for state land, but I'm nearly positive all 50 states have exemptions for non-profit religious organizations.",
"In all 50 states, property used for religious purposes is tax exempt.\n\nThe reasoning behind it is, If churches had to pay taxes, state could control them by raising property taxes on churches that government didn't like. Also, if they paid taxes, Churches could claim they should get input into government decisions because they are taxpayer like any other. "
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23sf05 | how do porn girls get away with anal sex followed by oral and vaginal? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23sf05/eli5_how_do_porn_girls_get_away_with_anal_sex/ | {
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2a1bs1 | for me to make money does someone else in the world have to lose money | If for example i have $1000 more than last week does that mean that collectively everyone else is $1000 worse off? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2a1bs1/eli5_for_me_to_make_money_does_someone_else_in/ | {
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"Not entirely. Economes grow and people (whatever their income bracket) become wealthier when there is a greater flow of currency in the marketplace. Capitol is leveraged against other capitol, corporations create new products that people purchase and use, the corporations pay the employees and those employess support other corporations and the people they employ by purchasing goods and services. The idea that wealth is a finite, limited resource and that the wealthy (or anyone who makes money) are somehow taking it from other people is a falsehood.",
"Unless you stole it...No, not really. Economics doesn't really work that way.\n\nSay you went to work and made $1,000, your employer really isn't worse off for giving you that money...\n\nTypically you are hired because it is presumed that you will bring in more money than you are paid (it has to do with finance and accounting equations, way too complicated for ELI5).\n\nTherefore, if you are getting paid $1000 you might be increasing profit by $1250. So really $1250-$1000 = $250...the business is making a net profit of $250 because you are working...so they are better off not worse.\n\nThis was really simplified. \n\nThink of it this way...\n\nA business is selling a product for $50 per unit, currently 500 units are being sold per week...there are currently 5 workers producing those units. Your employer thinks that an extra worker will be able to produce an extra 100 units per week, so he hires you...but he knows that he will have to pay you $1000 a week for your salary just like his other workers...\n\n(for this answer we will assume that he thought right about the amount of units you can produce)\n\nOriginal Net Profit = ($50 * 500-(5 * 1000)) = $20000\n\nNet Profit After You Are Added To The Work Force = ($50 * 600-(6 * 1000)) = $24000\n\nNet Profit Increase = $4000\n\nSo your employer is better off for hiring you....\n\nHowever, there are exceptions...\n\nLet's say you take out a loan from a bank...that is basically \"risked money\" that the bank gives you...they give it to you because they charge interest so when you pay them back they'll get more money than they gave...\n\nBut if you don't pay back they take a loss...sometimes (it depends if you put something up for leverage)...\n\nFinance has a lot to it...",
"No, because economies grow. New money is constantly being injected into the system, like the Federal Reserve stimulus money. Also, economies expand from inflation.",
"No, that's called the Zero-Sum Game theory. It means that both sides must \"balance\" out. ",
"The way I understand it, the reason the whole roundabout doesn't end up even is due to the banking system.\n\nIf I'm a company and I sell a bunch of things to you, I'm $1000 up and you're $1000 down. But then because I have a revenue stream I can take out a loan to make more things to sell and suddenly I've got another $1000 that someone else also counts as theirs.\n\nAlso banks can get in a deposit and lend it out more than once.\n(the number of times banks can lend out deposits is regulated. _URL_0_)\n\nThe banks themselves are able to draw on Central Bank Funds to keep money in circulation.\n\nThe whole thing is kind of hard to believe (I'm an economist and I don't fully understand it) but the proof is all around. Despite much bigger populations than in the past, the whole world is far far richer on a per capita basis than before.\n\n_URL_1_\n\n\n",
"The simplest way to understand this is through an economic concept called Pareto improvement.\n\nAny trade is a Pareto improvement if both parties regard themselves as better off for having made the trade. Imagine buying a hamburger. You prefer having the hamburger to having the $2 that it costs (otherwise you wouldn't have bought it and would have kept the money) and the restaurant prefers selling you the hamburger than keeping it (because they make a profit).\n\nBy buying a hamburger, you have slightly increased the total value of the global economy, by improving the efficiency by which resources are allocated. The same principle applies to the vast majority of trades - if both parties didn't think that they would be made better off for making the trade, then they wouldn't do it.\n\nThe vast majority of trades in a functioning economy are Pareto improvements. Every time one of those trades takes place, the total wealth of the world improves slightly, because the underlying resources have been allocated in a way that provides a greater amount of utility. Not all of these transactions are ideal, but they're better than no transaction at all.\n\nSituations in which trades are made with no Pareto improvement are sufficiently unusual that they have a specific name in economics, a \"market failure\". Examples of market failures include things like monopolies (where someone can control a market and coerce people into making unfavourable trades) and pollution (where a third party is made worse off by an economic activity).",
"No, because you can create *value* out of thin air. Value is what money buys. You can take a pile of worthless rocks, lying on the ground, and [pile them up into a fence](_URL_0_). Once you've done that, you could sell your land for more than your neighbour's identical plot, because your stone fence added value. When you create value, you create wealth."
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3s9e47 | the "safe space" movement in the us. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3s9e47/eli5_the_safe_space_movement_in_the_us/ | {
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"Basically kids have been brought up to believe that they should NEVER have to feel offended by anything and so now that they're older they are all demanding \"safe spaces\" everywhere they go so they are never exposed to a potentially offensive thought or action.\n\nAnyone who refused to, or is complacent in creating a safe space is typically viewed as some sort of bigot because they don't understand that some people value being exposed to conflicting and even offensive ideas in order to further their own understanding. Instead they assume if you don't want to create a safe space you are intending to offend them at some point and cry foul.\n\nSafe spaces generally mean any action at all that could possibly, even inadvertantly, offend someone is unwelcome. For example some people get anxious around crowds clapping and so some safe spaces actually ban clapping as an expression of approval.\n\nEDIT: I should clarify, safe space isn't a physically defined location. It can be anywhere of any size. It could be an entire work place, a campus a city, anything. Basically a \"safe space\" needs to be anywhere these people are present.",
"It's not really a \"movement\", it's just some college kids. You're not missing much, you don't need to pay any attention to it, and no one in the real world cares about it at all.",
"People raised to believe the world owes them stuff + 'social justice' ideology = 'safe spaces'\n\nThey not only can't handle disagreement or anything they dislike; to them these things simply should not exist in any form. They're basically whiny brats and everyone knows it, but they're politically untouchable because anyone who openly challenges them is accused of being racist/sexist/etc.",
"The social justice movement has become something of a telephone game in the US. At the core, there's good ideas, but down the line certain self righteous individuals take them to illogical extremes. Like with trigger warnings. Saying \"Hey, if you could put a warning before any descriptions of rape or sexual assault, Id appreciate it.\" That's reasonable. But now we literally get people saying shit like \"I'm triggered by Russian speakers.\" Safe spaces, at their core, are a good idea. The LGBT club should be a safe space to discuss your experiences with being LGBT. A feminist group should be a safe space to discuss what it's like to be a woman. Etc etc. But like, a safe space isn't a physical location with demarcated boundaries. You don't \"step into\" the safe space. I don't know. I agree with the core ideas of social justice, but some people are just clueless. Like with any movement, ever.",
"It's the idea that there are places where a person can be without others judging/actively trying to make them feel worse about *whatever*. The idea is that a person's right to feel comfortable in these places is more important than someone else's right to be an ass. People freak out about being told to not say things that hurt others' feelings (see the other comments here) but the idea isn't that you can't say what you want, it's that in these places if you do something to hurt another person (perhaps inadvertently) you'll be asked to stop or go somewhere else.",
"Edit: Apparently something happened in Missouri. Some people were trying to keep media out by force and called it a \"safe space\". That is *not* what a safe space is, whether or not you believe protesters deserve to be media free on public property. I will keep this up in case people want to get informed on the real \"safe space\" idea.\n\nOriginal: I want this post to get more attention so I'll add my own answer as well. This is **long** so TL;DR at the bottom if you don't have time.\n\nI am a Resident Assistant at my university. I'm unsure if the UK uses that term so I'll explain: I live in the dormitories, enforce policies, ensure health and safety of residents, and put on events for residents, some to educate and some just to have fun.\n\nAll residents at my university are safe space trained, and our RA office is a so called safe space, so I will present my understanding of it in the context I know it.\n\nA safe space is simply a place designated to be... well, safe. Anyone who regularly is in that space, or is required to be in that space is educated on being tolerant of other people's ideas and to be careful not to hurt anyone who is emotionally vulnerable.\n\nI would like to put forth some ideas that you may or may not agree with, but they are the basis of the safe space concept. \n\n1. **You are not a worse person for being emotional or emotionally vulnerable.** Despite all your efforts to rationalize or otherwise improve yourself, you may be very emotionally unstable when certain things are concerned. Usually trauma is involved and causes you to be unstable.\n\n2. **Identity crisis is traumatic.** Everyone would probably agree that they wouldn't make a \"your mom\" joke to someone who's mom just died (unless they explicitly expressed they were ok with it). Not many people are willing to admit that someone trying to figure out their sexuality and/or gender are experiencing trauma similar to that kind of loss. Not everyone is, some people are lucky or resilient. But suddenly realizing the person you thought you were for the past 20 years is dead and never coming back is a traumatic experience for most to some degree. Having panic attacks about who you are and how people you love will shun you and employers will shun you and the **world** will shun you, is traumatic. Realizing that you will now never be happy and feel comfortable in your own skin unless you tackle these challenges and deal with the repercussions is traumatic. Identity crisis is traumatic.\n\n3. **Words are powerful.** When you speak you are broadcasting an idea straight into the minds of those that can hear you. Their minds take the idea and do with it what they might, sometimes against their will. You may not be the one who made these people vulnerable to these ideas, but you are presenting the ideas to them. It's equivalent to putting a bomb on the edge of a building's roof. Sure, you didn't set it off, but you made it likely it would. Now of course you don't read minds and aren't expected to, and that will be taken into consideration further down. But just know, words have power.\n\nFinally, on to **what a safe space is:** a safe space is a place where someone can go to talk without fear of an emotional attack. People who are emotionally vulnerable can go to a safe space and ask for support in many forms: where to go for help, how to get therapy, or simply a listening ear so that a secret isn't all on one persons shoulders.\n\nIn addition, safe spaces usually have other purposes as well. The RA office is meant for me to work in and residents to come with any concerns at all about the building, their room, roommate, etc. So another purpose of a safe space is to simply be inclusive and free of judgement, so that people of any denomination feel free to use the safe space for its other purposes. Basically, there shouldn't be anything said that would make someone uncomfortable. Those trained are required to not say the basic obvious ones (that's gay, don't be a faggot/retard/) etc. Those using the space are usually simply asked to think twice before speaking, and if something slips they aren't immediately crucified and sacrificed to Fabuli, the gay penis God. That's not what safe space is about. But being persistent about something that upsets someone will get you asked to leave and eventually kicked out if you still persist. This isn't much different from walking into most places in America and called every black person a \"nigger\". You will be asked to leave and/or kicked out from many places. Safe spaces just acknowledge more that can be hurtful, such as things concerning sexism, sexuality and gender, in addition to race.\n\nIt is my understanding that there is some push to make classrooms and teachers offices safe spaces as well. While I feel they should be, I believe this to be a lofty and hard to reach goal. I would rather not label a place as a safe space if it is not one, and a classroom can never be a proper safe space IMO. Teachers offices might be a little bit more reachable. I think we need to change public opinion about mental illness, social issues, and emotion in general before we can accomplish that.\n\nThis was long and I might have forgotten some important points along the way but:\n\n**TL;DR** Forget animals, **people** are people too. No matter what it is, if you saying something that greatly disturbs someone's mental and emotional state, *please stop saying it around that person*. Even if it's an important idea for intellectual discussion, they won't be able to process it if they are having a panic attack. **You are allowed to be a dick in this world. You aren't allowed to be a dick in a safe space because it could kill someone or cause permanent damage.** I'm also unsure how making classrooms safe spaces would work since having lots of trained people kinda makes it work, but maybe in the future if the public is more accepting of emotional issues."
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37hmo5 | why does facebook want to buy snapchat? why not just add a similar feature? | Are concepts like photos that disappear actually patentable? The idea of sending pictures for messages that disappear after an amount of time isn't exactly new. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/37hmo5/eli5_why_does_facebook_want_to_buy_snapchat_why/ | {
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"Simply put, buying the Snapchat will allow them to keep the user base. If they try and start their own only a few people will use it since Snapchat already exists, think Google+.",
"Nothing to do with patents.\n\nFacebook *could* set up a competing product and they *might* be able to beat Snapchat... even though Snapchat has a head start, great brand image, and a functional product.....\n\nOr they could take the Oracle Corporation Approach (patent pending) - if you can't easily beat them... buy them.\n\nBy buying Snapchat, Facebook gets not only their technology... but also their customers. Much easier and cleaner than trying to compete.",
"To add to what other people have said Facebook *twice* have tried to compete with Snapchat, both of which are considered failures.\n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n"
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20gmve | why did they create a cheek and tongue cleaner when i can just use the toothbrush itself? | Just something I'm a little confused by. It seems like the cheek and tongue cleaners don't do anything at all in comparison to the toothbrush. Is it bad to use the toothbrush for that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20gmve/eli5_why_did_they_create_a_cheek_and_tongue/ | {
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"I've never read a study that said a dedicated tongue cleaner was more or less effective than the brush, but I imagine it's simply a marketing thing -- why sell you one tool when I can sell you a two-in-one tool, or a three-in-one tool with little to no additional engineering and manufacturing?"
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6asoz4 | how does buying something help the economy? | I'm always told to buy American products to help the American economy. How does my purchase help our economy as a whole? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6asoz4/eli5_how_does_buying_something_help_the_economy/ | {
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"\"The economy\" is the flow of money.\n\nWhen you buy a thingy, that money goes to the store you bought it from. Some of it goes to pay whoever made the thingy, some of it goes to pay the store employee, some of it goes to the store's landlord as rent. It flows onward from there: the guy who made the thingy can now go buy something himself; the store employee can take his wife out to dinner; the landlord can pay for building repairs. And it flows onward from there: whomever they pay their share of the money to, that person can go buy something themselves. It's a constant flow. The more people spend, the more money that flows, the better \"the economy\" does. The less people spend, the less stuff changes hands, the worse \"the economy\" does.\n\n\"The economy\" can be subdivided, though. Every town has its own economy, every nation has its own economy, and so on. Money can flow into or out of these mini-economies from other mini-economies. So, say you live in a small town, and you spend a bunch of your money over in another town. Now there's less money flowing around your town, but more flowing around in the other town. You've helped out that other town's economy, but you've hurt your town's. \"Buy American products\" is the same principle. When you buy stuff made in America, you're paying money that eventually ends up as the salaries of American factory workers. They'll spend that money in American restauarants and American movie theaters and such. But if you buy stuff made in another country, that money leaves America and pays the salaries of factory workers somewhere else. You've taken your money out of the US economy and sent it to flow around in a different economy.",
"Let's say you buy something \"Made in USA\"... say a Weber grill. You pay Home Depot $500 for that grill, and that lets Home Depot afford to pay their employees, pay the rent for their store, pay Weber the $300 the grill cost them to purchase it wholesale. Weber can in turn pay the factory workers who made the grill, pay the truck driver who hauled it from the factory to your local Home Depot store. \n\nSo now your $500 has ended up in the hands of workers (and shareholders) at Home Depot, the landlord, the factory workers, the truck driver. And don't forget the sales tax! The state and city employees get paid, the construction companies hired to pave the highways, the etc. get paid, too. Now they can all go out and pay their mortgages, take their family out for dinner, buy a t-shirt, get a haircut, etc. And the cycle repeats..."
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1ebf3p | why are there different ratios for bleach to water when cleaning things (baby toys, the floor, the tub, etc)? | Won't the bleach kill everything no matter how much or little there is in the water? And if it doesn't, why use it to clean in the first place? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1ebf3p/eli5_why_are_there_different_ratios_for_bleach_to/ | {
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"In general cleaning is a game of percentages. You CAN clean it absolutely, kill every living thing on the surface. But it'll require you to use something which may be dangerous for a kid to lick, for example.\n\nSo you use something which kills most of the stuff, which for nearly every purpose is good enough, and also extremely useful for your health."
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3uf84s | why don't they better manage audio levels on dvd movie releases, making quiet talking scenes more loud and toning down loud action/music scenes? | I remember watching The Hobbit, and I had to turn my audio up to about 30 to hear scenes with everyone talking (which is high, by the way), and then it would cut to a new scene and play adventure music EXTREMELY LOUDLY. Why don't they better manage audio levels for movie releases so that way we don't have to constantly adjust our volume? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3uf84s/eli5_why_dont_they_better_manage_audio_levels_on/ | {
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"Because (majority of the time) your setup is at fault, not their mixing. I'm betting you weren't using a 5.1 surround sound system, correct? Well, tv speakers (and soundbars) are not great. Some things you can do to counteract this is to enable \"dynamic range compression\" on your DVD player and on your cable box, and/or use \"Dialogue Enhancer\", \"Clear Voice\", or whatever your tv labels these settings, so that the frequencies of human speech is amplified. \n \nNow, if you were using a surround sound system and still are encountering this issue, increase the sensitivity of the center channel (where most dialogue is played) independently of the other speakers. \n \nAlso, you are using DVD's, which have worse audio quality than Blu-ray, or other HD sources. This isn't really a prevalent factor, but a factor nonetheless."
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3upahm | what makes 80s music so recognizably "80s" and different from music from other decades? | I think it's three things: opera-like vocals, heavily reverberated rhythm tracks and a melodic scheme with bass carrying the bulk of the melody and treble being used for bridging the melody to the beat, which is different from the method of other eras to bridge drum to melody with bass. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3upahm/eli5_what_makes_80s_music_so_recognizably_80s_and/ | {
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"Synthesizers and drum machines primarily, if you were to ask me.\n\nOpera-like vocals in the power ballads maybe, but honestly most decade music comes down to the instruments at the time. \n\nlike my association of the 90s with the \"basitar\" that you see with PotUSA for instance.",
"At the start of the 1980s a lot of pop and rock bands were able to take advantage of cheaper, more reliable and more portable synthesizers than had previously been available, which meant that particular sound was able to gain a stronger foothold.\n\nFor a while, it seemed that guitar bands were possibly disappearing from the spotlight. In reality they were merely preparing a fresh attack. By the mid-80s a new breed of virtuoso *shredders* had come along, with performers such as Yngwie Malmsteen and Joe Satriani releasing their first records. In addition to highly polished technical ability, this batch of performers often had a strong grasp of music theory, meaning that their tunes weren't restricted to the same familiar patterns of chord progressions and scales.\n\nMusical instrument manufacturing, amplification and sound reproduction all came along by huge strides too. This meant that musicians could focus more on their art, instead of being distracted by shoddy equipment which previously had been the norm for many. It also meant more artists could successfully move into regularly performing in large arenas and outdoor stadium venues, developing the type of songs which are more suited to that style of performance.\n\nIn parallel, the underground music scene was continuing to ebb and flow in different locations around the world - resulting in the discovery and success of bands such as Liverpool's [The La's](_URL_1_) and [Echo & The Bunnymen](_URL_0_)\n\nBy the late 80s we had the emergence of grunge and shoegaze, two more very influential and distinctive sounds.",
"It's not. It's just that the stereotype of \"80s music\" is for one particular genre of music that was popular during the 80s. \n\nThe reality is that there is plenty of music made in the 80s that couldn't be dated to the 80s if you didn't know it was the 80s. I can think of a bunch of music that I would never guess was 80s. E.g., Guns n Roses, R.E.M., U2's Joshua Tree, thrash metal. ",
"Really? Nobody is going to mention the sound that defines it all? That overproduced snare drum with reverb just SCREAMS 80s. It's unmistakable. Fortunately it petered out in the early 90s. ",
"There are few songs that sound really 80's. Walk the Moon's Shut Up and Dance sounds really 80s. Darkness's I Believe In A Thing Called Love sounds 80ish too at least to me.",
"It's when synthetizers became useful and cheap enough to take a leading role in music, and suddenly you could orchestrate with sounds no one had used before.",
"There's a great documentary by the BBC called Synth Britannia about post punk, the rise of synth-pop bands and how that defined 80s music and beyond. Really fun to see all those great 80s musicians talking candidly about that era, and great music clips too:\n\n_URL_0_",
"There's actually a serious scientific study that touches on this topic. \n \nHere's the [study](_URL_1_), which is decidedly *not* ELI5. For something a little easier to digest, here's a [PBS Newshour](_URL_0_) article on the study (although their choice of a headline is a bit...unfortunate). \n \nBasically, they had a computer program study songs from the last fifty years, looking at things like harmony and timbre. One of the findings is that music from the 80's were stylistically the least diverse during the rock and roll era. \n \n\"But these sounds and styles of the Reagan era flooded the music scene, pushing out genres like country and folk to the point that mid-to-late 1980s became most homogenous period in music over the last 50 years, based on the team’s computer analysis. This theme doesn’t mean music from this era was bad, but rather it suggests “a small number of styles were very catchy and therefore dominated,” Pagel said.\" \n \nTo put it simply, most of the popular music from the 1980's sounds very much the same (homogenous) - moreso than any other era of music. And it is this distinct \"sameness\" that stands out. ",
"What is interesting is that songs like Hollaback girl and Edge of Glory could be 80's songs, so in a way the form never really died out. Also you can hear the influence to some extent in modern EDM.",
" > opera-like vocals,\n\nDon't agree on that property: \n\n_URL_0_ ",
"Well son everybody just got these new fangled gadgets called synthesizers. They could produce both drums and other instrument sounds. These sounds compared to the sounds made today sound cheap and well...\"synthetic\" which is just a word that means a copy or even \"fake.\" When we hear these cheesy drum sounds and synths together it makes that unmistakable \"new wave\" 80's sound. ",
"For me, it would be the synthesizers. The sound of the Prophet and Fairlight is all over the music of the early to mid 80's. \n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\nThese created such a specific sound/vibe that it just yells 80's. I love the quality they create in songs like West End Girls by the Pet Shop Boys, or Suddenly, Last Summer by the Motels. All of Peter Gabriel's music is filled with them: Shock the Monkey and San Jacinto are great examples. Someone also mentioned the gated reverb, which is absolutely 80's. On the drum side, not just the drum machines, but the original Simmons electronic drums (which look so very 80's).\n\nThe later 80's gave way to glam or big hair rock, as a reaction to the overly produced sound of the early to mid 80's. Which, in turn, eventually gave birth to grunge in reaction to the mindlessness of glam rock.",
"The synthesizer defined the 80's.\n\nSynthesizers existed throughout the 70's, but they were almost universally single voice (monophonic, think like the synthesizer sounds used by Kansas or other prog-rock bands of that time). Synthesizers that could play multiple voices would cost you more than a car. Therefore, they were uncommon and when you heard them they were frequently a \"novelty\".\n\nAs the 80's kicked off, synthesizers began to drop in price. Newer digital technologies that would create more \"realistic\" sounds with multiple voices came into being, and they were cheaper to manufacture as they could be done on Integrated Circuits instead of having to use discrete analogue components for every single part of the sound. This also caused analog synthesizers to plummet in price.\n\nEven the newer digital technologies of the early 80's weren't all that great when it came to replicating sounds though. This was a time when a home PC with 16Kilobytes of RAM cost over $1,500, and that's not adjusting for inflation. As a result, the new digital technologies either continued to rely on synthesis techniques to reduce their sounds to numbers in a memory block, or if they did rely on sample playback would only have a single waveform which would have to be shaped by filtering to mimic the instrument's playback properly.\n\nAn Electric Piano on a DX-7 sounded like an Electric Piano on a DX-7...and not like a real electric piano. A PPG Wave never passed for real strings. However, as people began to delve into the digital technologies, they found out that they could make all sorts of rad 80's sounds with them.\n\nIn addition, the market saturation of analog synths meant that instead of your mainstream rock bands having a synthesizer or two, your nerdy kids might have five or six and also have purchased a sequencer in addition. Artists began talking all kinds of neat tricks out of their analog synths...resulting in even more rad 80's sounds.\n\nAs the 80's progressed, people just began doing more and more fascinating things with their shiny music equipment. Fewer and fewer people making larger and more intricate compositions became the norm. Peter Gabriel could have up to 12 acoustic artists working on a single song and still have a lot of the song be performed on synthesizers in addition. Kraftwerk was four people crafting very repetitive almost classical-style music, while Depeche Mode was four people crafting very repetitive dance music. Eddie Van Halen used an Oberheim OB-Xa to make brass ensembles far more bombastic and vibrant than could ever be accomplished by real brass instruments. Land of Confusion by Genesis would simply not be the same song if it weren't for that obnoxious DX-7 bassline coursing through it. \n\nThis all sounded nothing like anything that had ever been done before. The point you make about the change in arrangement is likely because songs came to be structured around what was now possible.\n\nTwo things happened that brought an end to this era. First, Kurt Cobain murdered music. Second, music technology finally go to the point where digital instruments were finally \"convincing enough\" to replace acoustic instruments. The Korg M1, released in 1988, had 100 patches of mostly realistic instruments. The instrument, and many instruments like it that followed, really reinforced the notion of going back to \"conventional\" instrumentation in much of music. There's still A LOT of great synthesis stuff out there in both the hardware and software domains, but it really didn't start to pop back into the mainstream until the past 5 years or so.",
"Lots of music in the 80's was influenced by dance music in the 70's. The era of music between what was disco and what would become EDM is very fascinating because it went in so many different directions.\n\nEuro disco might not have caught on stateside and American disco might have been \"dead\" but guys like Giorgio Moroder and the CHIC Organization had their hands on plenty of 80's pop hits from Blondie's \"Call Me\" to Madonna's \"Like A Virgin\" to David Bowie's \"Let's Dance\" to \"What A Feeling\" from Flashdance.\n\nThe dance producers of the 70's were among the first to popularize the synthesizer which ended up dominating the 80's.\n\nHip-hop was also influenced by dance music of the 70's. So many early hip hop songs were raps over disco. Some dance producers also made great hip hop. Before the hip hop acts of today used EDM, there were groups like the Jungle Brothers with \"I'll House You\".\n\nEven rock was influenced by dance music. So much is talked about how so much rock music in the late 70's was made \"in opposition\" to dance. But once the 80's rolled around, some of those bands definitely took some sort of influence. The music scene in New York City from the late 70's and into the 80's is a big example. So many different bands with different sounds yet with similarities. A melting pot of sound. Lots of what is called \"post disco\" and \"post punk\" also show this influence. Examples include Liquid Liquid and ESG.",
"Truncated sounds are a pretty big part of it. If you listen closely to 80s songs you'll start to hear the end of the notes will almost be 'cut off' and not let to ring out. Depeche Mode's \"Just Can't Get Enough\" is a good example of this. The notes sound quickly and are then quickly truncated off before they make any lasting ring-out.",
"Recording engineer who also grew up in the '80s as the son of a working composer/musician here.\n\nThe '80s sound comes from a lot of things:\n\n1. Digital audio\nDigital audio recording began in the late '70s and by the '80s it was commonly used in major recording studios in combination with analog gear (to retain \"warmth\"). While this allowed for cleaner, brighter recordings, I also brought on the advent of \"sampling\" which is when you take a short (apx 2 secs or so) piece of digital audio, manipulate it, and use it as thee sound on an instrument. This lead to...\n\n1. The drum machine.\nSpecifically the [roland TR-808](_URL_2_) The drum machine hit the mass market in the '80s as an easy to use, easy to record/mix alternative to a live drummer, and it developed into a style. Setting up a drum kit is a time consuming pain in the ass. (which is why most recording studios have one mic'd and somewhat ready to go) Also a time consuming pain to record and mix. This is a a time when all studios charged a large chunk of change per hour. Drum machine is easy, plug in 2 cables, hit play. [tr-808 emulator, i think. I couldn't test it on my mobile device](_URL_0_) try to not instantly recognize every sound in the thing.\n\n2. Synthesizers.\n\nWhile they had existed in the 70s, the were expensive, hard to use, and broke down often. Like the drum machine, easy to use synths that had a very distinctive sound like the [yamaha dx7](_URL_1_) went onto the market in the '80s. The chief benefit of these synths was that you could store and recall your settings, and thus reproduce the same sound easily. They also had basic sounds that we all recognize easily. Older synths required lots of patch cables and tweaking and never really sounded exactly the same twice in a row. They were also [Massive.](_URL_3_) \n\n3. Solid state amps, pre-amps, and compressors. \n\nSolid state equipment is much easier to use, maintain and transport than older models. It's lighter, more consistant, and more resilient. SS gear from the '80s have a very distinctive (shitty, imho) sound which became synonymous with the '80s, as that very fake, plastic feel fit in very nicely with the dry soulless midrangey sound, which was often countered with layer upon layer of cheap effects. \n\n4. Midi/computers.\nThe '80's brought us the home computing revolution, and with it came midi, a universal language computers can use to talk to synths. The ability to program music changed the way music sounded. Suddenly almost every album had perfect time. Before that, tempo was set by people. You could set a click track (metronome) but no human locks perfectly to a click. This isn't a bad thing, your ability to play in or out of the beat (or pocket, in music lingo) is considered a mark of a great musician. the truly great studio guys can play to a click, and make it sound natural. Computers didn't have the ability to feel the rhythm the way human does. If you tell a computer to play a quarter note on the one, it played a quarter note exactly on the one, down to the millisecond. There were ways around this (perform it on a midi keyboard, have your software \"record\" the midi signal) but the novelty of the \"computer\" sound was big in the '80s.\n\n5. The '70's.\nAlmost all music is, to some extent a response to the music that came before it. 60's hippy music is answered by 70's stadium rock, which is answered by new wave, which is answered by grunge, etc. A gross over simplification, I know, but you get the idea. Prog rockers from the '70s became pop stars (think Peter Gabriel and Phil Collins) and brought a newer, more complex and experimental aesthetic to popular music. Punk brought a blunt aggressively rebelious style that got integrated into the mainstream. Budget cuts to music education for inner city schools got urban youth making music using their parents turntables. \n\n6. The '80s.\nIt was mostly this. Like in any industry/community, things go into and out of fashion in the recording and mixing industry. The boomy, almost bass-drum-like snare sound of disco was out, heavily compressed guitar licks covered in cheap delays and reverb were in. [The yamaha Ns-10 speaker made a massive impact on the recording industry for 30 years, which began just in time for the 80's.](_URL_4_) Mixes got brighter and more compression. Drum machines meant much cleaner drum tracks (bass drum doesn't bleed into the snare mic, etc) so you got super clear, distinctive drum sounds. When you did have a drummer, his kit was HUGE, and had lots of odd things all over it. (gongs, chimes, trashcan lids, roto-toms) The [record John Bonham with 4 mics] (_URL_5_) style was out, and the \"put an [sm-58](_URL_6_) on every goddam part of my 75 piece kit\" method was in. The combined vision of producers, engineers, artists, the buying decisions made by the consumers, and a whole host of other stuff that was happening at that specific time got together and made the collective artistic genre that is the '80's.\n\nEDIT: When I'm wrong, I'm wrong. I was WAAAY off on the timeline for digital recording, so revisions were made (auto-correct REALLY wanted this sentence to be \"revisions were mace\". idk why). We're talking about an era that's 5-15 years before my time in the industry and not, say, elementary school, so all my knowledge is second hand (although my second hand sources are pretty damn good). You also have to understand that talking about digital vs analog recording amongst recording engineers (more so in the 80s-90s) about digital vs analog audio is much like talking about mac vs windows pretty much anywhere on the internet. so research here was a bit lacking given the .03 seconds I originally did any. ",
"Thin, high leveled snare drums, reverberated everything, phased/flanged guitars, lots of shit sounding synth, lots of shit sounding synth as a lead, eighth notes, high-gain guitars",
"During the 80s, analog and digital synths became readily available for use by musicians. However, they weren't as complex as the software synths used in today's music. The 80's synth sound is based on sawtooth waves, a jagged sound wave that produces the \"buzz\" sound. They are still used today, but they are more precise and less distorted than the ones from the 80's.\n\nAnother element was the 80s analog drum machine. The 808, DMX and Linn drums produce most of what we think of as \"80's\" rhythm. They are to the 80s as the 909 drum was to 90s techno music. People experimented with all sorts of timbales, castanets, woodblocks, bells, and other sounds hidden in these machines."
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1eoi60 | why does the rh factor in blood types make a difference? | I understand why we have different blood types, but I'm having a hard time understanding exactly why an O+ and O-, for example, are very different. What exactly does the presence or lack thereof the Rh factor mean? Does it have any type of impact on us? Thanks in advance for your time and answers! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1eoi60/eli5_why_does_the_rh_factor_in_blood_types_make_a/ | {
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"Blood typing is figured out by looking at what antigens they have. An A type has A antigens, B type has B antigens, AB has A and B antigens, and O type has no antigens.\n\nWhen an antigen is put into blood that does not have that antigen, it causes problems. That is why AB can accept A or B or AB or O, why A can accept A or O, and why O can only accept O.\n\nJust think of RH as another antigen. If blood already has it, it can accept it. Otherwise, it causes problems. If a blood type is RH+, it can take RH+ blood or RH- blood. If it is RH-, it can only take RH- blood.\n\nThat was the ELI5 version, if you want technical details, maybe try wikipedia."
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86wl6t | why is the perfect ratio of oxygen to hydrogen in rocket combustion 6:1 and not 8:1? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/86wl6t/eli5_why_is_the_perfect_ratio_of_oxygen_to/ | {
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"I understand why you think that, but the stoichiometric ratio is not the most important consideration when determining propellant and oxidizer ratios.\n\nBurning propellants is most efficient, in terms of heat produced per mass of propellant, at the stoichiometric ratio, which as you know is 8:1 for hydrogen and oxygen, but for a given amount of energy, the momentum is maximized by making the gas molecules as light as possible. which is why hydrolox engine ideally has a large excess of H2 molecules over H2O and other combustion products, meaning they need to run fuel-rich.\n\nIt's different for every single engine, and sometimes varies per engine during the flight. For example, the RS-25, the Space Shuttle main engine, used a 6.03:1 propellant mixture ratio, the J2, which powered the 2nd and 3rd stages of the Saturn V used a 5.5:1 ratio that could be adjusted during flight, and the Vulcain 2, which power the Ariane 5, uses a 6.7:1.",
"This has to do with creating the fastest exhaust velocity.\n\nWithout going into much technical detail, the exhaust velocity of a rocket is directly related to the overall expansion ratio of the exhaust gases. Hopefully this should make logical sense to you. This explains, from one point of view, why rockets create less thrust at sea level than they do in a vacuum.\n\nHydrogen has the greatest rate of thermal expansion of any gas. by adding additional unburned hydrogen to the chamber it increases the amount that the exhaust expands as it exits the nozzle, thus increasing the exhaust velocity. This is because water vapor has a lower thermal expansion rate than pure hydrogen. The fact that it decreases the chamber temperature as well, increases the margin of safety of the chamber walls, which is a bonus.\n\n\n"
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e70xl7 | how do websites know a phone number is google voice? | I like to use my GV to avoid spam to my real mobile number but some websites can detect that it's not tied to a mobile carrier and won't allow it. How do they know? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/e70xl7/eli5_how_do_websites_know_a_phone_number_is/ | {
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"Different carriers purchase a range of phone exchanges to use and assign to subscribers. I’m sure Google is just doing the same thing and those websites are able to determine this by validating the number. You can do a reverse lookup on a phone number to find out the carrier using public databases.",
"There are databases you can query to see what carrier a phone number belongs to. First is the LERG (local exchange routing guide). The LERG will tell you the carrier that block of numbers is assigned to. But if a number has been ported to a different carrier, you have to query the LNP (local number portability) database. That tells you where the number has been moved to (AT & T, Tmobile, Google Voice)."
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za3ok | why is my groin tan compared to the rest of my pale skin that never gets any sun? | Answered! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/za3ok/eli5_why_is_my_groin_tan_compared_to_the_rest_of/ | {
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"I also want to know why this is.",
"Your balls are tanner than my face",
"You should probably wash your groin. ",
"My guess:\nSkin around there is a lot more folded and loosen (a little bit like knees and elbows) which makes it more shadowy / darker. If you stretch it it will look pale as it actually is.",
"Yes, why is my penis more tan than the rest of my body? This is something I would like to know.",
"I think it's a combo of thicker/folded skin and increased blood flow",
"Okay little Timmy. You asked about a big boy part of the body. That's fine. If you are ready to ask the question then you are ready to hear an answer. \n \nRemember how red a red balloon is when you first take it out of the package? Remember how it looks much lighter red after you blow it up? That's because the balloon is all squished together before it is inflated and the red seems darker. \n \nWell, the skin on your boy bits are like that balloon. Squished together and they can be streched out where they would look as white as the rest of your skin. \n \nDon't worry about the streching out part until you are older. Right now you are far too young and you could hurt yourself if you pull and strech too much. Later when you are a teenager yo will be able to understand this stuff better. \n \n[***Wow! These 5 year olds are asking the tough ones these days!***]",
"Having some experience with transgender crotch regions and noticing how they compare (pasty white) to my own, I think it has to do with the circulatory system around your nads. When you are \"excited\" down there, you notice how it fills up with blood, right? Well, it needs a lot of blood-filling-friendly tissue to be able to do that. Granted, I'm not a doctor - I'm probably the farthest thing from one - but that's the conclusion I came to when considering the question.\n\nTL;DR - I think it's because there's so many veins/spongey tissue full of blood in that region.",
"Thanks to you, \"penis melanin\" is now in my browser history. Good thing nobody else uses this computer.\n\nFound a few \"good\" resources saying that melanin in whites is mostly in the nipples, penis and vagina, and a bunch of questions on yahoo-answers type sites and forums echoing the same thing.\n\nFrom _URL_0_\n\n\"Pheomelanin is particularly concentrated in the lips, nipples, glans of the penis, and vagina.\"",
"Alright you feckin' boys.... Why, as a woman, are my naughty bits a little more tan than the rest of my (very pale) skin?",
"When this was asked in /r/AskScience, the consensus was that the groin had higher concentrations of melanin (The stuff that makes your skin look dark) than other parts of your body. ",
"According to my biology teacher uncle, it's because there's more melanin (the chemical that colours your skin, eyes, etc.) in your groin than other places. He couldn't remember why off the top of his head, but he suggested it might have something to do with the proximity to major glands causing higher hormone activity which somehow precipitates higher melanin levels. Gimme a bit to eat and I'll try to find out why.",
"UV lights under the inside rim of all toilets.",
"ITT: People checking their groins right now.",
"Like many others have pointed out, melanin is what makes skin dark. But it's not the *concentration* of melanin that does this, it's the *size* of the bits of melanin, called *granules*. Larger melanin granules protect the skin from many threats, like UV exposure and skin cancer. One hypothesis for why fair skinned individuals have larger melanin granules in the groin region is based on the idea that darker skin can even protect against bacteria and fungal infections! This was first noted during the Vietnam War, when African American and Latino soldiers were found to report fewer cases of these infections, which are caused by the damp jungle climate. Since your groin could probably be compared to a \"damp jungle climate\" it is possible that darker skin in that area serves as a first line of defense against these types of infection and provided an evolutionary advantage to those individuals with that trait. ",
"Are you wiping front to back?",
"never before have i read a post that's forced me to immediately open my pants and look at my genitalia "
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11a5cj | why is syria shelling turkey? | Help me understand what is unfolding over there. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11a5cj/eli5_why_is_syria_shelling_turkey/ | {
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"there are some strong indications that free syrian army might be behind this shelling so that turkey could enter the war that rebels losing against the syrian army.",
"/u/devTristan explained why they cannot get along. But not a lot of why NOW they are shelling each other? Here's my own opinion, open to discussion:\n\nCurrently, only 4 out (of 11 or 12) Corps of Syrian army are fighting the rebels. The other 7 corps aren't totally trusted by the regime. Pulling Turkey into fight, which sounds very crazy will cause Assad to declare national war against Turkey \"to defend their country against invasion\" and so order all army units to fight.\n\nOne would think, why would Assad want powerful Turk Army to get involved? Well, first he has nothing more to lose (except his life, since he lost presidency long time ago on ground). Second, only 1/3 of Syrian Army is fighting now and more than 30 thousand people died. Imagine what would happen if all the army is fighting? This will cause the causality rate to sky rocket and will force other countries like NATO, Iran and Russia to get involved and cause a regional war. Something which Assad himself said will happen if anyone invaded his country. This war might then end in a peace treaty or a political solution, which is a very good option for Syrian regime.\n\ntl;dr Syrian regime is trying in all ways to export the war. This will cause the other 2/3 of his army to fight and will force other countries to become part of it, then finally call for a treaty, surrender or urge for a political solution.\n",
"There is a Syrian city and Turkish city [right next to each other on the border](_URL_1_), Syria says that rebels are crossing at this point with supplies from Turkey.\n\nSyria claims to be targeting these rebels, but accidentally shooting too far across the boarder.\n\nHere's the Syrian information minister [explaining and apologising for the incident](_URL_0_):\n\n > Syria's Information Minister Omran Zoabi offered Damascus's \"sincere condolences to the families of the victims and to our friends the Turkish people\".\n\n > Without admitting the shelling, Mr Zoabi said: \"The border with Turkey is long, illegal arms trafficking takes place along the border and armed groups move along the border.\"\n\n > Syria, he said, respected the sovereignty of neighbouring countries. ",
"Am I the only one who thinks it is ridiculous that Assad suddenly decides to attack Turkey while there is a civil war?\n\nWe know USA really want to jump in and these attacks will give them a strong reason to.",
"All this talk of tukeys makes me think this should be on /r/explainlikeimjive ",
"Because of Thanksgiving, probably. Oh, SHELLING.",
"Something I'd like cleared up is whether Turkey has been \"accidentally\" shelled multiple times over the course of a few days since last week by Syria and so this is why Turkey has been bombing Syria for days now or if Turkey was only \"accidentally\" shelled once last week by Syria to which Turkey responds with continuous bombing. The stuff I've been reading hasn't made this explicitly clear to me yet. Pretty much I'm asking if it seems like Turkey is overreacting by this point or if it's become an ongoing back-and-forth thing."
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a484bd | why do some patients get high off anaesthesia while others don't? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a484bd/eli5_why_do_some_patients_get_high_off/ | {
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"Most anaesthesia are morphins or related substances.\n\nThe desired effects (numbing pain, causing sleep/unconsciousness) are caused by the very same substances that cause the \"high\".\n\nBasically everyone does get high - but mileage may vary. Some people might feel it more strongly and others less.\n\nMost people never notice the high, because they just sleep through it."
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8bu85o | how do members of the clergy get promoted? | What consititutes good performace, which qualifies someone to be considered for promotion? Or does it not work that way? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8bu85o/eli5_how_do_members_of_the_clergy_get_promoted/ | {
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"I come from a non\\-denominational background, so I can't speak to large denominations, but I'd say it's a two\\-parts: 1\\) they need to handle tasks and roles \\(teaching, organizing events, offering counseling, administering funds, etc\\) assigned to them by the senior pastor and other leadership well, and 2\\) they need to have a good rapport with the congregation, as much as their role allows \\(obviously some roles don't interface as much with people as others\\).\n\nAlso, in some cases it doesn't matter. In strict business terms, if you don't like how things are run, you can always go start your own. That said, to be affiliated with some organizations, you must serve in their organization first and be ordained, etc.",
"Pretty much like any other career. You try to show you can do your job well, especially the parts that are applicable to the next position. You don't make your boss come in and solve your problems for you, but at the same time you don't let them get out of control by bringing them in too late. You make it well known you are interested in the next position. You put in your time and pay your dues, and you play a lot of politics.\n\nIn the case of the clergy, you might start out as a youth pastor at a small church. You run the Sunday school program well, you design interesting youth activities, keep attendance high and get more compliments than complaints, and you get promoted to associate pastor. \n\nThere you might be in charge of things like adult Sunday school, senior outreach, church maintenance, and you would conduct some services as well. Do well at that, and you become a head pastor and run a whole church. Do well at that, and you might become a bishop or some other kind of regional leader. And so on, until you are pope or grand patriarch or whatever.\n\nThis assumes you are in a religion with a lot of hierarchy. Many are more grassroots, and there is nothing beyond running a church, and a promotion means leaving to start your own.",
"Those denominations that have a central hierarchy and thus have ranks in their clergy members have methods of observing how well they perform. Church attendance, donation rate, conversion rate, amount of charity work done, skill as an orator, etc are all things taken into consideration for advancement. The specifics will vary based on the position being filled and the skill and goals of the specific denomination. "
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3rymfm | why are election polls often inaccurate? why should or shouldnt we trust them? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3rymfm/eli5_why_are_election_polls_often_inaccurate_why/ | {
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"Polls depend on two things: asking a representative sample of people, and the people telling you the truth. Neither can be guaranteed. Early polls fail because people change their mind, they don't do what the told the pollster they would do. Late polls fail less, but it's often due to the first factor, it can be very hard to figure out which part of the population will actually vote.\n\nTrust is nice, but you need to have reasonable expectations. The folks at fivethirtyeight tend to do some nice studies of polling statistics as the election gets nearer."
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elbyu3 | why being in any pose in bed in the morning is so comfortable yet it takes time to find comfortable pose trying to sleep? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/elbyu3/eli5_why_being_in_any_pose_in_bed_in_the_morning/ | {
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"When you’re trying to go to sleep the muscles in your body have yet to completely relax. If you stretch and/or meditate for a decent amount of time before bed you will feel more relaxed and be more comfortable.\n\nWhen you’re waking up your muscles have been resting all night, so you feel cozy.",
"Your brain is still half sleep and most of your conscious mental energy will be spent thinking about going to sleep or waking up, not whether or not your body is a position that's 99% comfortable instead of 100%. Kind of like when you're drunk, your brain just doesn't care about minor details when you first wake up.",
"I may have understood the question wrong but here's my take.\n\n--\n\nWhen you first get into bed at night, there's that same \"comfortable\" feeling.\n\nThere's a mechanism where you're brain asks your body \"are you sleeping?\" by triggering a position discomfort or a face itch. If you don't answer those triggers by moving or scratching, your body gets very comfortable again and the brain numbs the body. Feels like a weird system for as long as you're unable to sleep due to lack of weariness, the brain keeps asking that question if you're still long enough and answer the question.\n\nIf you're still weary in the morning, there's not enough time for the question to be asked before you fall back asleep.",
"While you sleep your body creates and fills up with a chemical tranquilizer that relaxes your nervous system (to help you stay asleep and to reduce involuntary movements while you are dreaming)\n\nSo when you wake up you are basically on a drug. a very \"feel good\" drug, very similar to an opiate.\n\nI takes a few minutes of standing (increase heart rate and blood flow) and breathing (oxygenate blood) to clear out the tranquilizer. This is why you feel groggy when you first wake up as well (because that tranquilizer is in your head too)",
"Your muscles are relaxed and your sleep chemistry is wearing off, which includes chemicals that \"paralyze\" your body to stop it from moving too much in your sleep.",
"ELI5 explanation: once your body has been in rest for that long, your muscles go numb from limited blood flow throughout your body and aren’t being as active as they were when you were going to sleep so you feel less pain/discomfort for all positions when you just wake up.",
"Because you're in two entirely different states of consciousness at each time. At nighttime—with the exception of a few people obviously—you have been a conscious, thinking being for over 10 hours and it is difficult to be comfortable in a position of physical rest when you are in a position of psychological unrest (this is more true in this day in age where work hours and, similarly, stress, ADHD, and mood disorders have increased.\n\nSo you’re less high-maintenance when you have low-consciousness because the more aware you are of your surroundings, your feelings, the more aware you are of anything that can be a discomfort. When you are just waking your body, and mind, up you just don't have the capacity to feel much discomfort.",
"Because, it is the *changing of states* wich which children and, too often, adults resist, or in this case, have some trouble. I present the claim that you use your snooze as evidence.",
"When you go to sleep it takes time to process how reality rawdogged you with bullshit all day, then the mental gymnastics of convincing yourself things will be better soon, finally relax. Takes awhile.\n\nWhen you wake up from the dreams you had from buying into your own horseshit, you are in a fog for a bit. everything seems fine before the fog begins to lift and reality begins to pound you with its hard on for your suffering.\n\nDuh.",
"Your body is relaxed after sleep, before sleep it’s not relaxed and needs time to loosen up",
"Soooo someone once said something that changed sleeping for me forever. \nSo exactly this, you know how in the morning it's soooooo comfy and in the evening it's all toss and turn.\nIts a mind trick, for whatever reason you can't settle in the evening try and imagine it's the morning and you need to get up and you've just got 10 more minutes to snooze, feel how heavy your body gets and how you get quite comfortable quite easily. \n9/10 works for me most times 👌"
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5onhm1 | why is judaism considered as a race of people and a religion while hundreds of other regions do not have a race of people associated with them? | Jewish people have distinguishable physical features, stereotypes, etc to them but many other regions have no such thing. For example there's not really a 'race' of catholic people. This question may also apply to other religions such as Islam. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5onhm1/eli5_why_is_judaism_considered_as_a_race_of/ | {
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"Judaism is a non-proselytizing religion that only accepts converts reluctantly and frowns on intermarriage. \n\nUnlike the other Abrahamic faiths, most Jews claim descent to the people who lived in the middle east during biblical times, rather than convert populations. There are some convert populations, of course, but not a huge percentage. \n\nAs a result, Jews are less like catholics, and more like Italians, if Italians were 90% of catholics and you could basically only become Catholic by birth.",
"Judaism is what's called an \"ethno-religious group\". Thousands of years ago, that was pretty common. If you were Egyptian, you almost certainly also followed the Ancient Egyptian religion. If you were Jewish, you almost certainly also followed the Jewish religion.\n\nThis was to the point that it was almost \"by definition\". The Egyptians didn't expect non-Egyptians to follow the Egyptian religion, and the Jews didn't expect the non-Jews to follow the Jewish religion. There are writings from antiquity talking about how whenever someone traveled to a different place or married into a different tribe/nation, they'd sacrifice to the local gods of the area, not worrying about the ones back home until they got home. During times of war, there would be attempts to lure the other side's god(s) to your side with offers of better sacrifices or whatever.\n\nAgain, this was the common state of humanity and its various groups for thousands of years. It was generally assumed that there were many gods of many nations, each set of god(s) looking out for their respective nations. Pantheons were fluid, with gods in different pantheons being identified with each other (oh, you have a thunder god too? It's probably the same guy, you just call him Bob instead of Spencer, next time I sacrifice I'll call out to Bob too...).\n\nWhere the Jews and Judaism differed from most others is that they became strict monotheists (there's evidence that at the beginning of the Jewish religion they were more accurately \"henotheists\", meaning they recognized that other gods existed, but only theirs was the best/most powerful/chief).\n\n(EDIT: Above I originally said that henotheism meant that they felt it was only right to worship one, not that one was the most powerful/chief/best. The correct term for thinking it's right to worship only one is \"monolatry\", which is a difference that I swear I knew before. Props to u/Zorro_Darksauce for the correction.)\n\nThis monotheism gave rise to the idea that non-Jewish gods didn't exist. While they shed polytheism, they didn't shed the nation-god association, meaning that God was *their* God and while He was also everyone else's God, everyone else had a lesser role in His plan and weren't required to do as much and/or were denied His special favor.\n\nThe other way in which Judaism differed from many others is that this dynamic continued until today. The other major examples that I can think of would be Shinto and Hinduism, but there are countless religions of equal pedigree and age around the world that are often lump under the generic \"folk religion\" tag.\n\nThis is contrasted with religions like Christianity and Islam, which were founded as religions not for a particular people, but for *all* people. As a result, they had an imperative to go out and convert others to their religion that was lacking in the earlier dynamic (and would even have been viewed as kind of silly...\"they're not Japanese, why would they practice Shinto?\")",
"As other people have mentioned, Judaism doesn't focus on conversion and often people marry within the faith. Because of that it's actually possible to tell genetically if you have racially (not religiously) Jewish ancestors. My mother's family is Jewish and my father's family is Christian. I did 23andme a couple years ago and it accurately identified me as 49.9% Ashkenazi (a subgroup of Jewish people who originated in Eastern Europe).\n\nSo to answer your question, it's because Judaism *is* both racial and religious and that can even be proven with DNA. I am not religious, but I consider myself Jewish by culture.",
"Idea is that Abraham's faith was passed down to his son Isaac then to his son Jacob a.k.a Israel. He had 12 sons whose progeny's progeny became a clan or 12 tribes of Israel. Abraham had made a covenant with God to ~~upload~~ uphold certain rules of God in order for his children to remain guided and prosper. Jews practiced these laws of God until they received a law bearing Prophet of God named Moses. Jews renewed the covenant and were blessed with more guidance and laws. With the renewal of the covenant they because the chosen people. Jews come from the same ethnicity, although Europeans have mixed into Jews and have become Jews now as well. The Jews are understood to be a separate ethnicity and because of interbreeding with other Jews, there are specific illness and diseases that are more common in Jews then they are in other ethnicity.\n\nEdit: I forgot to language. ",
"To add to what others have said it's also worth pointing out that many Jews are not typically Semitic looking- despite centuries of discrimination and the like you cannot tell either religion of ethnicity by looks. ",
"You say Jewish people have distinguishable physical features, but I am not sure I agree with that. Jewish people have a wide range of appearances, which are more closely tied to where they originated than their religion. If you walk around Beirut, for example, the local people (mainly Christian and Muslim) don't look significantly different to those in Tel Aviv (mainly Jewish), less than 150 miles along the coast. \n\nAnd you say that hundreds of other regions don't have a race associated with them; they very much do. Almost all regions have a local or native ethnic group, so I am not sure what you mean.\n\nWith regards to other religions, there is not a race of Christian people, but you do get local Christian ethnic groups, such as the Assyrians, Goan Catholics, Antiochian Greek Christians, Armenian Christians, Chuvash, etc. and that applies to all of the major religions, and many of the minor ones too. With Islam, for example, you have Hausas, Uyghers, Somalis, Bosniaks, etc. who all have their own distinctive physical features, culture, language, and so on.",
"Because it was an ethnic group first that developed a religion for its people. This was common during the era of humanity that the religion was created and most religions in human history were like this. The concept of converting other people to your religion is a \"new\" thing in human history so having religions not associated with your ethnicity are new. Judaism is simply one of the few religions of the older form that has survived into modernity. \n\nEdit: And for Islam, it started with Arabs but does not actually have any ties to an ethnic group. That is a common mistake made by people ignorant of it as a religion. Most Muslims live is Southeast Asia and are not even near the Middle East. ",
"Except you'll notice it doesn't appear as a race on standard and official documentation and forms.",
"It is actually an ethnicity and religion, not race and religion. \n\nThere are many types of religions and they are different in many ways. One way in which they differ is how they expand. Judaism is not the sort of religion that recruits followers, but rather breeds only with Jews to increase numbers (used to, anyway, times have changed). While anyone born to a Jewish mother is considered Jewish, they will also share the religion of Judaism. An ethnicity is a group of people who share common blood and cultural heritage, often also associated with certain locations in which they reside. ",
"Considering that the question of whether Jewish is a race has been debated for ages, I'd say your premise is too questionable to ELI5.",
"Before I answer your question, I have to note that most of the answers here, even those with hundreds of upvotes, are in part or even wholly wrong. I don't know why there is so much ignorance about Judaism - it is not exactly a secret religion and there is plenty of fairly authoritative information about who we are and what we believe on the Internet (well, I guess a lot of BS written by non-Jews and even anti-Semites, too, so maybe it is difficult separating truth from reality here).\n\nTo dispel some of the myths I've read so far:\n\n- Judaism does accept converts and has so since ancient times. It is only frowned upon because Jews see the obligations incumbent on Jewish people alone (613 commandments) is an unnecessary burden for Gentiles to take on (who are obligated to follow 7 commandments). Jews believe that Gentiles who follow that tiny subset of obligations to be just as righteous as Jews who follow the full set.\n\n- While Judaism doesn't stress the afterlife like Christianity and Islam do, what's clear from our tradition is that it is not reserved for Jews. Everyone (everyone) ends up in the same place: \"the world to come\" (which is ambiguously defined since, well, no one has ever come back to tell us about it...).\n\n- Sincerity is important for conversion, so the idea that converts are only allowed to take in spouses is diametrically wrong. Prospective converts are routinely denied if they are found to be doing so just to appease future in-laws.\n\n- Not only are converts considered as Jewish as someone born Jewish, there is actually a commandment that Jews can not treat converts differently, and can not even draw attention to the fact that a convert wasn't born Jewish. A convert is as Jewish as Moses.\n\n- The \"God's chosen people\" is completely misinterpreted. Among Jews familiar with our religious tradition, it has always meant the obligations of Torah and the fact that the Jewish nation chose to accept them. It has never meant we believe God loves us more than Gentiles; this is a strawman invented by Catholic authorities ages ago in order to demonize us.\n\n- In Judaism, there is no concept of race. It is meaningless. There are and have been Jews of all sorts of national origin since ancient times, not least due to the fact that conversion has always existed (the book of Ruth is literally about Judaism's first convert). As for how we feel about treating people who are different based on their looks/national origin: in the Bible, Moses's sister Miriam is struck with a sort of disease when she makes fun of Moses's (African) wife, and God doesn't release her from the disease until she repents for days.\n\n- There is no concept of a \"racial Jew\" or \"partial Jew.\" You're either Jewish or you're not; you were either born to a Jewish mother or a convert, or you're not Jewish. Period. Someone with a Jewish father but a Gentile mother is not Jewish (unless s/he converts). And since both mother & father contribute the same amount of DNA to a child, the idea that Judaism cares about how much \"Jewish DNA\" you have is simply not true.\n\nSo, to answer your question: \n\nJudaism is only a religion. The reason that, in certain locations in the world, Jews look broadly similar to one another is that those groups historically didn't intermarry (they followed the religious commandment to marry another Jew) and conversion was either frowned upon or outright forbidden (sometimes under penalty of death or punishment of the Jewish community) by the surrounding population, or there was so little contact between Jews and their Gentile neighbors that each population evolved separately.\n\nIt might be helpful, though, to think of the Jewish people as a nation. You can either be born to a nation automatically and have all the obligations incumbent on you automatically by virtue of your birth, or you can join the nation (\"naturalize\") by agreeing to follow rules and being accepted by a designated authority.\n",
"The difference is actually a lot simpler than a lot of these posters are making it seem. \n\nHebrew= the Jewish ethnicity,\nJudaism= the religion of Hebrews",
"Something to add on is that Jewish people appear to be more of a unified \"race\" because of hundreds of years of discrimination. In Spain late 15th century, the inquisition. In Germany middle 20th century, the holocaust. And just continuous discrimination throughout history since the founding of the religion.\n\nEDIT: Forgot that the Jews were never enslaved in Egypt, thanks people's. \n15th not 14th century.",
"There's an increasing trend (especially in Reform Judaism) to accept patrilineal Jews as part of the fold, and Kaifeng Jews are different in that, like most Chinese people, inheritance comes through the father. And there are plenty of people whose fathers were the Jewish ones but they were still raised (or at least partially) Jewish, like Carrie Fisher. Thing is, it's basically in the realm of ethnicity and community. And converts ARE accepted, there's just a prohibition on proselytism and a conversion process is long to make sure that people really want to go through it. There are also many types of Jews (Kaifeng, Ashkenazi, Mountain, Beta, Mizrahim, etc) but we're united by the faith (even if many aren't religious), common family ties and the fact that we're around 1% of the world's population.\n\nSource: am Jewish.\n\nPS it's so typical to see the racists and antisemities crawl out of the woodwork to scream about Israel and Pharisees and whatever nonsense they like to think Jews cause even though this thread only asked about ethnoreligion.",
"I really want to challenge the proposition that Jewish people have distinguishable physical features. There is sufficient genetic diversity within the Jewish population, if nothing else, across the Ashkenazi/Sephardi divide. There's a Jewish diaspora all over the world. Eastern European Jews have had a long time to have different genetics than Iberian Jews. I grew up next to [Mexican Jews](_URL_1_) such as [Diego Rivera](_URL_3_). There are also [black Ethiopian Jews](_URL_2_). Natalie Portman looks nothing like Sammy Davids Junior who looks nothing like Mila Kunis or Daniel Radcliffe.\n\nFurthermore, be very wary of the concept of \"[race](_URL_0_)\" itself, as there is a widespread suspicion amongst modern scientists that the idea that people can be classified into races is untenable.",
"It's because their religion was also their government and social and political system. The religion was a 'tribe' and the tribe was the religion. \n\nIt's true outsiders could convert and mix into Judaism but overall they kept fairly exclusive and so did their blood, genetics, their physical family features and ancestry. \n\nIt does seem confusing today because Judaism is no longer one single unified tribe of people in one single place. They were dispersed around the world. \nAnd they have even become less and less of a 'genetic family' that way too as they mixed with people around the world. Hence 'blond blue-eyed Jews' or dark Arabic Jews or Slavic Jews etc. \n\nBut the original idea was that the race and religion were the same thing. They were one in the same. ",
"Judaism is highly wrapped up in ethnicity, you can convert and be welcomed but historically most people didn't and they weren't actively encouraging conversion because it's their religion, so you end up with kind of a base population that most Jews trace their origin from. Actually several base populations, e.g. Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Ethiopian, but those are widely separated populations and mostly didn't bump into each other. Thus the similarities in appearance.\n\nThe key difference from Christianity and Islam is that the other two are universalistic religions. They think they're appropriate for all people in all places in all circumstances at all times. They actively seek converts, so there can't be an ethnicity thing.",
"This subject is limited by our vocabulary.\n\nFor example, when someone asks \"are you mexican?\", without proper context you won't know if they are talking about mexican nationality, mexican ethnicity or race, or mexican culture.\n\nJudaism is like this except it has religion as well.\n\nIt's worse in the US where anyone not caucasian gets asked \"where are you from? (ethnicity)\".\n\nThings get even more messy when you ask the question to someone that wasn't born in the US. Like a white person from South Africa or a black person from the UK.\n\nIn short: nationality, ethnicity, religion and culture are things that may have the same answer and thus talking about it can get confusing very easily.",
"thousands of years as a segregated minority group (segregated both by choice and not) led to an overlap between the religion and genetics.\n\n",
"I'm reading a bunch of the answers here but I have a question. Didn't Hitler put a big emphasis on the Jews being a race? Because if the Jews are a race then there is something inherently wrong with them in their genes and that is why they are inferior (their thoughts not mine). I remember learning that somewhere.",
"Jewishness is not a race. People of any race can be Jewish- either by birth or by conversion. Jewishness can be considered an ethnicity (e.g. Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi, Ethiopian Jews are ethnic groups). ",
"While there is some concept of ethnicity, the simple fact that most jews are either ashkenaz (east european) or sefarad (north african) shows how much ethnic diversity you can find in the religion. A Moroccan jew looks like a Moroccan, not like a ashkenaz jew.",
"As a Jew I i was told by my father at an early age that we are not a race, we are members of a faith, and throughout history people have only categorized us as a race to persecute us.",
"Identification of religion and ethnicity is not limited to Jews. Zoroastrianism was originally a world religion but is now confined to two ethnic groups. Throughout the Middle East there are groups like Yezidis, Mandeans, Druzes, even the Alevis in Turkey in a way, who are both things at once.",
"As an ethnic Jew who practices Christianity, I can answer this easily. \n\nJudaism is considered a race/ethnicity as it is conferred by birth, regardless of what you look like. If your mother is a Jew, then you are a Jew. As Jews, there is a religion that our group has followed for thousands of years (it's made some changes, but the broad strokes are the same). Since the religion is only followed by Jews, it's called Judaism. You can convert to being a Jew, but it involves not just changing your religious beliefs, but the honest desire to become a part of the Jewish people as well. It's similar to becoming a citizen of another nation. \n\n ",
"Assuming by race you mean what all usually mean, then it's because people are stupid and can't tell the difference between an ideology and skin colour. Some will argue that because people of this ideology keep the breeding (some what) within a community that shares their ideology that this makes them a race. It doesn't. Other religions do this, they aren't races. Some nationalities do this, they aren't a race unto themselves either. Canadian breed with other Canadians, there is no Canadian race. ",
"So aren't most arabs thought to be muslims, and most indians thought to be hindi just because of their race?",
" > Jewish people have distinguishable physical features\n\nAnd these physical features would be?\n\nHonest question. I have no idea what physical features you are talking about that would be exclusively \"jewish\".",
"Why are Jew's considered a race (to some small extent)? In my mostly unlearned opinion, because of the diaspora. Every couple generations Jews would be either forcibly removed from an area or the conditions would be otherwise be made so bad that they would leave. The holocaust was just one of many events over the last thousand years that specifically targeted Jews (yes i know the holocaust had other specific targets as well). \n\nAs such, Jews were not (the following are not necessarily representative of countries that contributed to the diaspora) Polish, or Romanian, German, Egyptian, Russian, or Turkish........They were Jews who happened to live within that border. \n\nAdd to this the low rate of intermarriage and the genetics that this will create, and you have a set of people who ascribe to a particular religion as being seen, in part, as a race. in my opinion. ",
"Hinduism has that too. Almost all hindus are south asians, but not all south asians are hindus.",
"u/goldiespapa provided an excellent response. I wanted to contribute some additional personal insight as a Jew born and raised in the US. (Side note PSA: \"Jew\" is only a slur if you use it as a slur, so don't.)\n\nJudaism is a religion first and foremost, but it can also be seen as a nation without a physical state. In addition, it carries a cultural element. Jewish culture is distinct from non-Jewish culture.\n\nThere may be Jews who disagree with my insight below or the way that I present it, but hey, that's Judaism for ya, we love discourse.\n\nI belong to a caucasian ethnic group called the Ashkenazi, which evolved in central and eastern Europe around the time of the Holy Roman Empire. Ashkenazim make up the majority of the Jewish population according to Wikipedia. We're the ones that are stereotyped as having large noses, etc.\n\nBecause Jews don't push conversions on other people, the set of all Jewish people has largely remained the same in the last 1500 or so years. There was a long time period in which Jews were straight-up isolated from the general European population, which contributed to the phenotypical distinctions between us and other European groups.",
"Just want to add to these comments here, because it doesn't seem like anyone mentioned this:\n\nThere are still many other ethno-religious groups, but they're subsets of larger groups. You see this a lot in post-Ottoman Eastern/Orthodox Christianity. Easiest example is Greek Orthodox -- it's a specific ethno-religious group and (in the modern day) is tied to the Greek identity to some extent. \n\nBack during Byzantine times, I'm sure these two weren't tied as heavily, but can still imagine that Latin foreigners were assumed as Catholic (and vice versa with Greeks in the West, at the time). With the Ottoman conquest of the Byzantine empire and subsequent conversion of Anatolia to Islam, the Greek Orthodox church (as well as many other Christian churches) switched from a state religion to that of a smaller minority group. Couple that with the fact that the Ottomans practiced 'Suzerainty' which tied people (to some extent) to the jurisdiction of their native religion, and you can see how post-Ottoman cultures have this in them.\n\nSame if not more for Armenian Orthodoxy. Many Armenians (like my own mother) correspond the Armenian identity with that of Armenian Orthodoxy. In fact, if you're baptized in the Armenian Orthodox church, you can easily gain Armenian citizenship regardless of the nation of your birth and/or residence. Up to a generation ago, if an Armenian wanted to marry a non-Armenian it was insistent that the non-Armenian was baptized into the Church first for a formal inclusion in the Armenian community. \n\nTL;DR - Jews aren't the only ones, but it requires a specific cocktail of characteristics to replicate this effect in an ethnicity, usually including a history of living in a group as an isolated religious and ethnic minority. ",
"Also, there are several different ethnic groups of Jewish people that wouldn't have similar features. Your average Ashkenazi Jewish person isn't going to look exactly like your average Sephardic Jewish person isn't going to look your average Bukharan Jewish person isn't going to look like your average Cochin Jewish person, because during the several Jewish diaspora, the Jewish peoples moved into other nations, fell in love with and had children with local ethnic groups, but also had a significant degree of intermarriage and unique customs that each of these groups became distinct ethnically.\n\nWith regard to Catholicism/early Christianity/orthodox faiths, remember that during its spread, the Roman Empire, Byzantine Empire, etc., spread them by force and conquest, and sent missionaries out to every land under the sun. \"Catholic,\" as an adjective, literally means \"universal.\" The idea was that everyone was obligated to convert to Christianity. Some iterations of the faith took this to mean \"... or die!\" while others did not. So the reason why there is no strong ethnic association with Catholicism (there are weak associations; the Irish, Italians, Latin Americans, etc.) is because Catholicism never envisioned itself as the faith of any particular ethnic group. It was always practiced by multi-ethnic groups of early Christians. \n\nJudaism, on the other hand, was the ethnic religion of the Hebrews, much like all of the Indo-European groups had some version of the PIE religion. Catholicism, for the most part, wiped out folk religions of Indo-Europeans, to the point today where all attempts at reconstructing those folk religions for worship are at best copies of copies of what we think someone eight hundred years dead thought about those religions. But there are always movements within ethnic groups to practice that group's traditional religion. It's just that the Jewish peoples, like a few others (Zoroastrians, for example), have managed to maintain and preserve their ethnic folk religion in a way few others have.",
"To be ethnically Jewish your mother has to be Jewish. This concept was first of its kind. Usually throughout mankind we connect lineage towards fathers. Jewish culture cannot do that because they will concede that Arabs were the first born to their \"dad\" Abraham. \n\nFor those a little rusty with their biblical stories- Abraham had Ishmael first (the father of Arabs) with Hagar and whom he favored and taught how to hunt. He then finally, years later, had Isaac (father of the Jews) with Sarah and her jealously of Abraham's relationship with Ishmael (and Ishmael being Abraham's first born) made Abraham cast them away to the desert- the whole story with the zam zam well at Mecca. \n\nWhy did I bring this up? For Jewish history, to get the first born blessing (birthright) the lineage would have to exclude the dad- only the mom. For the most part throughout history lineage is always passed by through the dad. Jews can't go down that road so they switched it to be through the mom. \n\nSo official answer- your mom has to be Jewish in order for you to be Jewish.",
"Jewish people have \"distinguishable physical features, stereotypes\"?\n\nI suppose you're referring to hook noses and cheapness? Are you serious? Do you think you can tell someone is a Jew just by their features? \n\n",
"Not sure what everyone else has said, but it's worth pointing out that the only folks who've ever argued that Judaism was a race were European racists of the Chamberlain/Hitler variety. That is to say, Jews does not consider Judaism to be a race, but only a religion, regardless of race. \n\nRace, by and large, is a socially constructed concept. Many people who believe Judaism is a race are taking their cues - consciously or not - from racialist thinkers supported by groups like the Nazi Party. \n\nOf course, that doesn't mean that lots of people don't hold that view, just that most (all) aren't aware of it's really quite racist foundation. ",
"This has been informative to read, thanks for asking the question. The only thing I can contribute is that part of why they may be seen as a distinct \"race\" is because we keep talking about different ethno- cultural groups using that word. I know its sort of standard operating proceedure to refer to \"race\", a sort of short hand, but it really does carry a lot of baggage as a term that distracts from ~~the~~ actually coming to grips with the subject of human difference.\n\nIts a relic from the Victorian age that pervaded 20th century thinking, we should let it be history.",
"Not a *race* OP, but more appropriately, an ethno-religious group, i.e. an ethnicity and a religion. You don't have to be genetically Jewish (to put it bluntly, you don't have to be related to the tribe of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob) to be a Jew, but most Jews are, because it's a relatively small and ancient religion.\n\nBecause the community is so small, the chances of ethnic identity being shared is much higher.\n\nHowever, there are African Jews and Chinese Jews, Arab world Jews and Scottish Jews, German Jews, Russian Jews, South American Jews, etc. It's not confined to a race. A white skinned Jew is still a white person. The difference is that ethnically, we can trace most Jews back to the same heritage and bloodlines, because it's such a small community. \n\nThe big difference is that with Catholicism and Christianity, even though it started with Jesus, and with a particular group of people in a particular region, Christians make it part of their mission to convert others, and thus create Christian communities among ethnically diverse cultures more often than Jews do. So while there are Jews who aren't white or middle eastern, there are a lot more cases like that with Christianity.\n\nTechnically, no, Judaism isn't a race, or even an ethnicity. But because the community is so small, and shares so much history, most Jews happen to be of the same ethnic background. But they don't have to be.\n\nI don't look particularly Jewish or act in any certain way. My ancestors are white Germans or possibly Lithuanians (it gets hazy because I lost almost all my family on one side in the Holocaust). \n\nWhite supremacists like to assert that Jews are NOT white, that we are racially different. That is historically and scientifically flawed. Especially as time goes on, the differences between people are much harder to define. It's very likely that many proud white nationalists had some or even fully Jewish blood hundreds of years ago, until their families converted and emigrated to safety. Likewise, many Jews might have more \"aryan\" features that Hitler was so found of, because centuries ago there was plenty of cultural interaction and fucking and converting.",
"Judaism is strictly a religion. Hebrew is the ethnicity that is most commonly associated with Judaism but a person of any ethnicity, race, or nationality can become Jewish.\n\nEdit: Under Hebrew you have many other ethnic sub-groups such as Ashkenazi, Sephardi, and many others. If this is incorrect someone please sharpen my understanding instead of simply down voting.",
"If you look at me IRL you would call me black and keep it moving. However, I'm Jewish because my great grandmother was a French Jew and married a Nigerian. She had my grandma who also married a Nigerian. Thus making my mother Jewish. She also married a Nigerian and had me. My children will also be Jewish too. ",
"It should be noted that there is an entire \"tribe\" of Jews known as Beta Israel, or Ethiopian Jews. As the name may suggest, they have very different features than, say, Polish Jews. And yet they are still considered fully Jewish and many have immigrated to Israel.",
"What is missing here is the DNA. There are people who do not practice the religion of Judaism but have the DNA marker for the Jewish race, whether it be Sephardic, Ashkenazi, etc. Many people in this thread keep talking about the religion. Anyone can be jewish (religious) but not everyone is Jewish (genetically).\n\nAnd while there is a bunch of loving stuff, be warned what a singular person believes is different than what the jewish/Israeli government thinks. An example:\n\n_URL_0_\n\n\nA large majority of the Christian Palestinians are genetically Jewish, but they are not equal (or even people) in the eyes of the Israeli government.\n\n\n",
"\"it's worth pointing out that the only folks who've ever argued that Judaism was a race were European racists of the Chamberlain/Hitler variety\"\n\nExactly correct. It's a little scary that people are still asking this question, frankly.",
"'Race' is the wrong word, try 'Tribe'. And look at the DNA to see how consistent the heritage has been.",
"Ok so I have a question (and yes I've read most of the top answers). My mother and father are Jewish. We're not part of any specific group of Jews i.e. Ashkenazi, we're just \"simple\" Jews. However, I do not understand why I am categorized as being Jewish. I am not religious, I know nothing about Jewish culture, and my family has been intermixing with Slavics and other European groups for centuries. So how, considering all of these facts, can someone call me Jewish?",
"Something that a lot of top comments are missing is how tiny the global Jewish population is - only about 15 million. The majority live either in Israel or the NY metro area these days.\n\nThe global population is still lower today than it was before WWII... and I think that helps forge a sort of ethnic identity.",
"They aren't a race of people. It's social construct and Shlomo Sand provides a comprehensive exegesis of this in his book the Invention of the Jewish People. Most Jews living today are converts and while they may be able to find a lineage into those who would fit the general definition of Jewishness through lineage, most will probably have no knowledge of this. A marketing triumph of incredible proportions and implications though. ",
"Hopefully, this comment will be noticed because I haven't really been satisfied with many of the answer although a few were close. \n\nThe answer boils down to country as a form of Identity.\n\nMost people can identify themselves on both a religious and ethnic level. For example: \"I'm German and Protestant\" \"I'm Italian and Catholic\" etc. In most cases, these are 2 very different sets of identities.\n\nJews didn't really have this because of the Diaspora. When the temple was the destroyed a 2nd time, the Jews scattered to various places. They also had to constantly move because of persecution/pograms, etc\n\nSo how do you preserve your culture? How do you keep the Hebrews from assimilating and starting to identify as Persians, Italians, Germans, etc? The answer was to tie your identity completely to the facet of being \"Jewish\". So for example, the Torach is read in the exact same order everywhere in the world. On any given Saturday, if you walk into ANY synagogue, you should in theory hear the same passages and prayers being read.\n\nJewish community became insular. If everyone started marrying the pretty/handsome locals, assimilation would quickly ensue. On the flip side, many communities didn't want the Jews mingling with them either, hence you had the rise of ghettos. Due to this, the insular communities started to develop distinct cultures on top of established religious obligations as well. Over time, these things merged and for many Non-Jews I'm sure it's hard to distinguish one from the other although I assure they are quite different ",
"A couple more points....\nJudaism is not the only major religion that is a race today. Hinduism is also a race. \n\nBut more to the point. Jewish people have never been much into proselytizing to others. Especially since I'm the cases when someone does convert to Judaism the results have often been bad for the Jewish community. Resulting in accusations of mind control and witchcraft. And leading to pogroms. \n\nIt follows, that Jewish people would be a race as well as a religion. (there are in fact many Jews who have indeed converted, and do not fall within the \"Jewish race\", however they are still Jewish)",
"Technically, Judaism is the religion, a person is Jewish, which can mean that they are a)both of Jewish descent and practitioners of that religion, or b)of Jewish descent but not practitioners of that religion. \n\nSo really, the question is, why can only Jews be Jewish? ",
"It's confusing because race is a simulacrum, an illusion perpetrated for power and wealth. The word you're looking for instead is: culture.",
"because race isnt real on a genetic level so it really can defined in any way that people want to use it.",
"To a five year old I would say: Judaism is not a missionary religion, that means that unlike the other two popular religions with only one God they do not try to get people to join their religion. In fact they make it hard to join on purpose.",
"Most religions which are not proselytizing in nature can be thought of an ethno-religious group. This includes Hindus, Jews, Zoroastrians, etc. and other older religions like Egyptians, Greeks, etc. until Islam and Christians came. For example, there have Hindu atheists who have been pretty anti-Muslim and state their goal to make India a Hindu nation (Hindurashtra). "
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1uoex2 | how is it possible to be a professional in a game of chance like poker? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1uoex2/eli5_how_is_it_possible_to_be_a_professional_in_a/ | {
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"Poker is actually more a game of strategy than luck and yes, there are professionals in poker.\n\n*Edit: The more strategy you use the less luck you need",
"In addition to what /u/usmarine4160 said, the way to become a professional is to make a living off of it. Since very skilled poker players can win more often than they lose, they can make a living by playing against less-skilled players.\n\nThis is still a risky profession, in that every time you play you can lose more money than you gain (and even professionals have plenty of bad days). But good players can also get sponsored, which means some of them can make money even if they lose at the table.",
"A lot of things contribute towards a good poker player. Professionals have years of experience. This results in them having critical evaluative skills, mathematical skill, self-control, interpersonal skills, analytic and strategic skills.\n\nTo put it simply, pro players rely on skill, knowledge and experience to win consistently."
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euz060 | are there notes in-between the half steps of a piano? | I'm sure this has been asked before, but I couldn't find anything online. Are there notes in-between the piano keys? And if so, why are they never used? Do they sound terrible? I'd love it if someone could clear it up. Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/euz060/eli5_are_there_notes_inbetween_the_half_steps_of/ | {
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"The notes that we have on the piano are mathematically related and we have become accustomed to their harmonies (which are also mathematically related).\n\nYes, there are notes between the half-steps of a piano. We're not used to how they sound with the half-step notes of the piano.",
"Charles Ives made quarter note pianos with the \"notes\" in between the usual keys. It's pretty interesting stuff!\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe video features a video of said piano",
"Western music uses a 12-tone equal temperament system. That means that there are 12 equally-spaced notes to each octave. \n\nThe reason this works so well is that humans find simple ratios between 2 notes as more pleasing and consonant if their frequencies are related by simple ratios. For example, an A at 440hz and an E at 660hz give a 3:2 ratio, which we perceive as a perfect fifth. 12-TET happens to give us really good approximations for these ratios, such as 4:3, 5:4, 6:5, and these intervals are what Western music is rooted in.\n\nBut you don't need to pick 12! Why not 19? Or 22? 24? These equal temperament systems also have good approximations for simple ratios. But you also get tons of new, foreign ratios that 12-TET can't do.\n\nDoes it sound bad? Well, go you YouTube and have a listen! They will sound consonant but very alien. Whether you like that feel is a matter of personal opinion.\n\nTldr - Yes, there are infinite notes between the 12 we use. They can sound good if you divide the octave with consonance in mind.\n\nEdit: At least 1 form of Western music uses one of these in-between notes! Barbershop singing. One also shows up in 'Happy Birthday to You\", in the 'many many more' part at the end (on more).",
"I wrote some of this for a friend a few months ago. It explains the mathematical relationships between some of the notes.\n\nThis page is a table of the frequencies of the notes as a piano is laid out. \n_URL_0_\n\nThe note A4 (440 Hz) is the standard, kind of like 0° F or 0° C is a standard. It's convenient to count from somewhere, and A4 (440Hz) is where musicians count from. \n\nHere's the interesting thing: \nIf you double 440 you get 880. \nA4 is 440Hz. Double that is A5 (880), which is the same pitch, but one octave higher.\n\nA5:A4::2:1 \n(does that make sense? A5 is to A4 as 2 is to 1?)\n\nIf you picture a line from point Y to point Z, you could represent A4 as a single hill, and you could represent A5 as a hill that goes exactly halfway from Y to Z, and a mirror-image valley that goes the rest of the way from Y to Z. A full sine wave. The A5 hill is exactly half the length of the A4 hill. The A5 hill is a 1/2 ratio to the A4 hill. \n\n**Here's the next interesting thing:** \nSimple adjacent ratios produce other pleasing note combinations. \nHere are the first few simple adjacent ratios: \n2:1 \n3:2 \n4:3 \n5:4 \n6:5 \n\nThese ratios form the basis of music theory. \n2:1 is called an octave. A5:A4, for example. 880:440 \n3:2 is called a perfect fifth. E5:A4. 660:440 \n4:3 is called a perfect fourth. D5:A4. 586.66:440 \n5:4 is a major third. C#5:A4. 550:440 \nand 6:5 is a minor third. C5:A4. 528:440 \n\n_URL_1_",
"Yes. And no. And yes.\n\nThere are an infinite number of frequencies between any two notes, but Western music is based on the piano keys, and to it anything in between is not considered a note. There are other musical traditions that use more notes, like the Arab Tone System that includes the frequencies halfway between the piano keys.\n\nAlso, since the precise pitch is arbitrary, you could tune a piano to have all of its notes halfway between the standard ones, and it would sound perfectly fine to most people.",
"I would like to take a different approach to this answer. \n\nMicrotonal sounds (outside of the traditional 11 notes you get before an octave repeats) have been around for a long time. Piano, as an instrument is not designed to be microtonal. However, some folks have created ways of “bending” notes on a piano to achieve microtonal colors.\n\nAs far as the “weirdness” or “dissonance”, you’ve been hearing it your whole life. Turkish music, Indian music, Native American singing, music of the Far East. Heck, find a group of excellent horn players and they will show you how they have to adjust some notes to get them to be “in tune with the chord”.\n\nBut piano was designed to provide a specific kind of sound and it’s harder to deviate than other stringed instruments. \n\nIn harmony and melody, it’s all about color and a tension and (maybe) release. Microtones take a 12 bit set up and make it potentially infinite. Approach with an open set of ears and a desire for new flavor."
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1vtfo2 | how does the 'black market for organs' operate? | do corrupt hospitals help out? how much do the organs tend to cost? where are the transplants usually done? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1vtfo2/eli5_how_does_the_black_market_for_organs_operate/ | {
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"This usually doesn't happen in western countries seeing as no hospital ANYWHERE in america, England, Aus would allow someone to just show up with a random kidney and say \"transplant it\"\n\nI am in china, while i do not have any personal experience with black market organ sales i have heard stories. \n\nThe most recent one i remember was maybe 1-2 years ago. \n\nThey found some idiot kid from rural china. This kid probably can't speak mandarin and most definitely can't read or write it. Some suave looking guy who speaks the same chinese dialect convinces him that you can live fine with one kidney and gets him to give up his kidney for an iphone (true story, ill find the link later). obviously kid gets really sick and regrets it. \n\nI have seen many corrupt hospitals here where im sure you can find at least 1 doctor who won't ask questions. ",
"The same as any other \"black market\" works. There is an obvious demand for organs, and thus there are some people that set out to satisfy this demand. They either seek out wealthy individuals, or the wealthy come to them, looking for organs.\n\nFrom this point the people/organizations undertake all sorts of methods to get the organs. Bribed officials or doctors to get them from dead patients or prisoners. Knocking people out and stealing them. Paying or extorting poor people into voluntarily giving them up. And pretty much any other crazy way you may have heard. \n\nIt's not uncommon for I these people to be part of a network of criminals engaged in these activities, not unlike the sex trafficking business. But yeah, it's pretty much just like everything else. Strong demand creates people who are willing to go to great lengths to be on the supply side of the equation. "
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672ujg | why are we able to do anything we want with one hand while the other can't even hold a pencil properly? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/672ujg/eli5_why_are_we_able_to_do_anything_we_want_with/ | {
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"Well for one: \n\nPRACTICE... think about it, how many times have you held a pencil with your dominant hand vs the number of times with your non dominant hand.",
"I can. Its very easy for me to use [either hand to do things](_URL_0_). But writing is different. I can't write with my left hand because I have so much practice with my right. No reason to learn to do it any other way. I assume its the same with any other very precise task. If one way is more efficient and easier to do (writing stuff is designed for right-handed people generally.) then we'll do it that way.\n\nBut for the most part, about 1% of us can use both hands equally well.",
"I have learned to do several things left handed because, while I am mostly right handed, my left eye is my dominant eye for some reason. When I shoot something, or line up a pool shot, stuff like that, I use my left eye, and do it left handed. I wonder if this is how ambidexterity is formed, at least sometimes?\n\n"
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8mmp5f | why does traditional animation age better than cgi animation? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8mmp5f/eli5_why_does_traditional_animation_age_better/ | {
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"A couple of reasons. It's not so much that Toy Story looks bad, it just doesn't look as realistic as modern CGI and realism is what you're judging. You're only expecting Snow White to look like an animation; by realism standards it's terrible.\n\nThe other reason: 80 years ago, painting/drawing technology was pretty much the same as now. 20 years ago CGI technology was way behind where it is now. It'd be more like comparing cave paintings to traditional animation.",
"With hand-drawn animations like Snow White, you're not expecting reality. You're expecting a simple representation of reality, more of a gesture, really. CGI animations like Toy Story are close enough to reality for you to have a sense of expectation that never gets satisfied due to the limitations of the technology. It's the little imperfections of life that are difficult to quantify, thus difficult to render. We don't really notice these subtle imperfections in real life, but we surely notice when they're absent. This is something like the [Uncanny Valley](_URL_0_).",
"Snow White looks horrible compared to today's animation. Her hair doesn't even move when she moves!",
"3D Animation was in it’s infancy in the 90’s (there are a few pieces full-frame 3D Animation from the 80’s, but those are mostly clips and proof-of-concept segments). It was not only a developing art form, but a developing art form running on a developing technology.\n\n2D Animation was well beyond it’s infancy-stage by the time Snow White was released. You could argue that 2D Animation made in the 1920’s hasn’t aged very well either. Most pre-1930 animation and almost all pre-1920 animation function more as a historical curiosity then entertainment nowadays. I don’t know too many people who could binge-watch Koko the Clown, Felix the Cat or even the oldest Mickey Mouse cartoons.\n\nDisney made massive improvements to 2D animation between 1928-1938. Compare [Steamboat Willie - 1928](_URL_0_) with [The Old Mill - 1937](_URL_1_). Snow White was the first 2D full-feature, but it is also the culmination of skill and experience that Disney had acquired the previous 10 years. \n\nIt’s not really fair to compare Toy Story to Snow White because they were at different stages of development in each of their fields. 2D Animation techniques were practically perfected when Snow White was released, whereas 3D Animation techniques weren’t nearly as refined when Toy Story was released. The only things keeping Toy Story from feeling *really* dated is that Pixar chose a subject matter that the technology could render decently convincing at the time (plastic toys). And that Toy Story had (and still has) excellent direction.",
"The short answer is that there are two important aspects to this area of art - the same applies to video games pretty strongly as well. The two aspects are visuals and graphics. Visuals are the way it looks, and graphics are the technology behind how it looks. \n\nHand-drawn animation is very low tech, and reached approximately its highest level a long time ago. There will be a few new minor changes here and there, like new tools, new media, but the end result is still quite similar to what they could produce a few hundred years ago; it just might be easier to reach that point. All of this type of art is fully relying on visuals rather than graphics to stand out.\n\nWith graphics, the quality of graphics are rapidly growing. In the 90s, movie CGI was horrible, 3D models used in games were horrible, it was very obvious how fake everything was, because the power wasn't there to render something better. To render high quality CGI, it takes a lot of processing power. \n\nThis is also why movies tend to look better than video games, if they rely heavily on CGI. In a movie, everything is pre-rendered. In video games, it's rendered in real time. With things that are pre-rendered, you can leave your computer running for hours, days, weeks, to generate frames in a movie. With a video game, you have to generate 30, 60, 120 of those frames every second.\n\nThe main reason that CGI quality is increasing with time is because processing power is increasing. New, heavier techniques can be employed because our computers can now handle it. Toy Story took about 4 hours per frame to render. Each second would be 24 frames, so 4 days to render 1 second of film. When they went to re-render in 2010/2011, it took about 2-4 minutes per frame, or a little over 1 hour per second of footage. When they re-rendered Toy Story 2, each frame took about 30 minutes, and 12 hours per second, due to the dramatic increase in quality between the two films. \n\nTo summarize, Snow White (1937) looks good simply because it is hand-drawn and the level of quality is tied to the capability of the artist, while Toy Story (1995) relied on the quality of computers more than the quality of the artist.",
"It's interesting to know that one of the reasons they went with Toy Story was because they knew the limitations of computer animation at the time and since the main characters were all made out of plastic, the little things like moving hair, that make for great cgi, weren't as noticeable. So smart in that the mediums own plastic feel at the time was a bonus for their animated toys. \n\n",
"Off topic\\- watch Toy Story and Toy Story 2 back to back\\- the animation jump in just four years is incredible."
]
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley?wprov=sfla1"
],
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"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBgghnQF6E4",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYEmL0d0lZE"
],
[],
[],
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39ytu2 | when my cell phone is limited to making emergency calls only, why can't i use the signal for other things? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39ytu2/eli5_when_my_cell_phone_is_limited_to_making/ | {
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"It's an agreement from all of the providers that they'll allow anyone access to emergency calling. As long as you're within range of somebody's tower, you'll be connected to 911. ",
"Most governments mandated that emergency calls should be allowed on any mobile network, regardless whether it is the network of your provider.\n\nSo if I'm in an area not serviced by my own provider it will be able to make emergency calls on the networks by competitors. If you'd want to use that signal for other things you'd have to pay for the competitors network I guess.",
"Your cell phone doesn't have a registered account with the phone company that owns the tower that provides the signal. That means that they are unable to send a bill anywhere for services used over that signal. They let you make emergency calls because that's just a good idea (But they came into that agreement kicking and screaming), but nothing else because they can't make you pay for it."
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ar6tj7 | how do anti radiation pills work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ar6tj7/eli5_how_do_anti_radiation_pills_work/ | {
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"\"Anti-radiation pills\" generally refer to potassium iodide pills. When a nuclear bomb explodes or other radiation disaster happens it releases a bunch of radioactive material which can cause damage to the cells of the body. Unfortunately there isn't any way to mitigate the effects of radiation exposure other than shielding which is usually far too bulky to be practical in a suit, and certainly no medication which will prevent its effects.\n\n\"Radiation suits\" then are simply barriers to prevent physical exposure to radioactive particles, making them easily removed and preventing their infiltration into the body. They do not actually block radiation itself but instead allow the wearer to stop being exposed when they decontaminate and remove the suit. Otherwise they might breath in radioactive dust for example and keep being exposed to radiation long after leaving the contaminated area.\n\nThe iodide pills as mentioned above are a response to a particular danger of radiation exposure, that of absorbing radioactive iodide. Iodine can be absorbed by the body and stored for long periods of time in the thyroid gland. If that iodine is radioactive it will irradiate and damage the thyroid, and the body is particularly likely to absorb available iodine and store it away. What the iodide pill does is provide a surplus of regular, non-radioactive iodine for the body which saturates the ability of the body to absorb more iodine. If exposed to radioactive iodine the body hopefully will not absorb any because it is already stuffed full, and it can be excreted from the body before causing too much harm.",
"The only real \"anti radiation pill\" that I've ever heard of is the potassium iodide pill. It acts to saturate you body with non-isotope (radioactive) iodine so that your thyroid doesnt absorb any accidentally made iodine isotopes that are made in your body by radiation exposure. It exists solely to protect your thyroid and the thyroid of fetuses as well.\n\nIt does *not* protect you from any form of other radiation exposure, and there is no consumable item that will. The *only* tangible way to protect yourself from radiation is to reduce exposure or find shelter or clothing purpose made to block radiation ranging from alpha decay to x/gamma ray.",
"There aren't pills that stop the bad effects of ionizing radiation as far as I know. There are pills that protect the thyroid from absorbing some radioactive particles when one is exposed to radioactive fallout.\n\nPotassium iodide pills saturate the thyroid gland so hopefully the thyroid won't absorb too much fallout.\n\nThe fallout or falling radioactive dust from a nuclear incident contains radioactive iodides. If our thyroids, which like to absorb iodides, absorbs radiated iodides one is at a higher risk of thyroid cancer for years to come. These pills protect against one of the serious problems of being exposed to fallout but are not really anti-radiation."
]
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3cwxnj | why is it recommended that you start drinking beverages with the lower alcohol content and then steadily raise it (beer - wine - whiskey), and why is it bad to do the opposite? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cwxnj/eli5_why_is_it_recommended_that_you_start/ | {
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"Hmm, this is the opposite of what I've always been told. Beer before liquor, never been sicker. Liquor before beer, you're in the clear.\n\nIMO you should start with higher alcohol beverages because alcohol takes a while for you to gauge how drunk you are, so if you're taking shots late in the night you might end up way drunker than expected.",
"The only real issue is personal judgment. They say beef before liquor because typically you'll go to a bar, drinking three or four beers, and then switch to shots or something. You're already drunk, and you'd proceed to get drunker. If you are drinking sensibly it doesn't matter. Every heard of a boiler maker? You couldn't drink that if that rule was true. \n\nAlso, mixing fruit drinks and grain drinks may effect you, but that's a reaction to chemicals in those respective foods. \n\nThe ethanol in tequila is the same as the ethanol in every other drink. Alcohol is alcohol. Tequila doesn't make you crazy unless you think it will and you drink a shitton. "
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7k316g | what's the difference between a guy singing falsetto and a man with a high vocal range? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7k316g/eli5whats_the_difference_between_a_guy_singing/ | {
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"There are four [vocal registers](_URL_4_). Each register is a different way of vibrating your vocal cords to produce sound. [Vocal fry](_URL_0_) is the lowest-pitched register, followed by [normal](_URL_1_), then [falsetto](_URL_3_), and then [whistle](_URL_2_).\n\nA large vocal range usually refers to being able to sing extremely high notes. This can mean in total, or within an individual register. It's possible to train your normal range to hit notes that another man might have to switch into falsetto for, for example.",
"There are a couple different tones of singing voice.\nI thimk they are commonly referred to as \"chest\" and \"head\" voice.\n\nHow I would convey it is:\n\nChest voice is using your diaphragm to push air out and is your \"full\" singing voice.\nLoud, solid, deep.\nThe highest notes you can hit before your voice \"breaks\" and cracks are your vocal range.\nSome people can train their voice to go higher and higher without breaks.\n\nHead voice corresponds to falsetto, \nUsing less air and tighter vocal cords, not using diaphragm as much.\n\nIt might help to think of falsetto as using muscles in a different configuration of your singing voice.\nIt doesn't use the full power of your chest cavity and diaphragm to resonate but allows you to sing clearer and more high range notes above the vocal break at the cost of less overall power.\n\nEdit: u/AirborneRodent definitely knows more about this than I."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_fry_register",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modal_voice",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistle_register",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falsetto",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vocal_register"
],
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47lujv | why do so many english words that start with "s" start with "es" in spanish? | Pretty self explanatory, a lot of cognates have an English word starting with "s" while the Spanish word has an "e" before it. Some examples that come to mind are:
Station- estación
Stress- estrés
Stupid- estupido
Skis- esquís
There are a lot more. Is there a linguistic reason for this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/47lujv/eli5_why_do_so_many_english_words_that_start_with/ | {
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"You'll note that this is really only true of English > Spanish words that start with \"s + consonant\". The reason this is true is explained [here](_URL_3_).\n\n > The simplest syllable type is just a consonant (C) and a vowel (V), written as CV. Every language allows this type of syllable, but some languages, like Hawaiian don’t allow anything more complex than that, ever. This is why you get phrases like “Merry Christmas” borrowed into Hawaiian as Mele Kalikimaka.\n\n > Other languages, like Japanese, allow a maximal syllable of CVN, where N stands for a nasal sound, as in Nihon (CV-CVN), but for an English loanword like “picnic”, you need to insert vowels again: pikunikku.\n\n > Many languages, including Spanish, allow up to two consonants before the vowel, as long as the first consonant is a stop or maybe a fricative (/p, t, k, b, d, g, f/) and the second one is a liquid or a glide (i.e. /l, r, j, w/). The maximal Spanish syllable is CCVC, which is why you can have words like playa “beach” _URL_0_, fresa “strawberry” _URL_0_, tres “three” CCVC, and duerme /_URL_1_ “sleeps” _URL_2_. \n\n > English allows for up to three consonants before the vowel (nucleus) of a syllable. When there are three, the first has to be /s/, the second has to be a voiceless stop, and the third has to be a liquid or glide. When there are two consonants, either the first can be /s/ and the second a stop, or the first can be a stop or fricative and the second a liquid or glide. So English allows for words like “stray” and “splinter” and “scream” /skrim/ in addition to words like “stop”, “spoke”, “skin”, and “twin”, “glance”, “queen” /kwin/. \nIn fact, the maximum complexity that English allows in a syllable is something like CCCVCCC, as in the word strengths /strɛŋθs/, although it’s fairly rare.\n \n > So when you borrow an English word into Spanish, [...] all of those consonant clusters that contain an /s/ don’t fit into what Spanish considers a reasonable syllable to be, so speakers will fix them somehow. Just like with Hawaiian and Japanese, we can do that by adding a vowel: that initial e- that you see in Esprite and also in Estefania (compare: Stephanie) or escuela (compare: school). The extra vowel means that the /s/ belongs to the previous syllable, so instead of sprite as a single CCCVC syllable, you have es.prite as two syllables: VC.CCVC.",
"Your first three examples are both ultimately from Latin. Spanish is a Romance language, descended from Latin, and English has a lot of words of Latin origin, through old French and Norman, as the Normans invaded England in 1066 and ruled it for a long time. Ski is from Old Norse ultimately, and became esquis in Spanish, for reasons explained in a different comment to this post."
]
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"CCV.CV",
"dwer.me/",
"CCVC.CV",
"http://allthingslinguistic.com/post/60968736608/phonotactics-or-why-spanish-speakers-drink"
],
[]
] | |
6ouoij | why does recycling have to be encouraged, rather than being the main conventional form of dealing with trash? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ouoij/eli5_why_does_recycling_have_to_be_encouraged/ | {
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"People are cheap & lazy.\n\nThe easiest thing to do is toss everything in one bin & get it hauled off. The cheapest thing to do is not resort that trash after to haul it. Doing anything else requires incentives.",
"Recycling takes extra time because you need to seperate stuff and takes extra space for different bins (glass plastic etc.) People te d to take the easier way and decide not to waste their time on it. Cause what does 1 bas of waste matter right?\n\nThe effects of recycling also arent immidiatly visible so you dont feel like you accomplish anything by recycling (therefore feeling like a waste of time)"
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1dcit1 | what is it that causes a cold feeling in my forehead/spine when i experience fear? | Example: I came close to dropping my pocket watch, but barely caught it. I noticed my forehead felt cool for a second during/after. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1dcit1/what_is_it_that_causes_a_cold_feeling_in_my/ | {
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"It's caused by the hormone, adrenaline being released into your body (from cells that make it, mainly from the brain and various glands). When you are exposed to a frightening stimulus (something scary) your body has been conditioned over many generations of evolution to respond with either a fight (attack) or flight (run away) response. In other words, you're body is in a heightened state that uses more energy in a shorter amount of time than usual. Your cold forehead and back was a product of sweat, which came from this quick energy influx.\n"
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6qsxec | if a hangover is a combination of dehydration, lack of sleep, and mild alcohol poisoning, why do two beers in the morning kill it faster than water? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6qsxec/eli5_if_a_hangover_is_a_combination_of/ | {
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"I'm a neuroscientist, and someone who likes beer probably more than he should, so I think I'm in a perfect position to answer this.\n\nYour question is perfect. What it demonstrates is that a hangover cannot *just* be dehydration and lack of sleep (let's forget \"mild alcohol poisoning\" because that doesn't make much sense for a bunch of reasons).\n\nLet me take this in what seems like a different direction: Did you know that people with epilepsy can often suffer from seizures the morning after heavy drinking? Why might that be? Also, very heavy drinkers often have seizures when they stop drinking. Why might that be?\n\nThe answer to both of these questions comes down to one fact, and one general principle of biology. First: Alcohol makes the main \"inhibitory\" neurotransmitter in your brain more effective. What does that mean? A neurotransmitter is a chemical that is released from one brain cell to talk to another. Generally speaking, neurotransmitters make the cell that receives the neurotransmitter either MORE likely to release neurotransmitter themselves, or LESS likely to release neurotransmitter themselves. A inhibitory neurotransmitter is the last one. An alcohol makes it work better.. making it even more potent at telling brain cells stop releasing neurotransmitter.\n\nThe general principle in biology I was talking about is called \"homeostasis\" and it means that if you exert some change on the body, the body tries to reverse it. While it doesn't always happen, in this case it does: alcohol makes the inhibitory neurotransmitter more effective, so the brain does a variety of things to reduce the effectiveness of the inhibition.\n\nThe problem then comes when the alcohol is removed from your body. Your brain has turned down the level of inhibition, and with no alcohol floating around, this lowered level of inhibition does not make you feel great. In people prone to seizures already (i.e. epileptics) it can be enough to trigger a seizure. In non-epileptic people, it just makes you feel gross (and is why, I guess, that sometimes after drinking, you end up waking up earlier than normal, and can't sleep, even though you feel terrible).\n\nBy resupplying a little bit of alcohol, you are turning the level of inhibition back up a bit, giving your brain time to readjust it's inhibition back to normal levels.\n\nI know I've gone a bit above ELI5 levels. Sorry about that.",
"Follow up question- why do some people wake up with no hangover?",
"Because alcohol fucks with your GABA receptors.\n\nHigh GAGA = You feel awesome, don't care about anything\n\nLow GABA = You feel like absolute shit and can't sleep\n\nIf you drink in excess, your GABA is depleted the next day and you are basically suffering from alcohol withdrawal. By drinking two beers in the morning, you increase your GABA (again), feeling ok temporality until you come down again. \n\nExtreme GABA depletion can cause seizures and even death. This is why alcoholics often die when they quit cold-turkey (I think this is why Amy Winehouse died). "
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4rj2it | how is a hard disk drive able to be simultaneously read and written to? | My 5TB external drive is always being backed up to the cloud, but I can still read/write from/to it without any trouble. Since it relies on mechanical arms to access the data, how can it do all of this at the same time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4rj2it/eli5_how_is_a_hard_disk_drive_able_to_be/ | {
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"it doesn't read and write at the same time. It can't do that.\n\nwhat you are seeing is the operating system caching the reads and writes, so that it can do a little reading, then little writing, then a little more reading, etc, so that it SEEMS it is doing both at once."
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2hafdw | how do we know atoms are spherical, and how do we know nothing makes up and atom? | I have a lot of questions on these "building blocks".
If they are spheres, are they the only thing that is perfectly round?
Do Atoms vary in size?
Has it ever been possible to photograph one, or a microscope so powerful to see one, if so how does it work?
Explain the String theory like I am five.
What color is an Atom?
Thank you very much!
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2hafdw/eli5_how_do_we_know_atoms_are_spherical_and_how/ | {
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" > Are atoms spheres?\n\nAtom \"shape\" is determined by the outermost electrons. For some atoms, the electrons form a spherical shape, some but some form different shapes. See [this image](_URL_0_) for some of the shapes.\n\n > Do atoms vary in size?\n\nYes, atoms with fewer protons, neutrons, and electrons tend to be smaller. See [this image](_URL_2_) of a periodic table to see the difference in atomic sizes.\n\n > Can we use a microscope to see atoms?\n\nYes, certain types of [electron microscopes](_URL_4_) can see individual atoms. [Here](_URL_3_) is an image of silicon atoms taken with a scanning tunneling electron microscope.\n\n > Explain string theory like I am five\n\nEverything is made of incredibly tiny things that are sort of string-shaped. String theory tries to explain things that cannot be explained if everything was made of just tiny particles.\n\n > What color is an Atom?\n\nAtoms can emit light if they first absorb energy. This is why things like metal glow red when they heat up to very high temperatures. Each atom has a unique spectrum, or set of colors it emits. For example, Neon emits some greens, yellows, and mostly red. Our eyes blend this together and see an orange-red color. Here are some other elements' spectra: \n\n_URL_1_\n\nIndividual atoms are too small to absorb or reflect light, so you won't see a single atom colored green, like you would a leaf. However, get enough atoms together and you they start to absorb and reflect different colors of light. The coolest part is that a thin layer of atoms will have a different color depending on its thickness.\n\n[Here](_URL_5_) is a chart of the color of silicon dioxide for different thicknesses (in angstroms- where 10 angstroms = 1 nanometer). You can see the incredible range of colors you can get out of one material just by varying the thickness.\n",
"Most atoms aren't spheres, but some are. To be more precise, atoms don't have a strict shape like you might think. Instead their electrons orbit around in a fuzzy, cloudy pattern that's kind of arranged into *orbitals*. And when atoms bump into each other and interact, those orbitals interact in a way the feels like a shape to them. [This picture shows the shapes of many of the orbitals atoms have.](_URL_1_) But in reality it's too hard and glossy, real orbitals are fuzzy and look/feel [more like this](_URL_2_).\n\nBut every atom other than helium will have more than two electrons, so they will have multiple orbitals overlapping at the same time^1 , and all that overlapped fuzziness can make them feel sphere-ish sometimes too. But the shapes of the orbitals controls the shapes of the molecules they make, and a lot about what properties those molecules have.\n\nDo they vary in size? Yes, and a lot. [This page has a picture of the typical sizes of the atoms.](_URL_3_) It's easier to visualize them as hard spheres so they draw them that way. Check out how huge Cesium is (bottom left) compared to Fluorine (the tiny one near top right)!\n\nBut also scroll down—I said \"typical\" sizes because atoms are fuzzy and have different shapes depending on how they bond with other atoms, so you have to pick and choose how you define their sizes. Different definitions give different sizes and they have a whole table of the common ways. One of the most popular (in chemistry at least) is to let them bond with other atoms and measure how far apart their centers are. Do that enough times and you get a bunch of numbers where you can do the math and figure out their sizes.\n\nIt is possible to \"look at\" atoms with a type of microscope called a *Scanning Tunneling Electron Microscope*, but it actually uses something more like quantum braille to feel the atoms. It doesn't have the resolution to show individual atoms as more than blobs, so the easiest way to see their shapes is when they form molecules. [Check this recent work out!](_URL_0_) In the diagrams, every line is a bond between atoms, and every corner between lines is the actual atom. So in the microscope pictures, you can see how most of the fuzzy electron cloudy part is stretched out in blobs between the atoms, matching the textbook diagrams shockingly well! Especially when you realize the textbook ideas of molecule shape were being worked out almost 150 years before we invented this sort of scope that could show us directly.\n\n[1] Two electrons can share an orbital, but no more that that. The reasons are complicated and quantum."
]
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"http://yecheadquarters.org/images/////007010.jpg",
"http://crystalmaker.com/support/tutorials/crystalmaker/atomic-radii/resources/VFI_Atomic_Radii_sm.jpg",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scanning_tunneling_microscope#med... | |
9cu3e0 | how does an external battery charge a device with more power than itself? | If my external battery is nearly dead and my phone is near 100%, it stands to reason that the net charge of the external battery is lower than that of the phone's battery. How does the external battery continue to add to the phone battery's charge? If they form a circuit wouldn't the higher charge flow into the lower charge? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9cu3e0/eli5_how_does_an_external_battery_charge_a_device/ | {
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"There's is most likely a diode in the phone preventing power from flowing back to the external battery or any other connected power source.\n\n",
"Both your external battery and your phone have voltage converters in them. Essentially pumps to make sure the electricity goes in the right direction.\n\nThe *actual* battery in your external battery's converter, if it's almost dead, will have a voltage about 3.0 volts. And your phone, if it's near full, will be about 4.2 volts.\n\nThe circuit in the external battery converts the 3 volt power from the battery up to the standard USB voltage of 5 volts. The circuit in your phone converts that back down to the needed charging voltage of 4.2 volts. Both of these converter circuits are only designed to work in one direction."
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3wog33 | in movies, when a nurse gives a shot, s/he taps the syringe and squirts a little bit. do real nurses do that? why? | I've never seen a real person do this. I'm not sure if it's because I get a different kind of shots or because this doesn't actually happen. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3wog33/eli5_in_movies_when_a_nurse_gives_a_shot_she_taps/ | {
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"I think it's to get air bubbles out of the syringe. I don't think it happens IRL that often",
"The idea is to make sure any air bubbles that may be in the syringe are eliminated prior to injecting them in to the patient. I don't think it has to be done for every shot, necessarily, it's only required if there are air bubbles in the syringe.\n\nIn movies, though, they'll always do it because drama.",
"As an EMT, I do it every time. I don't squirt the liquid out, but do tap it to bring the air bubbles to the top and to make sure the air is out of the syringe and let a little bit of liquid dribble out to confirm the air is out. I do it as habit based on what I've been taught.",
"I do it when I give my cat insulin. It's not just about the air in my case, it's also about ensuring an accurate dose - the air bubble can get pretty large. So I draw out some extra, and then remove the air.\n\nEdit: I think squirting it, rather than letting some drip out more carefully, might be a dumb plan. There are probably medications that would be eye irritants or otherwise potentially harmful.",
"In movies and tv shows, I've REPEATEDLY seen an actual air bubble, sometimes quite large) in the syringe, watched the actor flick the syringe, bubble doesn't move, then they inject the other actor. Cringe...",
"For my daughter's insulin, I was taught to inject the desired dose of air into the vial, draw out a little more insulin than needed, tap the syringe, then push the plunger up to the desired dose. Finally, withdraw the needle. \n\nThe air ensures that the vial doesn't develop a vacuum in it. "
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1nf4ql | are the eggs we eat aborted chickens? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1nf4ql/eli5_are_the_eggs_we_eat_aborted_chickens/ | {
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"No, they would be unfertilized. For an egg to be fertilized, there would need to be a rooster that loves the chicken very much. Mass-produced eggs would have no rooster loving chickens.",
"no, more like chicken periods"
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18t3y5 | why is it possible to install a wide variety of generic operating systems on just about any computer, but a custom rom has to be developed for every smartphone? | With the computers you can pick nearly any machine and just install your favorite OS on it, as long as it has enough resources for it. You may have some driver problems, but still it is possible to switch between different flavors of Windows and Linux.
With the phones it takes entire communities of developers adopting the ROM for every specific device. And you are usually stuck with the operating system you originally had on the device.
Why can't phones be more like computers? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/18t3y5/why_is_it_possible_to_install_a_wide_variety_of/ | {
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"I suspect this goes back to the creation of the IBM Personal Computer.\n\nWhen IBM decided to create a personal computer, they hired Microsoft to write the operating system, MS-DOS.\n\nI'm afraid I can't remember the exact details, but there was some contractual issue which meant that it wasn't illegal to reverse-engineer IBM PCs. Because of that, just about every man and his dog started making \"PC-compatible\" computers. These computers could also run Microsoft's operating system. However, there was no contractual agreement between these other manufacturers and Microsoft, and nothing to stop anyone installing any operating system they liked on these computers.\n\nThis situation is pretty unique. It's not just phones which won't run on whichever operating system you choose. It's also games consoles. And even other personal computer architectures - for example, Apple's computers are not supposed to run anything except Apple operating systems (I know there are ways around this). And really, why would a manufacturer want you to go and install someone else's software on their device? It's the combination of software and hardware that makes their device unique, and makes you buy their device with their features and not someone else's device.\n\nSo basically, your question is worded the wrong way around. The real question isn't why we can't install any operating system we like on phones, it's why we *can* install any operating system we like on PCs.",
"You actually answered your own question. It is primarily drivers. On PC manufacturers have agreed upon standards and protocols that allow most hardware to operate similarly without the need for complex drivers. The best example of this is monitors and flash drives and the worst example is graphics cards, although even those work at a basic level with generic drivers most of the time.\n\nThis is especially a problem with radios. Each carrier uses different frequencies and each phone can use a different chip. There is no incentive for manufacturers to supply drivers to consumers, so they have to be reverse engineered or coded from scratch, frequently on a per phone basis.\n\nCouple that with the relatively young age of the growing smartphone market and you have your explanation.\n\nEDIT:\n\nI forgot to mention that many phones also come with locked bootloaders, which can prevent running custom software on a device. A bootloader's primary purpose is to load and then hand off control of the hardware to the Operating System. This has become less of a problem recently, as many manufacturers are starting to offer methods to unlock bootloaders themselves in an effort to encourage developers to buy their phones.",
"because manufacturer don't want to release proper linux drivers \n\nvideo cards under linux had this problem for a long time too",
"It is simply a microsoft legacy that a few other OS adopted. If you think about it, there was never really any company that sold software that worked on every piece of hardware by a million diffrent parts makers.\n\nThe OS maker must have every intention to support various hardware in the form of a port or writing alot of drivers for it.\n\nOf course, what sealed the deal was that various technology came together at the right time and \"made\" the core structure of the PC we know today.",
"It mostly comes down to drivers.\n\nUnlike PCs, drivers on mobile devices are kept pretty close to the chest and aren't generally released to the public. So ROM developers have to write their own custom drivers or try to reverse engineer the already existing ones to get the phone working in a custom ROM or in an updated Android version. \n\nThen, there's also trying to get the device OEMs to release the source code to the Android kernel that they used for their device. Without that, it's pretty impossible to develop your own custom ROM.",
"Many commenters have one part of the answer: drivers, but are forgetting another important element which is un/locked bootloaders.\n\nOn a PC the bootloader is unlocked. As long as you have a bootable device and the correct drivers you can install whatever you want on it. Linux, Windows, even OSX (with some hacks/tweaks) and any other marginal OS. However, on a phone, the bootloaders are often locked which is usually mandated by the cell phone carrier. This means that you can't just install anything you want, EVEN if you did have the drivers for it. Developers either need to pressure the manufacturer to unlock it, crack the bootloader themselves, or find workarounds that are less than optimal.\n\nI had a device that suffered from this problem, the Motorola Droid 2. The bootloader was locked and it was never cracked. The latest official firmware was Android Gingerbread. However, during the Froyo days people found a way to work around it and install GB while using the Froyo kernel. Less than optimal of course, but at least you got some of the benefits of the new Gingerbread OS. Fast forward to today, the phone is completely abandoned by Motorola because it's not a new device and makes them no money, but it's perfectly capable of running ICS, one of the newer Android builds. Developers have found a way to workaround the limitation of the locked bootloader and install a newer OS, but because of the locked bootloader there are tons of bugs and limitations.\n\nThe short version is that mobile devices are much more closed devices than personal computers.",
"mostly drivers. you can get a cyanogen mod running on nearly every android phone but stuff like camera will most likely not work untill the manufacturer releases the source with the same base version. That's why it took over half a year for us incredible s users to get a android 4 with a fully working camera....",
"When you are installing Windows or another OS you are really running a program that investigates what kind of hardware you have and create a custom ROM from its DVD drive archives that can handle the found hardware and installs this ROM onto your hard drive. \n\nThis make sense when you want your OS to be install able by normal users. Phone ROMs so far has no fancy installers but the ROMs are put together manually by enthusiasts and developers.\n\nIf someone made such an installer for phones we could have the same experience there, but with limited space and bandwidth to phones it might not make sense to download a lot of drivers and stuff that you wont use anyway.\n",
"Smartphones kind of remind me of when cars first came about. You have various manufacturers and no standards or laws. Today we have some of those but it's all controlled by the mega carriers and corporations which means shitty hardware and service with no oversight. You're best bet is to get whatever you can cheap or if you want to splurge get a more open device such as the google nexus that allows a touch more freedom. It's all a pointless waste until there are concrete open standards and some uniformity across all the carriers. Considering how important communication is and that the USA has laws regarding e911 service it's surprising we don't have a more centrally planned tower network that allows any carrier to piggy back off of it.",
"Phones are based on ARM chips, and ARM is just a standard from which every manufacturer can significantly configure to be whatever they want.\n\nIt's also more than just the simple answer of \"drivers\" that some people have stated. It's not just that drivers aren't standardized, or that drivers are in short supply, etc. It's the fact that ARM-based devices are also entire systems on a single chip. This creates **massive amounts of dependencies between the drivers**. \n\nSince everything is so tightly integrated into a single chip, every driver running every part of that chip needs to be closely designed in a way that their co-dependencies are carefully managed.\n\nIf you get a Windows 8 Clover Trail-based PC, you'd actually notice the same types of required dependencies. Since Clover Trail is Intel's first System on a Chip architecture like this, they've discovered how important it is for drivers to be carefully managed and reliably installed. "
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1szaq2 | why do you sweat so much when playing video games? | Maybe it's only me but when I'm sitting still playing intense video games my armpits sweat like a beast. Anyone know why? My heart doesn't seem to be all that elevated and my scalp never sweats. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1szaq2/why_do_you_sweat_so_much_when_playing_video_games/ | {
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"I don't think that normal.",
"Usually, you sweat when concerntrating or focusing on something intensely. When I play a game in any form of competitive format (like Starcraft, Tribes: Ascend, etc), I focus soley on what I'm doing, and seem to sweat buckets. You are 'stressing' about how you're doing, and your body reacts to it \n\nPlaying a laid back game, like a point-and-click, or a puzzle game, you're not so intensely focused, ao you'll be less 'stressed' about the situation"
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5fl6a6 | why do some of us fell the urge to smile at something we know is terrible, like seeing another in pain or hearing someone has been killed, even though we know we shouldn't? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5fl6a6/eli5_why_do_some_of_us_fell_the_urge_to_smile_at/ | {
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"Everybody responds to things in their own unique way depending on many factors throughout their life. My guess is that the behaviour of smiling when hearing of distressing news is a learned psychological coping mechanism. It could be a way to avoid inner feelings of fear and distress, especially if a person has been taught to feel shame regarding appropriate outward expression of emotional distress in their family of origin. I know a guy who laughs when he hears distressing news, it's a part of how he releases the energy of the emotions he is uncomfortable with because he was taught that crying and yelling is inappropriate. I don't know if that lands for you regarding your experience in your life, but that is my theory. "
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61umht | how did russia take crimea without any repercussions? did most countries watch and do nothing? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/61umht/eli5_how_did_russia_take_crimea_without_any/ | {
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"Well, there were sanctions leveled against then but that was when we had a president that wasn't in Putin's pocket.",
"_URL_0_\n\nTheir defense budget among other things are dropping significantly due to sanctions placed on them by western countries. There were fairly significant repercussions, but the major powers now will not go to war openly with each other over a small country. The wage war against each other economically or through proxy wars in less powerful countries, like Syria and others."
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6josqd | when racing, why do people run their engines to redline before shifting when max hp or torque is well below redline? | Wouldn't you want to shift right after you come over the crest of the hp or torque curve so you can again approach peak? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6josqd/eli5_when_racing_why_do_people_run_their_engines/ | {
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"In addition to what others have said, lower gears give you more mechanical advantage, which can far outweigh the engine being off peak.",
"Horsepower is a factor of torque at specific RPM. I don't have the specific equation handy, but HP and TQ are always equal at 5250 rpm, then HP and TQ start to diverge with HP continuing to increase and TQ decreasing, until the engine becomes mechanically limited due to airflow restrictions, valve float, or other factors, but for the most part, the faster the engine is going the more power it is making. This is why high revving 4-cyl engines can make disproportional HP over TQ at peak.\n\nIf you shift at the crest of torque, you most likely aren't shifting at peak horsepower (which is closer to redline generally) unless your motor doesn't have enough airflow or an appropriate cam(s)"
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3xz3af | why is a pulse audible on a pillow only sometimes when resting your head on it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xz3af/eli5_why_is_a_pulse_audible_on_a_pillow_only/ | {
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"Because the vein in your neck pulses slightly (it's really noticeable in infants and thin people) and if the pillow is in just the right position you can hear it rustling the fabric against your skin. If it's not just right - you can't hear it!"
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2teyl9 | how can communities where polygamy is common, have a large enough quantity of females when the the boy to girl ratio is around 1:1 ? | I have mostly Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints and Muslim communities in my head but i know that there are plenty more that have polygamy as a part of their culture/tradition. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2teyl9/eli5_how_can_communities_where_polygamy_is_common/ | {
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"These communities typically fall into one of two categories:\n\n1) Males tend to have higher death rates than females, likely due to active armed conflict with another group\n\n2) Most males, for one reason or another, are socially ostracized and kicked out at a young age, leaving more women than men remaining in the community. ",
"Er, I hope you meant Mormon instead of Amish. ",
"They have some mechanism of getting right of excess men and acquiring excess women.\n\nMany societies that practiced polygamy were fairly violent and prone to warfare. Young men eager to win a wife would take greater risks and often die, and women were often taken as spoils of war.\n\nOther societies, particularly subcultures within a monogamous society, would find ways to expel men while more actively recruiting women.\n\nFinally, even in polygamous societies, polygamy was unusual...most men would only have one wife, and only the elite would have more than one.",
"They don't. There's some number of men who never marry as a result.",
"Muslim here. According to Quran you can marry up to 4 if you can be just between them. \"But if you fear that you will not be just, then [marry only] one or those your right hand possesses. That is more suitable that you may not incline [to injustice].\"\n\nSo, It's not really encouraging to do so, also only one and it's a hassle (jk).\n\nI bet we (Muslims) get more surprised when we heard someone have more than one wife, not surprised like maybe you do with \"that's wrong\" but with \"that's rare\". The cause may be that as long as the ratio is 1:1 Women will not like to be a second wife. Supply and demand just like anything else.\n\nBut I can think of some communities that's this problem but not because polygamy, Like Japan where 45% of females have no interest on sex/relations/marriage while only 25% of men don't have interest on that, Or countries like USA and Brazil where the number of gays is the double of lesbians add to that men on prisons more than women...",
"Being in a polygamous community doesn't mean that everyone marries.",
"In cultures where this is common, usually the wealthiest men take the most wives. So if you are very well-off and an important person in the community, you will have several wives. (And, historically when polygyny was more widespread, a king or sultan might have hundreds of wives.) Ordinary \"middle class\" sort of men probably only have one or maybe two wives. Poor men are never able to marry at all.\n\nSo that's what happens to all the extra men: they just don't get married at all.",
"You are referring to polygyny (one man, multi wives) specifically not polygamy in general (more than one spouse). There is also polyandry (one woman, multi husbands).\n\nThere is also a big difference between allowed and common. It is normal for rich men to have a wife and a mistress, so why are there any women left anywhere?"
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9pfllh | how are old texts and manuscripts from ancient civilisations translated? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9pfllh/eli5_how_are_old_texts_and_manuscripts_from/ | {
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"We don't know pronunciations of dead languages, its purely a guess. And how we figure them out depends on the language, we usually need 2 versions of the same text in the same language. Hieroglyphs for example were translated from the [Rosetta Stone](_URL_0_) ",
"To figure out what a word in a language MEANS doesn’t depend so much on its pronunciation, especially when we’re talking about hieroglyphic/ideographic writing (like the Mayan one). There’s a very useful distinction one should make: a written word has three elements: pronunciation, meaning and (visual) form. That’s why we are very clear about the meaning of ancient Chinese texts (like inscriptions on bronze vessels) but we have almost no clear idea about how it was pronounced. \n\nGenerally you need something like the Rosetta Stone- which is a text that is written in the language you’re trying to decipher and another known language (like Greek in the case of Rosetta Stone), if you don’t have that, you need at least one or a few words that you know for sure what they mean, kind of like a “key” and you can start from those, mostly that’s half-guessing, this happened in the case of Sumerian. Also, like in the case of Sumerian, having an enormous amount of texts from the very beginning of writing helped a lot. \n\nStill there are many elements which are a pure guess, sometimes you can verify it within the context, some other times you can see if the text you’re trying to decipher makes sense and/or in case it describes historical events, you can check if it correlates with other contemporary accounts from other countries, but sometimes there’s really no way to be sure.\n\nIn the case of something that looks like writing but you have no other information about it, one should first: 1. Delimitate words/phonemes and then smaller elements like letters or radicals/keys (like in the case of Chinese); 2. Try to figure out what language is the text representing (it could very well be a well known language written with a different writing system - in that case it’s very easy to decipher it); 3. If it’s an unknown/unidentifiable language try to see if there’s any correlation with another known language (like the Rosetta Stone); if you can’t do any of these you’re pretty much fucked - like in the case of the Rongo-Rongo writing - we might have some idea but it’s mostly guesswork.",
"To begin to answer this, it is important to establish what exactly it means to see an undeciphered script.\n\nIn one case, we know the **language** that the script is writing, we just don't know what the script says. Both of the historical examples that you show fall into this category. We knew that ancient hieroglyphs were transcribing the spoken language \"Old Egyptian\", and we knew that the Mayan hieroglyphs were transcribing the language \"Mayan\", but we just weren't sure what the words actually said. To give a more modern example, consider if I gave you a 8 page essay that was written entirely in Wingdings. You would know that it was writing English, and thus you would vaguely know the sort of grammatical structure and rules, but you wouldn't know exactly what it was saying.\n\nThe other kind of undeciphered script is one where the script is in a familiar alphabet, but we just do not know what language the script is writing, or the language the script is writing was completely lost. Imagine seeing this\n\nGamben Coisto Gipoda Kavabi Ghyloi Ruttan Tabuck Higgio Cib iBootArafE xciMozoCy moAzuzF ipnPee nBikv\n\nYou know the letters are in the Latin alphabet, and you know how to SAY the language, but what do the words mean? This is the second kind of decipherment.\n\nSo let's talk about the texts. First, let's get something right off the bat-- pronunciation is gone. There's no way to get that back, and when the \"hieroglyphs\" have been deciphered, that just means we know the meaning-- we cannot read them out loud.\n\nSo given a text to translate, what do you do? Some preliminary steps are immediately doable.\n\nFirst, what direction is the text written in? Is it left to right, right to left, top to bottom, or bottom to top? Almost every single script writes top to bottom, and figuring out whether a script is right to left or left to write isn't that hard, since you can look at how the paragraphs end-- if they end with a bunch of space on the right side, like this -- > \n\nThen you can probably imagine that the text reads left to right. \n\nAnyways, once you've figured that out, the next major step is to figure out what kind of script it is. There are 3 major kinds of scripts.\n\nThe first is alphabetic. In an alphabetic script, all words are composed of a sort of alphabet, where each letter doesn't necessarily represent a sound in itself. For example, the Latin alphabet is an..alphabet. You can easily identify an alphabetic script since it won't have lots of unique characters. The Latin alphabet used to write English, for example only has 26, and you'd be hard pressed to find an alphabetic script with more than 35 characters.\n\nThe next kind of script is syllabic. In a syllabic script, each **syllable** has a unique symbol. I don't know Japanese, but I do know that it is a syllabic script. Almost all syllabic scripts have symbols that are \"consonant-vowel\", like \"Ka\", or \"consonant-vowel-cosonant\", like \"Kad\", or something like that. You can identify a syllabic script because they usually have 35-60 unique symbols. Also, a weird problem syllabic scripts run into is that they have trouble ending words with consonant sounds, since again, most of their syllables are \"consonant-vowel\". For example, you have Ko-ni-chi-wa in Japanese. So in lots of syllabic scripts, you'll often see some sort of mark at the ends of words to symbolize the last vowel is silent. You see this in a lot of modern day scripts, and one major rule of linguistics is if you see it in modern day scripts, you'll probably see it in ancient ones.\n\nThe final kind of script is logographic. This is how Chinese is written. Logographic scripts are easily deciphered, since they have hundreds or thousands of unique characters.\n\nAnyways, once you find out what kind of script it is, the next step is usually to hope the Archeologists find a bilingual text, or the same version of the text in 2 languages. If you know the 2nd language, it will do wonders to help you translate the 1st.\n\nFor example, if you find out proper nouns, those really help too, since the way proper nouns are pronounced don't really translate that much between languages. The president of China in Chinese is 习近平, but in English its Xi Jingping. Can you guess how 习近平 is pronounced? If Chinese were alphabetic of syllabic, you'd start to get an idea of how to translate the script and if you know what language the script is supposed to show, then you're looking really good.\n\nFor example, the Hieroglyphs were actually deciphered this way. The Rosetta Stone had the Hieroglyphs as well as Greek, and the guy who deciphered it, Champollion, figured out that in Hieroglyphs, proper nouns were written in these weird bubbles called Cartouches. From there, he figured out the hieroglyph for \"Ramses\" and \"Alexander\", and he worked from there (although I don't know exactly how).\n\nThere are also lots of random tricks you can use. Certain words will appear much more frequently than others. Articles like \"the\" and \"a\", or pronouns like \"I\", \"you\", or \"he/she\" will appear frequently, and they probably won't be very long. Also, if you see a string of symbols come up a lot, say,\n\ncowy (I made this up), and then you see a very similar word come up, like cowydx, you may be able to figure out that, say, adding \"dx\" in my made up language symbolizes plural, or past tense, or possessive, or anything. Typically, articles, pronouns, prepositions, and conjunctions will appear a lot.\n\nUsing this same idea, you can also probably figure out what words are verbs, adverbs, nouns, or adjectives, based on where the words are. I cannot stress this enough however-- the MOST important thing you need to be able to decipher one of these texts is to have a shit load of it so you have lots to go through.\n\nSo yeah, linguists have ways to figure this stuff out, but yeah, it's hard as hell. In the past 200 years, only 5 major scripts have been deciphered-- Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Linear B, the Mayan Hieroglyphs, Hittite, and Cuneiform. All of these took decades and decades of concerted effort to solve, and involved a whole lot of random guessing. For all of them we found a bilingual or trilingual text. I wish I were an expert on this (I'm a scientist :P) and could explain in more detail how each of these were done, but a professional could probably give you a better answer than I could."
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8157xs | what is the calculator trying to do when you divide something by zero? | It displays error, but i want to know whether its trying to do something but can't do it, or made/programmed in such a way that it shows error? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8157xs/eli5_what_is_the_calculator_trying_to_do_when_you/ | {
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"It's not trying to do anything, it simply recognizes that dividing by zero is an undefined operation and gives you an error. Any sane programmer or engineer is going to trap an error condition like this *before* starting to solve the problem and running into issues later. You're looking at:\n\n def divide(x, y):\n if y == 0:\n RAISE EXCEPTION(\"can't do that bro\")\n else:\n do_stuff()",
"There are three different ways of dealing with this problem\n\n1. Don't do anything. The calculator gets into a infinite loop using up all its RAM until it crashes. This is a bad plan\n\n2. The calculator outputs 0 if the denominator is 0. This will be a quirk of the language the calculator is written in and how it interacts with deciding by 0. Instead of outputting an error which may cause the calculator to crash it outputs zero\n\n3. The calculator always works out what is on the denominator first. If the denominator is 0 then the calculation is halted to prevent the system from crashing or a wrong answer being generated and \"error\" (or equivalent) is shown on screen. \n\nThere are other edge cases. Like Log(0), √-1, etc. "
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2y6pdf | how is it legal for the homeowner's association to dictate what i can/cannot do on property i've purchased? | (I actually don't have a house... but the news story about the girl with leukemia made me wonder...)
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y6pdf/eli5_how_is_it_legal_for_the_homeowners/ | {
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"The property owner signed a contract that they would abide by the HOA's rules when they bought the place. And there's a binding clause in there that say you can't sell it to someone who doesn't also agree to the rules.",
"Easy. On the deed to the property, there are restrictive covenants which say what you can and cannot do with the property. Those covenants are part of the property, much like zoning restrictions, and travel from owner to owner.\n\nThe developer bought all the land, put the restrictive covenants on the deeds, and sold them to people (now with houses!). The HOA is part of those covenants. Violation of those covenants is treated exactly like any other contract under law.\n\n-----------------------\n\nRestrictive Covenants are used for many things besides HOAs, they do serve a legitimate purpose. For example, say you have a piece of property, and you sell part of it. Only now, the part you're holding onto no longer has access to a state-funded road. If you were smart, you would have put a covenant on the deed that you sold giving the owner of the now-isolated property driveway rights so you can access the state road.",
"For starters, just because you own some property that doesn't mean you can do whatever you want with it. Cities already have building codes & upkeep standards for homes. An HOA just lets the people in a neighborhood have additional standards (as well as services).\n\nWhen you buy a house in a HOA-controlled neighborhood, you agree to join & follow the rules. The people that built the house won't sell it without you joining the HOA. Once you've purchased the house, you can't sell it to somebody else without requiring them to join.\n\nDon't assume that all HOAs are those evil things you hear people bitching about on the internet. Most of them aren't that bad & they serve a purpose - that's why people join in the first place.\n\nThe most basic example would be if you live in a condominium & the residents need to pay for landscaping & maintenance of the outside of the building. The HOA provides a central place for planning & paying for these things and makes sure that everyone pays their fair share.\n\nLet's say you're building a suburban housing development & want to put a park in the middle but the city won't pay for it. You'd create an HOA for the neighborhood to handle maintaining it. The city says they won't put up street lights? The HOA takes care of that too, collecting money from all the residents to cover the costs."
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[],
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xgwn3 | would a helicopter work in space? | If you managed to get a Helicopter into space would it be able to fly around? Assuming it didn't freeze, would the blades still make the helicopter rise in a vacuum? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/xgwn3/eli5_would_a_helicopter_work_in_space/ | {
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"text": [
"No. But, assuming you could get the engine to run in a vacuum, it would spin itself around in a potentially entertaining manner. ",
"No.\n\nA helicopter works by pushing the air around it downwards with its spinning blades, which pushes it upwards. It's like when you swim by pushing water away from you, or how when you're jumping you move up by pushing down on the floor.\n\nIn space there isn't much to push against. So instead you have to bring your own things to push against. Often this is rocket fuel: it explodes and shoots out one direction, which push you the other direction. Sometimes spaceships move by pushing away tiny particles incredibly quickly (like in an ion drive). It's also possible to let light from the sun push you around.\n\nBut helicopters are designed to push against the air around them, not air they bring with them, so they couldn't fly in space."
]
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[],
[]
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2y3r6z | why can't amazon automatically detect messed up shipments and fix them before they end up late? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2y3r6z/eli5_why_cant_amazon_automatically_detect_messed/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"This is likely a problem of limited resources. If their distribution center is overwhelmed by more shipments than they can handle, then some of them are just going to be late. End of story.\n\nSo at this point, there are several shipments that are in the \"We are processing your shipment now\" status. Some of them will be processed and shipped in time, and some of them won't. By calling them, you cause them to prioritize your almost-late shipment over someone else's, because the customer who complains gets priority over one who doesn't.\n\nSo the system you're suggesting wouldn't help, because it's not like they don't already know that some shipments are running late. They know, and it's just a matter of which ones get sent at the last minute, and which ones miss the deadline."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
42fcl8 | why do people care so much about swearing/cussing around kids? | It just seems so contrived to me. You can be way more demeaning/negative/inappropriate and never even utter a swear word. What is it about these "magical words" that make them so inappropriate for children or anyone really? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/42fcl8/eli5_why_do_people_care_so_much_about/ | {
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"text": [
"Typically these words are crude terms for things we've culturally decided is not appropriate for children. Why did we decide this? I have no idea; people are weird.\n\nThat being said, parents hate it when your swear in front of children because *they repeat everything*. Like a sugar-crazed parrot. Then they don't understand why they can't say it, because even their little child minds understand that curse words are a pretty stupid cultural construction.",
"I'm no expert, but... Sorry, I'm fairly sure of this answer, so I answer regardless.\n\nAnyhow, the reason children are sometimes oblivious to what's happening around them is that their concept of the world has nothing that could connect to those events. A person can die, and they don't have concept of death, it's simply \"they're sleeping for a very long time\".\n\nWhat cuss words do is they often provide very tangential attachment point to the cruder parts of the world that can either haunt the kid because they don't understand it but they have tangible thing to think about, a word, or it might provide them window from which to sate their curiosity and research that topic(google \"what is a cunt\")",
"No one wants the first words their child to walk around saying fuck shit fuck fuck all day. I wouldn't care but my parents would judge the fuck outta me. ",
"Swear words are used in language in different forms. One form is to refer to sex. Another is to evoke hatred, anger, or filth. Both are ways of introducing \"innocent children\" to concepts of extreme and mature nature which most people think is inappropriate for children to be exposed to. ",
"Swear words are like a BB gun or the car keys: you don't want your child to use them until you are certain she can handle them responsibly. A well-placed swear word can enhance a conversation or it can cause some major embarrassment with substantial social consequences, maybe even violence in extreme cases. Parents want to be certain a kid is old enough to understand the ramifications of swear words before they start spouting them.",
"I work with children with family issues or behavioural difficulties. I would suggest a couple of reasons. \n\n1. We have some vaguely arbitrary things about what kids should or should not be exposed to (and some very NOT arbitrary things, of course) and one of them is swearing. So people side-eye parents because they aren't keeping to cultural convention - which isn't such a big deal, but why is it hard to not swear in front of your kids?\n\n2. Swearing is really common in everyday language now, but it used to be saved for intense moments a bit more in the past. So if you go back 20-30 years, it's more likely that a kid hearing a lot of swearing is hearing a lot of anger, which for obvious reasons isn't great for kids to be around. I don't think this is necessarily true any more though. \n\n3. Kids struggle to regulate how different behaviour is acceptable in different situations, so even if you don't care about your kid swearing it's still hard to teach them not to do it at school/church/grandma's house. And then you get some pissy teacher who calls *me* and makes a huge fuss because a 7 year old told him to fuck off. And then the parent(s) have to explain why their kid is swearing. And have this discussion about about whether it really matters. And is that really worth the effort?\n\nBasically a kid swearing could be a red flag that their home life is angry, or their parents call them those names. It's probably *not* but people worry about it and that worry can cause hassle, so it's better to just avoid the situation. "
]
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1l0ury | bonds, assets and stocks and how can i buy them | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1l0ury/eli5_bonds_assets_and_stocks_and_how_can_i_buy/ | {
"a_id": [
"cbumhyw"
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"text": [
"Assets are anything you consider valuable, you buy them by finding them and offering money for them or building them yourselves. Some things I consider assets are my home, vehicle, computer, the education and professional experience I've accumulated and my dog.\n\nBonds are giving an institution money in exchange for a promise of repayment with interest in the future. You're the bank when you buy a bond. \n\nStocks are shares in a public company. If a company splits the ownership into 1000 shares and sells them off, and you buy 1, you are now a 1/1000 owner of that company. You can gain benefits from that ownership like dividend payments or voting rights, or you can sell that ownership interest to someone else if they want it.\n\nScottrade is a good place to start for the latter two.\n\nEdit: 'Now' an owner, instead of not an owner."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] | ||
446hdq | do all these weather sites & local news just regurgitate what the nws is projecting or do they come up with forecasts on their own? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/446hdq/eli5_do_all_these_weather_sites_local_news_just/ | {
"a_id": [
"cznsn3r"
],
"score": [
3
],
"text": [
"A little of both. Especially with local news, where the local guy has experienced the normal weather patterns and quirks of the area and can add insight the NWS number crunchers might miss."
]
} | [] | [] | [
[]
] |
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