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1kap7w | How are popular animated TV-shows made these days? Who draws all the frames? | I've always wondered how modern-day animated TV-shows are actually made. How do they have time to draw all the frames? Is it true they outsource a lot of the work to countries like India? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Some are still produced in the West, usually with computer technology as a major enabler using tecniques like keyframing (animators work with a small proportion of the frames, and computers \"fill in the gaps\" using mathematical interpolation). One example would be [Friendship is Magic](_URL_1_) which is produced in Canada.\n\nMany are also outsourced to lower-cost countries as you say. For an example, the *[Avatar](_URL_0_)* series and *The Simpsons* are primarily animated in Korea but writing, storyboarding, sound recording and such happen in America. The artist Banksy famously made [a Simpsons intro](_URL_2_) commenting on sweatshop practices in this kind of production, but it should probably be taken with a grain of salt.",
"A lot of shows are flash animated, such as MLP, using \"symbols\" that correspond to different body parts and animation(this is why you'll see AJ's mane switch sides when she turns her head, her head is a symbol and they mirrored it to make it look like she turned her head).\nOther showed use a type of animation called reverse kinematics. This animation works by have you draw and character as separate pieces that are then set up with motion pegs or \"bones\". This animation normally looks horrible. Animation is both jerky and rubbery, there's nothing natural to it at all. The effort needed to make this sort of animation look good is more time consuming than learning to simply draw out every frame.\nMany shows are still drawn \"by-hand\" even if this means drawing all the frames digitally. Companies like Disney still do initial pencil animation drawings that are then cleaned up via computer.\nIn the end a lot of shows will have a combination of techniques. They'll have some hand-drawn sequences, some computer generated animations, and whatever else fits the style of the show. Usually shows that are heavily stylized fall more on symbol and reverse kinematics use and shows that are more realistic are more hand-drawn."
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} | train_eli5 | How are popular animated TV-shows made these days? Who draws all the frames?
I've always wondered how modern-day animated TV-shows are actually made. How do they have time to draw all the frames? Is it true they outsource a lot of the work to countries like India? | [
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257ojc | why did Apple buy Beats? | disclaimer: I know this is still technically a rumor, but what benefit would there be for Apple to buy Beats for $3.2B?
Beats Music is too small of a part of Beats for justify Apple's acquisition.
Beats headphones do not deliver sound quality of other headphones in similar price range.
Then what benefit is there for Apple to buy beats for $3.2B, its biggest acquisition yet? Is there something I'm missing or did somebody at Apple just made a big mistake? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nNobody really knows, but the talks are happening. \n\nI personally think Apple made a mistake. Unfortunately Apple is getting a notorious reputation for coming out with stale ideas and overpricing (not to mention that older generations have latched onto Apple - making younger generations shy away). If they came out with their own awesome headphones it would be great, but instead buying another company means you aren't innovating. People liked Apple when they were innovators like Steve Jobs was.",
"Everyone thinks it is a bad deal however this deal will result in a strong synergy IMHO. Apple is buying beats mainly for their music streaming-they are competitive because of their curation abilities and subscription based model that allows ad-free music content. Also, beat's revenue last year was 1 Billion with HUGE profit margin. \n\nAt the end of the day, 3.2 Billion is chump change for Apple (they have 150B in cash reserve) They are not stupid people ready blow that much money if it weren't gonna provide a future economic benefit.",
"There's a number of reasons behind the acquisition. \n\niTunes sales have been on the decline recently, and Beats has a subscription style music service (Beats Music) that Apple's own iTunes Radio was competing with. Now, it's theirs. \n\nAlso, Dr. Dre and Jimmy Iovine. But mainly Jimmy Iovine. He is a **very** influential figure in the music industry and having him at Apple would bolster Apple's ability to do business with record labels and such, further improving their music sales.\n\nAs /u/toastter said, Apple has seen a few younger users move away from their products, and again, if we all know one thing about Beats, it's that they know how to appeal to that demographic. \n\nI don't think they have any real plan about the headphones right now, but the reasons above are what most people consider the likeliest reasons for this acquisition. \n\nPersonally, I think it isn't a good move, but that doesn't matter. I might be right. I might be wrong. Time will tell.",
"Apple, Facebook, and the other tech companies are in a acquisition war with each other. Each one is so rich with cash, that its worth their effort to simply buy companies rather than competing with them, developing new item and customer bases, or letting them get bought by a competitor.\n\nThe stranger question is why the hell did they spend $3.2B on a company likely valued at half (or less) of that price? We don't know that answer yet, but it probably relates to the ideas in the paragraph above."
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} | train_eli5 | why did Apple buy Beats?
disclaimer: I know this is still technically a rumor, but what benefit would there be for Apple to buy Beats for $3.2B? Beats Music is too small of a part of Beats for justify Apple's acquisition. Beats headphones do not deliver sound quality of other headphones in similar price range. Then what benefit is there for Apple to buy beats for $3.2B, its biggest acquisition yet? Is there something I'm missing or did somebody at Apple just made a big mistake? | [
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63iz9z | Hat happens to water/food when it falls in the lungs? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A small amount of water will usually be okay provided it wasn't contaminated with bacteria. The tissues basically just absorb it. Food almost invariably results in something called aspiration pneumonia, basically it makes your lungs really sick from bacterial growth, and because of that your entire body responds as well (fever). That pneumonia can be deadly."
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} | train_eli5 | Hat happens to water/food when it falls in the lungs?
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4tie4h | How does vacuum insulation (like in a Thermos) work? Why is it so good at keeping things hot or cold? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Heat travels in three ways, convection, conduction, and radiation. \nConvection is from an air or fluid flowing over the object. Example: the steam coming off tea, or when you open a hot oven and feel a blast of heat on your face. \nConduction is from the two objects (one hot and one cold) physically touching each other to transfer heat. Example, how an egg cooks when it hits a hot griddle, or how you burn your hand on the stove. \nRadiation is from energy carrying particles hitting the object. This can travel through a vacuum and is how the sun heats the earth. \nBy putting a hot or cold liquid in a thermos, you are preventing two of the three methods of heat transfer. You prevent convection because it's sealed so no flowing air goes over it, and Conduction because there is no matter in a vacuum, meaning there nothing touching so the heat can't transfer on touching things. Plus most radiation is blocked by the thermos not being clear (most common form of radiation heating is light). So you are slowing down heat transfer like how shutting down lanes of a road slows traffic.",
"Heat always transfers from hot to cold. If one atom touches another atom, the hotter one transfers its heat to the colder one until they are the same. If Atom A is 100 heat and Atom B is 50 heat, if they stay together they will both end up at 75 heat. Vacuums are a space without matter, they are literally empty. If Atom A is on one side of the vacuum (inside a thermos) and Atom B is on the other side (outside thermos), then they can't touch each other, and can't transfer heat.",
"For moderate temperature differences (i.e., those between the temperature of the liquid in your thermos and temperature of the environment outside your thermos), heat exchange occurs primarily through direct physical contact between solid, liquid, and/or gaseous materials. In the vacuum between the walls of the inner and outer containers that constitute your thermos, almost all matter (including the air) has been removed. If there is no medium through which heat can travel, insulation will be excellent!"
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} | train_eli5 | How does vacuum insulation (like in a Thermos) work? Why is it so good at keeping things hot or cold?
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6dx80z | How do anti-malware programs determine what is malware and what isn't? | Title.
How does software like that determine malware from its harmless file counterparts? Is there any chance it could remove/quarantine a harmless file/program? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One of the oldest methods is the signature based detection, this is basically a big list of \"this file is bad\", unfortunately malware creation kits allow people with no skill to pump out vast numbers of new malware so this method is not viable any more.\n\nAnother old method is the heuristic detection, rather than looking for an entire bad program, they look for bits of code used by malware writers, this is great because the automated toolkits that make new versions of the old malware generally just re-arrange older code to try and get past security tools. The problem is you need to rip apart the malware that gets through and update your heuristic signatures. But if the malware gets through how do you know to pick it apart?\n\nOne of the more common techniques is to apply a weighting to the program and watch it. If the program starts watching your keyboard, add a few points to the bad side of the scale. If it starts talking to the internet again add \"bad\" points but not a lot as it could be legitimate. If it accesses a site known to be used by malware, add a whole bunch of \"bad\" points and so on. Once the program racks up enough bad points kill it and tell the user.\n\nThe continuous monitoring of the program is necessary because malware will often be designed to modify itself or download extra bits whilst it is running to try and hide from older types of antivirus software.",
"Depends on the type of Anti-Malware program it is. \n\nThe first kind of protection is signature based. This means that there is some database that exists that lists the signatures of known malware and if it's detected, the program is notified. So this only works when the malware is known to exist. \n\nThe second is anomaly based. This contrasts with signature in the sense that for this type, there exists a known behavior of the system that it exists on. Anything that is outside of that known behavior is known as an anomaly and is registered as a possible threat. \n\nThey each have their pros and cons. Signature is generally faster but is more susceptible to new malware or zero day attacks."
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Title. How does software like that determine malware from its harmless file counterparts? Is there any chance it could remove/quarantine a harmless file/program? | [
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6z9w12 | Why is the base of a flame hotter than the top? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The base of the flame is hotter because that is where the bulk of the actual burning is. The top of the flame is more just the ash cooling until it stops glowing."
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} | train_eli5 | Why is the base of a flame hotter than the top?
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3uala3 | The difference between an exonym and an Anglicized word. | So I have been reading about exonyms and find them very fascinating. But I'm having difficulty understanding the difference between an exonym (such as Köln being Cologne in English) and an Anglicized version of a region or place. Or is an exonym a synonym to Anglicization? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ok, Exonym is the general term for a external name for a geographical place that's solely used out side of that place. \n\nAnglicize is the specific example of Exonym."
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} | train_eli5 | The difference between an exonym and an Anglicized word.
So I have been reading about exonyms and find them very fascinating. But I'm having difficulty understanding the difference between an exonym (such as Köln being Cologne in English) and an Anglicized version of a region or place. Or is an exonym a synonym to Anglicization? | [
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1uss67 | How do they get the Stripes on the grass on a baseball field and on golf courses? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think the strips being referred to by the asker are those vague, nebulous stripes you get from mowing in opposite directions on different passes over the field. Golf courses don't have painted stripes, but they do have the swaths of different colored green -- I get the same stripes when I mow my back yard.",
"They pull a weighted roller behind their mower. Also, type of grass, length of grass, and positioning can play some roll in getting the \"best\" or \"professional\" effect. Toro sells one. Lots of DIY info on youtube. \n\nHere is Toro's video.\n_URL_0_",
"The difference in color is caused by the direction the grass is lying. It's done by the mower, and can be enhanced by a roller. You can duplicate the effect on a saxony carpet by running your hands over it in opposite directions.",
"The way the grass lays after it is cut by the mower and then the sunlight reflects off of the blades of grass differently from each direction."
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} | train_eli5 | How do they get the Stripes on the grass on a baseball field and on golf courses?
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6umrnd | Why does HR universally suck at all midsize/big companies? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"HR tends not to attract the best and brightest because it's mostly an administrative role. In a big corporation, HR is probably the least demanding department in terms of skills. You don't need to be a technical expert in anything like engineering or laboratory folks, you don't need people skills like the sales guys, and you don't need to be skilled at task management and leadership like someone in operations management.",
"If you are not in a core function of the company, your department often gets ignored/neglected. So incompetent or less effective employees can sometimes camp out in such a department for years without drawing much attention. A company making widgets focuses on selling more widgets, not having the best HR or accounting department they can possibly have."
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} | train_eli5 | Why does HR universally suck at all midsize/big companies?
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3u6et2 | - Why can't people that go vegetarian/vegan taste meat again? | I have a couple of friends that tell me that if they taste meat (or even some grease) will most likely end up in the hospital. Why is that? Edit: Thank you all for your responses :) | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It isn't true. They might get a bit of a bad stomach for a day or two, but it won't put them in the hospital. They're just being dramatic. \n\nChances are they eat meat all the time anyway. Survays have shown that the majority of 'vegetarians' eat meat occasionally. Especially when they are drunk.",
"Meat wouldn't make them sick (unless it's the idea of meat that makes them feel sick), it definitely won't put them in the hospital\n\nYour digestive tract does get used to a certain type of diet though after years of you eating the same foods, it's why some people get gas after eating beans or eggs or anything else they're not used to while others can eat these foods daily without any problem. If a vegetarian ate meat after years of abstaining, they might feel a bit bloated but nothing more"
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I have a couple of friends that tell me that if they taste meat (or even some grease) will most likely end up in the hospital. Why is that? Edit: Thank you all for your responses :) | [
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288mav | Difference between Marxism and Cultural Marxism? | Hello! Could someone please explain the differences between basic marxism and cultural marxism? I've been looking at Wikipedia, but I just don't understand. I just have a easy answere, hehe.
Thank you very much! | explainlikeimfive | {
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"**Marxism** - The ELI5 version is that economics dominates and explains human society. Specifically, by looking at how capital is distributed you can explain and predict how society will be organized. It also predicts, based on history and a particular view on how technology will develop, that one day the world will end up at a point where there are no economic \"classes\" and everyone jointly owns everything, working according to how they can, and getting what they need. \n\n**Cultural Marxism (actual)** - Is an offshoot of Marxism saying that to understand society, especially western society, you need to look not just at how capital and money is distributed but also at the cultural systems that maintain society a certain way. So, for instance, a regular Marxist might say that you have slavery because it's a society with a certain level of land ownership and technology that makes slavery worthwhile and that as technology develops (say that makes land easier to work) slavery, and the cultural things that justify it, will go away. A cultural Marxist would say that underestimates the sttenght of those cultural things, so, for instance, better technology might make slavery less profitable, but it will hang around because some religion associated with slavery, that made everyone believe slavery is okay, will keep social roles the same even as technology shits. \n\nUltimately, it's not really that different, it's more a matter of emphasis and timing. In the West, a Cultural Marxist is different from a Marxist, because the Cultural Marxist focuses on talking about how the cultural keeps classes around, rather than about how economics explains everything. So a \"cultural Marxist\" professor in the 1970s when it was very popular might teach a class saying that poverty exists in part because the belief that the individual work ethic is important inhibits people from sharing what they produce with others who are less able to work. \n\n**Cultural marxist (as heard on TV) ** - This is basically used to mean anyone more to the left on the political spectrum the the speaker. It is meant to carry the connotation that they are someone who not only disagrees about some policy---say, they support the minimum wage or they think that prayer in school shouldn't be mandatory---but who also hates Western society at a fundamental level, thinking that it is inherently bad for poor people or all people. Ultimately, at this point, it's really just a bad sounding word that means \"anti-work\" or \"anti-religion\" or \"anti-american.\"",
"Marxism is just a way to describe the world. Cultural Marxism is this paranoid conspiracy theory where, usually right wing nuts, think that people in high positions, such as a university professor or people in charge of newspapers, try to disseminate marxist ideas with the hope of establishing a marxist hegemony. Not only is this totally insane, but it goes against the whole Marxist idea regarding social change."
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} | train_eli5 | Difference between Marxism and Cultural Marxism?
Hello! Could someone please explain the differences between basic marxism and cultural marxism? I've been looking at Wikipedia, but I just don't understand. I just have a easy answere, hehe. Thank you very much! | [
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8tzqpw | The rule of thumb is to add acid to water to prevent splashing. What happens when you sip some water and it mixes with your stomach acid? Does the body have biological mechanisms to prevent the splashing? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Water doesn't just free fall down your esophagus, it's sorta encompassed in a muscle Mexican wave. Your stomach isn't an empty chamber with a puddle of stomach acid at the bottom like some people believe either, it's more a hydrochloric acid sack. Even if the water could splash up most of your digestive tract has protective mucus all over the place so you don't dissolve from the inside out.",
"The \"add acid to water\" rule is for very concentrated acids like Oleum, fuming HCl, or 98% sulfuric. Your stomach acid is way more dilute than those. Also, where would it splash to? Your stomach is not an open beaker.",
"That rule is mostly for concentrated sulfuric acid, because mixing it with water creates a lot of heat, the first added bit of water may even boil and splash concentrated acid everywhere.\n\nStomach acid is hydrochloric acid and not very concentrated at that, it \n also already splashes around in your stomach when you move, so stomach can easily take all the splashing caused by drinking water.",
"Only certain acids are volatile enough to have to worry about splashing. Stomach acid is not one of them."
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} | train_eli5 | The rule of thumb is to add acid to water to prevent splashing. What happens when you sip some water and it mixes with your stomach acid? Does the body have biological mechanisms to prevent the splashing?
| [
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6s9vcw | What causes the "drop" feeling you get in your stomach when you experience something thats upsetting? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"when you step on a lego your spine sends the 'jump' signal; before your brain gets the 'lego' signal, and this is a survival reflex to keep you from doing stupid shit. basically you have an entire second brain in your gut and spine and sends all sorts of involuntary signals before your brain even knows whats going on.\n\nthis facilitates fight or flight, both are easiest on an empty stomach, also vacating your bowels might dissuade a predator. so, like the 'jump' reflex, the 'vacate' reflex switches on and primes the pump based on a signal from your nervous system that didn't involve your thinky bits.\n\nso, cop in your rear view? 'we need to talk' from the SO? you might have a sinking, vaguely vomit/shit your pants sensation the split second before your eyes or ears have fully grasped the situation, because it COULD be a tiger, and you gotta be prepared for that."
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} | train_eli5 | What causes the "drop" feeling you get in your stomach when you experience something thats upsetting?
| [
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1m98qj | Russia- communist, secular, religious, democrazy? What's their deal? | A quick Google search yielded too many detailed and long explanations that I simply don't have time for. Essentially, **can someone give me Russia's political history for the past ~100 years in a few sentences?**
I'm confused. They *WERE* secular and without religion for a while, but now they are orthodox or something? And they are still communist, but who exactly is Putin and what's his role? Many thanks! | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Okay.. this is super brief and missing a lot of information. But its a good start.\n\nAhem..\n\nWell, before 1917 - Russia was a monarchy ruled by Czars. The term \"Czar\" (also spelled Tsar) comes from the word \"Caesar\", and these rulers were Russian royalty who ruled with supreme power. Russia was an empire, not a kingdom. It is considered an empire because Russia is divided up into several states called \"oblasts\". \n\nIn early 1900s, ruled a Tsar named Nicholas II. Meanwhile, the Russian poor people got really fed up with the rising gap between rich and poor, the shitty treatment of workers, the *massive* wealth of the upper class, etc.\n\nThe Bolsheviks (translates to \"majority\") was a political party lead by Vladimir Lenin, inspired by Karl Marx's writings, represented these disenfranchised poor workers. During World War 1, the Bolsheviks saw weakness in Tsar Nicholas II - and in 1917 stormed the Winter Palace and SHOT UP THE ENTIRE FAMILY. His daughter's (Anastasia) body was never found. There was rumors that she escaped the shootings and led a full life in France or something. That's what the Disney film, \"Anastasia\", is all about.\n\nAnywho.. Lenin seized power. The Bolsheviks became the Communist Party. Russia became Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Civil war followed, but Lenin took out all enemy mo'fuckers. Bolsheviks were \"reds\", and the resistance was called \"whites\". \n\nThe term \"Soviet\" means council. So like.. \"Council of Defense\" would be \"Soviet of Defense\". The term \"Soviet\" eventually came to mean citizen of the Soviet Union. \n\nPeople LOVED the new country. Workers get treated fairly! Unions are amazing! Everyone is equal! Healthcare! Schools! Fuck yeah! Over the next few decades, quality of life improved DRASTICALLY. \n\nOther countries wanted in on the action too. Belarus, Ukraine, Azerbaijan, etc, etc. They all became Soviets as well - forming the Soviet Union. Made of 15 countries, with Moscow as the Capital City. \n\nSoon, Lenin died. Everyone has a sad. Stalin took over, he's fuckin' crazy and mad with power. He has these two \"5 year plans\" which DRAMATICALLY improved Military Power, Industrialization and other technology. New cities built up overnight! Sounds good right? Wrong. Stalin punished people that didn't see eye to eye with him, or that were too weak to continue working. Stalin KILLED millions of his own people.\n\nThen WW2 happened. Hitler and Stalin didn't get along. Soviets almost single-handedly wins the war. Lots die. Like.. 1 in 3 didn't make it home. \n\nSoviet union rebuilds. Cold war and shit happens with the US. Americans fear Commies. Commies don't really care that much Americans, turns out. Mostly just wanted to be buddies. Eventually, shit gets competitive. Arms Race. Space Race! America claims they win space race when they sent a guy to the moon. Russia said, \"Uh what? We sent the first object AND dude to space. That literally means we won.\". Americans fear climaxes in the Red Scare and McCarthyism. Nothing of the like happened in the Soviet Union. Americans were viewed as silly and disorganized. \n\nNow here comes Gorbachev. Russia's in an economic depression. Gorby knows what to do! He knows oppression doesn't work, he lived through Stalin afterall! Gorby sets up a policy called \"Perestroika\" (Rebuilding) and \"Glasnost\" (openness). This opens Russia to the west. New businesses like McDonalds and Macy's enter Russian market. Everyone's happy. \n\nThings were really good for Soviet Union in the 1980s. They saw American television and saw all the gang shootings in Detroit, the crack epidemic in NYC, the homeless people in San Fran and thought to themselves \"Thank fuck I live in the Soviet Union! Where I'm well taken care of!\". \n\nWell.. people wanted more freedom. After experiencing some of it, states like Latvia were like \"Hey umm.. independence?\". Soon, all the states were like \"Yeah! I wanna control myself!\" and they all sort of succeeded. Eventually, they dissolved the Soviet Union in 1992 and drafted a new constitution, with free markets (no more communists) placing Boris Yeltsin in charge. \n\nEarly 90s Russia SUCKED. Severe economic depression because they didn't have the government telling anyone what to produce anymore. Cities fell apart. Homelessness became a problem. Yeltsin did everything he could to keep shit together. \n\nPutin gets elected. Fixed a lot of problems. His friends get rich in the meantime. Cities like Moscow and Saint Petersburg are every bit as well off as any powerful/wealthy American City, maybe more. Rural Russia sucks, but noone gives a shit about them. \n\nPutin goes mad with power, gives up presidency. Becomes Prime Minister.",
"Autocratic empire until 1917, then communist for nearly 75 years. The USSR collapsed in 1991, and Russia has been an increasingly autocratic semi-democracy since then. Russia is absolutely **not** a communist state any more, and hasn't been for more than twenty years. Putin is the current president, who had a lot more personal power and influence than many would like. He served his terms as president, then had his handpicked successor elected, so then immediately appointed Putin as Prime Minister. After Medvedev had served a term as president, and Putin was eligible to run again, he did, and is now back in office. He managed to get the presidential term increased too :)"
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} | train_eli5 | Russia- communist, secular, religious, democrazy? What's their deal?
A quick Google search yielded too many detailed and long explanations that I simply don't have time for. Essentially, **can someone give me Russia's political history for the past ~100 years in a few sentences?** I'm confused. They *WERE* secular and without religion for a while, but now they are orthodox or something? And they are still communist, but who exactly is Putin and what's his role? Many thanks! | [
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3026gt | Why do nipples get erect when testicles retract into the body when it's cold outside? | If testicles get closer to the core of the body in order to maintain warmth and temperature in that area, why don't nipples invert or at least not get erect when it's cold outside?
Especially since they're a lot smaller and at risk for negative consequences from the cold.
On a side note: wtf IL? It's supposed to be spring now, didn't you get the memo? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My best guess (I could be wrong tho) is that nipples get erect the same way goosebumps work. When it's cold they contract to seal off pores in the skin, which helps keep in body heat.\n\nMeanwhile, testicles need to stay at a certain temperature, which is slightly below body temperature, so when it's warmer they need to be farther away from the heat of the body, and closer to it when it's cold."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do nipples get erect when testicles retract into the body when it's cold outside?
If testicles get closer to the core of the body in order to maintain warmth and temperature in that area, why don't nipples invert or at least not get erect when it's cold outside? Especially since they're a lot smaller and at risk for negative consequences from the cold. On a side note: wtf IL? It's supposed to be spring now, didn't you get the memo? | [
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2rg5ql | What would happen if an important character on a TV show died mid-filming? | I'm going to use Parks and Rec as an example.
Imagine if something happened to Aubrey Plaza between shoots. If she got arrested, is hospitalized, or dies.
How would the show proceed from there?
What if these things happened to an actor who plays a more central character like Amy Poehler? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you watched the sitcom News Radio you'd see an example. Phil Hartman was killed while the show was still in full swing. The writers killed the character off-screen with a heart - attack and wrote in a replacement character.",
"[8 Simple Rules for Dating my Teenage Daughter](_URL_0_) had to deal with this when John Ritter died. They incorporated his death into the show, then the show tanked due to low ratings.",
"Spartacus had it's lead actor die after a season so they replaced him with another actor.",
"It happened in The West Wing. \n\nThere was a scene where someone went into a bathroom off-screen and screamed because they had \"discovered the body\". It was an unexpected heart attack. \n\nThen they continued the show and incorporated the death of the character in the rest of the show."
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} | train_eli5 | What would happen if an important character on a TV show died mid-filming?
I'm going to use Parks and Rec as an example. Imagine if something happened to Aubrey Plaza between shoots. If she got arrested, is hospitalized, or dies. How would the show proceed from there? What if these things happened to an actor who plays a more central character like Amy Poehler? | [
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2piy1d | If we're all told to "not be the hero" in dangerous situations, why are we calling the hostage who died trying to wrestle the gun away in the Sydney hostage situation a hero? | IMO I think he *is* a hero, but I don't understand how I can be told two completely different things on the situation. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"He is a hero. You're told not to be a hero because being heroic generally involves taking huge risks which may result in injury or death.",
"Because he is a hero. He is also dead. Don't be the hero and you'll be less likely to wind up dead.",
"You got three choices when you are confronted with an active shooter/hostage situation. You can run, hide or fight. Run (escape) is the best option. If you can safely get out of the situation, you will be unharmed and may be able to provide the rescue people with information they can use to resolve the situation. Run should be your first choice if it is an option. \n\nHide. Create yourself a defensible position, turn out the lights and your cell phone and stay put. Lock the doors between you and the shooter/hostage taker if you can. Sure, you may John McClain your ass out of there, but that ain't the point. You are trying to sit there and wait safely until the rescue team can resolve the situation. If the attackers can't find you or can't get to you they can't hurt you, generally. \n\nFinally, you have the choice to fight. If you can't escape and you can't hide, and you know your are going to be killed anyway, use whatever you can to not defend yourself, but to put maximum violence on the attackers. It is the last choice because there will be casualties. Even if you can get rescued, the rescue team is going to have to secure the area before medical persons can enter the scene. So even if you suffer a minor wound, you may be stuck there for hours waiting for medical personnel to arrive. Also, with casualties, the hostage taker now has a bargaining chip to offer to get more time or better treatment. If he releases the wounded, he may get a better chance to get out."
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} | train_eli5 | If we're all told to "not be the hero" in dangerous situations, why are we calling the hostage who died trying to wrestle the gun away in the Sydney hostage situation a hero?
IMO I think he *is* a hero, but I don't understand how I can be told two completely different things on the situation. | [
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3gb2jq | How come in the event of a pregnancy the father has essentially no say in whether the child is kept or not, but can still be forced by the courts to provide for the child? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are three people whose rights are all involved: the father, the mother, and the child. And there are three \"phases\" where the various rights of the various people matter more or less.\n\nBefore the child is conceived, both the mother and the father have absolute control over whether they want to have a child. If either of them does not want to, they can not have sex. If they choose to have sex, they have to accept the possibility that a child will result. Before sex, the child has zero rights (because its only a thought), and the man and woman have equal rights and control over their behavior and any consequences of that behavior.\n\nAfter the child is born, someone has to take care of it, and the courts/laws/society cares much more about the child's rights to not be neglected, starved or otherwise uncared for than we care about what that does to the parents. Both parents decided to have sex, and now both parents owe it to the child and to society to take care of the life they created. Neither parent may really want the kid, but we don't just let parents throw them in the gutter.\n\nMost people don't think any of the above is really controversial. So the real question is what happens before the child is born, but after it is conceived. \n\nFirst, the child's rights and interests are not very well served if we let men give women ultimatums. All \"deadbeat\" dads would just tell mothers that they don't want the kid, and you have a ton more children being raised without financial support, and likely a ton more kids who require more welfare spending to make up for the money their fathers aren't contributing. If someone is going to \"lose\" in this situation, we would rather it not be the child.\n\nThe woman's interests in the middle period is her basic freedom not to be forced have a medical procedure she doesn't want. This is a pretty important, fundamental right. We generally don't want one person using economic threats to coerce another person into making a major medical decision. It's the same reason we don't let people buy and sell their organs; we want people have some basic control over their own bodies.\n\nThen there is the man's interest in not having a child. Laws don't force the man to have any emotional connection or investment in the child, so essentially the only interest the man has is \"I would rather spend my money on beer and vacations than on diapers and food for a kid I never see.\" We as society don't think this is as important a right as (a) the child's right to have basic needs met or (b) a woman's right to make her own medical decisions.",
"Plainly put, the father and mother both have equal responsibility in creating the child.\n\nThe mother, however, is affected medically by it-thus having the choice to carry, abort. She has to tolerate all of the issues that can come up with a pregnancy (or the ramifications of taking a pill to abort the fetus or a procedure to do so, or the fetus perhaps having a problem before reaching term). All of these things can make the mother sick, and the mother surely has to change dietary things as well as other things, depending on what is needed.\n\nWhile the mother is carrying the child she has the say so because any decision during that affects her health directly. It affects her life and her ability to provide for herself as well (if she is doing so).\n\n\nOnce the child is born it is the legal responsibility of both people involved in the conception.\n\nIf the child was some how conceived in some container external from mother and father, then it would be a different story.",
"\"if the mother ... is aware of the fact that the father doesn't want the child, how is he still seen as liable for the support of the child?\"\n\nFor the same reason that a mother that doesn't want the child (but doesn't believe in abortion) is \"still seen as liable for the support of the child\" when the father takes care of it. **It goes both ways**.\n\nOthers have already addressed the issue of it being the mother's body and her risk to choose to carry the child (or not)."
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} | train_eli5 | How come in the event of a pregnancy the father has essentially no say in whether the child is kept or not, but can still be forced by the courts to provide for the child?
| [
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1j15mn | what are neutron stars? | 1. What distinguishes whether a star will becomes a black hole or a neutron star?
2. Why do neutron stars form, why are there no proton or electon stars?
3. Have scientists seen a neutron star, and if not how did they come up with the idea and determine its properties (mass, size, density, temperature, rotation speed, etc)?
4. Why does it shoot electromagnetic radiation? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> What distinguishes whether a star will becomes a black hole or a neutron star? \n\nMass. A small star will cease fusion and become a white dwarf. One that is large enough to overcome electron degeneracy pressure will become a neutron star. One that is large enough to have its Schwartzschild radius outside itself will become a black hole.\n\n > Why do neutron stars form, why are there no proton or electon stars?\n\nBecause when atoms are squished together extremely tight, the electrons and protons can combine and become neutrons. This doesn't work for protons or electrons."
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} | train_eli5 | what are neutron stars?
1. What distinguishes whether a star will becomes a black hole or a neutron star? 2. Why do neutron stars form, why are there no proton or electon stars? 3. Have scientists seen a neutron star, and if not how did they come up with the idea and determine its properties (mass, size, density, temperature, rotation speed, etc)? 4. Why does it shoot electromagnetic radiation? | [
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89f6gp | Why do our noses run when we eat spicy foods? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Capsaicin is what makes food taste spicy. When the mucous membranes (mouth, nasal passages, etc) get exposed to it, it irritates them and mucous is produced by the body as a defense to try to flush out the irritant. Same reason your eyes water from dust, basically.",
"Someone has explained that capsaicin is an irritant. I'll add the \"why\" because I think it's interesting. It's believed that capsaicin's job is to deter mammals from eating the chiles. Mammals' molars can destroy the seeds, preventing the spicy fruit from doing its job of ensuring the plant's successful reproduction. Birds, however, are immune to capsaicin, and they don't chew the seeds. This means they poop out whole seeds, which can then sprout into a new plant.\n\nSo your nose gets runny because the plant doesn't want you eating the chile in the first place."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do our noses run when we eat spicy foods?
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8hi1b6 | Why is most of the girls handwriting „better“ than boys handwriting? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I work with kids.\n\nGenerally, there's a big difference in how girls and boys are socialized in regards to handwriting. I find teachers are often harder on girls who have messier handwriting, while boys are sometimes chalked up to inaccurate assumptions about boys' development and interests. \n\nWhile teaching handwriting, there may be a very, very slight difference in terms of fine motor control, but it evens out pretty quickly. Girls also tend to find a lot of enjoyment out of school supplies, and are encouraged to do so with fancy pens, glitter pens, etc. It's seen as a 'safe' hobby or interest for girls, but feminine, so not as encouraged in boys.",
"to follow up, why do girls handwriting tend to be \"bubbled\" versus boys?"
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} | train_eli5 | Why is most of the girls handwriting „better“ than boys handwriting?
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5tlgcg | Why are not there just people called Jesus outside the Hispanic countries? | Just as in Muslim-majority countries there are thousands and thousands of people called Mohamed, in the Spanish-speaking countries (mostly Catholics) there are also many people called Jesus. Why does not this happen in the rest of countries of Christian majority, mainly the Anglo-Saxon countries? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Iberian peninsula fell under Islamic rule after the Arab Conquest of Hispannia. Muslims love to name their children Muhammad. As a response to this habbit by their Muslim rulers, the Iberians began to name their children Jesus. The short answer is Hispannia fell under Muslim rule, hence they adapt their practice of naming. The Anglo-Saxon countries, never fell under Muslim rule, hence they don't do that. Though, the anomaly to this is the Balkans since Jesus is not a popular name in that region yet the region was subjugated under the Muslims just like Iberia was.",
"Because the English name variant of \"Jesus\" is \"Joshua\" from the original Hebrew Yeshua. The biblical version is from the Latin translation of the Greek translation of that original Hebrew.",
"There are. Jesus is just a spanish translation pronounced \"heh soos\". Jesus as you know him, _URL_0_.was \"Yeshua\" which means \"to deliver\" in Hebrew. Over time its translated into many languages, the english equivalent would be \"Joshua\" .",
"Jesus is a common name for Muslim's to call their children also. It's pronounced Issa. Jesus, as is Abraham, Adam, Noah, Moses and Mohumed to name a few, is a prophet in Islam and children are named after all of them. Yoshua is another prophet and this name is not used synonymously with Issa. Haven't cleared anything up but bought some more to the table! Cheers."
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} | train_eli5 | Why are not there just people called Jesus outside the Hispanic countries?
Just as in Muslim-majority countries there are thousands and thousands of people called Mohamed, in the Spanish-speaking countries (mostly Catholics) there are also many people called Jesus. Why does not this happen in the rest of countries of Christian majority, mainly the Anglo-Saxon countries? | [
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1e9g24 | Networking code on video games. I.E "Lag Compensation." | As many people may know, the code in Black Ops 2 is horrible causing terrible lag compensation and "shooting around the corners." How do you code it so that it makes you "lag" and give a fair advantage to everyone with bad internet? Has a game almost "perfected" it? And if they have, why haven't they shared it around with other developers to make games better? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Short answer is they don't make you lag. Multiplayer games constantly send your information (position, projectiles fired etc.) to a server and that server redistributes that information to everyone else as required so their games can place your character appropriately.\n\nSlow network connections can cause a situation where your server position is not perfectly up to date with your position on your own computer. Usually the server position is used to resolve hits, which can feel unfair if either your position or your target's position on your computer doesn't correspond with the server position.\n\nThere's a number of stop gap solutions but that really is just what they are. Crude solutions. Some games (I think the recent call of duty games do this) started using the local opponent position for hit detection. Ie. the position your opponent occupies on your local computer is used to resolve hits from your weapon. This gives you the feeling that the game is always completely fair to you because your opponent can't lag out of position. You won't miss because your opponent is actually elsewhere but your computer hasn't updated yet.\n\nIt's terribly unfair to your opponent of course. If your connection is slow to update his position, you'll still hit him and he might feel you shot him even after he moved behind a wall. The general idea is that this feels the least frustrating for the shooter and it's a lot harder to determine if you were shot unfairly than it is to feel like you missed unfairly (ie. I hit him right in the chest but nothing happened)\n\nThere's more complicated solutions that involve prediction and extrapolation. Ie. a player is moving 2 meters per second and he has a half second lag time. That means he's 1 meter further along in the direction he was going than the currently reported position. So the model is moved accordingly. It's basically just predicting positions based on reported position + speed * direction.\n\nIn the end its all just guess work, favoritism and extrapolation though. The best solution is faster networks and better optimized netcode to avoid lag in the first place.",
"Man, I just had a great analogy involving nerf guns, but I realized it didn't really explain your specific question. :/\n\nThis is difficult to explain without some sort of graphical presentation. But I'll try.\n\nMultiplayer games like Call of Duty have two different aspects to them: the client and the server. The client is you and your system playing the game, and the server manages all of the players' data, collecting data like your position, health, damage, etc. and transmits that data to all of the other players.\n\nSo when you fire a gun, the client (you) tells the server (or host) that you've fired a gun. The client tells the server exactly how many bullets, at what angle, etc. The server then tells all of the other players that you've fired those bullets in that direction. \n\nEach time data is transmitted from the client to the server, it takes time. We're talking a fraction of a second. And then it will take another fraction of a second to relay that data to all of the other players.\n\nSo in your scenario, you're running away from an enemy. The enemy starts shooting before you make it around the corner, but you manage to make it around the corner before he kills you, and then you die anyway (an we're assuming he's not using the hardened perk, or attachment or whatever the heck it's called in BOII that lets you penetrate walls). Here's why:\n\nYour character is a few feet away from the corner. Your game client tells the server that you're a few feet from the corner. The server then tells the enemy that you are a few feet from the corner. By this time, a fraction of a second has passed, and you are now *at* the corner - but because of the time it took to transmit your location data to the server and to the enemy, the enemy still sees you a few feet from the corner. So he starts shooting at you. Another fraction of a second passes, and you have made it around the corner. However, *because of the time it takes to transmit that data all the way to the enemy, he still sees you AT the corner*. So he is still shooting at you from his perspective, but you have made it to safety from your perspective.\n\nWhen the enemy kills you from his perspective, his client tells the server that he's killed you. In Call of Duty, the server goes \"OK, I believe you\" and kills you off.\n\nI could go further, but I think the explanations just get more convoluted after answering your question. Also, I've spent too much time writing this XD ... ALSO, I don't know how they managed to screw it up, but I really feel like Modern Warfare 2 was the last CoD that didn't have absolutely horrid multiplayer code. I first started noticing horrible lag problems with Black Ops 1, in that you could get 6 or 7 hit markers on an enemy, but the server only saw 3 or 4 by the time you died... therefore those last few shots just didn't count. In MW2, you simply didn't see this happen unless the host's connection was abysmal, and even then, it was incredibly rare (on XBox).",
"_URL_0_\n\nDrift0r explains it better with demonstrations better than I ever could hope to. Unfortunately BO2 does not do a good job with lag comp; if anything, the CoD series has taken steps backwards with it since MW and MW2. The reason being it is very, very difficult to code properly with every little change having an effect on it."
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As many people may know, the code in Black Ops 2 is horrible causing terrible lag compensation and "shooting around the corners." How do you code it so that it makes you "lag" and give a fair advantage to everyone with bad internet? Has a game almost "perfected" it? And if they have, why haven't they shared it around with other developers to make games better? | [
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2jefx9 | I understand that Ebola has been around for a long time, but what caused this sudden spread of the disease? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Unlike previous outbreaks that happened in rural, isolated areas which burned themselves out, this one managed to spread to a large densely populated area with poor sanitation and terrible healthcare services. Throw in poor education, lack of basic knowledge of the illness, superstition, burial rituals that evolve touching the bodies of the dead and you have the perfect conditions for it to spread.",
"I have done absolutely no research besides what I read on reddit, but I believe I read somewhere that this strain of Ebola has a much lower lethality than most strains, something like 60% compared to 90%. This would increase the infectivity a lot since a 90% lethality means it usually kills most of its hosts and it wouldn't spread very fast/very far. I am also under the impression (again, no research, not an expert, just something I think I heard somewhere once or something) that Ebola is generally spread mostly by the people who survive it, because they can remain contagious for days afterwards, so a drop in the lethality to 60% would mean the strain would spread MUCH faster and easier.",
"Earlier outbreaks were in remote hard-to-reach rural and jungle areas. The current West African outbreak has hit densely-populated areas that are well-integrated into national, regional, and international transportation networks. In short, it was hard for people to travel in or out of the places where earlier outbreaks occurred, but it was very easy for people in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia to get on an airplane in Conakry/Freetown/Monrovia in the morning and be somewhere in the USA, Europe or other African countries by the afternoon, evening, or night."
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| [
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m9ywc | How come you don't get an echo when your phone is on loudspeaker? | You would think that the sound you're sending would go back into the receiver's mic (when they have it on loudspeaker) and send it back to you, making an echo. But this doesn't happen.
Why? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's because they have programmed in a feedback control loop to detect which sounds are coming from the speaker (as opposed to your voice) and which should be echoed and which should not. \n\nLots of engineers worked hard to make this work.",
"Anti-echo software. They add an inverse wave of the speaker's sound to the microphone's sound to cancel the echo out. It's also an option in most desktop VoIP clients like Vent, Mumble, Skype, etc.",
"While it may not happen directly through your phone, feedback loops can happen frequently if you call someone who has their phone going through their car stereo. It creates a rather distracting loop/delay.",
"Not an echo. The speaker is too close to the microphone for echoes. For a tenth-second echo, you'd need them to be about 100ft apart. Any echo will happen a thousandth of a second apart or less. So instead, you should get a feedback whistle. Anti-feedback circuitry corrects this.\n\nOn the other hand, you *do* get an echo if the room has flat solid walls and hardwood floor. Listen to someone using speakerphone in a gym or bathroom, and everything gets all echo-y.\n\nLast: all telephones should make a feedback whistle, no? The microphone is too close to the speaker. In an old-style phone handset the microphone and loudspeaker are connected by a hollow plastic tube! To prevent this the phone co. invented something called a \"[hybrid network](_URL_0_)\" that was installed in all the old dial phones. It subtracted the microphone signal from the incoming-plus-microphone signal. That way the incoming signal would go to the loudspeaker, but the microphone signal would be canceled out. Not bad for 1915 technology."
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You would think that the sound you're sending would go back into the receiver's mic (when they have it on loudspeaker) and send it back to you, making an echo. But this doesn't happen. Why? | [
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4u2hep | How do hard shutdowns work even if device is frozen? | If a device is completely locked up and not accepting any inputs, how are we able to force it to shut down without physically removing power to get the device to start accepting inputs again? I'm talking about holding down the power button on computers, holding down power + home on an iPhone, power + volume on an Android phone, etc. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Outside of the parts of the device that can 'freeze', there's a simple switch. This switch cannot be activated easily, as one would reset or turn off the device too often. Instead it's a simple mechanism that's activated by a combination of pressing a particular button for long or combining it with another button. \n\nOn an iPhone the lock and home button are both connected to the hardware, and both have distinctive functions. But they are also connected to another switch, one that is not affected by the rest of the device, and a simultaneous long press will lead to the battery briefly being disconnected for a moment. No matter how stuck the device is, the switch operates in a separate circuit, and will therefore always work (unless this particular switch also breaks.. which could happen, and one would then need to screw open the iPhone to physically disconnect the battery).",
"They work basically as it is a low level function handled by the motherboard that tells the power supply to just cut power, it doesn't tell the OS anything (doesn't give it anything to process). So it basically is just like pulling out the plug (or laptop battery).",
"Device being locked up usually means that your CPU is somehow locked into a task and won't change into a new task, or this task switching is somehow very slow(If times between task swaps rise beyond 1 millisecond, you're gonna start noticing something's up. If it takes like a second to switch between tasks, you're gonna notice the computer is unusable and almost completely unresponsive. Making sure these kinds of slowdowns don't happen is impossible problem to solve in general case, and there is a lot of clever tricks being employed to make it as unlikely as possible that your computer freezes like that, but they may fail due to whatever reason)\n\nPower switch is beyond your CPU. Most power switches are set up so that at first, they just send a message to CPU to tell that power switch has been pressed. Your operating system then deals with this message, showing appropriate menus. However, if you keep it pressed, then the power switch simply, well, switches the power off. This logic happens within or near the power switch itself, outside the reign of CPU. It's very simple and fault-resistant device, other than physically destroying it, you can't really glitch it.",
"**ShortAnswer:** Essentially it is like physically removing power to the device, but it is controlled by a button.\n\n\n**Longer Answer:** The power button on your computer doesn't send a signal directly to what you think of as the actual computer. Instead, it is hooked up to what is effectively a smaller and simpler \"computer\" which controls power to the actual computer. Because this smaller computer is so simple (it only has one job to do), it is pretty much guaranteed not to stop working. As a result, even if your computer stops working, the part that controls power to the computer still works. When you hold down the button for long enough this power supply computer turns off power to the system causing a hard shutdown.\n\nThis also shows the difference between a hard shutdown and a soft shutdown. In the case of a soft shutdown, the main computer is still working (at least partly) and it receives a signal from the power supply computer telling it that it \"should turn itself off\". It then proceeds to save anything that needs to be saved and cleanly stop itself. In the case of a hard shutdown; however, the power supply computer just cuts power to the main computer, so the main computer has not necessarily had a chance to properly save everything. With modern operating systems and filesystems, this is usually not a problem, but there are still cases where a hard shutdown can screw up your computer, which is why a soft shutdown is preferable whenever it is possible.",
"\"The processor\" in a modern computer-based device (PC/laptop, phone, tablet, etc.) is not the only microcontroller inside the machine.\n\nAs well as the main processor running Windows / macOS / etc., there are a bunch of chips doing \"processor\" tasks - but very minimal task-specific things. Often, the software inside these is fixed at time of manufacture of that chip and can never be changed.\n\nOne such chip looks after power management (possibly as well as other functions). On a desktop \"Wintel\" PC, the power supply is always a little bit \"on\" and giving a small amount of power to the motherboard. The power switch on the front/top/etc. of the computer case is connected to the motherboard, and if you press it when the machine is \"off\", the chip responsible for power stuff detects you've pressed it and sends the signals to get the machine to really start up.\n\nThat same chip keeps paying attention to the power button. If you press the power button a little bit, it sends a message along to the operating system - which usually interprets this as a request for a neat tidy shutdown to happen (and in turn, Windows will then tell that chip when it's ready for the computer to be \"switched off\" at the end of shutdown). But if you keep the power button held down for a few seconds, the fairly dumb chip understands that this is a message the user is sending to *it*, NOT to Windows - and it tells the power supply to go back to \"almost entirely turned off\".\n\nThe computer code running in that chip which controls the low level power stuff is not going to be bothered if the software running on the main CPU is all screwed up. If it interprets a signal (like a button) as a \"force power-off right now\" command, it's still able to do that.",
"These devices often have several layers of systems on top of each other. If the top systems have problems you can still access the lower systems. Similar to how an application might crash but the operating system is still available the computer might crash but there is a separate chipset on the motherboard that is responsible for a lot of low level tasks like controlling the power so you can restart the computer. If you get into servers you might even have another full size computer with its own OS, network, storage and display to manage the server remotely.",
"Some of the answers I don't think are getting to the meat of your question. I believe you are asking, how can a computer or tablet shut down if it is frozen?\n\nThe power button is a physical switch and is directly controlled by motherboard and also used as inputs for CPU. Meaning, even if tasks are locked up inside CPU, motherboard can still perform the vital function of turning on or off with physical switch. The CPU inputs from switch can be used to perform different functions, but the motherboard still has ultimate control over the switch.",
"The power control system only controls the power that goes to your computers components. Very simple task and it's impossible to fuck it up or get confused."
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} | train_eli5 | How do hard shutdowns work even if device is frozen?
If a device is completely locked up and not accepting any inputs, how are we able to force it to shut down without physically removing power to get the device to start accepting inputs again? I'm talking about holding down the power button on computers, holding down power + home on an iPhone, power + volume on an Android phone, etc. | [
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4xpjnb | Why should we brush our teeth before breakfast and not after? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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35ndqb | How does a deflated football provide an advantage? | explainlikeimfive | {
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} | train_eli5 | How does a deflated football provide an advantage?
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1l0lrb | What is a felony? | and what distinguishes it from other crimes? Not from the US, but here the word a lot in American films and TV shows. Also, are these different by state, or a nationwide thing? What is the added weight of a crime being a felony? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In the USA a felony is a more serious type of offence, and is punishable by more severe sanctions. Lesser offences are called misdemeanors. People convicted of felonies often face restrictions that continue after their sentences have been served, such as voting restrictions or not being allowed to own firearms, etc.\n\nOn the off chance that you're a Canadian, we make a similar distinction between indictable and summary offences."
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} | train_eli5 | What is a felony?
and what distinguishes it from other crimes? Not from the US, but here the word a lot in American films and TV shows. Also, are these different by state, or a nationwide thing? What is the added weight of a crime being a felony? | [
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1rcdnu | Ads on reddit | How does reddit profit from ads heading back to reddit? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Reddiors are paying actual money to advertise those posts or subreddits.\nIts basically pitty & spam purchases."
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} | train_eli5 | Ads on reddit
How does reddit profit from ads heading back to reddit? | [
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8so7m6 | How do heart rate sensors track your actual heart rate? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained:\n\n1. [ELI5: How do heart rate sensors on wrist watches work? ](_URL_5_) ^(_7 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How do smartwatch heart rate monitors work? ](_URL_4_) ^(_47 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How do the heart rate monitors that clip on to your finger also find oxygen levels? ](_URL_1_) ^(_ > 100 comments_)\n1. [How do those smart watch green light heart rate sensors work? ](_URL_6_) ^(_3 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How does a smartphone app measure blood pressure and heart rate? And how accurate are they? ](_URL_0_) ^(_17 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How can those treadmill sensors tell what my heartrate is while I'm running really fast and the whole thing is shaking like crazy? ](_URL_7_) ^(_7 comments_)\n1. [ELI5: How do treadmills measure your heart rate at the gym by just holding two handlebars. ](_URL_3_) ^(_17 comments_)\n1. [How can some watches give you your heart rate? ](_URL_2_) ^(_2 comments_)",
"By measuring your pulse? They sit near a point on the body where the veins are close to the skin so it can detect the pulse. Same as if you put your fingers there."
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5rivhs | Before we went to space, how did we know there would be no gravity? | I know as early as Galileo (and even earlier), we've known about the force of gravity. How did we know that travelling in to space would make us weightless (or near)? Was it known purely from observing planetary bodies in space or something else? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Travelling into space doesn't make us weightless. Travelling in an orbital path does.\n\nThink of throwing an object. It travels some distance then falls to the ground. Now throw it harder. It travels further but still falls. Now throw it really, really hard. It can travel far enough that the curvature of the Earth makes it take a bit more time to impact. Expanding on this, you can assume that, if you can get something \"thrown\" fast enough, by the time it \"falls\", the Earth will have completely curved out from under it, resulting in the object perpetually falling. This is what an orbit is. We can't practically do it in the atmosphere since the air resistance slows down the object, but up high enough, the lack of air resistance means it can orbit for quite some time.\n\nrelevant xkcd: _URL_0_"
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I know as early as Galileo (and even earlier), we've known about the force of gravity. How did we know that travelling in to space would make us weightless (or near)? Was it known purely from observing planetary bodies in space or something else? | [
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6p8tk1 | Why does it take 3, 5, 10+yrs for some games to come out, such as Fallout New Vegas to Fallout 4 when the games become profitable on mere preorders alone? Halflife 3 would generate billions, yet it is an opportunity no one is pursuing? | Developers please enlighten me, especially while Battlefield/Call of Duty receive yearly releases. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Games like Fallout or Halflife are niche genres without much widespread interest, so any additions to the series have to be carefully created and marketed in order to preserve their following while attempting to gather more interest.\n\nGames like BF/CoD have a massive following; it doesn't matter if the newest one is good or better than the previous, people will still buy it, and they won't likely ever lose interest in the series. They're also a lot easier to make because those companies don't need to hire historians/story writers to make sure the lore is accurate to the universe and to make compelling stories.",
"Sequels are not a guarantee of a quality game or sales if you're not paying attention to details. And yes, for a massively popular franchise like Half Life, if they released Half Life 3, it would sell decently no matter what. But if the game wasn't good, suddenly the franchise is in jeopardy.\n\nAnother thing you need to take into account is, if Half Life 3 got released and let's say it was subpar - You can return steam games up to a certain amount of playtime. So just because you made a sale doesn't mean you keep the sale - if you start playing the game and it's not good, you can just return it. Generally speaking, physical media is a lot harder to return (and less people are likely to do it due to the hassle).\n\nThere's also a huge difference between the amount of development involved in Battlefield/Call of Duty updates (mostly assets and engine tweaks), and creating an entirely new graphics engine from scratch/major overhauls, and the amount of content required to fill up a massive world like you see in Fallout 4, for example. Doing that every year isn't feasible, and if they kept releasing a new Fallout game every year, people would eventually get bored with the formula. This doesn't happen nearly as much with multiplayer, competitive games.",
"There are a ton of misconceptions in your question. \n\nFirst off, Bethesda is a single studio. They only work on one game at a time. They swap between fallout, TES, and new properties. \n\nSecondly, Half Life 3 would NOT generate \"billions\". Skyrim, a widely popular game that has sold 7 million copies in the first month alone, has only generated 650 million over the course of its life. \n\nThird off, Battlefield and call of duty are games that are cookie cutter. They use the same engine every game, and develop very little content overall. Think about how fast you go through CoDs story mode versus how fast you go through fallout 4. More content, more development time. That's ignoring that open world games are harder to design from the start. \n\nFourth, Half Life 3 has not received a sequel because the man who made it, and the team behind it, genuinely doesn't want to continue working on it. They have no new ideas, no drive, and no passion for HL3. Better to let a legendary game die legendary, than to kill it by releasing a half assed game with no effort put into it."
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Developers please enlighten me, especially while Battlefield/Call of Duty receive yearly releases. | [
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38qdvj | How the hell does Asia have so many people? | It seems throughout history Asia has always had huge populations compared to the western world. I don't get it. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well to start with it's goddamn enormous, so there's that, it's also been populated a *lot* longer... got to remember that Westerners didn't even make it out to America until a few centuries ago, before that the 'Western World' was pretty much just Europe.",
"To put it simply, it has a good amount of arable land and more importantly it uses crops and farming techniques that maximize the productivity of that land.\n\nFor example, when planting rice in a terracing system, adding another hand will produce more rice. So if you have one more baby, the. It is easier for the agricultural system to absorb and provide for that worker. This continues for a surprisingly long time before the benefits reduce to where it is no longer worthwhile.\n\nThe other reason is the green revolution, which is modern farming techniques and the use of industrial fertilizer and pesticides which dramatically improved crop yields. When these practices hit, Europe was already significantly industrialized and urbanized, and had a lower birth rate anyway. Whereas the high birth rates of village life were suddenly supplied with a lot more food and therefore a better chance of surviving childhood.",
"There is more usable to grow food as a percentage of total land than in Europe or Africa. North & South America have only been populated for ~10k/years and only highly populated for ~200 years. Over time it is possible that density could approach Asian levels in some parts of those continents.\n\nAsia has extremely good water transport that allows crops to be distributed to huge populations without modern industrial transport.\n\nChina developed a very effective central government more rapidly than any other large land-based culture and exported it to most of the rest of Asia. That central government proved adept at the challenge of growing the food needed to support large populations."
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} | train_eli5 | How the hell does Asia have so many people?
It seems throughout history Asia has always had huge populations compared to the western world. I don't get it. | [
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3vxlbg | How does having a Youtube channel with lots of subscribers make you money? | I mean, where does the money come from? Is it all from advertisers? Or are there other factors at play? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"People watch your videos, and those videos have ads on them. You get a percentage of the profit from that ad based on how many people watch the video. There's a good breakdown of how the profit is divided here: \n\n_URL_0_",
"Mainly, advertising (the amount paid per 1000 views depends on the kind of the ads displayed), also product placement and sometimes networks contracts.",
"Adverts, sponsors, product placement, contracts. It's exactly the same way as a TV channel gets money, just on a smaller scale. The more people see your video, the more ad revenue you'll receive, same with sponsorship money and other forms of money making"
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I mean, where does the money come from? Is it all from advertisers? Or are there other factors at play? | [
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xrxvf | How does ctrl+f work? | What process occurs that allows a computer to quickly find text in a document? Does it take the string and line it against all other data until it finds a match? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is a huge can of worms your looking into lol. Search algorithms are really complex and go really deep into several methods. Now I'm not sure exactly how windows handles its search, but as a web developer, I've had to make a few different types of searches. I may be getting the terms wrong here, but here's an overview.\n\nLinear Search: You have a paint color at your house, and you want to go to the hardware store to find some touch-up paint. The guy there hands you a book of colors. You take your paint sample of your house paint and, one by one, compare it to the colors in the book, until you find the match.\n\nSplit it up: This time you go to the hardware store with a friend. Go to the guy and he hands you the book of paint again. This time you split the book in half. You look through the first half, and your friend looks through the second half. The more friends you bring, the more you can split up the book.\n\nSort and Search: This time you know the name of the color. Lets say its Green. So you to the store, get the color book, go right to the green section without looking anywhere else. Now you can either start going through one by one till you find it, or split it up with a friend again.\n\nI know I'm grossly oversimplifying the process, but that's a small insight into how some searches work.\n\nIf you want to get into more of the nitty gritty, Wikipedia has a lot of info _URL_0_"
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} | train_eli5 | How does ctrl+f work?
What process occurs that allows a computer to quickly find text in a document? Does it take the string and line it against all other data until it finds a match? | [
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67s9rs | Why has there been such a marked increase in spam/scam phone calls in the past few years, and is there anything that can be done about it? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ELI5: When you mail a letter some place, you usually put a return address on it. However there is nobody that actually checks to verify the letter came from where you say it did. You could live in California and pretend to be from Washington, and if you use a re-mailer service the post marks will even show it's from Washington. \n\nIt is the same with telephone numbers in the digital age due to the ability of many voice over IP customers to change the phone number displayed when they call someone, much like setting a fake return address above. This allows scammers, robodialers, telemarketers, even bill collectors, to call a person without revealing their real phone number, or even pretending to be somebody else like the IRS, a neighbor, the police department, or a business.\n\n\nDetailed explanation: Telephone systems used to work using a protocol called SS7 or signalling system 7 which uses point codes instead of ip addresses. SS7 packets contain information about the source point code, the destination, and information on who placed the call, and where the call is destined. Because the telephone company had exclusive access to this network, it was not possible to fake a telephone number. \n\nThen came voice over IP which uses TCP/IP networking to send telephone calls over a data network using things like SIGTRAN or SIP (thanks for the correction Databeast) which helps establish calls over IP networks. \n\nSIP information can be sent by the telephone company, but if you have access to a SIP provider, then it is possible to change the displayed number and make a telephone call appear to come from any phone number you wish, the same way changing the return to address on a letter can. \n\nThis allows spammers and scammers to hide their real telephone number, and make the call appear to come from any phone number they wanted. For instance the IRS 800 number, your local police department phone number, friends or family, or even your own local area code and prefix so they could pretend to be a local call. \n\nThis makes it very easy to abuse the telephone system in a hard to trace manner while remaining anonymous so your victims have little information to find or incriminate you. \n\nThis is why telephone abuse is becoming more prevalent even on national call blocked numbers. Some people have asked why the phone companies don't block them and the answer is it was against the law and they could incur FCC fines for disrupting telephone calls. The FCC is working on new rules that would allow a user to give their phone provider permission to block these type of calls without incurring fines. \n\nIt is a good policy to set your phones default ring tone to silence or 24 hour \"do not disturb\", and specifically add phone numbers of friends and family to the exclusion list so the phone will still ring when they call. \n\nAnd if you see a phone call placed from the first 6 digits of your real phone number, it is guaranteed to be a scam. If your phone number is 210 855 4444 and you see a phone call from 210 855 1234 it's a scam.",
"The level and detail of information about people is so accurate now that these companies can afford to ring you. Before they would need to randomly dial every number for a few hits. Now they can purchase data on things like, people who have had a car crash, people who have bought a PC etc.\n\nOur data is everywhere. What you buy, when you buy it etc are all easily collected. Things like a store loyalty card isnt there because they really really like you, its because they can tell if people in a particular area prefer Pepsi or Coke-Cola etc.\n\nThey also get mega bucks by passing these sorts of details over to marketing people who by these lists from all over the show, and then sell big lists to anyone who will buy them. This means that you can afford to only ring the 100,000 people on your list about that car crash they've had, rather than the entire country.",
"Don't forget reason number one: **Because it's profitable.** If it weren't so, people would stop doing it.\n\n > is there anything that can be done about it?\n\nWhen you find it, let us know!\n\nIn the meanwhile, here's my trick: \n\n* Phone rings. LET IT RING.\n* \"Answer it\" -- pick up handset, push green button -- after THIRD ring, but DON'T SAY ANYTHING.\n* Wait two seconds, listening. If you hear electronic beeps or clicking (call being switched) disconnect.\n* Finally, say Hello. If you don't get an IMMEDIATE response, disconnect.\n\nAnd Rachel from Cardholder services will start talking as soon as you pick up, so you don't have to say anything. Play a game: See if you can disconnect before she says \"Rachel\"!",
"I'll tell you what I do about it that seems to help tremendously. I do this for the Microsoft style scam calls and the ones asking things like if I had a bladder mesh surgery and want to join a class action suit. \n\n\nAs others have mentioned, the cost is so minimal nowadays that for all practical purposes, it costs them nothing. But, the one thing they don't have is unlimited time. Therefore, I drag it out so long that it makes it very inconvenient for them to call me. First, I play along and play dumb for as long as possible. They ask if I'm a homeowner, yes. They ask if I'm a renter, yes. They ask if I have been exposed to asbestos, yes. You get the picture. \n\n\nThen they finally catch on that I'm wasting their time. Many of the outright scam artists come from countries where family is very important. I start telling them how they embarrass their families by being dishonest people. If this doesn't bother them, I move on to how their parents must be so embarrassed that they are such failures that being a scam artist is the only type of job they are capable of because they are such pathetic people. I'll tell them they are dumb, pathetic losers who aren't capable of legit jobs. Their parents must be so embarrassed by what failures they are. While everyone else brags what their kids do, their parents have to stay silent to their friends because they are such losers that they shame their family. I'm not going to lie, I get downright vicious. \n\n\nThey will most likely become hostile at this point. Then I move on to insulting their penis. If they say anything back, I flat out taunt them. They work as scam artists in 3rd world countries, it's not like they have the means to get on a plane. I insult their dignity and their manhood. Eventually they get do pissed they hang up on me. I do this all over a good 10-30 minutes. I make it so hostile, uncomfortable, and time consuming that it no longer makes sense for them to contact me. Whatever scam outfit that person is from, they typically will not contact me again for a good 6 months to a year.\n\n\nSorry this isn't an official this works to report them to authorities who will care and do something about it. However, I've found this to be the most efficient way to get these people to stop bothering me.",
"It has EXPLODED. The \"do not call\" registry used to be slow to take effect, but worked well after a month or so. \n\nIt doesn't work at all anymore, it's telemarketing galore with no boundaries these days. All you can do is ignore and block!",
"Yes, yes!! There is something you can do!!! \n\n_URL_0_\n\nThis guy, Roger, created a computer program that talks to your telemarketers for you. It's absolutely hilarious. My personal favorite is Kim the Kraken. She (the human voices robot) keeps this guy on the line for like 8 minutes. You can hear all of the different voices of robots on the site. \n\nIt used to be free, not sure anymore. I bought a subscription for $6 for a year and I three way call ALL my telemarketers and get links to my recordings emailed to me. \n\nI totally look forward to getting these calls now. At work, people gather around my speaker just to listen in. Very, very funny. \n\nThis is legit. Google it. The founder has given Ted talks, he's been interviewed in all kinds of magazines. You'll love it.",
"My job at work is to caption phone calls for the deaf and hard of hearing. About 30-40% of calls that we connect to are either telemarketers, cardholder services, pre-recorded charity drives, warranty chasers, and PC scams. Occasionally we do get dangerous calls like the ones that call and pretend the person's grandson is in jail in Mexico or that they won something and they're demanding $250 bucks through Western Union before they can get their millions. \n\nThere is nothing we, the interpreters, can do about that. FCC regulations clearly defines that we have no business intentionally altering the conversation to alert the poor old biddy that gets drawn in to these kinds of things. We can only caption verbatim. I know a lot of colleagues who become distressed after certain calls because they have to just sit there and listen to someone get scammed out of their money.\n\nHowever, if you do have a relative that has a captioning phone, interpreters are allowed to collect the call IDs that we suspect as scams and patch it through to operations. This is a relatively recent addition and our marketing team sends out newsletters to customers just to at least warn them of such calls. Personally, I've told my parents and my grandparents to always come to us should they get any calls that demand money from them and stay clear away from those Microsoft scam fuckers because they are literally the worst. Top shit tier scum buckets along with the Western Union guys.",
"Here's what you can do: \nWaste their time. \n\nThe scam only works because it's fast to sort the rubes from the non-rubes, even though the probability of finding a rube is very low. Change this balance even slightly, and the scam becomes unprofitable. \n\n\n You can't lower the percentage of rubes in the population, but you can increase the time it takes to find them: by keeping the scammer on the line even though you know it's a scam. \n\nThe scammers hate this. They're trying to make a fast buck, and you're slowing them down. As a result, they furiously scrub their lists for time-wasters. \nNothing else works. Hanging up doesn't work - that costs them nothing. Being rude doesn't work, that just means they hang up and cut their losses - they'll still call again. \n\nThe only thing that works is to be nice, string them along, keep them on the line as long as possible. \n\n**Waste. Their. Time.**",
"It's a couple of things, both related to VoIP.\n\nCalling has gotten ridiculously cheap. Long distance used to be 5-10c/min. Now it's less than a penny a minute.\n\nAlso, many carriers don't verify the caller ID for calls entering their network. The FCC should force them to. Also, there's no way for the carrier further in the chain to verify what the originating carrier sends.\n\nSource: big commercial VoIP industrial customer.",
"I don't know why, exactly, but it has to do with how gullible people, in general, are. Working in law enforcement, I encounter calls from citizens being scammed like this, about a dozen everyday. The most recent one I remember was a man in his 20s or 30s and transient; he got a call from the IRS on the day after Tax Day. The person on the other line said he owed money to the IRS and if he didn't pay, there will be a warrant out for his arrest and local PD will be out to get him (nevermind that he's transient and doesn't have a stable address for them to come get him, but I digress). He believes this and agrees to pay. They tell him to pay with $400 worth of iTunes cards and send the numbers or whatever to a particular account or number, and he does so. He realizes several hours later that he might have been scammed.\n\nHe asks me, with hope in his voice, \"ma'am, is this true? Does the IRS typically accept that form of payment?\" Because in spite of everything, he honestly believed them. It was kind of sad. \n\nInstead of saying what I really wanted to say, I just posed a question: \"what is the IRS going to do with an iTunes gift card?\"\n\nThen it struck home. \n\nRemember folks, if the IRS needs to get in touch with you, they will contact you through mail. And they will definitely find better ways to fuck you out of your hard-earned money than to demand iTunes cards!",
"There are apps like [hiya](_URL_1_) that identify spam/scam calls and prevent the phone from ringing",
"Waste their time.\n\nHere's my recent attempt. The guy wanted to know my PG & E password so I made up a random 48 character password. Spent 20 mins of the call trying to convey just the password.\n\nSmall recording towards the end where I was confirming to make sure he wrote it down correctly.\n\n_URL_2_\n\nRemember to have fun.. that's the most important part.",
"My go-to strategy is to engage them but never give them what they want. \"Oh yes, tell me more\", \"how's your day going, it's so nice to chat with you\", \"can you explain it to me like I'm five?\", \"how's the weather there, it sounds like rain\", \"yes, yes, yes, yes, yes\", \"I'm on a run, you'll have to speak up\", etc. \nit's wonderful how much quicker they stop calling you when you waste their time opposed to asking them not to call you.",
"I use an app Truecaller. It shows caller ID for most calls and shows if other users marked it as SPAM. It also allows blocking callers. Super useful.",
"If anyone knows how to stop them that would be nice. Just about every day I get a phone call with the same area code and first three digits as my own phone number. It's annoying, but at least I know which calls to ignore. \nOn another, somewhat related note, is it legal for a newspaper company to send me an advertisement catalog every week when I've asked them to stop? No matter how many times I call the number on the catalog and request a stop they keep sending it.",
"Can I sue these companies that keep calling me for TCPA violations?",
"My work involves a lot of driving around in a gated community. I love these calls. They break up the monotony. I like to see how long I can fuck with them before they hang up on me. I used to be able to keep them on for 15-20 minutes, but they have gotten better over the last couple of years. My greatest accomplishment was making this one Indian guy go absolutely berserk on me. I started really nice and concerned. Right as he was about to scam me I just drop so much shit on him. He said he was making more money than me and going to find me and kill me. I was just laughing my ass off, which just made him more angry. Good times. Now I can barely keep them on for a minute. I have tried different tactics, but I think if you sound intelligent and young they just hang up on you. They are really looking for the dumbest of the dumb and the most old and senile people. I can tell i've pissed them off because sometimes after I fuck with them I'll get calls from all over the country for a few days a lot, and when I try to connect with someone they instantly hang up. Good times. Give it a try if you got some spare time.",
"The problem would disappear if each caller were required to pay you one dollar (or whatever you like) for every incoming call. \n\nFor those few calls that are not spam, you could maintain a trusted caller list. Or just return the call, which would refund the dollar.\n\nThis type of phone plan would be every popular if Verizon etc would offer it.",
"Free cruise algorithms have gotten better but you have to reserve your spot with your CC immediately.",
"I receive a few calls a day from telemarketers. I guess they use a technique to change their number so it shows up in my caller ID appearing like a local number that is similar to mine (same area code, similar first 3 digits). The other day I finally got a call from myself. I have to be honest, when I first looked at the phone it scared the hell out of me. It felt like a horror movie scenario for a second. I was scared to pick up the phone and hear myself on the other end.",
"Since the why has been answered, here's something you can do to help. T-Mobile offers free spam blocking services if you change your benefits on mytmobile. Otherwise, just try blocking numbers. You can also forward spam texts to SPAM (7726, I believe?) and that is supposed to help them do... something. You can also try apps, such as Hiya, which will also block numbers. \n\nMy motto is basically \"if it's important, they'll leave a message.\"",
"I answer them and waste their time. I think I am slowly getting blacklisted to not call me because I am a time waster.",
"Are you telling me my business HASNT been approved for a $200,000 loan?",
"If you want to mess with these people and waste their time (which is really the only recourse we have against them) try _URL_3_ . They provide an automated responder to telemarketers that sounds like a confused old man, one of their favorite foods, who's game for their scams, but soooooo confused. Could you repeat that again? What did you say? Hello? \n\nI was getting daily calls from the \"Vehicle Warranty Department\" or whatever it called itself, trying to sell me a fake warranty. I put the Jolly Roger in my address book, ready to have fun at their expense next time they called... and then they never called again. Phooey.",
"Nomorobo has decreased the number of robocalls we get on our land line. It says there that they've got something for iPhones now too. See _URL_4_",
"I started getting regular (twice a week) calls from the same company ( i forget the name now) trying to get me to claim for an accident I hadn't had. During one of our calls I let them give me the whole sale run down rather than hanging up until they mentioned the company name. Using the company name (and the london number) I found the address of their building they were calling from on google. The rep freaked out a bit when I told them I pass thru London a couple times a year and would be super interested in checking out their building at (address I found) and would be very interested in talking about accidents as they seem so eager. I stopped getting calls from them after that.",
"protip: stop using phones; the whole idea is outdated; and i mean that, just never pick up unless it's from someone you know (you can do this in some phones i guess, ignore except for contacts), and let it go to voicemail\n\nproertip: give out only a google voice number in forms and such, and disable the voicemailbox \n\nbeen doing this forever and never had any issues; granted if you use the same phone for private and work use ymmv",
"I went from once a month or so over the last 2ish years to at least once a day in the last month. What the hell is going on?",
"You still use your phone? Put it on silent except for your favorites. Everyone else. Send me a text.",
"All calls placed on the Switched Public Network end up at a tandem switching office. A tandem office is to end offices what an end office is to the telephones themselves, a routing point. Calls incoming to the tandem office have ANI (Automatic Number Identification)digits the same stuff that shows up on your caller ID. The spoofers are able to change these outgoing digits to the tandem office. If AT & T ever put into place the required translations into the tandem offices, they could simply verify that every call coming in from the end offices was a legit number that was SUPPOSED to be originating from those end offices. Everything else, all the spoofed and fake numbers, could be routed to an intercept announcement, stating that the call cannot be completed \"as dialed\". If this happened, and 123-456-7890 called you, the only digits they could play with and still have the call complete would be the station code, or the 7890. If they tried to make it look like your call came from another area code, the call would fail. AT & T refuses to install this fix, because, even though the spammers are violating FCC law by manipulating call digits, it still makes AT & T a shitload of revenue.",
"As an IT guy for 20 years who now works for a large company my desk Cisco phone was getting called by Panda Antivirus in India. While I waited for the numbers to be blocked I had some fun with these greetings:\n\n\"Mort's Mortuary, you stab em', we slab em'\"\n\nFrank's Taxidermy, you snuff em', we stuff em'\n\n\"Bob's ambulance, you maul'em, we haul'em\"\n\nAbortion clicnic, you knock'em up, we knock' em down, no fetus can defeat us, we have a special on twins today, how may I help you?\"\n\n\"Pinky's porno place, what's your pleasure today\"\n\n..... I thought these would turn the India bastards away...\n\n\"Bob's cow butcher shop, how can I help you?\"\n\n\"RCMP, how may I direct your call?\"\n\nSometimes I had fun too.....\n\n\"Panda antivirus?, I'M WITH PANDA ANTIVIRUS TOO! (Pretends to stand up), where are you, are you sitting near me?\"\n\nThey only hung up on the RCMP and Panda ones. Eventually we blocked the numbers through our own call manager.",
"Interesting, I've actually noticed a reduced amount of spam/scam phone call. I used to get the \"you won a cruise\" one all the time when I was in high school. It's been years since I've heard it.",
"How many people with cell phones get called? Generally curious, house line is always telemarketers or bs, but I've rarely had any on my cell numbers. \n\nI like to have fun on the house line",
"It's cheap and easy for fly by night companies to blast out thousands of calls and there's money to be made. If it wasn't profitable then it wouldn't happen. Check out [RoboKiller](_URL_5_)",
"What is this \"Phone Call\" you speak of?"
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} | train_eli5 | Why has there been such a marked increase in spam/scam phone calls in the past few years, and is there anything that can be done about it?
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2kt9sz | Why do the tendons in my foot randomly contract to the point where my toes will curl up? | It is kinda painful and really random. Whenever it happens I have no control over my toes/foot for about 10-15 seconds. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It sounds like a regular foot cramp to me. I get those sometimes.\n\nMaybe you need potassium or something? Are you eating properly? Taking a multivitamin? Do you get leg cramps? \n\nMaybe you need electrolytes and hydration.\n\n*Edit: IANAD",
"You need to visit a doctor. Call soon.\n\nIt could just be an ordinary cramp, but if it's interfering with your life you should have it looked at."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do the tendons in my foot randomly contract to the point where my toes will curl up?
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5vr6a7 | How we know the age of the universe? | Title | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The ELI5 version is that we know universe is expanding, and if you know how fast something is expanding you can extrapolate backwards to a time when everything was all in the same place, which is considered the beginning of the universe as we know it.\n\nIf you want a more complicated answer:\n_URL_0_\n\nYou might want to hit up ask /r/askscience if you need more than that."
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} | train_eli5 | How we know the age of the universe?
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1taxmv | - Does masturbation decrease sperm quality? NSFW | Wife's friend told her she was advised by doc that her man masturbating 3 times a wk would decrease her chance of getting pregnant. This was relayed to me and dammit, I'm skeptical. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's bullshit. If anything, masturbation is good for men, as it 'clears out the tubes', so to speak. In fact, \"high frequency ejaculation\" (i.e. 21 or more times a month) reduces men's risk of prostate cancer! [Study](_URL_1_)\n\nEDIT: A search on Pubmed returns NO evidence WHATSOEVER that masturbation decreases either sperm count or quality.\n\nEDIT2: Here's a [study](_URL_0_) that says just that - even though density and volume are decreased, it has no effect on man's fertility",
"I don't have an answer for this, but 99% of men masturbate, and 98% of those people don't have any sperm problems, so no, probably not; or if it does, it isn't noticeable."
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} | train_eli5 | - Does masturbation decrease sperm quality? NSFW
Wife's friend told her she was advised by doc that her man masturbating 3 times a wk would decrease her chance of getting pregnant. This was relayed to me and dammit, I'm skeptical. | [
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1zojlq | What happens to a check after the teller takes it and does the magic? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's been years ago, but I used to be a proof operator. Essentially the checks, with the deposit slips and cash in/cash out tickets are collected from all branches and sent to the proof operator. That person encodes each item for its individual amount. If you notice when you get look at your check, the amount is encoded on the bottom right (next to the account number). The proof operator is the one who does that. \n\nOnce everything is encoded, all transactions are run through a machine that reads the bank code, account number and amount. Once that is read by the computer the actual paper check isn't necessary anymore. \n\nChecks used to be sent back to the customer each month. Now, the bank keeps a digital image that customers can request on demand. \n\nThat's how it was 25 years ago. I don't know if it still works the same way.",
"At retail it goes in the cash drawer and gets picked up at the end of the day. Then it goes in the safe for a while. Its all electronic but they keep it just in case. It's almost the same as using a debit card really, even worse because everything we need to charge the account is retained at every retailer in paper copies. \n\nI think the money handlers in the armored car pick them up along with cash and take them to the bank, and they go back to the originating bank eventually, but that's well after they are drawn so there really is no point other than tradition. I always thoight we should run them and shred them and piss off some old people, but that's just my style of thinking.",
"At many big banks, a check given to teller is processed through a [check-reading machine](_URL_0_) that not only reads it but also takes a picture of it and verifies it. Checks that are processed that way are destroyed within 2-3 days, since now there is an image of it that exists digitally. \n\nSome checks are only collected by tellers, credited to the account, then sent to a processing center where they verify it's a good check, then destroy it. \n\nChecks deposited through ATM do both. They take a picture of it (in case, for example, something happens to the ATM like someone steals it or severe weather renders it impossible to open) so an image exists digitally and they are then emptied by the bank or a cash courier service to a centralized location where the checks are verified."
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} | train_eli5 | What happens to a check after the teller takes it and does the magic?
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3og0b6 | Why is is customary in rap/hip-hop to use a different name? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's often a part of culture. Especially in the African American community, nicknames are what people are most known by.",
"Its just a convention of hip hop. \n\nProbably influenced by very early NY hiphop being closely linked with graffitti, where you'd make up a tag, coz writing your government name on the side of a train isn't smart. The common hiphop thing of using lots of numbers and letters was also big in early NY tags (eg T-kid, futura 2000)\n\nSome other music genres have similar conventions. In punk bands its also common to give yourself a silly name (eg Poly Styrene, Rat Scabies, Chuck Wagon, etc). Bluesmen had nicknames too (Howlin Wolf, Muddy waters, Blind Lemon Jefferson)\n\nSome stuff just becomes \"how it is\" in genre."
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} | train_eli5 | Why is is customary in rap/hip-hop to use a different name?
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2wupx3 | Why are Russian bombers flying "over" the UK? | [Russian bombers near UK](_URL_0_)
1. Russians pilots are ordered to fly near (or into) our airspace.
2. Our pilots are ordered to fly over to these guys and ask them "what's up" and could they take their potential-nuclear-weapon-carrying-planes elsewhere.
3. They relay this information back to their superiors who tell them "yeah, come home"
4. Everyone calms down.
What the hell is the point of all this nonsense?
EDIT: Front page? Crikey.
| explainlikeimfive | {
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"They are flying over the uk to prove they can, train their pilots and most importantly test the response time of the RAF. Provides them with valuable information in the event of relations heating up even more than they are! They have been doing this three or four times a year for the past decade, there's nothing new!",
"ELY5?\n\nYou know when you walk your dog and you go past a neighbours yard and your dog runs up the the fence and goes WOOF WOOF WOOF at the neighbours dog and the neighbours dog runs to the fence and goes GRRR WOOF WOOF BACK and then you carry on? \n\n\nThat's what's happening.\n\n\n(Look up operation Chrome Dome on wikipedia - fascinating)\n\n\nIt's being going on for years as other posters mention, my step dad spent a fair portion of his RAF career in a lightening chasing MIGs around the north sea. It's politically good to report it now to keep us all on our toes and make sure we all join our dog in growling at the fence at putin and his dog",
"CTRL + F: radar. Nope, doesn't look like anyone is talking about it. Warning, long post about radar ahead. If you know how it all works skip to the bottom.\n\nYes, one of the reasons Russia does this is to show off their dick. We (USA) do the same thing to them. And yes, we're also doing it to show Russia how big our dick is, and make sure they remember that we can still send tons of bombers to their lands with tons of bombs each.\n\nBut there's another reason. Most NATO and Russian bombers are very well known by either side. They've been around for a very long time and they've flown many missions all over the world. Consequently, we all know the capabilities of each other's bombers-range, radar profile, typical cruising altitude, all that good stuff. But we both know that our bombers can reach their shores and theirs can reach ours.\n\nWhat is less well known however is the defensive radar capabilities of each other. Radar installations aren't waved around in each others countries giving themselves away. They sit in the mountains, or on the shoreliens of their respective country, and for the most part run in a pretty passive state.\n\nWhat you should know about defensive/offensive radar is that it has two modes-scanning mode and targeting mode. Scanning mode does just like what it sounds-it searches the whole sky for return signals (echoes of itself bouncing off an airplane), in all directions-just like what air traffic control centers use to direct planes around. Think of it like a flashlight spinning around in the dark. You spin it around with nothing to see and all you'll see is darkness. Hit an airplane with the flashlight beam and you'll see the airplane. Except, just like the flashlight, it's easier to \"see\" the radar from further away than it is for you to point it at something and be able to see it. Imagine shining a flashlight out in the dark at a bug far away. That bug would have to be relatively close for you to see it. However, the bug could be over a mile away and it would still be able to see the flashlight winking at them.\n\nSame thing with radar. Radar detectors on the airplanes can \"see\" the beam of the radar wayyyy before the radar can detect the plane.\n\nAlso, remember how I said there are two modes? Targeting mode is kinda like switching from a flashlight to a laser beam...or just twisting the lens on a Mag-Lite so that it focuses on a smaller point farther away. It focuses the radar in a particular direction, lighting up the target so that you can fire a radar guided missile at it. This mode is usually at a higher frequency, higher power, and points at the target constantly instead of rotating around. Being able to see the enemy activate this mode would be extremely advantageous from a signals intelligence standpoint. Because once they've turned it on you know that is the range at which their scanning radar has detected you. Sure they can keep the targeting radar turned off until you get much closer so that they don't show their cards, but keep flying towards them waving your dick-making it look bigger with more airplanes, and someone might get scared and turn it on earlier. And then you keep flying at them over and over to see how soon they'll turn it on. They might turn it on over and over at 300 miles, but they might get scared, screw up, and turn it on at 500 miles and there you go-you know that anything inside 500 miles from the known location of the radar and you're done for. They were just bluffing when they kept turning it on at 300 miles. Stay outside 500 miles and you can do whatever you want without them knowing.\n\nDifferent radars will operate at different frequencies. Some will pulse on and off, or hop between frequencies to make them more difficult to detect (imagine trying to listen to an FM radio station that kept bouncing between 101.5 and 99.1). They'll operate at different wattages and have different antenna shapes which both vary their range of operation, and the wattage can be altered to extend the range.\n\nKnowing all of these capabilities is invaluable to the enemy, and the only way to get them is to either have really good spies that can infiltrate and steal the info, or to have airplanes fly up to the radars and have the enemy turn them on, and to have radar detecting equipment good enough to analyse and record it all. This in turn allows them to go back home, share the data, and have someone build a better radar detector. If you know the frequency hops around or that the radar pulses you can tailor the detector to look for that type of signal. Think of it this way: if you know you're looking for an infrared laser you don't want to go looking for it with just your eyes or a UV laser detector. You want the device to look for infrared. The difference isn't as drastic since it's all within the radar spectrum, but the distinction is just as important.\n\nAlso it should be noted, that since the RAF scrambled fighters, that likely means they never turned on the targeting radar. Having fighters go up and meet the bombers sends the same message: GTFO, we know you're here. Unfortunately for Russia that means they have to make a guess at how far out they were detected by estimating the time it takes for them to scramble the fighters. But the RAF could just as easily have held the fighters on the ground for a while to let the Russians think it took a while to detect them.\n\nTL;DR: Make no mistake, these are not bombing missions these airplanes are being sent on-they are reconnaissance. They might have bombs loaded just in case or to make a bigger point, but their primary mission is to collect radar data.\n\nedit: Obligatory thanks for the gold, stranger.",
"They aren't flying over the UK, they are flying in international airspace near the UK.\n\nUK pilots don't ask them anything, they escort the bombers while they are near UK airspace.\n\nRussian bombers don't talk to their superiors to ask to get back, they follow the route of their \"patrol\".\n\nIf Russia would someday decide to surprise-bomb the UK, it would be beneficial for the flight to look like a \"routine\" patrol, so as not to have the whole of NATO on high alert once they leave Russian airspace.",
"The same reason they do flights near Alaskan airspace: old-fashioned saber rattling. They've been doing it since the early years of the Cold War, and do it to test response times, train aircrew, etc. The Soviet pilots would do it so often that they often became quite familiar with the American interceptor pilots.",
"Now that we're on this topic: I keep reading reports about Russian aircraft flying really close to European national airspace. However, I never read about western/NATO planes doing the same thing near Russian borders. Is this because it isn't happening? Or does the news just go unreported?",
"Putin have been pushing limits around Sweden's borders as well. Planes showing their missiles to Swedish Gripen-planes, flying into Swedish airspace. The Swedish army also suspects that they have been mapping our archipelago near Stockholm in October last year. They haven't been this aggressive since the eighties.",
"Aside from actually fighting a war, militaries are useful for \"projecting power\". Not actually bombing anyone, for example, but showing that you can.\n\nThink of it like how you'd interact with strangers in a potentially dangerous environment. If a stranger manages to convince you that they could suddenly hurt you really badly, you're probably going to treat them differently than you would if you knew for certain that they're actually incapable of mustering any strength.\n\nIt's a way of getting in the head of your potential adversary, in a world where everyone (all the nations) do not really trust each other.\n\nIt's another reason the US wants to have military bases (and sometimes conflicts to justify them) all over the globe.\n\n Everywhere an American military base already exists, is one place where other powerful nations are limited in their ability to \"project power\". A verbal threat from China isn't going to scare South Korea, when the US has soldiers in harm's way in your country. That's because China knows, if they ever tried attacking South Korea, they're now guaranteed a war with America. Neither China nor America actually wants that, because no one would \"win\".\n\nRussia likes foreign bases for their military too, but these are incredibly expensive, and Russia only recently came up with the cash to resume these flights with their bombers (thanks to petro-dollars...which are now drying up again).\n\nTL;DR A military is really just a bunch of chess pieces in the game played by global elites, vying for self-preservation and a pathological quest to expand influence over others.",
"North East England here. This is a pretty frequent thing, and it seems right now people have just decided to report it this time cause it fits in with the whole Russia thing going on right now.\n\nBasically, it's dick waving.\n\nThey're not technically in UK airspace, they're hanging around the international airspace borders. It's the international equivalent of putting your hand in front of someones face and saying 'look how close i can get to yu, y u gettin mad bro, i aint touchin you i aint touchin you y u mad i aint touchin you'",
"I live in Canada and they do the same thing to us. Another reason they do this (in addition to all of the others listed here) is to waste our resources. When they violate Canadian Arctic airspace, one of their planes are going to be met by at least 2 Canadian fighters, and possibly some American fighters as well. One of their planes causes at least 2 of ours to scramble much further distances to intercept them, only to turn around and make a huge round trip for nothing. Jet fuel is not cheap. It costs us way more to scramble and intercept their planes than it costs them to get their planes into our air space.\n\nAnother reason is to wake me, and others, the fuck up from a sound sleep in the middle of the night. Hearing two 2 planes rip across the sky to defend our airspace is fucking loud and waked my ass up every time. Fuck Putin for doing this. If I had unlimited funds, I'd put some kind of sonic/laser oscillator in orbit above his sleeping residence just to shake his house and wake his ass up in the middle of his night in response to EVERY TIME he wakes me up.",
"Okay, pilot here. Let me explain Russia's motives here:\n\n**Training**\nRussia has increased the frequency of their flights in the past few years in part due to the increased spending on their military, which means more money is available for training operations.\n\nThis means that their aircraft get more flight hours and have more fuel available to use - and these missions of flying near UK and neighboring airspace is perfect for long-range missions that provide -real-world (non-simulated) interaction with foreign airspace and foreign air defenses.\n\n**Strategic Interests**\nCountries often fly aircraft close to other nations while staying in international airspace. The US is one of them that does it. Part of this is to gauge the response time of other nations - to probe their defenses, if you will.\n\nThe other is that it provides valuable intelligence as these aircraft carry sensors and what not that can pick up enemy radars, communications, etc. and provide updates on their capabilities.\n\nAlso, in the case of Russia, they do it out of strategic necessity - it is an integral part of their nuclear defenses. Read on:\n\n**Nuclear Triad**\nThe nuclear triad of a country is the trio of nuclear-weapons delivery capabilities (by strategic bombers, submarines, or land-based ballistic missiles) of which only the US and Russia has a comprehensive capability. These ensure a second-strike capability in a nuclear exchange.\n\nThe US hasn't relied on its strategic bombers much because the US has turned to its extensive submarine-launched ballistic missile fleet and its advanced rocketry which made ballistic missiles in general more appealing.\n\nRussia, however, doesn't have the same extensive capabilities, especially in its smaller ballistic missile submarine fleet. In turn, they rely a lot more on bombers, for which the Tu-95 Bear, the bomber commonly intercepted, can launch nuclear-tipped cruise missiles near a country's borders. This gives that country only minutes to respond - often not enough - and ensures Russian nuclear dominance against less-capable foes.\n\nThus it is imperative for countries like the UK with its small territory to send fighters to intercept these bombers out over international airspace. If one opens to perform a hostile act, the RAF would be inclined to shoot it down to prevent any launches from happening.\n\n**Politics**\nAlso, Russia is re-asserting itself (or, at least trying to) on the European political front. And it is doing so by telling its neighbors that \"look at us, we're able to do what we used to during the Cold War!\" again.\n\nTechnically, they've never officially stopped, but the frequency has increased and has garnered a lot more attention in Western news lately, especially due to their aggressive moves in Eastern Europe - all of which bolsters public opinion at home for Russia and its allies and puts its rivals on edge.\n\nFinally, some countries just do it to be dicks - I've known of guys flying transport aircraft who the State Department cleared with the government of China to overfly their airspace to get to Mongolia or other countries get intercepted by the Chinese over technicalities and force them to go home. This cat and mouse game has been going on for a LONG time.",
"Russia wants more influence\n\nBecause the country is backward and corrupt, it can't be influential\n\nThey have a large military, though it couldn't stand up to the US or combined forces of NATO\n\nHowever, nobody wants to go to war. it's bad for business.\n\nPutin knows this, and knows that nobody respects him, so he tries to scare them by acting like he can bring war to their doorstep.\n\nin Europe, Putin's like the drunk, racist uncle that no one likes, but you can't kick him out of a family gathering and if you react to his antics he'll knock over a bowl of soup.",
"Try to look at it from their view. \n\nCurrent events with Ukraine very much parallel the US intervention with Cuba (and every other South American communist/attempted communist state). To put it differently, they see a \"NATO\" stronghold showing up near Moscow, and they're pissed about it. \n\nI'm not saying that their only reason, but, if France suddenly decided to ally with Russia (or insert British enemy here), you would get very hostile as well.\n\nPutin is basically their Reagan (in some ways, again, it's hard to make comparisons with terrible people like Putin, seriously, people don't kill me for this). He's incredibly nationalist, and his two basic missions (outwardly) are to restore Russia to her former power and to defend what power she still has. \n\nSo while their actions are *incredibly* disagreeable, not only is it intentional, but it has *some* historic justification. \n\nEdit: this is almost entirely Dan Carlin",
"Same thing happens with the Turkish pilots who fly over Greece!",
"1. They aren't flying over the UK, they're flying in international airspace adjacent to the UK\n2. These flights were a regular occasion throughout both the 70's & 80's & tailed off during the 90's & the collapse of the USSR, they were so regular in fact (two or 3 times a week) that they weren't reported on, it's only recently with Russia increasing its military spend & recent posturing over the Ukraine by both sides that have led to a resurgence in the flights\n3. As well as having a propaganda use of showing your enemy what you're capable of ie sabre rattling, their other primary use is to test the RAF's speed of reaction & extent of their airborne intelligence \n\nSource my father was an airforce officer on a number of the bases used for quick reaction.\n\nFunny tale, in the 80's one of the main bases used to intercept Russian bears was Lossiemouth. Give the frequency of these flights it was quite common for both the Russian & RAF flight crews to wave at each other & exchange pleasantries, during one routine scramble to intercept one of the Russian Bears, the RAF crew of a Phantom (F4 to our colonial cousins) were surprised to be greeted by the air crew of the Russian Bear waving copies of RAF Lossiemouth's station magazine, the photos that the RAF navigator took of this incident then subsequently ended up on the front of cover of next edition of the station magazine.",
"1. no they aren't flying over. They are in international airspace.\n2. standard procedure to scramble and ward off\n3. yes, because the test was about time, not threat\n4. yes, of course everyone calms down. that is the nature of saber rattling.\n\nThe point is to maintain supreme power in government and military institutions. If you forget they are there, they lose the impact of their perceived value and strength.\n\nIs it base? yes, but so is humanity. Despite all the nice stuff we do, the buildings and amazing things, the truth is that power rests in the hands of those with might. It has never changed and it will never change. We cannot nurture our nature away.",
"Because it was a standard drill in line with INTERNATIONAL LAW, but our media would like to set us up to fight the russians once again.\n\nWhich is a fucking bad idea, because atom.",
"To test the reaction times of the RAF, how fast they can deploy the Eurofighter, especially in bad weather. They've been doing this for years now but only seem to have started to become relevant since the media have started to notice.",
"The Russians try to start a Bro Fight:\n\n1. Find a target.\n\n2. Tell them that you are not looking for a fight.\n\n3. Tell everyone that you are a tough guy who you should not fuck with.\n\n4. Get your bombers to the start.\n\n5. Claim that you just want to defend your country.\n\n6. Let your bombers take off.\n\n7. Show off your super dope new missiles.\n\n8. Make sure that your bombers turn before shit really starts.\n\n9. Make your bombers turn. Let them fire a few shots into the sea.\n\n10. Announce on RussiaToday how stupid the West is and that you always get sanctioned because you are too nice.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Well to answer this you have to go back 25 years to the falling of the Berlin wall. At the time no one really wanted to see a re-united Germany, especially Russia (then Soviet Union) who lost over 26 million people in WWII. So at the time US President Bush, who didn't want to have a conflict with the then Soviet Union, made a deal with Gorbachev that Germany would be re-united and kept under NATO while NATO would not move ONE INCH EASTWARD OF GERMANY, and Russia would withdraw their troops near Germany and put a peaceful end to the conflict. This deal was never written down however and after the fall of the Soviet Union, Clinton (mainly because of election promises) expanded NATO east and the US broke its promise. Now Russia also has their own national interests, and has consistently made the claim UKRAINE WILL NOT BE A PART OF NATO and likewise Crimea, which has a huge historical significance to Russia and has always been considered by the Russians to be a part of Russia, would likewise remain under Russian (and not US) influence. About three weeks before this whole Ukraine conflict, someone intercepted and put on Youtube a conversation between US assistant secretary of state Victoria Nuland and the US ambassador to Kiev saying that there would be a coup d'etat in Ukraine and Ukraine would become a part of NATO and that Crimea was next. The people of Ukraine don't really like coup's to begin with so when the US and EU tried to pull a coup in Ukraine, the conflict started and has carried on to where it is today. Now when Russia saw the coup and conflict in Ukraine and recognized the goal that Crimea was next, they made a stand that they weren't going to let that happen. This is when they annexed Crimea, which has had a long tradition with Russia dating back to the end of the 18th century when Catherine the great expanded the territory to include Crimea as their first and only warm water port. Now despite the fact that a vote was held prior to the annexation and the Crimean people voted 97% in favor of joining Russia, the west has used the annexing of Crimea as major propaganda to make Russia out to be this evil empire, when it actuality they are merely protecting their interests and the US is the empire that can't help but expand and control other countries they have no business being involved in. Now Russia has consistently said that they will not let Ukraine become a part of NATO, but the US and EU can't simply respect Russia's interests here. This is basically the conflict (and what the news is not telling you apparently) and why it seems that Russia is now forced to make this statement of military power. Because the US thinks they can do whatever they want, and the EU jumps whenever the White House tells them to, you have Russia forced to make a show that hey we have a military too and you guys can't just intrude on our territory and cause coup's in our most closely tied countries. \nThis is a brief explanation of what's going on here and it isn't the best and there are a lot of details that I've left out, so if you want to get a more complete explanation of why this situation is occurring I suggest watching this video and go to about 20 minutes in. _URL_1_ \nIn fact any interview with Ray McGovern will probably clear up all your questions about what's going on and you get a much clearer picture of everything.",
"People have given plenty of good explanations as to why Russia might do this, I'm going to answer why this is in the news at the moment.\n\nThe fact is this has been happening fairly consistently since the cold war. It is absolutely nothing new. A bomber reaches our air space, we send a couple of fighters up, make sure it doesn't actually enter our airspace and follow it until it is a safe distance away. This usually occurs a little way off the coast meaning if a bomber were to start flying towards a major city it would be shot down long before, and would most likely crash in the ocean.\n\nThe question is therefore, if this is happening on a routine basis, why does the news care all of a sudden. Well firstly, it gets a good headline and sells a few extra papers. However it also whips up a bit of fear in the population. Fear is good for two reasons, it help the papers as people are more likely to follow the news closely in times of fear. It also help the government because if everyone is busy panicking about an imminent world war 3 they are less likely to be paying attention to the laws government are passing. You will see quite often these big frenzies coincide with the government passing unpopular laws. In addition to this the more the population fears communism the further right our government can move.\n\nTL;DR: If the headlines are about the worlds impending doom, be concerned about what your government is up to not the media instilled frenzy.",
"Normally I would tell you this is penetration testing to reveal locations of radars and response times of fighters. But that's not the case with Russia.\n\nRussia has become a paper tiger. They have a desperately old military. But they want to be seen as a threat so they can impose their political will. It is sad, really. \n\nOne day they'll push too far and get hammered down hard.",
"I think it's the same thing as the US does with its navy. The reason I say this is because the US has a lot of oversea points to establish power (and they are strategic points, but I'm mainly mentioning the power).\n\nRussia is probably flexing right now. I think they want to intimidate. Although, I could be wrong. It's just my opinion.",
"Russia does this in northern Canada regularly. Should fly over Russia and see how they like it. We invented the jet engine, I'm sure with some noise cancelling technology we can slip into and pass through the entire country before they realize we're not a blip on their acoustic detection system.",
"Vladimir Putin is a thuggish jack-wad who tries to intimidate people with his decrepit fleet of propeller driven bombers. Remember the nerd in school who took Karate but had been handily destroyed in every single real fight he'd been in? That's Putin. Now he's relegated to getting into fights with his weaker friends. A true loser.",
"As part of a Charlie Brooker programme the other week, there was a segment about Putin, and basically he tries to confuse everyone (both foreign states and his own people) as to what his real motives are. I see this as part of his plan.",
"The classic term is \"Rattling the saber\". Russia is doing this to show the UK not only that they can do it, but they're not afraid to do it. It's bullying, but on a global scale.",
"They are just doing what the US military does.... getting near other countries in a show of force.",
"Let's get a few things out in the open because for casual observers, seeing news like the what the OP showed can be scary but is also misleading, in that it doesn't give you a real perspective on events.\n\n* last year NATO military dramatically increased its airborne missions along Russian borders, and [quadrupled](_URL_5_) the number of aircraft it deployed on Russia's borders. \n* Official statistics show that Russia has [not increased](_URL_6_) its military patrols in the Atlantic Ocean over the year, according to statement made on Jan 28 by a British defense ministry spokesman at the UK Quick Reaction Alert.\n* We also hear that Russian planes fly with their transponders turned off, which is deemed dangerous and unacceptable. In fact, this is a common practice for military aviation around the globe, including, first and foremost, the NATO military.\n\n\n > 1. Russians pilots are ordered to fly near (or into) our airspace.\n\nNear is not the same me as into. This flight (as all other routine flights of the Russian military aircraft) was carried out in strict compliance with the international legal norms including International Flight Rules and Regulations, without violation of other countries’ airspace, therefore it cannot be regarded as threatening, destabilizing or disruptive. As far as I know, the British aircrews welcome the training opportunities these flights provide.\n\n > What the hell is the point of all this nonsense?\n\nAccording to the [former U.S. ambassador to the U.S.S.R., Jack Matlock](_URL_5_), who was present at some of the most pivotal discussions between President Reagan and General Secretary Gorbachev during the Cold War’s denouement:\n\n > the taproot of the current crisis is NATO expansion. Beginning with NATO’s Madrid Summit (1994) at which NATO announced it would begin the process of bringing in new member states, through NATO’s Bucharest Summit (2008), at which the alliance declared that “Georgia and Ukraine shall become members of NATO,” the United States has reneged on the promise President George H.W. Bush made to Gorbachev at the Malta Summit (1989) not to expand NATO eastward.\n\nRussia wasn't strong enough to ensure the West kept its promises back then, but now they are in a position to at least defend what they see as their existential interests in Ukraine and elsewhere. \n\n\nDown vote me all you want, but the OP wanted to understand why. Americans are sleep walking into another Cold War, so it's essential you all at least *try* and understand the other nuclear power's position before we become fully committed to this pointless endevour. \n\n\nIf you want to see a real expert talk about it, I recommend the aformentioned [Jack Matlock](_URL_6_), former ambassador the USSR , or political scientist [John Mearsheimer](_URL_6_).",
"BLUF - nobody's flown into UK airspace. The UK press and government is hamming up an old issue because they want more military funding, and because nothing unifies a population like a common enemy.\n\nEven after the downfall of communism, Russia and China exist as a counterbalance to NATO. Peace lasts as long as profits, and if the global economy keeps tanking another confrontation is inevitable. Both sides therefore do their due dilligence and occasionally probe their adversaries defenses, run espionage, and play diplomacy in a way that will hinder their opponent.\n\nThe reason this is being played up now is because a year ago the US and its allies backed the violent overthrow of Ukraine's unpopular but democratically elected leader. Obviously you can't say that on the news, so they portray it as a home grown popular revolt, then point at the regions in the south and east of Ukraine (culturally and linguistically Russian, who heavily supported the ousted president Yanyukovych) who declared themselves autonomous in its wake and say \"hey look at Russia being aggressive again, better beef up military budgets\". Hyping up something that has gone on pretty consistently (and beningly) since the end of the Cold War feeds that narrative and makes it easier to eventually portray Russia as the aggressor in World War 3 (hopefully without nukes)",
"The British are aware that having two aging soviet era bombers near their airspace doesn't put them at any additional threat given that the Russians have thousands of nuclear weapons or affect the ability of NATO to retaliate.\n\nSo far the British response has been the official version of rolling their eyes or a small shrug\n\n+It isn't really about testing the UK response time since the British are undoubtedly aware of this possibility and are probably deliberately mixing up their response times. And frankly all this would tell you anyway is how Britain would respond to two vintage Russian bombers during peacetime.\n\n+It isn't about seeing what the Eurofighter can do because there are countries with Eurofighters less than a 14 hour flight away.\n\n+It isn't really about training pilots because the 50 year old Bear bombers don't stand a chance against Eurofighters or any modern fighter.\n\nThis leaves the only real possibility which is that this is all for domestic consumption for propaganda reasons.",
"A reason that I haven't seen anyone touch on is that the Russians, and everyone else in the world with planes, test the response time of other nations. If a bomber flies into your territory, you immediately respond by sending your own planes. It takes a certain amount of time for those planes to intercept. And if you do this enough times, you can gauge where would be the best place to enter their airspace and have the most amount of time there.",
"You should seriously check out the latest Dan Carlin podcast called 're heating the cold war'. He goes into exactly this topic. Essentially its Russia playing a game of \"see how this feels\" in response to the Wests influence in Ukraine. Dan Carlin. Check it out.",
"Basically the reason you see this in the news is because they know it will stir people up and news is a for-profit form of entertainment. \n\nAs for the bombers, this is nothing new. Russia/Soviet Union has been doing this for 60 years.",
"You know that \"game\" kids play, where they get as close as they can whilst going \"I'm not touching you, I'm not touching you\". Basically this but in a \"grown up\" manner, or rather big kids with dangerous toys.",
"It's pretty much a regular weekly affair in Norway. Good training for our pilots i guess. It's not very dramatic, apart from when green or cocky russian pilots do dangerous maneuvers in close proximity to our planes.",
"Why are US planes flying all over the entire world? We would be much better off if we all Considered the news they do not spoon feed, and we will learn.",
"There are many different excuses and justifications, but they all boil down to one single specific reason. \n\nBecause Putin is a dick.",
"Are those filthy commies mess in with Americas father? Only we can piss of the redcoats.",
"They are probing. Small incursions into another country's airspace to assess their defense posture.",
"It's because nato are patrolling russian borders basically a dick swinging competition",
"The simplest explanation is that they are *not* flying *over* the UK.",
"why is UK located where Russian bombers want to fly?",
"Ok, so about 70 years ago WW2 ended and the United States and the Soviet Union were the two countries that managed to get out of that fight with the ability to just about flaten anyone else on earth. Over the course of the next 50 years the US and the USSR were involved in a \"Cold War\" in which both built up staggeringly vast stockpiles of world-ending weapons just in case they had to fight one another. \n\nDuring this time the US and the USSR were what political scientists call \"super powers.\" According to Alice Lyman Miller a superpower is \"a country that has the capacity to project dominating power and influence anywhere in the world, and sometimes, in more than one region of the globe at a time, and so may plausibly attain the status of global hegemony.\" \n\nAnother way of saying that is that a super-power is a country which could, unopposed, run the world. \n\nNow conventional wisdom holds that the USSR was a superpower right up until it fell apart in 1992. How and why the USSR fell apart is beyond the scope of this answer but suffice to say that 80 years of Bolshevism (which is more or less a flavor of communism) didn't do good things for the Soviet Union's ability to hold things together economically. Shortly after the fall of the USSR the Soviet military was in shambles, its citizens were starving, and the entire country was run by drunks, thieves, and has-been-spies.\n\nBut Russia is huge, has enormous mineral wealth, and is nothing if not stubborn. Over the course of the past 25 years they've come a long way. \n\nBut in those 25 years the US and her European allies have treated the Russians as a has-been power. America has expanded the NATO alliance -- a Cold War club of nations founded with the express purpose of telling the Soviets to piss off -- right up to Russia's borders and, today, American military units run and use bases within a stones' throw of Russian soil. \n\nThis understandably threatens Russia. More to the point, it wounds Russian national pride. Remember, within living memory this was a Superpower -- a nation which terrified the great and wealthy United States and which Americans approached with caution and deference. Today the same countries that feared Soviet expansion chide the Russians for their involvement in Ukraine while simultaneously attempting in insert their own influence in the area -- this in a part of the world that was part of Russia since the 1700. \n\nSo why is Russia ordering nuclear capable (armed?) bombers to buzz British and US airspace? It's to remind American and British leaders that Russia is not some third rate power to be pushed around like North Korea or Iraq; Russia has strategic bombers, missiles, and more than enough nuclear firepower to turn every city of note between Berlin and Berkley into a smoking crater. \n\nThis is Russia reminding the West that it too has a sphere of influence and that it will not be ignored and if the US or the Brits speak up about this the Russians will respond something like \"I'm sorry; I thought this was a thing we did now what with your ships in the Black Sea and your interference in the whole Ukraine thing.\"",
"eli5. So you and your stinky brother have separate rooms. Mom(nato/UN) says dont go in each others rooms.\n\nBut your brother, being a stinky little twit, opens your door, and sticks his hand in your room. Technically he's not \"in\" your room..just floating his hand in . You don't like that, so you yell to mom, and for now he pulls his hand out., but the next day he does it all over again.. This goes on for a while until one day he takes it too far and just jumps in. ..Thus the great room battle 3 began.",
"The Norwegian airforce has to intercept russian military planes almost weekley. The russians like to show of their air sovereignty. Since the 1980's, it has been observed almost 500-600 russian military planes along the norwegian border yearly! And it's said that the russians these last years have gotten more finance to their air force, so therefore the air activity has increased. Look at their flight [raid pattern](_URL_7_). \n(i was stationed north in the norwegian army, and my experience and interpretation of the russians is that they do what ever they want, Sorry my bad english.)",
"The Soviets did this along the east coast of the US for years, just outside of our airspace. They were shuttling \"Bear\" bombers back and forth to Cuba. We would scramble fighters to shadow them all the way. It stopped with the fall of the Soviet Union, but I read something about it resuming. Source: I am the son of an air traffic controller.",
"We got a battleship further up the UK in Scotland...they wanted to test how long it would take for HMS Defender to get up to them from Portsmouth. It was up in the Highlands too so I suppose it was like a test for the full length of the UK. [Here's a link to an article about it] (_URL_8_)",
"This happens in canada too, we only caught them once... But it's probably a monthly routine. \n\nRussian pilot reporting back: \"sir, we have been flying here for 8 hours and they still have not responded...\"\n\nOooh canada.",
"This flyover has particular relevance because of the timing and current relationship between NATO and Russia. Essentially a \"how do you like it\" type of maneuver being that NATO is nearly bordering Russia.",
"Russia is exercising its right to determine the UK's military concen vis a vis itself. This is allowed under the [Open Skies Treaty](_URL_9_) which allows all member states to initiate unarmed aerial surveillance.",
"It's only \"news\" now because the US is trying to generate more political will to increase sanctions on Russia. This happens all the time and has been going on for decades.",
"in the Netherlands this happens for about 3 - 4 times a month for the past five years.. Nothing to see. Just the Russians showing 'who's the boss'.",
"Its a game. NATO tries to expand and put military bases around Russia, Russia pesters NATO countries a bit.",
"These events happen very regularlly, however they are not over the UK, instead they are several miles off the coast, over international airspace, yet an area which the UK decides is of national importance.\n\n[Not so long ago another long range patrol rattled the Japanese airforce] (_URL_10_)\n\nYou should realise the Nato also perform long range patrols around the edges of Russian airspace, such as the Artic and the Black Sea and receive a similar response, however NATO doesnt ususal use long range bomber aircraft.\n\nAs well as testing response times of NATO, these bombers could be equipped with electronic equipment which could collect radio signal information from NATO jets/airbases. \n\nNormally these interceptions happen without incident, the pilots fly alongside each other and wave a hand gesture and then head home for smoked kippers.\nDepending on the type of aircraft used photographers onboard will snap photos of the other nations aircraft for intelligence (sounds dumb, but it could reveal a new design of a component or the weapon load-out could give clues to the flight time/over all weight of the aircraft).\n\nFrom a political point of view its about power projection, Russia stopped these flights for several years due to money problems, now they are keen to show they are rich economy with interests outside of their territory which they will protect, such as what is happening in Ukraine right now.",
"This has been going on for longer then you have been alive. Sometimes politicians use it to stir up some fear and ferver to help them make policies about who they can and cannot fuck with and how they will fuck with those whom are to be fucked. Its like two idiot jocks standing shoulder to shoulder in a mirror comparing cock sizes to determine some matter of contest. Even if its just to see who has the biggest Dick! We have been on the brink of global holocaust since the advent of nuclear weapons and to be perfectly honest, each and every day we are still alive is a miracle when you think of the kind of people we have giving the orders and making the laws on both sides. I mean lets face it, we have batshit politicians with nuclear weapons running the world. How we even are still here to discuss this is quite literally, as I said, a miracle, an actual genuine miracle.",
"Because Cameron wants to play statesman and he lobbied for crippling sanctions on Russia and on the Russian people (which you never hear about in the media for some reason, presumably because they're white so it doesn't matter if we impoverish them) and has generally pissed Russia off at every turn. And before you blame Putin realize that Crimea *identifies* as Russian. They voted Russian in a referendum; the West had some issues but nobody seriously doubts that they would vote Russian anyway. Exactly the same reason of the right to self-determination is cited by the UK for holding onto the Falkland Islands and various other territories and exactly the same queries could be raised about self-determination polls. (\"OMG you have troops in the Falklands so the locals will feel pressured!\")\n\nIf a war breaks out and we get a hydrogen bomb dropped on us, you have Cameron to thank. He didn't have to drag us into this.",
"This reminds me of the Iron Maiden song \"two minutes to midnight\", I've never liked 99 % of politicians, but to be honest Putin is not really a politician he is a crazed man in power, he envisions Russia the way it was (Soviet Union), and is making his vision a reality, I don't know what keeps him in check at this point but whomever does better have Putin meet with an accident, I wonder if Putin believes he can somehow win from a major war because people as egotistical as Putin care more for themselves above all and everyone else is just \"things\" unworthy of real consideration and obstacles that are in his way to what he visions as the way \"it should be\" too many of these egomaniacs are in power because they are ruthless in their quest to reach \"their promised land\" and people are always foolish enough to follow them.",
"It's because we've reverted back to a new cold war, complete with proxy wars, propaganda and overt war games to cause fear.\n\nIt was only a matter of time really, Putin is ex. KGB and knows how the game is played, our western leaders have prodded for this for long enough because they need never ending wars and fear to control people. (1984 anyone?)\n\nWe have the Americans training and arming the FSA in Syria to prolong a civil war, while attacking ISIS which itself is blowback, and at the same time condemning Russia for getting involved in the Ukrainian civil war.\n\nFor a brief period in the late 90s to early 2000s we had a chance at real peace, but sadly the Eastern and Western governments all need a target to get the proles to focus on.\n\nDon't be blind to what's going on. Be selective in the bullshit you believe.",
"Sometimes when countries are having tense relations, like when one country wants something and another country doesn't want them to have it, they will go through all sorts of posturing to show off their strength.\n\nIn this case, Russia wants Britain to know that their bombers COULD reach Britain, should it come to that. They also want to know how difficult it is, how long it takes,how the British respond and how quickly.\n\nThey also want to see how Britain responds to the provocation, do they say anything or just grin and bear it?\n\nIn the end, this is classical posturing to try to intimidate the other country into not pushing as hard as they otherwise might.\n\nThe other answer is, 'Because they can't fly under it'",
"It's in retaliation for the sanctions put on them. \nThey have not been flying \"over\" the UK they fly in international airspace bordering our sovereign airspace. They get close but don't enter our airspace. They have done the same to other countries since the sanctions were put in place. Holland and Denmark are other countries they tried to show their toothless grin to in recent times.\nThey are achieving nothing but it's Putins way of trying to save a little face. He's failing to do this though. Russia pose no threat to the UK. \n\nYou can be sure that we [UK] have a Trident nuclear sub lurking in (or near) Russian waters at this time. And they know it. It's a pissing contest.",
"They do not fly into British Airspace and we do not fly into their Airspace.\nThey are flying near to our Airspace and we are flying near to their Aispace constantly.\nThis was never a Problem for them nor was it for us but since Ukraine conflict started our medias and our Nato-Clowns have have discovered that some Russians flying some airplanes can excellently be used to scare the shit out of our people in Nato-States. \nI'm wondering if Medias in the Russian Federation are trying the same scare tactics towards their Citizens whenever they spot a NATO-Airplane somewhere near their Borders.",
"I'm going to take a shot and guess that it may also be [linked to the treaty on open skies] (_URL_11_) that was signed back in 1992 and put into effect as of 2002. There are 34 countries that participate in the treaty and Russia is one of them. \n\nIt establishes a program of unarmed aerial surveillance flights over the entire territory of its participants. The treaty is designed to enhance mutual understanding and confidence by giving all participants, regardless of size, a direct role in gathering information about military forces and activities of concern to them.",
"They have increased flights by 4-5 times over the past year so with the frequency up it is making news. They fly with transponders turned off making them a large threat/disruptor to commercial aviation and the escorts help with that. Theoretically there is training, and sneak attack potential but after 60 years most of that is well understood. Putin appears to be pursuing destabilization policies and this is likely part of that. The Economist has a nice summary, though perhaps not balanced explanation depending on your point of view. \n\n_URL_12_",
"You know how the Raptors in Jurassic Park tested each bit of electric fence to find a weak spot?\n\nThat's exactly what they are doing. Finding the spots with least radar coverage and slowest intercept times. \n\nThe UK would be doing it to Russia as well but we currently have fuck all combat ready Typhoons as it is. We also just bought 2 new aircraft carriers with nothing to put on them. It's a joke really.",
"Didnt read all comments so I dont know if this has been said yet but there is a standing agreement between some nations that they can perform flight operations over each others countries for the purpose of surveillance and evaluation. They use bombers because they can be great vessels for taking aerial photos. Additionally there are always representatives from the observed nation onboard supervising that everything is being done in accordance with proper procedures.",
"Russia has been doing this for years, since the Cold War. They used to do it to test our air defences (and still do, sort of- our only operational air base is in Scotland, which is why the Russians flew over the South) and now they mainly just do it to remind us that they're still there. They did it a couple of years ago. It really is nothing to worry about.",
"They are testing the response time and abilities of the RAF to formulate strategies should a conflict ever ensue. They've been doing if for ever, and other countries do it to them too. There's nothing new here, other than the media seems to want to report it more now for some reason.",
"[US spy plane fleeing Russian jet invaded Swedish airspace ](_URL_13_) \nUS officials have confirmed Swedish media reports of a mid-July incident in which an American spy plane invaded Sweden’s airspace as it was evading a Russian fighter jet. The maverick plane was spying on Russia when it was intercepted.",
"Because everybody who has something to say is pissed at each other. And they have bigger and better toys. It's like your neighbor buying a better car than you have, just to prove a point.\n\"Look at me I'm a bad4ss, don't mess with me!\" kind of point.",
"Listen to the podcast Dan carlins common sense. There isn't a good tldr here, but I'll try. Russia is mad NATO is putting military bases on their borders. Similar to how the UK or US would react it Russia was putting an army base 200 miles from ours.",
"It's like a bully who you've sometime get along with is pushing your buttons every now and then to see what they can't get away with. Maybe he's just playing, but maybe one day he's gunna sucker punch you so he testing your reflexes.",
"Also you should question who is telling you this, I noticed an article in the (horrible) Daily Mail. This is used as scare tactics to up our military spending to defend us from this \"threat\".",
"This happens over the Baltics and Scandinavia all the time. Both Sweden and Norway has seen big increases in Russian activity after the Ukraine crisis broke out.",
"These are dry runs. Send up a bomber and get immediate interception? Use a new stealthier option and see what haooens",
"they are flying in international space, news agencies think this is useful for propaganda and declare it provocation by Russia...",
"They do the same to Finland. Russian aircrafts have violated Finnish airspace quite a few times in recent times...",
"This is nothing new. It has been going on since the 60s. Think of it as world power dick-waving.",
"Does anyone know what bombers they are using? Are they using their classic Tu-95 or their B-1 ripoff Tu-160?",
"I poke you, you poke me back. Both side's populace sees said poking and cheer. Everybody wins.",
"It's all about detection, response time and level of response. in other words intel.",
"BECAUSE THE SHIT IS ABOUT TO HIT THE PREVERBIAL FAN ! Good luck people............",
"If they flew under it the planes would crash?",
"Putin must wave giant Russian penis to the world.",
"Like if they shot down a commercial airliner?",
"Hands down the best explanation I've heard.\n\n_URL_14_"
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} | {
"url": [
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duMdVGXuwX4",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hH1UtgeRS-o",
"http://www.democracynow.org/2014/9/3/fmr_us_ambassador_to_resolve_ukraine",
"http://edition.cnn.com/interactive/2014/11/world/russia-west/slider/",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PIvaSrk5KQE",
"http://www.thenation.com/article/198289/legendary-ambassador-delivers-some-straight-talk-dc",
"http://www.rusemb.org.uk/ambarticles/407",
"http://1.vgc.no/drpublish/images/article/2012/07/25/23131207/1/990/1404845.jpg",
"http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/defence/portsmouth-based-warship-sent-to-shadow-russian-ship-off-scotland-1-5787359",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Skies_Treaty",
"http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/08/22/japan-russia-idUSL4N0GN2AR20130822",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_Open_Skies",
"http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21643189-ukraine-suffers-it-time-recognise-gravity-russian-threatand-counter",
"http://rt.com/news/177720-us-spy-plane-sweden/",
"http://www.dancarlin.com/product/common-sense-288-re-heating-cold-war/"
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} | train_eli5 | Why are Russian bombers flying "over" the UK?
[Russian bombers near UK](_URL_0_) 1. Russians pilots are ordered to fly near (or into) our airspace. 2. Our pilots are ordered to fly over to these guys and ask them "what's up" and could they take their potential-nuclear-weapon-carrying-planes elsewhere. 3. They relay this information back to their superiors who tell them "yeah, come home" 4. Everyone calms down. What the hell is the point of all this nonsense? EDIT: Front page? Crikey. | [
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455xiv | Why does Sean Bean always die? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"He often plays secondary protagonists or villains, both roles that often find themselves with a death scene. John Hurt, Bela Lugosi, and Vincent Price are killed in movies much more often. Then again two of those are famous horror villains so obviously they would die.",
"Sean bean is actually one of twenty-seven siblings born at the same time.\n\nThere is a prophecy that once all twenty-seven have been killed, the rapture will begin.\n\nThe Sean beans are trying to bring it about, and are actually dieing on film. The death scenes are real deaths.\n\nI think they have about 6-7 more to go?"
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} | train_eli5 | Why does Sean Bean always die?
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1m8rtr | Does decaf coffee have any amount of caffeine? Or is it completely void of all traces? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Totallyfightingfoo is correct, about 1-2% of the original amount of caffeine, but it should also be mentioned that the process to make decaf coffee involves using industrial strength chemicals and processing them in such a way that if you saw the entire process and the chemical list....pretty sure you would just avoid it entirely."
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} | train_eli5 | Does decaf coffee have any amount of caffeine? Or is it completely void of all traces?
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3q08p6 | Why does mold grow so fast on berries. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Berries are full of water & sugar - mold loves to eat this stuff. Berries have very thin skins, which allows the mold to get to the water & sugar (especially once you bruise them). Most of them have tons of nooks & crannies, giving lots of surface area for the mold to take root."
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} | train_eli5 | Why does mold grow so fast on berries.
| [
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8r2ajz | 5th, 6th, 7th, etc, Dimensions... | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Conceptually it’s the same. Another axis that can be measured and things can move in and around. \n\nYour problem understanding hem is we are very much locked into our 3 dimensions so you say “length width and height, I get it but how can I move 4th dimensionally?” \n\nYou can’t. This makes it very hard to understand. \n\nImagine you were one dimensional and existed only on a line. You could move forward and backwards and that’s it. If I said there was a second dimension that moved side to side you wouldn’t be able to get it because the concept of “side” would be impossible to visualize. \n\nSame if you were two dimensional, existing as a drawing in on a paper for example. Now you can move side to side and forward to back but if I told you about this third direction “up”/“down” you’d think I’m crazy. \n\nWell we are stuck in three. So when I tell you about this new direction “blart” and “klart” you’d think I’m crazy. That’s th me fourth. \n\nAnd the fifth. And the sixth. Etc. just because we can’t perceive or access these dimensions doesn’t mean they don’t exist. \n\nRead the short book flatland for a more thorough eli5 explanation of the concepts.",
"Whatever you want it to be. You can choose them, but it’ll be hard to imagine a geometry that’ll pass. But the system can be described by equations.\n\nYes, energy can be a dimension.",
"Technically yes. A dimension is just a measurable thing \\- energy would be Joules. Distance is meters, time is seconds, grams is mass \\- etc. \n\nWhen people talk about length, width, and height they are talking about spatial dimensions. \n\nUsually when people talk about 4 dimensions or 5 dimensions in the context of spatial dimensions, they're talking about another set of directions you can go in that space. \n\n0D is a point, 1D is a line, 2D is a plane, 3D is a cube, 4D is a hypercube \n\n0D has no direction. 1D gives you forward and backward (or up and down, whichever you like) . 2D gives you left and right. 3D gives you up and down. Lets call the new directions in 4D black and blue. \n\nin 1D, a front point is connected with a back point to make a line. This gives the property of length.\n\nin 2D, a left line and a right line are connected to make a plane. This gives the property of area. An object now has lines and area. \n\nin 3D, an up plane and down plane are connected to make a cube. This object now has lines, area on the sides, and volume in the middle. \n\nin 4D, two cubes are connected blackwards and bluewards to make a hypercube. This object now has lines, area, a bunch of volumes on its sides called 'cells', and a hypervolume. \n\nYou can keep adding on new directions and new dimensions.\n\nA little bit of play with these thoughts: \n\n\\-\\-\\-\\-\\-\n\nIf you pass a 3D object like a sphere through a 2D space, the 2D space will see a circle grow and then shrink. It cannot see the sphere.\n\nIf you pass a hypersphere through 3D space, we will see a sphere grow and then shrink, we cannot see the full hypersphere. \n\n\\-\\-\\-\\-\\-\\-\n\nIf you tilt a piece of paper in 3D, it starts looking slanted or weird shapes because part of it is further away from you and part of it is closer to you.\n\nIf you tilt a cube in 4D space, it starts looking slanted because part of it was blackwards and part of it is bluewards. \n\n\\-\\-\\-\\-\\-\\-\n\n[Here's a projection of a hypersphere.](_URL_0_)\n\nEach 'surface' of it is a volume. There are 8 cells in this hypoercube. This is exactly analogous to a cube having 'area' on 6 sides. This is also exactly analgous to a square having 'lines' on 4 sides. \n\nFor a cube, you can visualize it as two planes connected by lines. You can do that between any two opposite sides of a cube, it doesnt matter. Same works for the hypercube here, you can visualize it as two cubes connected by lines at each corner. But it works between any two opposite sides \\- \n\nFun fact, a 4D being would be able to see you and all your internal organs. If you were in a 4D space you would look like a very weirdly exposed 3D cross section. \n\nYou can keep going, adding new directions."
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} | train_eli5 | 5th, 6th, 7th, etc, Dimensions...
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19ksxj | Current and voltage. And how can a phase difference happen between them. | If an electric current is a flow of electric charge through an electrical conductor and Voltage is the difference in electric potential energy of a unit test charge transported between two points.
How does in ac current there can be a phase difference between them? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"[This image](\n_URL_0_) pretty succinctly demonstrates what potential, current and resistance are. Using the image as a reference, the simple answer to your question is that for any curent to move (eg, through the tube and ring of resistance in the cartoon) *first* there has to be a *push* from the voltage (the volt in the cartoon). The current won't move until after the volt pushes, and any delay in the movement of the current following the push will cause the phase difference you observe. \n\nThe reason that time varying potentials and currents can be out of phase is that the current is a *response* to the potential across a circuit or circuit element; ie, the current *always* follows the potential. \n\nWarning: Crude Analogy Follows. So the electric potential (voltage) is analogous to a gravitational potential (height). If you're on top of a cliff, right when you jump off is your maximum possible potential (because you can't fall up). As you begin to fall, your rate of descent (or current) slowly increases, and your potential decreases - until your current reaches its maximum value (what the metaphor discusses is specifically the time between when the voltage is maximum, until the current is maximum. In this example, the max speed is reached at impact, so the 'potential' and 'current' are out of phase by exactly Tau/4 - in reality the phase difference can be anything less than or equal to tau/4). \n\nNow, normally in an electric circuit the gap between voltage and potential is tiny - infinitesimal. However, if you give the potential something to work on, eg a very long path to travel across, it will actually take a noticeable amount of time for the potential to push the current through the circuit elements. This delay is the phase difference.",
"The existence of phase differences arise from the finite lag caused by the charging of capacitors in AC circuits."
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} | train_eli5 | Current and voltage. And how can a phase difference happen between them.
If an electric current is a flow of electric charge through an electrical conductor and Voltage is the difference in electric potential energy of a unit test charge transported between two points. How does in ac current there can be a phase difference between them? | [
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38l44h | The European Union and why it would be such a big deal of Greece left it | So I've been traveling around Europe for the past 7 days and our tour guide keeps talking about the EU and I don't know if it's just her or if I just am dumb and don't get it. But she was taking about how bad it would be if Greece left and how ever hates Germany's PM. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine there was a club for businessmen, where they agree to look out for each other.\n\nGerry and Frank are very rich and successful. They don't really need a club, but it does help them out.\n\nPaul, Steve and Isaac are doing ok. The fact they are in the club and backed by Gerry and Frank helps them get loans they might not otherwise get.\n\nGreg is a complete fuck. He uses the club's prestige to borrow shitloads of money, and lets his business go to hell while he buys fancy cares and parties all the time.\n\nSo they kick Greg out. The problem is, all the bankers in town say \"Whoa, when things go tough, they booted Greg and left us to foot the bill. Maybe we should think twice about Paul, Steve, and Isaac.\"\n\nSo now those guys are in trouble. They had a plan based on borrowing money as club members, and now they have to pay more interest to get those loans. That could push from from ok to in trouble, and makes the bankers even more skittish. There even be a domino effect, where Paul gets kicked out, which makes things worse for Steve, etc., etc.\n\nThat is the scenario everyone is worried about."
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} | train_eli5 | The European Union and why it would be such a big deal of Greece left it
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8qf12y | Why does baking soda cure canker soars? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It doesn't cure them per-say. \n\nBut the canker sores are typically infested with bacteria that like acidic environments. Likewise, the pain receptors exposed by the sore will react from acidic things.\n\nBaking soda is a basic compound, which means it will neutralize acid, which may both help with killing off bacteria keeping the wound infected, and more immediately, remove the stinging pain every time you poke at the sore (until your saliva eventually lowers the pH back down).\n\nYou can get the same effect by chewing up a Tums tablet (calcium tablet) in your mouth and swishing it around over the wound. It might sting for a second, but then pick and prod at it all you want - you won't get that sharp shooting pain.",
"I know baking soda can change the pH level. But if you want a good “cure” a cooking product called alum will help take the pain away from a canker sore.",
"How do you apply the baking soda to the sore? I've done the saltwater swish, but never tried baking soda"
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} | train_eli5 | Why does baking soda cure canker soars?
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1rhvui | Why is there a stigma associated with those who read comic books, but none attached to those who watch the same characters in comic book movies? | In other words, why do people act like you need to "grow up" if you read Batman or Spider-Man comics and then fall all over themselves to see the trilogies in theaters on opening weekend? It's weird. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Okay, remember The Avengers? Here's a scene from Marvel's [Ultimates](_URL_2_), a revamped version of the team.\n\nI know that's unfair, since the Ultimate Universe was always a little more adult, but I don't want to talk about regular universe Spider-Man killing his unborn baby and mind-raping his wife in a deal with Mephisto, the local Satan.\n\nBut hey, that's Marvel. DC's always been a little more innocent. It goes all the way back to the [the Super Friends.](_URL_1_)\n\nI wonder who those two kids are, and [what happened to them?](_URL_0_)\n\nRight.\n\nSo, about [Batgirl...](_URL_4_)\n\nI'm sorry you had to see it. But it's not because she's a woman. The comic book industry often fights gender stereotypes. [For example, here's the first Robin, now Nightwing, soon to be raped by an anti-hero named Tarantula just after he's seen her murder someone.] (_URL_5_) They date once his PTSD wears off. \n\nBut I'm really being unfair by cherry picking these scenes, especially since 3 of the other Robins were brutally killed, even if an insane Superboy punching a hole in the universe brought Jason Todd back to life, and DC is pretending they never killed Stephanie Brown after they pissed off their readers when a Batman writer pretended she was never Robin. After [this scene.](_URL_6_)\n\nAnyways, if you don't have a headache right now, and you want to know more, [go explore the wonderful universe of comic books!](_URL_3_)",
"There are tons of comic books and issues, so if you identify as a comic book reader, the assumption is that you pay attention to/read all those comic books. That creates the stigma that you are obsessed, perhaps unhealthily, with comic books. Popular portrayal of comic book readers as nerds or overly obsessed doesn't help with this (see [Comic Book Guy](_URL_7_))."
],
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"url": [
"http://thiswastv.files.wordpress.com/2012/06/screenshot_2012-05-28-14-13-061.jpg?w=278&h=432",
"http://www.comicbookmovie.com/images/users/uploads/11736/draft_lens2292123module61792892photo_1254928409Super_Friends_Wendy_Marvin_and_wonder_dog.jpg",
"http://s2.photobucket.com/user/ngrey651/media/blob-eats-wasp-ultimatum.jpg.html",
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"http://manwholaughed.files.wordpress.com/2013/02/killingjoke7.jpg",
"http://i.crackedcdn.com/phpimages/article/4/3/2/126432.jpg?v=1",
"http://wtfdccomics.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/spoilerdies.jpg",
"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comic_Book_Guy"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why is there a stigma associated with those who read comic books, but none attached to those who watch the same characters in comic book movies?
In other words, why do people act like you need to "grow up" if you read Batman or Spider-Man comics and then fall all over themselves to see the trilogies in theaters on opening weekend? It's weird. | [
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40jg7c | why do mosfets have Gate, Drain and Source rather than Base, Collector and Emitter? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In a transistor with a Base, Collector and Emitter, a small current is used to control a larger current, essentially copying the small current, but *larger*--thus, the transistor amplifies a faint signal into a stronger signal. There's a net flow of current through all three electrodes.\n\nIn a MOSFET, the purpose of the transistor is to act like a switch. If you add a small positive charge to the Gate, this attracts electrons from the Source into the region between the Source and the Drain, and once the electrons get far enough into that region, they can continue to flow out the Drain. There is no current flow between the Gate and either the Source or the Drain.",
"The short answer is they aren't the same thing. The gate on a MOSFET is more like a small capacitor -- it is segregated from the rest of the transistor by a dielectric material, so charge isn't actually passing through, but a small amount of electrical charge will be stored in the gate and influence the conductivity of the semiconductor crystal below. The base of a transistor, on the other hand, is just a piece of the same semiconductor (without any insulation) doped in opposition to the surrounding material (imagine cutting a diode in half and attaching one side to the end of another diode -- the base is the middle piece. )\n\nThe reason that the distinction is made is that you have to carefully design around the practical effects of these differences -- trying to maintain a constant current to a MOSFET gate would result in a slow but steadily increasing voltage in the gate (i.e. the R/C charge curve), with a commensurate increase in current change, while trying to drive the base of a BJT as if it were a MOSFET would, at best, result in a very brief activation followed by nothing. You also have to worry about different behavior under high loads -- MOSFETS will stop conducting in high-heat conditions, whereas BJT's will actually conduct *more* in high heat, which means that driving too much current through one will eventually result in a feedback effect that will cause the transistor to fail and quite possibly explode. So even though they fulfill a very similar purpose, you absolutely do not want to get a base mixed up with a gate, a drain mixed up with a collector, or a source mixed up with an emitter."
],
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} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | why do mosfets have Gate, Drain and Source rather than Base, Collector and Emitter?
| [
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5k9hyx | Why is there a standard arrangement of the numbers on a game die? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Some arrangements of numbers keep the extremes from clumping up on one side of the die, which if the die is unbalanced, would mean significantly higher or lower averages if rolled a large number of times. Though with dicemaking techniques available today, most dice are going to be mostly fair for most practical purposes regardless of pip arrangements, so it's nowadays mostly due to tradition and symmetry/aesthetic.",
"_URL_0_\n\nStarting at 5:27, mathematician (and comedian) Matt Parker talks about this property of dice in great detail. He goes through the different reasons of what makes dice fair: each pair of opposite sides all adding to the same number, or all vertices having their adjacent faces adding to the same number, etc.\n\nHe takes out numerous 6-sided dice, 20-sided dice, and 120-sided dice and gives an over-the-top mathematical critique of each of them.",
"The pips (or dots) on a die are made so that one side and it's opposite side total 7.\n\nThe 1 is opposite the 6, the 2 opposite the 5, and the 3 opposite the 4.\n\nDue to the removal of some of the die to create the pips, placing the specific numbers to specific sides of the die creates the most balance to the entire die thus ensuring the greatest possibility of randomness.",
"On a cubic die, when the sum of opposite sides is seven, 1,2, and 3 share a corner, which looks nice. Changing the arrangement won't affect probabilities."
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} | train_eli5 | Why is there a standard arrangement of the numbers on a game die?
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1sx715 | Why are women more attracted to "unavailable" men, is this chemical, psychological or a bit of both columns? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1. The less available something is, the more it is wanted. 2. if a man has a GF/wife he appears to be a good bet because somebody already thinks he's dateable.",
"Well, there must be a reason why he's taken. That suggests that he has something going for him.",
"I reckon it's at least partly because, by stealing another woman's man, one confirms to one's insecure self that one is better than her.",
"What /u/norby2 said but also the fact that that men and women both try and see if they can out do others and possibly see if they are still attractive as well as a combination of primal dominance like possibly be better than others your own gender. \n\n\nDunno if I worded that too well I'm on my phone.",
"1. People are often attracted to things they can't have. Tell a child he can't have x and the taboo aspect makes it more appealing.\n\n2. If he's taken, there's probably a good reason. (i.e. he is worth dating).\n\n3. This one depends on the situation, but I think a lot of women who are attracted to confidence/easy going-ness are attracted to taken men because they don't try as hard to be flirty and seem less desperate or awkward because they care less about what other women think than single men do.\n\n3. This is speculation on my part, so take it with a grain of salt, but I think part of the reason people experience this is the same reason that people tend to believe they always choose the slowest line even though statistically this is probably not the case- confirmation bias. Getting hit on when you're taken is frustrating, and it's easy to convince yourself that this happens more often than when you're single even though it may not be true."
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"url": []
} | train_eli5 | Why are women more attracted to "unavailable" men, is this chemical, psychological or a bit of both columns?
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2fbkl9 | How does a hostile takeover in business work? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"when someone tries to acquire 50% + 1 of the voting shares of a company without approval of the board/stockholders."
],
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} | train_eli5 | How does a hostile takeover in business work?
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3u4j45 | Why are some parking lots angled? | I just noticed that in a strip mall with a Target and Wal-Mart close by, the Wal-Mart lot has parking at an angle whereas Target has parking perpendicular to its lanes. They look roughly the same size. They both have cart return stations throughout.
Why the difference? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Angled spaces are easier to turn into and back out of, but require that you go down the aisle a specific direction."
],
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} | {
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} | train_eli5 | Why are some parking lots angled?
I just noticed that in a strip mall with a Target and Wal-Mart close by, the Wal-Mart lot has parking at an angle whereas Target has parking perpendicular to its lanes. They look roughly the same size. They both have cart return stations throughout. Why the difference? | [
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2bd7mi | What the term cancer means, and can we actually cure it? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cancer is a disease of cells. It is an abnormal growth of cells which tend to proliferate in an uncontrolled way and, in some cases, to metastasize (spread). \n\nCancer is also called malignancy. A cancerous growth or tumor is sometimes referred to as a malignant growth or tumor. A non-malignant growth or tumor is referred to as benign. Benign tumors are not cancer. \n\nCancer is not one disease. It is a group of more than 100 different and distinctive diseases. Cancer is NOT contagious. \n\nCancer can involve any tissue of the body and have many different forms in each body area. Most cancers are named for the type of cell or organ in which they start. If a cancer spreads (metastasizes), the new tumor bears the same name as the original(primary) tumor. \n\nThe frequency of a particular cancer may depend on gender. While skin cancer is the most common type of malignancy for both men and women, the second most common type in men is prostate cancer and in women, breast cancer. \n\nCancer frequency does not equate to cancer mortality. Skin cancers are often curable. Lung cancer is the leading cause of death from cancer for both men and women in the United States today. \n\nCancer is the Latin word for crab. The ancients used the word to mean a malignancy, doubtless because of the crab-like tenacity a malignant tumor sometimes seems to show in grasping the tissues it invades. Cancer may also be called malignancy, a malignant tumor, or a neoplasm (literally, a new growth). \n\nTreatment \n\nDevelopments in the treatment of cancer have led to greatly improved survival and quality of life for cancer patients in the past three decades. Traditionally, cancer has been treated by surgery, chemotherapy, and radiation therapy. In recent years immunotherapy has been added to that list. New drugs and techniques are constantly being researched and developed, such as antiangiogenic agents (e.g., angiostatin and endostatin), genetically engineered monoclonal antibodies, retinoid agents, and vaccine agents (stimulating the immune system)."
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} | train_eli5 | What the term cancer means, and can we actually cure it?
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37zvni | Why does China turn back North Korean defectors? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The Chinese view North Koreans as economic immigrants, similar to how the US sees Mexico. They're only crossing the border to try to get a better job in China, which many North Koreans do along the border.\n\nMost other countries see North Koreans as political refugees, like how the US sees Cuba. China is under a lot of pressure to re-categorize North Koreans.",
"They have a deal the the Pyongyang government to turn back defectors, and on top of that if they didn't do anything they would have a flood of refugees on their hands."
],
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} | train_eli5 | Why does China turn back North Korean defectors?
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29d7ll | When sheep run away from their herd they grow several pounds of wool. So how do wild sheep now get weighed down and die? | I'm confused because sheep that don't get sheared grow several pounds of wool. There was one sheep that grew like 60lbs. So how do wild sheep not grow that much and get too heavy and die? Was this evolutionary? Are sheep bred to be shearing sheep? I am very confused. | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"Sheep have been bred to produce more wool. Just like dairy cows have been bred to produce more milk, pigs have been bred to grow very large very fast, and chickens and turkeys have been bred to grow so quickly that they can be slaughtered at just weeks old for meat. \n\nWild sheep produce exactly enough wool to keep themselves comfortable.",
"I think the op is wondering what happens if a captive sheep escapes and can't be sheared. I am curious of this as well",
"there are vast and shocking differences between the \"hair\" on a wild sheep and the wool on a domestic. Its not even close to being the same. Wild sheep in alaska (cold) only have hair thats like 2 or 3 inches. There are hundreds of different breeds of domestic sheep and they have wildly varying types textures weights oil contents of wool. Some wool is used for sweaters, some for rugs, some used to be used for industrial purposes, some (merino) is used specifically for long underwear or socks that doesnt itch. Source: I own sheep, and live near lots of wild ones. They have similar roots, but are essentially different animals."
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} | train_eli5 | When sheep run away from their herd they grow several pounds of wool. So how do wild sheep now get weighed down and die?
I'm confused because sheep that don't get sheared grow several pounds of wool. There was one sheep that grew like 60lbs. So how do wild sheep not grow that much and get too heavy and die? Was this evolutionary? Are sheep bred to be shearing sheep? I am very confused. | [
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7xwhpf | Who is it screaming like crazy at the beginning of a run in Olympic downhill alpine skiing competition? Why do they do it? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"I was a competitive skier and for me it was always the coach / teammates. In most downhill ski events, you get a short distance before turns or gates start where you will see skiers skating to pick up speed faster. I always thought it as a the last way someone could yell encouragement and get your adrenaline pumping.\n\nSource: Skied competitively for 6 years. Never was at the Olympics though.",
"When I did a few runs on a giant slalom race as an amateur, it was me screaming mostly in terror at how steep that little start run was. Then I got too busy to scream.",
"Most of the time, it's the coaches. Some of the time, it's the skier showing their war face. It's all about attacking the course.",
"In my experience, it was mostly the support staff (physiotherapists, trainers, team doctors) that were helping us get prepped for the race. Typically my coaches were on course watching and passing info to the start over radios and my teammates were busy prepping for their runs or waiting at the bottom. The yelling is to help you get pumped up and feel supported for your run because a ski race is a lot like a high adrenaline sprint.\nSource: Competed internationally for ski racing"
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} | train_eli5 | Who is it screaming like crazy at the beginning of a run in Olympic downhill alpine skiing competition? Why do they do it?
[removed] | [
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18ku60 | Why do seemingly all Russians use dashboard cams? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"_URL_0_\n\nFor the super lazy:\n\n > Disclaimer: This is my opinion as a Moscowvite. Also I am kind of drunk (seriously). It's my first day at work after new years break and we had a few too drink in the office (unfortunately not vodka, as my colleague was in Italy and brought back a lot of wine. \nI am kind of sick of these comments. I will now try to explain whats going on with all these dash cams. It will also explain why this helicopter has a dash cam. \nDash cams became popular when cops were just crazy. They extorted money from you like crazy. This is due to the fact that most people did not even know the rules as a drivers license could be bought for cheap or given as a present (much more difficult now in Moscow but still possible for around $1000-$1500. Probably still easy in other regions.) Then youtube came along and people started uploading their interactions with cops. The first people to start uploading the videos where pretty intelligent, knew there rights and knew that they could film the cop at work, even though the cop says stuff like \"Turn off the F@#ing camera. \nThese people would my the cop feel stupid (often was the case) because the cop himself did not know the laws and would get away without a ticket. \nEventually filming cops became popular because \"Hey look at me I'm smart and the cop is stupid\". Most of the later videos feature people that don't know the laws either. Then they just became lazy turning on their camera phones and had a camera constantly on. \nWhen the camera was always on, people realized 2 things. 1 You can get some funny stuff on video. 2 When you're in an accident with some senators relative you can get off the hook when its actually not your fault. \nThe dashcams just became \"Hip\". Insurance fraud is present, but not that much. \nAgain, things can be different in other places other than Moscow. As some Russians say - There is Moscow and then there is the rest of Russia. \nThis wall of text was probablt unreadeable but I'm as you say Tipsy and getting drunker by the minute",
"Because there's an insane amount of insurance fraud that goes on. People who like to jump in front of oncoming vehicles or try to make it look like they were hit all hoping for a quick settlement. Others who back up intentionally into drivers who are behind them and claim they were rear-ended. Also, an unusual amount of violence that goes on between everyday drivers who can't keep their road rage in check."
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} | {
"url": [
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} | train_eli5 | Why do seemingly all Russians use dashboard cams?
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36auht | If humans become an interplanetary or interstellar civilization, what will be the best way to tell time? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well biologically, we're set for 24 hour days, assuming that doesn't change, I guess we would try and stick with it, but a planet spinning on it's axis is normally a good way to go too.",
"Time actually breaks when you start getting to other points in the universe.\n\nRight now we have atomic clocks to keep super precise time, basically you take an atom of an element and measure how often it pulses. Since we know EXACTLY how many pulses make up a second we can tell time with it even without earth as a frame of reference. \n\nThe thing is that time is relative. If you have seen the movie Interstellar you might have a good idea about this. Gravity directly impacts time, and it's not something you need to leave Earth to discover. The clocks on GPS Satellites all run fast because they are so high up they are less affected by gravity then we are down on earth. As a result they all have self correcting software that fights this effect, otherwise within minutes their clocks are wrong and they become useless.\n\nSo if we were spread out across planets within our solar system or nearby enough we could depend on transmissions from earth, but really once you start talking interstellar there is almost no real way to keep perfect universal time.",
"Atomic clocks, the same way we do now. Years will become mostly irrelevant, as that is very much a relative measure, but Cesium atoms vibrate at the same rate here or on Jupiter.",
"The pulses of neutron stars that spin at known rates (i.e. \"pulsars\").\n\nUsing very precise measurements the rate of rotation can be measured. Working backwards from a known initial rotation speed, the \"local time\" could be determined anywhere in the galaxy. Assuming that the observer is not subject to substantial time dilation effects (and even if they were, if those effects were known they could be added to the calculation) two people anywhere in the galaxy would be able to determine time based on a known fixed reference.\n\nThey would literally be \"stardates\".",
"Most likely in a similar faction to how we use time zones. Each planet would have its own time based on its own rotation. A UTC of sorts would most likely be used to convert between them. Something like Sol Time, or Earth time."
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} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | If humans become an interplanetary or interstellar civilization, what will be the best way to tell time?
| [
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445vf6 | group think or hive mind. And why does reddit suffer from hive mind instead of other sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Or do they suffer as well? Is there any advantages to hive mind? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Reddit has a hive mind because all user votes impact all other users. You can't choose to have Reddit not count votes from certain people, so the majority opinions on the website will almost always appear on top for everyone.\n\nTwitter, Facebook, and Instagram are more like echo chambers. Users control who they hear from/follow and they tend to follow people with similar viewpoints, so they rarely see views that challenge or oppose the ones they already hold. \n\nUsers have a little more control over this on Twitter and Instagram. Facebook will automatically start showing you more posts from friends whose past posts you have checked out often. Since you probably read the walls and links of friends you agree with more than the ones you disagree with, Facebook ends up showing you more content from friends you agree with. So even if you have a lot of friends with contrary views you may not end up seeing their posts.\n\ntl;dr - Reddit's voting system makes it so one clear winner comes out on top for the whole site. Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram allow groups with similar beliefs to isolate themselves into their own social media circle.",
"I don't know about the psychology behind groupthink but I would argue one of the major things Reddit has that Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram don't is the upvote/downvote function, which essentially ensures that popular opinions are brought to the top while unpopular ones are pushed to the bottom. Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook all have \"likes\" but that doesn't affect whether your comments are at the top or the bottom."
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"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | group think or hive mind. And why does reddit suffer from hive mind instead of other sites such as Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram? Or do they suffer as well? Is there any advantages to hive mind?
[removed] | [
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3du0b8 | How do hardware manufacturers keep MAC addresses unique when there are also other manufacturers that produce the same type of hardware? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a standards body that allocates MAC addresses similar to IP's. So Cisco will have a range or ranges of MAC addresses it can call upon. I do seem to recall hearing that they are not completely globally unique and may get reused from time to time.",
"You get to use 0000XXXXXX. I use 0001XXXXXX, acme uses 0003XXXXX. If you run out of 0000's, you get assigned 0004's.\n\nThere are 281 trillion unique Mac addresses.",
"The IEEE is a body that assigns the addresses. Each manufacturer will get a prefix -- the start of the MAC address. The manufacturer assigns the rest of it themselves.",
"MAC address contains vendor part and name space is managed by IEEE. On other hand you can set MAC address via net driver so collision is possible. Also in case of virtual infrastructure (like VMware) addresses are generated by software and uniqueness is not 100% guaranteed in some cases when multiple hosts are in place. \nEdit: missing sentence",
"Side note: If you're IT/development, assume they **will** sometimes collide. Because it happens, either due to dodgy hardware cost-cutting or through software configuration. \n\nFar better to know it can happen, than to spend weeks trying to find other answers to something you *thought* was totally impossible.",
"Having run into the issue of duplicate mac addresses (once in about 20 years) - they can't and don't necessarily have to keep them all unique. \n\nMAC addresses only have to be unique within a subnet. While you could have other software in an organization that requires MAC addresses for inventory, this doesn't interfere with networking. So an organization could have issues with reporting of multiple machines had the same MAC, all networking would still function without issue (as long as they were on separate subnets. \n\nSo it doesn't matter if you have the same MAC on your home computer as a 1000 people - only if you tried to network them on the same subnet. Similarly you can have the same license plate as someone in another state. So, 50 people could all have a reddit license plate and wouldn't cause issue - with the exception of getting the plate called into the police and the caller didn't know what state it was from. \n\nMost NIC cards today are programmable, so either the problem was caused by bad luck - or a user programmed it. My home router used to use the same MAC address as the wifi router of McDonalds in Times Square. I don't even live in NY - so it wouldn't cause me issue. I just thought it would be a funny thing to do.",
"Products that follow the IEEE standard are preassigned a MAC prefix as to prevent this very problem. MAC addresses are not as random as you would think, they are bits of information that is assigned to tag and identify specific objects.\n\nEach company is assigned a prefix code, so not only does each individual object have it's own MAC address, but you can also trace which company made the product granted it follows regulations and standards.\n\nThe ELI5 is, think of MAC addresses as unique names. If you have two people named Jimmy, you can tell them apart by family name. The first 3 bytes of a MAC address is similar to a family name. So yes, Japanese people are almost like living MAC addresses.",
"They don't. MAC numbers were never meant to be unique. \n\nThey get the first three hex numbers from a governing body.\n\nThey randomly assign the remaining three to the devices.",
"IEEE is the registration authority. You can see the full list of companies and registered OUI here _URL_0_"
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| [
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2divte | What does Comcast gain by being a dick to customers? What's stopping them from using the money they spend on lobbying to actually improve their services? | Non-American here. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't gain anything by being dicks to customers. The problem is that they are the only provider [in many areas](_URL_0_) so they feel that they don't need to make customers happy -- where else will their unhappy customers go? \n \nImproving their service might earn them many more millions of dollars but lobbying may earn them billions more in future earnings if they can pay enough politicians to vote the way Comcast wants them to vote and hands Comcast more control.",
"They don't gain anything. They're a monopoly. No one, really, can stop them from being dicks.\n\nI don't think you know what lobbying is. You don't lobby to better your company, you lobby so you don't have to change anything about your company (rules, laws, etc). You lobby to keep things in your favor/make more money. Whether that be keeping the smoking age to 18, or having the government view companies as \"people\".",
"Comcast is operating with short-term vision.\n\nThe market has been pretty static for years. Fiber lines didn't get very far off the ground in the US, so there was no real threat to them. They didn't have a *reason* to do better. They are making money with minimal effort, so why strive to be any better when there's no competition?\n\nNow Google and other companies are kicking up some dust with their gigabit fiber optic plans. Google is thinking long-term, and Comcast has no way to deal with that. I can see them taking a huge hit in the next decade or two if Google and other fiber optic companies have their way.",
"I think a better question would be: is it actually cheaper for them to lobby than to improve service, or just easier?",
"They don't gain anything, but they don't lose anything either.\n\nI could walk around ants on the street, or I could just stomp through without a single change in pace because nothing is going to happen if I don't stomp on an ant or if I do. Seriously, I'm not even counting how many ants I squish and I doubt you are either.\n\nThey could improve customer service, but they aren't going to get any more customers that way. Everyone who wants internet already has it. (through them) If their service gets progressively worse, the only options in many areas are\n\nA) suffer through Comcast\n\nB) suffer through an equally crappy provider (sometimes this option doesn't even exist)\n\nC) live without internet.\n\nWhy on earth do they have any motive to change things? People either have to live with it or sacrifice their internet.\n\nIf there was a new company (say... google fiber) then that TOTALLY changes things, because then they actually need to compete with that. An option D gets added along the lines of\n\nD) switch to a cheaper, more reliable provider with better customer service\n\nThe problem is that building an ISP is costly. Really costly. You can't build one in your garage and start with a few dozen customers. You need an infrastructure spanning miles, across multiple counties. Each county has their own rules and regulations for spreading cable. Once it's up and running you need to gain a userbase immediately (or a really longterm loan or stash of cash to operate from until you run at capacity)",
"What it gains: profit. Which is the #1 goal of a company."
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} | train_eli5 | What does Comcast gain by being a dick to customers? What's stopping them from using the money they spend on lobbying to actually improve their services?
Non-American here. | [
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5y2rd8 | How does antimicrobial clothing work? | And wouldn't whatever makes them repel bacteria be washed off when you launder the clothes? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First, to you second question... yeah definitely. Whether they're impregnated with a bacteriostatic/cidal agent, or have silver threads or \"nano-coatings\"... the washer is the great equalizer. Most, if not all such products cease to be effective within a couple of dozen wash cycles. Most people don't need them anyway, so they don't notice.\n\nThat said, if you're a marathon runner, or cyclist, or triathlete, etc... you may not care about the short life of the garments and you may want the positive effects. Outside of extremes though, it's just a marketing gimmick that quickly fades."
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} | train_eli5 | How does antimicrobial clothing work?
And wouldn't whatever makes them repel bacteria be washed off when you launder the clothes? | [
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6142y6 | isps being able to sell our search history | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you surf Reddit data is sent from your computer to the Reddit server which processes your request and responds with HTML data that your browser uses to display that site.\n\nISPs can track your network usage including all the sites you make requests too (including xbox, PS4, porn, https, etc) on their network. This information can be used to tune the network or track usage. Most large employers do this already. Most ISPs do this already as well. Usually this information is aggregated (lumped together for analysis) which provides users with some level anonymity. \n\nIn reality any network owner can track their network usage. Sprint, Comcast, TM, etc already track usage across their respective networks. This is how they know to throttle Sling, Netflix, Amazon, etc. \n\nWhat this legislation is doing is permitting ISPs and carriers to sell this data at its most granular level - the IP address. As far as I know there is no way to associate an IP address to a specific person on a home or SOHO network. It can be associated to a device through other metadata included with the requests if that data is included.\n\nKeep in mind that Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft all have already been doing for years. You can see this in web adverts that push stuff you just searched for.\n\nHow can you fight back....\n\nWrite President Trump a letter asking him to veto this legislation.\n\nSue. The closest would be the 4th amendment but that does not explicitly cover internet use or digital communication. SCOTUS has ruled that the 4th implicitly gives privacy rights against government intrusion. It could easily be argued that these network are privately owned and as such not covered by that ruling. This is the most likely path to success.\n\nUnsubscribe - stop using the services that do this. Economic boycotts rarely work without widespread support.\n\nUse TOR - The dark web\n\nStop using http sites. Stick with https sites. This is only a mitigation to minimize your exposure. Browser tracking still works though.\n\nThe other option is a National Broadband Network. Since this would be government owned and operated users would have a right to privacy according to rulings from SCOTUS and State Supreme Courts. However there additional conflicting rulings that would seem to imply a user would have no expectation of privacy since this would be considered a public venue. \n\nWe would likely need a Constitutional Amendment to guarantee a right to privacy. This is very unlikely to happen but is the best course of action.",
"Well, they were free to do that before the privacy protections were implemented as rules. The Senate vote is to end those privacy protections. Your ISP can easily spy on your Internet traffic, because you are paying them to transport your traffic. If you don't like their business practices you can get another ISP, or you can petition the government to outlaw the practice.\n\nI just don't buy the stuff advertisers target with the data, eventually they will figure it out, and like YouTube advertising they will stop spending money on it. If nobody will buy it, ISPs won't collect it. Problem solved."
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} | train_eli5 | isps being able to sell our search history
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2jd5ij | Why is Google considered a better search engine than Bing or Ask Jeeves? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Google could be said to be the best search engine for the following reasons: \nIt relies on a simplicity that many other search engines lack.\nIt's fast, reliable, easy to use, user friendly.\nFewer, less noticeable ads.\nThe search algorithm seems to bring the most relevant items to the top.\nMore relevant ads.\n\nWhy is Google the best search engine from a marketing perspective? \nMore people use Google than any other search engine in the world, giving Google the information to improve their engine further.\nit has the largest known database of metadata for searching and search criteria.\nReferrals from Google have higher conversion rate then any other search engine.\n\n\nGoogle Search can be customized, eg: \n_URL_3_ (regular)\n_URL_2_ (pink google)\n_URL_4_ (purple google)\n_URL_1_\n_URL_0_\n\n\nHow Google works: \nBasically, Google is a crawler-based engine, meaning that it has software programs designed to \"crawl\" the information on the Net and add it to its sizeable database. Google has a great reputation for relevant and thorough search results, and is a good first place to start when searching. \n\nGoogle's home page is extremely clean and simple, loads quickly, and delivers arguably the best results of any search engine out there, mostly due to its PageRank technology and massive listings. Google also earns high marks for its maps and searches for images, videos and blog posts; you can even search inside books with Book Search. However, search experts say that no single search engine provides the most relevant results for all queries. Google is also ranked number one because more people use it than any other search engine. \n\nPart of the reason google is so successful is, as with most successful technology companies, they first started specializing in one area and after mastering that they moved onto other things. Not dabbling in other areas such as email, maps, finance allowed them to concentrate all their time and resources on just searching the vast world wide web.",
"Well, while working at Microsoft, I took the 'Bing Challenge' which was a blind comparison test to see which gives better results. 5 out of 5 test searches I preferred the Google result over Bing..."
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} | train_eli5 | Why is Google considered a better search engine than Bing or Ask Jeeves?
| [
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8qaktw | Why seeing a very bright light leave an imprint in one's vision? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your eyes retina has photoreceptors (rods and cones) . There's a chemical reaction happening when light hits it, and if the light is very bright that chemical reaction is bigger than normal and it takes a little time until your eyes can get \"rid\" of it again, therefore you see an after-Image since the chemicals stimuli still send an image to your brain which usually is a negative of what you've seen.",
"in the back of your eyes, you have these lightsensitive cells which reacts to the light coming in. They respond to different colors, but when you see something very bright, they get overexcited, and it takes some time for them to calm down. These cells can also be damaged or not function like other peoples cells, which is why we have people who are colorblind."
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} | train_eli5 | Why seeing a very bright light leave an imprint in one's vision?
[removed] | [
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4a6csj | How does one become funny or witty? Is it just something you're born with? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A lot of it has to do with the people you surround yourself with. It also has a lot to do with developing it on your own. You borrow silly things from tv and movies, and then, for me personally i use some of that as a template for the silly shit that comes out of my mouth. I also just let my mind wander. I will say this- some of the things i think are witty or funny are considered crass and ignorant. The thing with comedy and wit is that not everyone will find you funny. Russel brand is considered to be a comedian, and i personally think he is just a fuckass. Jim jefferies i feel is super funny, but i have friends who absolutely despise the mans jokes. As a nation, we all thought dane cook was funny, and then, overnight, we stopped caring. \nSo, in a shorter way to say it- anyone can be funny, some people have a better knack for it. Timing has a lot to do with it, and so does experience. Read your audience, be confident, and who knows? Maybe its maybelline.",
"Brevity is the soul of wit, as Shakespeare wrote. The sharpest, wittiest people I have known share the same trait. Quickness or brevity. I worked with a woman who never smiled. Just a grumpy sort. We were walking out of a hotel once and there was a sign that said \"Psychic fair, 10 am, main banquet hall.\" I said to miss grumpy \"They really shouldn't need that, should they?\" We had never heard her laugh before, but I got her with that line. If I had been 10 seconds late with that, it wouldn't have worked. Timing, brevity. It takes practice. Sure, some people are naturals, but you can learn it, too.",
"I think you can learn to be wittier and funnier, but I think people who are especially witty/funny start by being a bit more intelligent than average, and then are raised in an environment where humor helps them cope. Their brains become wired to see the humor in situations, and it becomes natural for them to know what will make others laugh. People without these attributes can learn some of the mechanics of humor. They can build a repertoire of funny responses and repeat them at appropriate times, but few will ever before known for their wit. \n\nI picked up a guitar at 30. I enjoy it and can play and sing along with a good number of songs, but I'll never be a great guitarist. I don't have a natural ability, and I started to late for me to really be wired for it. I think it's similar with humor.",
"I have three words:\n\nTrial and error.\n\nActually, no, four words:\n\nConstant trial and error.\n\nDisclaimer: I'm not witty. I mean, I *try* to be, and I even *succeed* sometimes (this is a rare occurrence), but I'd say it would be more closely tied to trial and error than anything.\n\nIn that way, I guess it's like literally every other aspect of social interaction. Painstaking trial and error.",
"You kind of get the hang of it with time. My experience was that my brain would extrapolate how someone else came up with some kind of a witticism or joke. What you will see is that these people have a way of triggering a thought process from whatever is going on, that is somewhat of a different, and at times humorous, perspective. They just let their mind flow, and let it explore other connections to the current situation. Then there are some standard techniques - looking for a pun (don't do this please), or some absurdity in the current situation, or a related funny story you might have heard. You cultivate a skill of sort of doing this improv in your head, and presenting it in an interesting, funny way. Just watch the silly sitcoms, or read funny books, or listen to comics, and try to figure out how their brain (the writers) made the leap from the ordinary at point A, to something absurd or interesting at point B.\n\nYou will see that there are patterns. A way of letting your brain go off from things in the current moment.",
"It is equal parts timing, finding the right audience, admitting that mistakes and failure will happen, knowing how to analyse and learn from failure, and being able to stop and laugh at your self sometimes. \n\n\nComedy is subjective, like someone who loves chemistry would enjoy jokes like \"What did silver say to gold? AU!\" someone who has a darker side would enjoy dark jokes like \"What do you call a dog with no legs? Doesn't matter, he won't come.\"\n\n Things like comedic timing and a natural sense of humor can happen, but they can also be learned."
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} | train_eli5 | How does one become funny or witty? Is it just something you're born with?
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37vjet | What is the difference between a Router/Modem and an Access Point. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"* Modem: transforms a signal so it can be better transmitted (eg. DSL over telephone wires)\n* Router: connects two networks (like your LAN and the WAN)\n* Switch: a (more intelligent) distribution box\n* Access Point: like a Switch for Wifi\n\nThe things your telecom provider puts in your home usually combines all four ... to the carrier side, there is a modem (so you are able to send/receive signals to your carrier), then there comes a router (to make an internal network, so you can connect more than 1 device), and after that there is a switch and/or an accesspoint (usually on the same internal network so that WIFI acts as an extension to the normal wired network)\n\nEDIT: added the paragraph"
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} | train_eli5 | What is the difference between a Router/Modem and an Access Point.
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25ux2s | Why do Canadian car models use slightly different icons than the other NA country counterparts? | So I just got my first car, a 2012 Toyota Yaris. I was going through the car manual and I noticed that in the manual it had a few "tweaked" icons for Canadian models. For example, on my US car, when the parking brake is enabled it says "BRAKE" in red letters, but it said for the Canadian model it had this weird symbol that looked like a "!" inside (). I went to get my mom's car book from her Mercedes, and it was the same situation. It wasn't just those icons too. It was almost like Canada doesn't allow text for icons? Can someone explain this? I never understood. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"it is the other way around, there are standardized universal symbols/icons for stuff in a car used by car manufacturers in almost all their cars. but America require them to be written in English, i think top gear made fun of that once.",
"It has nothing to do with Canada. We use the same icons in the whole world (more or less). It's the USA that is weird."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do Canadian car models use slightly different icons than the other NA country counterparts?
So I just got my first car, a 2012 Toyota Yaris. I was going through the car manual and I noticed that in the manual it had a few "tweaked" icons for Canadian models. For example, on my US car, when the parking brake is enabled it says "BRAKE" in red letters, but it said for the Canadian model it had this weird symbol that looked like a "!" inside (). I went to get my mom's car book from her Mercedes, and it was the same situation. It wasn't just those icons too. It was almost like Canada doesn't allow text for icons? Can someone explain this? I never understood. | [
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41oa3b | how come birds don't collide while flying in a flock? | They can change direction frequently and seems like there's no clear flock leader. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's also a bit of an urban legend that birds in flocks don't collide. They collide all of the time, but it's not a Michael Bay collision, they just bump wing tips and adjust their flight. As long as they are all moving in generally the same direction, they don't \"crash\". \n\nBut general spacial awareness and an eye to the flock leader(s) will generally keep birds moving together. It's no different than people walking in unison. We occasionally bump, but your spacial awareness keeps you from crashing hard into anyone."
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} | train_eli5 | how come birds don't collide while flying in a flock?
They can change direction frequently and seems like there's no clear flock leader. | [
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548j3k | Why would the White House want to veto the bill that allows 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a principle in international law called state immunity, which is that you can't sue a government in a foreign court. In the U.S., this is enshrined in the Foreign Sovereign Immunities Act. The only general exception is that you can sue a state for its role as a commercial actor, e.g. if a foreign government bought something from a U.S. company and then failed to pay, they could be sued for breach of contract. Allowing U.S. citizens to sue a foreign government would be a major departure from both domestic and international legal norms.\n\nThere are other reasons, too. The U.S. is hardly without sin; approving this bill might prompt other nations to allow their citizens to sue the U.S. government.\n\nAnd, as much as we all hate to say it, Saudi Arabia is a U.S. ally. Their support is crucial to American strategy in the Middle East, especially as it relates to the Islamic State. Needless to say, this law would damage U.S.-Saudi relations.",
"Because it's an absurdity. If people can sue foreign governments in local courts, then you either have a clusterfuck of meaningless unenforceable lawsuits cluttering up the legal system, or a clusterfuck where citizens all over the world are suing America and America is forced to listen, having set the precedent.\n\nThink about it this way. An American goes to court in Georgia, sues Saudi Arabia, and wins, since Saudi Arabia doesn't defend itself. Now the American government is expected to force Saudi Arabia to agree to some Georgia judge's ruling and obey its orders. Next week, someone in Vietnam goes to a court in Ho Chi Minh City and wins a local lawsuit against America. Now Vietnam gets to force America to obey *its* local court rulings and extract damages? Or is America going to say \"no, everyone has to obey us, but we don't have to obey anyone, we dictate the world\"? How's it going to work? It was never going to make sense. It was a symbolic move that got shot down before it could waste everyone's time with six tons of bureaucratic gibberish.",
"Because they won't want the rest of the world to be able to sue them. If we can sue Saudi Arabia over alleged ties to the 9/11 attacks, then other countries will certainly sue us over similar things. According to claims by President Obama, allowing this law to pass could even open up US Armed Forces to lawsuits in other countries. \n\nThe White House believes firmly that this is a bad idea.",
"Opens a can of worms, doesn't it? Think for a second how many people around the world might like to sue the US government for things like drone strikes, or general collateral damage.",
"By setting a precedence for civil lawsuits against nations for terrorist acts it would open up questions of suing say America for acts of imperial and economic aggression.",
"Truly the only reason this passed in the house is because everyone knew it would be vetoed. This would be an unmitigated disaster if it occurred, opening up lawsuits between nations. America cannot have its allies taken to court by citizens. It would run out of allies quickly. \n\nSo it was passed because it looks good to a certain portion of the population, and re-elections are in two short years."
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} | train_eli5 | Why would the White House want to veto the bill that allows 9/11 families to sue Saudi Arabia?
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llmy5 | Why do some youtube videos take longer times to load than others? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So, when you go to a site like YouTube, or Google etc, you point your browser to somewhere, and a program immediately transfers you to another server. It farms out your request. \nYou are then on one of a huge array of boxes, which you make your request on. This machine then goes off and tries to get your content streaming through to you from yet another machine, and you start watching your movie. \n\nIn each step there can be interruptions, and each one of the machines in question might be more or less busy, have more or less bandwidth available to it, and so on. \nThere may even be some sort of algorithm that sticks less viewed stuff on crappier machines, or leaves it in a more compressed state. Who knows what they do. \n\nIn reality this is not precisely how it happens, but it's a useful mental model to help you imagine the sort of thing that happens."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do some youtube videos take longer times to load than others?
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12sgyk | Why do electronics (mainly computers) get hot when used extensively? | ELI5: Why do electronics (mainly computers) get hot when used extensively? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The short version: electronics are comprised of circuits. Circuits are, in loose terms, a collection of electrical components: resistors, inductors, capacitors, etc. While circuitry is a topic best saved for it's own thread, the most important thing to understand is that you have all these pieces connected together with wiring, and electricity flowing through them. \n\nThe next important concept you need to know is that pretty much everything in a circuit provides some measure of resistance -- the electrical components and even the wiring itself. Resistance in a circuit does a couple of things, but mainly, it does it's namesake: it resists the flow of electricity. Now a resistor can actually take the shape of many things: an actual resistor (electronic component), a lightbulb, etc. The main idea is that it resists an electrical current but it still allows some or most of the current through. \n\nSo now we get to the meat and potatoes. There's an important law called the first law of thermodynamics. It basically says that energy can't be created nor destroyed -- but it can change forms, or move around. If you've never heard of it, bear with me for a moment. So we have this circuit and there's a resistor in it. When electricity flows through, some of it would seemingly get \"lost\" due to resistance (this is measurable), but the energy isn't lost at all, it's simply changed to a different form of energy: heat. \n\nOne of the best examples of this is one I mentioned above, a light bulb. In essence, a light bulb is just a big resistor. Electricity flows through the lightbulb, and it basically converts that into heat. As the filament (the little coil in a lightbulb) has electricity pass through it, it heats up and glows. Perhaps you've touched a hot light bulb and now you may begin to understand where the heat comes from. \n\nWell, in electronics, all those resistors will mean that there is going to be heat generation on some level. In some electronics it's not a lot of heat, or it never approaches particularly high levels. However, when you have things like computer chips, it's a ton of resistivity packed into a small space, so it generates a lot of heat. This is why you need heatsinks (devices that pull and disperse heat from something hot) for those kinds of electronics -- like the CPU of a computer. \n\nHopefully that helps. I can try to answer any questions you have.",
"Because they aren't 100% efficient, some of the energy you put into it is transformed into heat. It gets hotter and hotter of that heat isn't escaping faster than it is being made. Same thing goes for light bulbs, your body, etc."
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} | train_eli5 | Why do electronics (mainly computers) get hot when used extensively?
ELI5: Why do electronics (mainly computers) get hot when used extensively? | [
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35txsb | Why don't trains or buses have seat-belts? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The fatality rate for school busses is 0.2 per 100 million miles traveled. The fatality rate for cars is around 1 to 1.5. Buses are already roughly 5x safer than cars, so seat belts aren't worth the bother. \n\nThe fatality rate for long-haul train passengers is 0.15 per *billion* passenger miles. Trains are a hundred times safer than cars. The vast majority of train deaths are pedestrians and vehicles that trains slam into.",
"This is from an article in _URL_0_\n\nThe explanation for the safety of school buses is explained by a concept called compartmentalization. In compartmentalization, the seats on the school bus are placed very close to each other and have high backs that are very padded. As a result, in an accident the student would be propelled forward a very short distance into a padded seatback that in a way is like an early version of an airbag. In addition, the fact that people sit high off the ground in school buses also adds to the safety, as the impact location with an automobile would occur beneath the seats.\n\nWhile school buses and highway buses both feature high backed seats and elevated seating locations, the same cannot be said of city buses. In fact, the transverse seats - the seats that are parallel to the side of the buses - do not have any protection in terms of seats in front of them that can absorb an impact.",
"Because something like 33,000 people die each year in passenger cars with seatbelt and something like 6 (or maybe 60) die each year in busses and trains.\n\nBecause when car crashes happen there is a lot of evidence that shows people getting ejected at high speeds. When bus or train crashes, however rare, have happened, this is much less likely.\n\nOverall, seatbelts are not a panacea that fixes everything. they are super useful in passenger cars driven by amateurs in chaotic traffic and on planes. Less useful in other situations.",
"If train and bus companies were to enforce seat belt policies, these companies would lose the economic opportunity of using unused space as \"standing room\". The resulting changes would cost millions of dollars in selt belt purchases and installation, not to mention the millions that would be lost due to trains and bus companies that can no longer fill their vehicles to capacity."
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} | train_eli5 | Why don't trains or buses have seat-belts?
| [
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36tec0 | How is Sepp Blatter still the president of FIFA? | Sepp Blatter is the most powerful man in the sports world. The scandals and corruption surrounding FIFA during his reign as president are pretty well-documented. It seems to me that many people, inside FIFA and outsiders alike, would like to see a change in leadership. So how is it that he has been able to stay in power since 1998? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When was the last time the CEO of Bank of America/Target/Walmart got impeached?\n\nIt's a corporation, not a government. If he wants to stay President, unless he does something that puts him in jail, which he could still stay president, there's nothing forcing him to leave.\n\nThe whole FIFA thing is a crockpile of shit",
"Each participating country gets to cast exactly 1 vote for the FIFA presidency and Blatter has used his position to re-distribute funds from wealthy countries to poorer ones, which are generally less concerned with potential human rights violations, etc. Those countries support Blatter because they need the money.\n\nHe hasn't exactly been bad for the coffers of FIFA's wealthier countries either."
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} | train_eli5 | How is Sepp Blatter still the president of FIFA?
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2lc846 | Why were there so many insane asylums 100 years ago, but you rarely hear about them today? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you are talking about the US, its because of a process called deinstitutionalisation. Starting in the 60s a combination of factors led to the closure of many mental institutions. Books like One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest and a series of scandals (such as the Kennedy lobotomy) turned the public against asylums. At the same time government funding of mental institutions was cut in half so as to cover the Social Security liability. Finally improvements of drugs meant that less people needed to be under constant care.\n\nThe effects of this can still be seen on the streets today. The biggest cause of the increase in homelessness from 60 years ago to today is the closure of mental institutions. The vast majority of homeless have some sort of mental illness, and would have been in an institution in the 1950s.\n\nEdit:\nbig typo",
"If you look at numbers, a lot of people with mental illnesses end up in prison instead. Especially those that would have ended up in an asylum do to the debilitating nature of their illness.",
"100 years ago a lot of people were locked up as being insane when they were really just inconvenient. Gay, promiscuous, radical, generally annoying. Locking people up for being inconvenient is much less popular these days.\n\nA lot of people with Down Syndrome or autism would have been committed, now most of those people live with their family, or in group homes. Group homes actually are asylums under some definitions, but no one calls them that.\n\nSyphilis was a big cause of insanity in days of old. Now almost no ones goes insane due to syphilis.",
"So there have been huge steps forward in mental health, but also huge steps backwards. Before if someone had a mental issue the idea was to send them to a mental institution to get better. The only problem was that no one really understood the underlying causes of the diseases very well. Now to get sent to a mental institution a person has to either be a danger to themselves or to people around them due to mental illness. \n\nFunding has been another big issue. Government funding has all but stopped for things like mental hospitals, nursing homes, and other social welfare programs. Welfare itself has become such a political tagline that no one wants to talk about it. This leaves the burden of care on the patients family. Often times someone with a mental disorder has no one to take care of them because they have pushed away everyone in their life. People who suffer from diseases that are immediate and blunt like downs syndrome tend to be better off than someone with schizophrenia because the person with downs syndrome has a better support structure. Down's syndrome is manageable in most cases though. Most mental disorders go un-diagnosed and untreated. these people are not able to take care of themselves and often times end up homeless. Depending on the city the mentally ill percentage of the homeless population can be as high as 75%. \n\nThere is by no means a lesser amount of mentally ill people. While we do have better treatments for many mental illnesses that we didn't have even ten years ago, let alone 100, there is less widespread access to those treatments.",
"I worked in an insane asylum in Massachusetts for nine years, ending this year. They are no longer called insane asylums, they are called Mental Health Hospitals.\nThe main reasons for the decrease in the mental patient population are better approaches towards treatment and most importantly the medications which are now available. \nDespite the controversy surrounding these psych meds, they can be very effective for some of the patients. \nThese facilities used to be warehouses where we simply kept those individuals who suffered from mental issues indefinitely. \nNow, almost all patients have a discharge plan and most succeed in moving on to group homes or their own apartments, or back to their families.\nAnd if they are unsuccessful in the new setting, they are readmitted, and the process starts again.\nIts not a perfect system, but its better than the alternative which would be to simply warehouse them forever.\nThe majority of our patients who are successful in living productive lives can only do so because of the meds that are now available.",
"We don't call them asylums anymore, for one. So that might be why you never hear about them. But also, we've stopped using mental hospitals to the same extent we used to. It used to be practically the first response to mental illness. \"Oh you're dealing with depression or paranoia? Let's send you off to an institution for 12 months.\" Nowadays there's a lot more steps you go through before doctors would even consider putting you in a locked facility. You go to therapy, you try medication, you alter your life situation to better manage your stressors. Locked mental facilities are something like the last resort, and basically used in emergencies, when you imminently are a danger to yourself or others. When you try to kill yourself or are thinking about doing it, they'll put you on the psychiatric ward of a normal hospital for a few days, and then release you when you're safe. Long-term care (for months or years) is the real last resort for people who just aren't responding to treatment at all and/or can't take care of themselves.\n\nAlso though, we've been shutting down facilities a lot due to funding cuts, so a lot of very ill people who probably are a danger to themselves or at least can't take care of themselves will end up on the streets. Also, a lot of the mentally ill, especially the ones who can't afford treatment, will end up in jail, sometimes even without committing a crime.",
"We have become much better at our diagnoses and treatments for mental health, so a lot of conditions are better managed (or at least differently managed). Back in the era you're speaking of, pretty much anyone with a brain disorder was declared defective and thrown into what amounted to a prison.",
"What are you talking about? Churches are everywhere these days.\n\nBa-zing!",
"Government funding and the rise of for profit prisons.",
"I'd think it had something to do with people just throwing their family in mental health institutions for pretty much anything (bipolar disorder, ADD, autism, and even down syndrome) to avoid responsibility and embarrassment. Of course, this'd lead to more and more asylums.\nI'm busy, and I know there's a much better way to answer this.",
"Instead of treating individuals with their mental needs states and etc decided to lock them in prisons/jails. Asylums require too much funding and are considered a profit loss. Prisons/jails are profit gainers for county, state, and etc.",
"Regan decided federal funding wasn't meant for the mentally ill. The drug war was a better idea, he left illness to be picked up by local charities.",
"I see lots of American based posts but i'll give a small historical fact about Australia's asylum history.\n\nTL;DR Supposedly humane prisoner rehabilitation technique led to an abundance of mentally ill Australians 100+ years ago\n\nSo White Australia was founded as a prison colony(1788). Transportation of convicts ending i think 1880 or so. In initial years of the colonies prisoners were immediately put to work on farms and building the colonies. Once the colonies were more set( 1810's or so) up labour wasn't needed as much there was also a change in the theory of prisoner rehabilitation based around the Quakers in the US, bible reading silent meditation etc\n\nMany prisoners on arrival in Australia spent the first 18 months in a special type of prison, usually the violent criminals with very long sentences. Essentially solitary confinement. 1 prisoner to a room. 23 hours a day locked up, 1 hour a day in a slightly larger \"exercise yard on their own, always at night. On sundays prisoners were escorted into church one by one and put in cubicles so they could see the preacher but not the other prisoners. The preacher and all guards wore hoods when handling prisoners.\n\nSo new prisoners in aus spent 18 months and never talked to a soul or saw sunlight. After that they served there regular sentence as farm hands or other jobs. No wonder 20 years after this new policy was enacted each colony in Australia built their first insane asylum because there was an abundance of unstable people for some reason.",
"We know how to treat mental illness a lot better now. Many people who would have been institutionalized 100 years ago can now live relatively normal lives within the community. People are now only admitted to mental institutions as a last resort if they are a danger to themselves or others, so although levels of mental illness have not decreased, fewer people are treated in inpatient settings for extended periods of time.",
"Under Reagan, most of the mental hospitals were closed. There was supposed to be support for people to live in the community via Community Mental Health centers, but these were never well funded and the funding as been steadily cut. Most of the seriously mentally ill are in prison or living in the streets.",
"Treating mental illness is not a priority in the United States--despite the tremendous social and financial cost of failing to treat. The Los Angeles County Jail is the largest mental health care facility in the United States.\n\n_URL_0_",
"If you look up Pennhurst State Hospital, there was a huge exposé on this place called \"Suffer the Little Children\". It's a good representation of the reason these places were shut down.\n\nInteresting watch to say the least.",
"Because 100 years ago the insane were containable, but I guess sometime in the last 100 years someone just said \"fuck it we're all insane\" and now the world is an insane asylum.",
"In the last 50 years we have moved most of our mentally ill from mental institutions to prisons. It's a huge problem.",
"Actually, they are called different things now. For Austin, we have names like \"Shoal Creek\" or Austin State Hospital....",
"They do [still exist](_URL_1_). They're just not as common anymore due to the reasons mentioned by everyone else here.",
"uncle ronny shut them down and threw the nuts out on the street",
"I work in one now - but it's called a hospital.",
"Probably because they renamed them to mental wards in hospitals"
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} | train_eli5 | Why were there so many insane asylums 100 years ago, but you rarely hear about them today?
| [
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84nukq | how do Sumo Wrestlers not pop out while in the ring | Ok so we have been watching Grand Sumo lately and have to wonder how do they not have unwanted penile exposure frequently? The Mawashi is a big long piece of cloth right? is there a cup in there or something? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Not a sumo wrestler. But watched alot of sumo and did a tour once. Penile slips rarely happen for three reasons. \n\n1) top layer looks loose but the underlying layers are secure and keep everything on place \n\n2) the schlong sits in a crevice in the material owing to the way it's wrapped. \n\n3) sumo wrestlers are generally not packing"
],
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} | {
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} | train_eli5 | how do Sumo Wrestlers not pop out while in the ring
Ok so we have been watching Grand Sumo lately and have to wonder how do they not have unwanted penile exposure frequently? The Mawashi is a big long piece of cloth right? is there a cup in there or something? | [
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2aci9s | Why when guys pee it some times splits into a double stream? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The pee hole isn't a perfectly round hole, under lower pressure the 2 middle parts can close leaving 2 smaller gaps either side.",
"[This helpful video from Hot Rod will explain all](_URL_0_)\n\n[This video will let you know that you are not alone](_URL_1_)",
"Sometimes a bit of skin (I'm uncut) gets in the way and makes the double stream, or sprays it like a mist setting on a hose.\n\nSource: I have a penis.",
"Usually when I get the double stream it means I have lint caught in the tip of my dick."
],
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} | train_eli5 | Why when guys pee it some times splits into a double stream?
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j86lq | LI5 Twitter. (No, I'm not kidding.) | What's with the hashes. The following. I'm not a dunce...but I don't understand. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Twitter is like sending a text or message to everyone in the world. You write a short message, and everyone can read it!\n\nHash tags are like descriptions. It's grouping similar tweets. For example \"Traffic here is terrible! #Boston\". I'm grouping my tweet with other tweets about Boston. \n\nYour user name is presented as @Username. When someone wants to reply to a tweet of yours they use the @ symbol. An example conversation:\n\nUser1: \"I just bought milk!\"\n\nUser2: \"@User1, did you remember to get bread?\"\n\nUser1: \"@User2, no I didn't. Thanks!\"\n\nFollowers are like subscribers. They watch what you tweet, and can receive phone or email updates every time you tweet",
"I'm no expert and I've just recently started with twitter, so I'm not the most credible. The reason I follow is because I am incredibly creepy and I want to know what x person is doing and usually to get a chuckle. (I follow mostly comedians... kinda) @ is to directly speek to a person like: Hey, @Theusernameofaperson and I just played some ball, Or: @Theusernameofaperson, wanna go play some ball? # are for a topic that you're talking about. #basketball is so awesome. And if it is used a lot it becomes \"trending.\" You didn't ask but RTs are retweets of stuff someone else said.",
"When you put a #hashtag in a tweet, twitter turns the hashtag into a link that people can click which will lead to a search for tweets including that particular word. So if this were a tweet I might decide to put #twitterexplanations in it, so that people could click on that hashtag and see other tweets with the same hashtag in it (assuming there are any)."
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} | train_eli5 | LI5 Twitter. (No, I'm not kidding.)
What's with the hashes. The following. I'm not a dunce...but I don't understand. | [
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3i1gc1 | Why do are some areas or towns have the name Kill or Kills in them? Was it old tyme English for slaughterhouse areas or the industry that started the town? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Kill comes from dutch, and it means creek. These towns were located near creeks during their founding and were founded by people that were Dutch or of Dutch descent.",
"Kille was an old Dutch word for *river* -- hence, in the mid-Atlantic especially, you'll see various rivers/locations with the word \"-Kill\". This includes Arthur Kill, Great Kills, Freshkills, Catskills, Schuylkill, and even Murder Kill."
],
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} | train_eli5 | Why do are some areas or towns have the name Kill or Kills in them? Was it old tyme English for slaughterhouse areas or the industry that started the town?
| [
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168yox | Why do I get the chills and goosebumps when hearing someone who sings really well? | Every time I listen to a particularly good singer, singing his/her heart out, I get the chills and goosebumps. It is a really good sensation, and adds to the enjoyment of the music. Why does this happen? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"not really an answer, but you might be interested in /r/Frisson and /r/asmr",
"It's the \"feel-good\" chemicals that your brain is releasing. When you're doing something that you REALLY love (like listening to a breath taking piece of music) your brain produces a high quantity, and you feel euphoric. I believe it's endorphin(s?).",
"I'm not a professional, but I believe anything that stirs your emotions can trigger a reaction like goosebumps, which tend to occur in states of physical arousal or anxiety. So if something scares you, moves you, creeps you out, or turns you on... goosebumps.",
"Multiple parts of the brain control different emotions. Some of these parts of the brain give an involuntary reaction known as Cutis Anserina (goose bumps). This is because strong emotions simulate a part of the brain called hypothalamus. The details are still speculative, but there's a guy Jakk Panksepp who is doing studies on emotional responses to music and he's concluded that more often than not the music will trigger the part of the brain that controls negative emotions like sadness that cause goose bumps. According to his theory, it is sometimes subconsciously associated with past social pains, such as the death of a loved one, break ups, loss of a friend, etc. These responses are remnants of a reaction that our ancestors had when they would hear screams or cries that would make them want to help and be reunited with loved ones",
"There's a guy that studies this, and wrote a book about it. _URL_0_"
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} | train_eli5 | Why do I get the chills and goosebumps when hearing someone who sings really well?
Every time I listen to a particularly good singer, singing his/her heart out, I get the chills and goosebumps. It is a really good sensation, and adds to the enjoyment of the music. Why does this happen? | [
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182nvx | Computer processors | What makes one better than the other? I know this is a question I should already know the answer too but it's one of those questions you're embarrassed to ask. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mason11987 gave good answers about the things that you'd look at to decide that one is better than another. \n \nThe details of doing some of those is really hard, though. Just looking at the specifications for two different processors can get really confusing when you are trying to figure out which one will do more stuff, faster. Is it clock speed? Internal cache size? Pipeline depth? Number of cores? Multithreading? etc. etc. etc. \n \nThere are a whole bunch of things like this, and simply comparing them often will not allow you to come to a correct conclusion. So what to do? \n \nWhat the industry does is use \"benchmarks\". These are computer programs designed to test the performance of a processor and measure the actual outcome. But processors do a whole bunch of things, and different applications may use them differently, so you actually need to look at multiple different benchmarks to do a good comparison. \n \nFortunately, there are lots of geeks who like doing stuff like this, and there are various magazines and websites who publish results. A little googling around should help you find comparison testing using benchmarks that will allow you to compare different microprocessors. The good ones will actually put together benchmark \"suites\" (collections) that are targeted for different types of usages...gaming, business, web browsing, etc. \n \nOr, if you don't want to mess with all that, look at the prices. If two processors are rated for similar amounts of power usage, the one with higher performance will tend to cost more money.",
"processors do the real work on a computer, they add numbers together, interpret stuff you typed in. Basically it's the brains of the computer.\n\nProcessors that can do things faster are normally considered better. \n\nProcessors that can do more things at once are normally considered better.\n\nProcessors that can do things more efficiently (with respect to power/heat) are normally considered better.",
"There's actually a pretty good subreddit for this: /r/buildapc \nIt's a great resource."
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} | train_eli5 | Computer processors
What makes one better than the other? I know this is a question I should already know the answer too but it's one of those questions you're embarrassed to ask. | [
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3bt8sf | why do humans require a balanced diet of various meats and plants, but most animals are perfectly healthy when only eating 1 or 2 types of food? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Contrary to popular press there are three types of animal. Herbivores, Carnivores, and Omnivores. The first eats plants, the second eats animals, and the third eats both. Humans are of the third type, with our multi-modal teeth and our multi-speed digestive tract we can eat plants by using our wide and flat back teeth to grind them and our gut on \"slow\" to digest them. We can eat meat by tearing it with our sharp front teeth and pass it safely through our gut when it's going \"fast\". (And we can eat both at the same time because we mastered fire and learned how to cook our food.)\n\nFeeding meat to the herbivores will make them very, very sick. Feeding only vegetables to the carnivores will starve them to death very quickly.\n\nHumans evolved to be able to deal with both as that frees us to live in many, and highly variable conditions of climate, forage, and prey.\n\nMost of the food you think of feeding animals is actually animal feed. That is, some human balanced it on purpose in a laboratory. Your dog can survive on dog food because it isn't _really_ just one food.\n\nAnimals in the wild, particularly the plant eaters, actually eat a wide variety of plants. The savanna isn't a lawn covered with one type of grass. There's dark and light grasses, clovers, ivies, weeds of narrow and broad leaf varieties, and lots of roots and shoots.\n\nCarnivores are very well suited, and meat is an excellent nutritional source, because the grass eaters did all the diet balancing first. The healthy tissue of a well grazed wild animal is full of all those nutrients that animal ate.\n\nOne theory of our current health dilemma is that our \"corn fed beef\" et al isn't as good for us as \"grass fed beef\" because the diet used to make them get big and fat _isn't_ balanced enough to make the meat deliver all the things good meat should. Basically the idea is that if you feed the cow \"junk food\" the meat produced is \"junk food quality\" with a larger amount of a fewer variety of fats and such.\n\nSo really your question is kind of wrong.\n\nOnce we, as humans, began to tinker with and micro-manage our foods we took up the burden of maintaining that variety by active management.\n\nWild critters get the random variation because they don't have time to worry about what to eat since they are busy trying not to be eaten or whatever.\n\nA very real practical example happens with caged birds. In the wild they don't have time to husk seeds (remove the shells) because they have to dart in, get the food in their guts, and then get out. In cages they will spend all day removing and selectively eating the starchy/fatty meat of the seed and discarding the nutricious husk and germ. So in captivity birds have to be given vitamin supplements and, more successfully, short feeding times with a mixed seed diet. If this isn't done properly the bird will get very ill, and some parrot species will even start biting into their own wing joints in an instinctive search for the nutrients they are missing. (I've seen it, I used to work in a pet specialty store and we had to board a couple of parrots that had virtually eaten their own wings off because their owner \"knew they liked sunflower seeds\" so fed them those as 90% of their diet _and_ gave them the chance to husk the seeds while eating.)\n\nSo yea, the natural variation is actually present, it's just not as obvious.",
"Plenty of people survive on an all-plant diet, and there are some who survive on an all-meat diet ([source](_URL_0_)). It's just very difficult, and entails eating either a huge variety of plants or a huge variety of meats/organs. \n\nBut anyway, to get at the heart of your question, humans are omnivores while the other animals you are probably thinking of are herbivores or carnivores of some sort. Animals have digestive systems specialized to extract nutrients from whatever it is that they evolved eating the most of. These adaptations include things like digestive tract length, enzymes produced, and types of bacteria living in the digestive tract. Pre-human primates were probably herbivores, and then early humans started eating some meat, and over time we evolved the capability to digest both plants and meats acceptably.",
"Noone here has answered the question yet.\n\nYes, humans are omnivores and yes lots of animals have specialized digestive systems, but that doesn't answer WHY humans cant just live off of carrots or something. \n\nThe reason why is that because humans have been omnivores for enough time to lose the capacity to make some amino acids/vitamins/proteins. \n\nThese things were plentiful enough in a normal diet that the the abilities to make them was not particularly selected for, allowing these abilities to be lost over time. Another factor is that it is inefficient to make stuff already sufficiently acquired through regular diet, so the abilities may have even been selected against.",
"We are omnivores. Most other omnivores also require eating a wide variety of material. Even Carnivores eat different kinds of prey most of the time, and herbivores most often eat different types of plants. \n\nMany other primates are omnivores or semi-omnivores"
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} | train_eli5 | why do humans require a balanced diet of various meats and plants, but most animals are perfectly healthy when only eating 1 or 2 types of food?
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32wlmh | Why does the print on some store-bought t-shirts fade and crack with age, and others seem to last forever, no matter how many times you wash them? | Why don't they just make all t-shirts by the better method that lasts longer? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Some t shirts are made with high quality material and printing. Others with lower quality fabric and printing. Price can be a good indicator of quality but not always as a brand can easily sell poorer quality for a larger price.\nScreen printing and DTG are higher quality methods of putting a design on a t shirt but cost more than heat transfer.\nAt the end of the day it's purely luck.",
"Why don't they make everything out of the best materials?\n\nBecause it costs more and people want cheaper stuff."
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} | train_eli5 | Why does the print on some store-bought t-shirts fade and crack with age, and others seem to last forever, no matter how many times you wash them?
Why don't they just make all t-shirts by the better method that lasts longer? | [
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237t1j | Why does diffused/reflected laser light appear to have a grainy texture? | Shine a laser on any surface- and you'll notice it has an almost beady, grainy appearance. Why does this happen? My first instinct is that it is due to the properties of the laser light itself, however when laser light is diffused on a surface it loses the linear light beam properties that are characteristic to lasers. Why does this only happen with laser light and not other intense sources of light diffused or reflected off surfaces? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"This grainy look is a product of the laser light waves bouncing off the surface and interfering with one another on your retina. Where two or more waves cancel each other out, you see a dark(er) spot. _URL_0_"
],
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} | {
"url": [
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} | train_eli5 | Why does diffused/reflected laser light appear to have a grainy texture?
Shine a laser on any surface- and you'll notice it has an almost beady, grainy appearance. Why does this happen? My first instinct is that it is due to the properties of the laser light itself, however when laser light is diffused on a surface it loses the linear light beam properties that are characteristic to lasers. Why does this only happen with laser light and not other intense sources of light diffused or reflected off surfaces? | [
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8s3cre | What does it mean for the Peers to give UK's Parliament a "meaningful vote" on the final deal reached with Brussels? | [removed] | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A \"meaningful vote\" means giving Parliament the power to approve or reject the final Brexit deal that the government negotiates. \n\nMany people, especially on the anti-Brexit side, are concerned the government will negotiate a bad deal and nobody will be able to do anything about it."
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} | train_eli5 | What does it mean for the Peers to give UK's Parliament a "meaningful vote" on the final deal reached with Brussels?
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25wpcr | Why were the Aztec, Mayans, etc wiped out by the diseases carried by the Europeans and not vice versa? | Did the Native Americans not have diseases that could have been just as foreign and deadly, like small pox, to the invading Europeans? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There were many settlers who died of disease. The thing is that the travel back to Europe was long enough that most lethal diseases would kill their victims before they could get back to Europe. \n\nEuropeans had more open trade with other groups (Each other, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East). They also lived with more domesticated animals and in closer proximity to said domesticated animals. All of that means they had more vectors for disease and thus had to have more robust immune systems to survive.",
"Europe around that time was an almost-literal shithole. like dumping chamberpots onto passerby's heads gross. When you live in those conditions the plagues are going to throw parties and invite all their friends.\n\nMesoamericans however had running plumbing with water pressure, flushing toilets, and a whole bunch of other advances europe didn't pick up for another couple hundred years. Turns out when your shit goes away it's not nearly as gross as leaving it sitting there.",
"I remember that come fall/winter in the Rustbelt area, europeans with a lack of vitamin c would develop a disease called Scorbut(french) IIRC it could be deadly back then. The Natives would make some kind of tea/juice by boiling citrus Zests and offer it to the european.\n\nThe europeans turned it around and gave them blankets that covered people that were sick knowing that without the remedy, they would die.\n\nTL:DR: the natives gave the remedy to the local disease, the Europeans gave gifts wraped with their disease and never gave the remedy.",
"Beacuse...urban living. The europeans created some unique diseases through their living patterns in city. Basically...festering in their own shit led to some unique diseases and then immunity to them. The diseases of the aztecs and such were much the same as those other humans had experienced prior to urbanization.",
"Syphilis did run rampant throughout Europe for a few hundred years there. One leading theory being it was bought back from the new world.",
"Because Europeans lived in close population / utter filth. They developed diseases due to this, and more immunities. \n\nAlso, it's heavily argued if it was the Europeans that brought the disease. Some studies show it was just a coincidence",
"* Europeans had built up better immunities, due to a higher population density\n* Europeans has greater genetic diversity, making it less likely a single disease would have a big impact"
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} | train_eli5 | Why were the Aztec, Mayans, etc wiped out by the diseases carried by the Europeans and not vice versa?
Did the Native Americans not have diseases that could have been just as foreign and deadly, like small pox, to the invading Europeans? | [
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2g5pvb | AT & T Next | Had a coworker try to explain AT & T Next to me in the office the other day. Since I desperately want an iPhone 6 (Apple fan boy over here), he made it seem like I'd be stupid to not join and get the device I so greatly desire. He told me something along the lines of what you pay for the phone when due an upgrade ($200) and what you'd pay with AT & T Next (~$650 over 20 installments) equals out because of some fees they charge you monthly with a 2 year contract. I'm very skeptical, seeing as $200 and $650 are not similar numbers in the least.
Some details:
-I'm due for an upgrade in June 2015.
-I'm on a family plan with my mother and brother. Said family plan is unlimited data, grandfathered in from when they stopped offering that plan.
-I'm clueless about this stuff.
| explainlikeimfive | {
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"Adding a line to AT & T next didn't change almost anything on my service (2 phones on my plan) plan, although I was already on a Mobile share with unlimited talk and text and I pay for 6 gigs of data. I can't see them taking away the grandfathered data plan if you bring it up to them that you'd like to keep it.\n\nThat said, I'm very happy I went with the Next program, despite original reservations. I definitely am the type that likes the new devices yearly, but it's nice having the option to just pay out the 20 months and keep the device. It's not like you're throwing away the $35 dollars a month.",
"I'll bet if you take their advice on the upgrade, you'll lose your unlimited data."
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Had a coworker try to explain AT & T Next to me in the office the other day. Since I desperately want an iPhone 6 (Apple fan boy over here), he made it seem like I'd be stupid to not join and get the device I so greatly desire. He told me something along the lines of what you pay for the phone when due an upgrade ($200) and what you'd pay with AT & T Next (~$650 over 20 installments) equals out because of some fees they charge you monthly with a 2 year contract. I'm very skeptical, seeing as $200 and $650 are not similar numbers in the least. Some details: -I'm due for an upgrade in June 2015. -I'm on a family plan with my mother and brother. Said family plan is unlimited data, grandfathered in from when they stopped offering that plan. -I'm clueless about this stuff. | [
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32tku3 | Will we ever stop evolving? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You're forgetting the difference between evolution and natural selection. Humans will always evolve (until we move past sexual reproduction or get designer babies) BUT through modern health care natural selection is becoming less and less effective on us.",
"Evolution is inevitable as long as you have imperfect replication and competition for resources. What we're doing with medical science and technology is merely altering the strength of the various selective forces working on us. That doesn't stop evolution; it just alters it course.",
"Yes, but \"fittest\" does not mean \"physically fittest\", it means \"best able to survive and reproduce in the environment it's living in\" - so in fatc the phrase \"survival of the fittest\" is something of a tautology.\n\nWill we stop evolving? In my opinion, biologcally, yes, in that in time we will become (evolve) into a differetn life-form based on a merging of biology and a range of technologies, adn will eventually determine our own \"evolution\" as we see fit, according to our desiores and the physical world as it chnages (maybe due to climactic changes, volcanioc activity) or even as we move into space.",
"Sexual selection, a changing environment and deadly diseases will continue to guarantee humanity will never stop evolving.\n\nMate selection has and always will be present. You cannot reproduce if no one choose you!\n\nChanging technology, climate and social structures will favor some types over others. Lets say you are allergic to many protein sources but were relying on fish for survival. Environmental factors may remove your fish source! Certain technologies like the internet are changing how we learn.\n\nDiseases like AIDS, ebola, the flu and malaria will constantly exert pressures on populations.",
"No, we will not stop evolving. Even if modern medicine gets to a point where any disease is cureable, there will still be sexual selection a genetic drift.\n\nI have this all written down on my computer, Ill copy and paste: \n\nPeople say we are done evolving, I disagree. First of all, we are under pressure to be good drivers, if this pressure continues than in a few generations we would have better reflexes! We are also under pressure to make good decisions as teenagers, in a few generations we will see shorter childhoods, kids' brains would finish developing sooner!\n\nI think things like confirmation bias will become less and less widespread as time goes on. If someone who owns a business truly believes that a certain style is what sells best goes into confirmation bias whenever someone tells him that it is outdated, he won't believe them. And his business will suffer. Of course, this may not be a good enough benefit as far as evolution is concerned.\n\nLess prone to addiction\n\nWe will be able to better handle stress. Stress evolved to help us in emergencies, it evolved to help us escape when a lion was trying to eat us. It causes all the bodily functions that are t necessary in a situation like that to shut off, the immune system, digestive system, etc. We aren't built to handle long term stress, and it causes a lot of health problems.\n\nPeople who can learn to use new technology as it becomes available have benefits. Older generations have no idea how to use iPads and cell phones. They have more difficulty learning how to type, use touch screens as well as other forms of technology. People who can learn as they age will be able to stay in the workforce longer. Although they won't necessarily be more likely to have children.\n\nPeople who are less sensitive to sweet things will probably eat them less, which means that they would be less likely to become obese and get other health complications related to high levels of fat (natural selection). They would also be skinnier and probably more attractive and have an easier time finding a lover (sexual selection).\n\nWe will be better at driving cars, which means we will have better reflexes, and maybe have a wider field of view. We will also probably evolve to be more capable of surviving car accidents, which means better at protecting vital organs from high G-Forces\n\n\nPeople who have better language skills would have an easier time in social situations, not to mention public speaking. They would be more likely to get a good job, which means more money, and money is sexy, they would be more likely to get a wife/girlfriend/boyfriend.\n\nPeople who are more responsible and think in terms of the future will probably get more money, and money is attractive (or soon will be).\n\nPeople who are attracted to people for their wealth will have children who are better fed, and more likely to get a good education, their children will be better off.\n\nWe'll become smarter in general, smarter people often make more money and are more successful.\n\nWe'll probably become more attractive in general. Women will get larger breast, men will get more muscular, both genders will have less acne and more bilateral symmetry. Both genders will be more conscious to how they look.\n\nWe will probably be less likely to let anger get the better of us in a few hundred generation, people who attack people from anger get sent to jail, and are likely to stay in jail for a while, and will be less likely to have children or a family.\n\nWe'll become better liars, liars can cover up a crime better, liars can keep relationships better."
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24sak3 | Why didn’t soldiers use any obstacles in renaissance firearm battles? | It is widely pictured that in the battles of those early firearms soldiers just stood still in the rows, battle taking place in some plain field. My question is – why didn’t they use any obstacles like trenches or even shields fixed to the ground while in the long range combat? Was it some sort of wicked knighthood thing of honor? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Also note, the first wars where firearms were rifled on a large scale, the casualty rates were astronomical and generals realized, tragically slowly, that standing in ranks was no longer viable.\n\nWhile the Revolutionary War did see the use of rifled weapons, specifically the Kentucky Long Rifle, these weapons were used by specialists while the regular army, the dudes standing rank on rank, were still using smooth bore by and large.\n\nIn the U.S. Civil War you see the use of the soft lead mini ball in rifled weapons used on a mass scale. These weapons were highly accurate by comparison. You begin seeing the beginnings of two new modern paradigms in war because of the widespread use of these weapons. One of them defensive,and one of them offensive.\n\n1) trench warfare (Vicksburg, St Petersburg Campaign, cold harbor)\n\n2)Fire and maneuver warfare (especially with breech loading carbine armed Cav troopers, but also in small unit actions in the Wilderness)\n\nSo really, to answer your question. They stood in ranks because they COULD. The fire wasn't as murderous as you would think due to wild inaccuracy. In the civil war, generals begin realizing that modern weapons have shifted the way wars can be fought, unless you are prepared to absorb ridiculous casualties, and they began to change their tactics accordingly. \n\nSadly, while the next big defensive jump in war, Trench Warfare would take hold in the next major American war (WW1, sorry Spanish war) while offensive tactics would lag behind. Again, we see generals using outmoded tactics against modern weaponry, and again we see them absorb huge casualties in learning their lessons. The lessons to emerge from THAT war would be the use of combined arms offensives, the solidification of fire and maneuver as a primary means of attack, as well as Armored warfare (Tanks).",
"Early firearms were extremely inaccurate and very slow to reload. The only way to do any real damage was to have a bunch of dudes standing next to each other all firing in the same direction, because there was no such thing (yet) as a gun that would shoot a bullet where you were actually pointing it. They were still useful, though, because those guns also did plenty of damage to whatever they did hit.\n\nThey were slow to reload, so if you wanted your volleys to have a firing rate of more than once a minute, the best thing to do was to have multiple rows of dudes all with guns, so that after the guys in front fired, they drop to the back line and reload as fast as they can while the other rows rotate to the front to fire.\n\nFinally, the heavy formations had another use. While the mounted knight in armor was gone or on its way out (as no armor could be made that would adequately protect horse or rider from bullets), cavalry were still a thing. Troops in formation, especially with polearms (and a flintlock with a bayonet on the end is the next best thing, on account of being both long and pointy) could hold off a cavalry charge. Troops *not* in formation would be scattered and destroyed relatively easily, because they could put up neither the heavy volley nor the tight formation necessary to resist a cavalry charge.",
"Early firearms were **wildly** inaccurate. The only real hope you had for hitting a target *at all* was to have lots of guns pointed in the same direction from very short range."
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It is widely pictured that in the battles of those early firearms soldiers just stood still in the rows, battle taking place in some plain field. My question is – why didn’t they use any obstacles like trenches or even shields fixed to the ground while in the long range combat? Was it some sort of wicked knighthood thing of honor? | [
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35fh23 | why female products often costs more then male products? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Could you name an example? Throwing out blanket statements makes it really difficult to answer your question.",
"Some products are 'made' for women but are really no better, and sometimes worse than the male/genderless equivalent. A lot of pinkwashing really with raised prices. \n For example, razors. Ladies razors are usually pink and have less blades. Guys razors usually look more rugged. Honestly I hate ladies razors and would just buy men's ones BC they were cheaper and more effective."
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1q4wcx | How does Accutane work? | I heard it has something to with the oils or something. But how? | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. Accutane is a cousin of Vitamin A that, when taken by mouth, decreases the skin’s natural oil production.\n\nWhen you produce less oil, there’s less oily wax that clogs your pores. When that happens, you get less pimples, cysts, and so forth."
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3z6mps | Why do so many tech companies move to such expensive areas like in Cali? Do you really need a fancy office to build apps or Facebook? Why not be located somewhere cheaper cost of living. | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's called a [Business cluster](_URL_1_). \nSee the [Silicon Valley case](_URL_0_) for example. Hollywood would be another example.\nLots of businesses within the same industry settle in a geographic concentration. This makes it attractive for startups or venture capitalists to locate themselves there as well.\n\nWith much companies on a relatively dense area, it's attractive for people who are searching jobs in this specific field to move there. \n\nThese clusters are often connected with universities, service providers, etc. specified on the given industry, which makes business relationships and stuff like that incredibly easier due to regional proximity and some kind of symbiosis between them.",
"I'm in Chicago, and I'm in r+d. I recieved job offers for more money in small towns, and did not accept them. In a small town if you decide you don't like your job/employer in a specialized area, you have basically sell a house, potentially end a relationship, etc and move somewhere else. In a tech center, you just get a different job and maybe commute an extra few minutes. \n\nIt's not just Cali though, raleigh(sic?) And Austin have huge tech industries.",
"Their employees would rather live in California than somewhere with a cheaper cost of living. California is expensive because it's really popular, and tech employees usually make enough money that they can afford to live wherever they want. If Facebook moved to Kansas or somewhere much cheaper, most of their employees would rather work for Google or Apple than move there with them.",
"The short answer is that it's where the talent is. It's easier to hire there as tech people already live there, and there's kind of an entire supporting industry that's also there.\n\nThat said, there's a lot of tech in other places now, like Austin and even San Antonio is making a push. My company is sponsoring college classes and other tech classes to help create this talent, but it's tough. Also started a tech incubation deal in town, and all sorts of stuff to drive more tech talent.",
"A similar thing happens in Formula 1 racing. Most of the teams are based in the south-east of England (Ferrari are the notable exception, but then they are Ferrari). It means that all of the talent is based in the same place and it's easier to find the people you want. Employees don't have to up sticks and move when they go for a new job.\n\nThe Toyota teams lack of success was put down, in part, to the fact that they were based in Cologne when all the best engineers were based in England. They also hired the wrong Schumacher.",
"A big reason is that Silicon Valley is home to the best venture capital firms that specialize in early stage tech companies (the reasons for this go back many years). These investors usually prefer companies they invest in to relocate to Silicon Valley so they are close by and have access to the biggest pool of talented employees, thereby increasing the odds of a return on their investment. Eventually, some early stage companies become really successful and recruit new talent to the area, causing a virtuous cycle.",
"I work at a startup in Portland, Oregon. All I hear day-in-and-out is \"OMFG this is such a tech backwater; you're never going to find qualified people; relocate to the Bay Area or you're **DOOOOOOMED**!\"\n \nShit is fucking annoying.",
"Proximity to a large talent pool for engineers and other people with tech experience like project managers and marketers, as well as venture capitalists. Earlier in the history of computer tech, silicon chip/hardware manufacturers were located here and software followed. But long before *that*, the US Navy performed technology work here, semiconductor companies started up, etc. Huge number of STEM-educated workers and entrepreneurs.\n\nUnlike some other businesses that can be located anywhere, like a factory that makes pretzels, the programmer talent pool is specialized and you would have fewer candidates to choose from when hiring in the middle of Oklahoma, but you can train a group of random employees anywhere to run pretzel-making machinery.\n\nIt's expensive to live in this area partially* BECAUSE of the high salaries, because tech industry people have the means to afford more expensive housing. If all of the tech companies had grown around Albuquerque instead, Albuquerque's cost of living would be higher. \n\n*Good climate and picturesque setting, too. In the absence of a huge tech industry San Francisco would likely still be expensive, but San Jose might still be full of fruit orchards.",
"I've thought about this for quite some time, since I'm in tech as well. Here's my rough analysis:\n\n-The Gold Rush in Northern California/Bay Area in 1848 created a culture of opportunity (and entrepreneurship in some respects). This is important as this separates why you have Silicon Valley in Cali vs anywhere else (i.e. near MIT/Harvard, etc.).\n\n-Two pivotal education systems were established in the surrounding area: UC Berkeley (1868) and Stanford (1885).\n\n-Two Stanford alums set up Hewlett Packard, an electronics hardware startup and the first real tech company, in 1939 near Stanford. This spawned what's now called 'Silicon Valley'.\n\n-In the Silicon Valley area, academia and research for computing blew up in 1950s-1970s. Commercial applications and hardware for computing blew up in the 1970s-1990s. Venture capital for computing blew up in the 1980s-1990s. Thus an ecosystem was created and fostered. Stanford and Cal were the breeding grounds for much this innovation.\n\n-It's only natural that software go with hardware, thus software hit stride in the 1990s. These software companies wanted to be close to the money (venture capitalists) and talent (engineers), so they set up shop all around Palo Alto/Stanford.\n\n-Traditional hardware companies resided in Sunnyvale/San Jose area (south Bay Area). Skewed older demographic. Suburbia. Families.\n\n-In the 2000s-2010s software companies flourished (read Marc Andreessen's WSJ guest post on \"Why Software is Eating the World\"). Employees of software companies skewed younger.\n\n-More tech companies — software and otherwise — started setting up shop in San Francisco. Why? 1.) younger demographic (i.e. engineering talent) prefers San Francisco's urban environment over Palo Alto/South Bays suburban environment, especially from a lifestyle POV, 2.) to be equidistant between Stanford and UC Berkeley (UCB held 2nd place vs Stanford when it come to innovation), 3.) San Francisco's mayor gave tax breaks to big companies (Twitter, Zynga, etc.) to be in San Francisco, 4.) huge tech company called Palantir took up and monopolized all the available real estate (not kidding) in Palo Alto/Stanford area, thus driving tech companies and venture capitalists to move to San Francisco, 5.) if building a consumer focused app or tech startup, you want to be where the action is, a densely populated area like San Francisco, 6.) serendipity (in the context of hiring talent, raising money, etc.) tends to happen in a more densely populated area like San Francisco.\n\nThat's my $0.02.",
"The other answers here that describe a \"business cluster\" are correct. Once a type of business gets started in one place, it can be self-perpetuating as the people, infrastructure, and other factors (e.g., venture capital) move or are created there. If you're Mark Zuckerberg and you're starting (or expanding) Facebook, it's a no-brainer to do it in Silicon Valley.\n\nFor Silicon Valley, it comes down to, in large part, the fact that [William Shockley](_URL_2_) grew up in Palo Alto. When he left Bell Labs to found Shockley Semiconductor, he did it in Mountain View to be close to his ailing mother. Shockley Semiconductor spawned Fairchild Semiconductor, which [spawned Intel and many others](_URL_3_)...",
"You have to move where the workforce is. Skilled young programmers making $100k don't want to live somewhere shitty just because it's less expensive.",
"People, infrastructure, and culture. \n\nWanna have a major business? You're gonna need a pool of talent. Talent pools congregate in certain cities, which attract employers, which attracts more talent, and so on. \n\nSecondly, infrastructure. What does your business need? You'll want a city that provides that. Access to major markets, transportation, ports, hi-speed internet, etc. \n\nThirdly, quality of life. If you are in demand, do you want to spend most of your time in a bustling world-class city, or a shitty has-been town?",
"I've always wondered this. I live in southern CA near LA and work as a QA Analyst. The money is better in CA, but the cost of living is horrible. I've looked at moving to more affordable states but every area with tech jobs cost exponentially more than their surrounding areas.\nThe only good side is that it's very competitive here. Since there's so many tech jobs a lot of companies give great benefits to try and retain their talent. The culture is much more relaxed. It's common knowledge the best way to increase your salary in tech is to jump from Lilly pad to Lilly pad. \nComparatively speaking, when I worked in Charlotte, NC I was paid half what I'm making now for more work, an asshole-puckered dress code, health benefits were horrible, no work-life balance, and not much I could do since tech jobs were far and few. Bank of America and Wells Fargo employ a huge portion of Charlotte and they're both notorious for mass layoffs at year-end.",
"It is called a 'business cluster' and it has a lot of advantages. These include:\n\n* Clusters usually have better access to employees and suppliers. Since clusters signal opportunity and less risk of relocation it is easy to attract employees from all over the world to that specific place. This lowers search and transaction costs in recruiting. Furthermore, suppliers require lower transportation costs, as they are typically also located in the cluster and therefore do not have to transport goods as far.\n\n* Employees of firms in clusters will typically meet up at the same bars, golf courses etc. When they do so, information is exchanged between them. Being located in a cluster therefore improves access to specialized information.\n\n* Often, members of a cluster are mutually dependent. With tourism clusters for example, it is likely that one tourism-oriented business, like a restaurant, will make money on the same customers that another business, like a theme park, does. Good performance of one cluster member can therefore affect all others positively.\n\n* A cluster enhances the reputation of the location and this makes it more likely that buyers will turn to vendors in those areas.\n\n* Local rivalry motivates employees and executives to work harder. Furthermore, pride and desire to look good pushes executives to attempt to outdo each other. \n\n* Companies in a cluster are often more aware of the environment, making them quicker to adapt to new customer demands and gaps in products or services around which they can build new business.",
"I think most of the above answers are true- most employees want to live in the best area they can afford and want to live a lifestyle that identifies with their demographic. For people in the tech industry (generally more liberal, tech-centric, skilled, affluent), California or NYC often fits that bill. They want to maintain an image that corresponds not only with their career, but with their peers as well.\n\nThat's not to say that tech companies AREN'T relocating or opening campuses in areas with cheaper living costs. Look at Austin (now being dubbed \"Silicon Hills\") or Kansas City. These cities aren't California or NYC in terms of cost of living or penetration into the tech industry, but they do have a demographic that is increasingly \"tech\" with lower operational costs. And they also have a pretty high standard of living.",
"It wasn't expensive when all these companies were founded in their founders' parents' garages, in suburbs around Stanford. They would have no idea that they would grow to employ thousands of employees, and many of the deleterious housing prevention laws were not in place then.\n\nSince then it's just a network effect / feedback loop - it's where the VCs and talent are concentrated.",
"We had a case study on this in business school, but it was a while ago, so I will likely get some terminology wrong. You tend to see clusters of the same types of businesses pop up near each other because that's where effective talent is. If you're a start up and need to hire a bunch of good people, you need to be where they are to lower the opportunity cost of them coming to work for you. Also, having a lot of local competition tends to drive faster innovation and if you're far from the center, it's difficult to keep pace as you learn what is happening at a lagging pace. If you're a small game developer, you should try to be near Boston, SF, or Seattle. If you are a tremendous designer of ladies footware, you need to be in Milan, or wherever else is a fashion hub.",
"It's sort of the other way around... those areas are only so expensive because the tech companies that grew there (Hewlett-Packard, Apple, Sun Microsystems, and now of course Facebook, Google) became so big and successful that there are lots of wealthy people working for them in that area, which has driven up property prices, and the price of living in general.",
"I asked our VP of engineering this question about 5 years back. Here is what he said to me: *of all the venture capital in the world, half is in the United States. Of all the VC in the US, half is in Silicon Valley*. Start-ups go where the money is. And qualified labor pool, etc.",
"The tech companies are what MADE the area expensive.\n\nIt's not that they picked an expensive area and moved there. It's the fact that they ARE there that is pushing up rents, etc.",
"Lots of companies live cheaper. Austin, Texas has been riding as a huge tech hub, and it's much much much cheaper than anywhere on the west coast. Salaries in Austin for software engineers are in the 6 digits. \n\n\nSeattle is much cheaper than California as well, but not as cheap as Austin.",
"Sometimes the reason is simply because they can without real logic. I run a tech company in San Francisco. We moved the company here because of it is fun to live in a new place, especially around like minded people in Silicon valley. Did it serve as a catalyst to growing a mobile app? Yes, a little bit. It's not as financially viable for a tech start up... but you sometimes it's easier to build relationships when your local. Its not necessarily a new home base, just a start to an amazing journey. We worked in a different country last year. It's also easier to find more talent to expand around tech hubs. Either way, Its not about where you are, but being around equally motivated individuals and enjoying what you do. Also, my take home pay has increased over 1000% in less than a year which is somewhat related.",
"To those saying \"all the techies want to live in California\", no, we *don't*. It sucks that California is where Silicon Valley ended up. California doesn't *deserve* a money generating engine so populated by freedom loving techies in a statist, government loving, anti gun, communist, high tax, nosy hellhole like California. I'm supporting with my taxes a population and a government that hates me and thinks the world would be better off with me dead.\n\nCalifornia should have stayed fucking farmland. Silicon Valley should have been somewhere where its libertarian streak would be appreciated and embraced instead of shat upon. It should have been in New Hampshire, Idaho, or Texas.\n\nUnfortunately, none of those places want to pay me $300k+.\n\nSo here I am.",
"The reason clusters are really great is that when you put all your eggs in one basket and that basket explodes, flies of a cliff, and dies in a spectacular ball of fire you get to become Detroit.",
"You've reversed cause and effect. Those areas are expensive *because* lots of tech companies are there. It feeds in on itself because newer tech companies want to be located where there's a ready pool of talent.",
"Money.\n\nVenture capital goes to three places in America:\n\nNew York\nBoston\nSan Francisco. \n\nIf you want to start a new technology company those are your three choices. The entire rest of America gets a small fraction of the venture capital of any one of those three cities. \n\nIt is a vicious circle because in order to get that money you have to know people, and you have to go to the places where the people that have and know how to get money already are. So that means every year more of those people are going to where more and more of those people already are. So they concentrate in Boston, NYC, and SF. \n\nYou can start a company in Detroit, but VC investment is literally a single digital percentage in comparison to a place like Boston. You also have a harder time finding good talent because the best tech workers are going to the main hubs to earn top dollar salaries.",
"Many tech companies (big and small) choose locations in high cost centers like Silicon Valley, New York City, and Boston for three reasons; People, Paper, and Partners. \n\nPeople- access to talent (I.e Stanford, MIT, Financial Services Industry\n\nPaper- access to investors\n\nPartners- access to large tech firms, corporations, and distributors",
"This is really because of economies of scale, companies move to places that have the infrastructure available so that they are able to operate most efficiently and productively. They usually have connections with universities that specialise in graduate programs that are employable.",
"Because East Bumfuck, Tennesee doesn't produce the talent to support any of these companies and the talent doesn't want to move there either.",
"Its a very good question.\n\nSome companies are leaving Silicon Valley. I live in RTP in NC, and we have more NetApp employees than are in California. Only a third of Cisco employees are in CA (5,000 are here).\n\nI suspect that for certain jobs, like coders, it makes sense to have a concentrated job market. But, I am seeing more and more virtual teams, spread across the world.\n\n(I work for a Fortune roughly-150 IT company)",
"Because successful people (executives in operations, legal, HR, IT, et. al.) want to live in nice places...so the good schools are in those areas, and the good neighborhoods to raise them in.\n\nNo one smart wants to live in [insert fucktard city], [insert fucktard state].\n\nedit: votes found the flyover states!",
"The areas become expensive because the tech companies move there. Since there are so many people with well paying jobs in that area the cost of living goes up because it can.",
"It's not the office. It's where there are employee candidates. Tech people like to live in Cali because there are lots of tech companies there",
"The area doesn't become expensive UNTIL there is an industry. Silicon Valley used to be rural America (farmland, ranches and orchards) before the computer. \n\nSilicon Valley got started when a bunch of smart dudes left the east coast because they wanted to do things their way in a place that was both inexpensive and far enough away from NY investors to keep their meddling to a minimum. So you have a situation where a pool of talent congregates, then after a while the talent figures they can do things better or can get a bigger slice of the pie by starting their owns businesses so they split off and form their own companies which attracts more talent from the rest of the country to congregate in the area. Now with the lucrative contracts and ultimately the ubiquity of the personal computer they started making shit tons of money, so prices went up. \n\nThe situation today is insane here in Silicon Valley, hyper-inflated housing prices because a few companies like Google, Facebook and Apple pay top notch salaries to their engineers. The thing that the land owners haven't figured out yet (or maybe they don't care) is that the people who can afford their prices in this area make up a small percentage of the overall population. There is definitely a bubble and when it pops it will be a shit storm here. There are tons of homeless, tent cities and protests for rent control somewhere on a weekly/monthly basis etc.",
"My answer will probably get buried, but here it goes..\n\nI work in the valley and live in San Francisco. Like so many people in my situation, I enjoy having urban culture around me. If I lived in suburbia or in a cheaper rural area, I would be bored out of my mind and not be able to connect with other likeminded people socially. Also, when you live here the cost of living means you make more money to help offset the, um, costs of living.\n\nMy biggest challenge is the commute.. It's 3 hours a day.\n\nI have been working at the same tech company for 14 years and living in the Bay Area my entire life and San Francisco for 25 years.\n\nThere are other posts that cover the other practical stuff, corporate dynamics, clustering etc. but I believe that part of attracting talent is to provide a living environment that they enjoy and find stimulating.",
"The main reason everyone has touched on which is that it's concentrated talent in a given area. \n\nAlso, big companies have very good tax set ups. I mean it's been all over the news about how Apple, Google and Facebook pay so little tax. Now that's how they can afford to stay in California, specifically bay area which has some of, if not the most expensive real estate in the US, and probably ranks high up in the world also.\n\nKnow tons of tech people in Bay Area, they get fired they find another job shortly. They have many opportunities to shoot up the salary ladder, the management ladder etc. You will be hard press to find that kind of movement outside of such places.",
"I think the whole Silicon Valley housing thing is HURTING it. Lots of talented software engineers (including myself) would not even move there. I am a frugal person, I don't want to live somewhere where 80% of my salary goes to rent, I want to live in a nice big house, like a person. \n\nSo the whole Silicon Valley thing is DUMB in my opinion. And they artificially create this housing BS to just make money for people who bought real estate there a long time ago. \n\nIt's like the Gold Rush. Nobody who goes there gets rich, its the people making money off the miners who gets rich",
"The talent pool in Silicon Valley is top notch so if you are a start-up or a serious tech innovator then you want a presence there in order to tap into that talent pool on the reg. \n\nIt doesn't hurt that it has a culture that is conducive to nerdy tech stuff as well as a very desirable climate and terrain. Texas and other places are good for outsourcing your more run-of-the-mill tasks that are a part of the back office support functions. The top tier engineers are more likely to stay in Cali or NY.",
"It's about networking, and not the ethernet kind.\n\nIf you're located in an area with lots of related businesses, you're more likely to find people jumping ship to work with you, people you can strike deals with to benefit each other, and create opportunities by being at the top of people's minds.\n\n\"We do A, but you need someone who does A+B? Well, I know someone who does B, he's just down the block, maybe we can work together for you\"",
"On top of the top comments, university is another factor. It's no coincidence that Silicon Valley is near Berkeley and Stanford. This is where the students or the students' parents lived. They were neighbors and decided to stay nearby to build their companies. Why move far away when you can recruit alumni straight from your nearby campus?\n\nAlso, back 20 or even 10 years ago, those places were in the middle of nowhere. It is only recently that they began booming",
"It's actually not them moving to an expensive area. It's them moving to the area that made it expensive. The tech people get paid a lot and pay for their homes for at market or above prices for housing. That makes all housing in that bracket go up. So tech guys who would have been able to afford a house turn to renting, which causes rent prices to rise.",
"Starting a venture-backed tech startup in the Bay Area can be easier - the law firms understand what's going on, the landlords know what startups are, people are willing to work at startups, there are venture capital firms that will invest in them, etc.\n\nI started my first company in Manhattan and we had to get a note from our investors so we could rent an office...",
"Birds of a feather flock together. Since established tech companies are located in these expensive areas, to find people with the skills required you would move to the same area.\n\nIf a company tried to move somewhere cheaper it would ultimately lose that advantage of drawing upon a skilled work base even if it was cheaper to other areas.",
"A lot of silicon valley companies are moving out. See Uber moving to Oakland, and Tesla locating its offices in Hawthorne. \n\nThe weather in CA is nice and they want the best, smartest people, so they don't mind paying a lot for their employees.\n\nIf anything, it works out in their favor because it keeps out the riff-raff.",
"> Why not be located somewhere cheaper cost of living.\n\nWell a lot of tech companies did that by moving work to Austin or creating start ups here. But after a few years the cost of living in Austin went up.",
"Tech companies don't move to expensive areas. They were started there. Microsoft, Amazon, Starbucks, Zillow, Boeing, etc, all started in the Seattle area and attract international talent. They're exactly why Seattle housing costs have ballooned. \"Build it and they will come.\"",
"Wow, there's a lot of snobbery in this thread. There are a lot of brilliant people in this country, and they don't all live in California. There's a ton of companies moving here to Texas. And no state income tax.",
"Technology companies don't operate like factories. You can't just locate a company anywhere there's a low cost of living, because you won't have access to the top level of talent needed to compete.",
"Because most skilled, intelligent, and experienced people don't want to pack up and move out to B.F.E. for a job, even if it does pay better and the cost of living is cheaper.",
"As a side note, tech companies and their employees moving here have contributed largely to the Bay Area's insane cost of living.",
"Proximity to talent, schools, money, infrastructure, supply hub, how do they work?",
"Lets say you are in the business of making widgets. You need to hire specialized widget engineers. You can make your widgets anywhere in the world. You're located in Oklahoma. Meanwhile, there's another company in California starting that also makes widgets. When you start recruiting widget engineers, assuming you each pay comparable salaries, your instinct might be that you should be more successful in recruiting since it's cheaper to live in Oklahoma, but the truth is your widget engineers are going to be making quite a bit of money; after all, the curriculum for widget engineers is pretty strenuous, and America isn't training enough widget engineers to meet the demand. To your widget engineer off the street, the cost of living isn't as important as the location since they're making enough for the difference to be negligible. So lets say for every 9 widget engineers you get on board, they get 10.\n\nNow, after a few years the widget market is booming, business is good, and the world of widgets begins to attract the attention of venture capitalists in Montana. They could start their company in Montana, but most widget engineers are already in Oklahoma and California. Why go through the pain of wooing and relocating widget engineers to Montana, when they've already set down roots in California and Oklahoma? No, that would be far too difficult, so if the mountain won't come to Muhammad then Muhammad must go to the mountain. After looking at numbers, the venture capitalists from Montana decide to start their widget company in the place with the most widget engineers, California.\n\nNow, you have two competitors out in California. When a widget engineer gets tired of working for one company, he can move to the other without having to uproot his life. Maybe he hates his boss or maybe, much more crucially, the other widget company has offered him more money. Maybe a few widget engineers even decide to split off and start their own widget company. With this \"bidding war\" over widget engineers, pretty soon the companies out in California are going to be paying more than you, and doing things to improve widget engineer morale like employee cafeterias, team bike rides, and calling their business park a \"campus\". Freshly graduated widget engineers and people thinking about starting their own widget companies will hear about this burgeoning widget scene out in California, and start to look at it as their Mecca.\n\nTrue, you can continue to, successfully, run your company from Oklahoma. One benefit you have is that your company is more tightly knit since your employees aren't transitioning around so fluidly. Once a widget engineer sets their roots down in Oklahoma, they can either work for you, or learn a new profession. On the other hand, you start to lose your brand name recognition. A widget engineer in California, over the course of their career, might work at companies X, Y, and Z, but they'd have very little personal information on your company out in Oklahoma, so unfortunately you become irrelevant to them. And California has so many more widget companies that they're attracting a lot more talent than you. Really, your best bet if you're heart-set on staying in Oklahoma is to accept you'll never be the face of the widget world, and to focus your effort on capturing a niche widget market. \n\n\nTL;DR: Location is everything.",
"I only did a quick scan of top comments but I'm very surprised how few people mention the simple concept of cause-effect. It is not always the case that tech companies just pick already expensive areas. It's also the case that many choose middling areas and make them expensive due to the influx of cash. \n\nIf you have a huge inflow of relatively affluent people move to an area, the rent is going to go up. Rent will go up because the demand for housing will go up with an equal supply of housing in the short-term. It will also go up because the price elasticity of demand of housing is low. When housing prices go up in a place where somebody has to live, they will have to pay more for housing, because they have to live near there. It's not like you can raise the cost of living and they'll just move to a different state. (Edit: assuming the example of someone moving to, say, San Francisco for a tech job)\n\nSan Francisco, Palo Alto, wherever else, didn't always use to have a high cost of living. But if tens of thousands of very wealthy people move in, it's going to become an expensive place. The same goes for any industry moving any place without a previous demand for space and commodities. \n\nFor example, the area around Las Vegas was very cheap a hundred years ago before Vegas was really a thing. But they brought a bunch of industry and commerce and now real estate on Las Vegas Boulevard is probably nine-figures for a couple acres. Another example are those little mining towns in random North Dakota where rent is like $5k/month for a single bedroom because those employees are making bank and need a place to live.",
"Those are the easiest places to find employees with the expertise/talent you need, as well as other resources, such as venture capital, office space, and other resources you need to start a company. I personally know of quite a few cases of people who leave one job to go to another, sometimes even on a different floor of the very same office building. I know early employees of tech companies that were literally recruited off the street, by someone driving by or meeting them in a store or cafe. I also know of tech companies that tried to move out to other places, and most of their employees simply quit and went to other companies rather than move to somewhere in the boondocks, uprooting their families, etc. You can drive a few minutes and meet with scores of venture capital people. That being said, it is not as concentrated as it once was, and the tech industry is getting much larger and more dispersed now and there are concentrations of tech in many different places now.\n\nYou could ask this of any industry, really, why doesn't every company everywhere simply move everything to wherever the lowest cost of living is.",
"I did a startup company in San Francisco. I am one of the few people that really hate the city.\n\n\nVenture Capital money is the reason for me and most companies. Technology companies are so lucrative because they have investors that are interested in high risk, high return opportunities.\n\n\nTalent wasn't the main reason, but it turned out that labor was super cheap (practically free) because the area is over saturated with engineers desperate to work in SF (kind of like actors in LA).\n\n\nActually, for those that are telling you talent is the reason, I can almost guarantee that those people are from California (lots of snobs...).\n\n\nThe real trend is to have the sales department in the bay and the engineering team in a lower cost high talent area like Pittsburgh or Seattle.\n\n\nLook at the migration pattern. The bay has forever carved a reputation for itself as \"tech\", but people are actually leaving right now because the cost is not worth it for many people.",
"I've seen a lot of good answers on how people go to the established business clusters, but there's also a reason why they are established in places like the Silicon Valley, CA and Raleigh, NC. Both are attractive to technology companies for two reasons:\n\n1) Tax codes. Those areas have (or at least had when the areas were becoming popular) tax codes that are most favorable for a large business.\n\n2) Coastlines. Foreign scientist can often help tech businesses get an edge on the competition, and locations near the ocean were much easier to get those scientists to move to. Generally speaking, the Silicon Valley attracted Asian talents and Raleigh attracted those from Europe.",
"Similar businesses in similar industries tend to cluster together because it makes collaboration easier, and is also encouraged by similarly localized support industries. Specifically, the tech sector remains in the Bay Area despite the high cost of living and doing business because its natural beauty, its vivid urban culture, its quality of life and many business/job opportunities attract qualified applicants from across the world and because of its proximity to feeder schools like Stanford and Berkeley which makes it easy to recruit talent directly out of college before they have a chance to relocate to other hubs like SoCal, Manhattan or DC.",
"cuz it's easier to raise $5 million in Cali than to raise enough to pay a single eastern european 2 months of wages in bumfuk nowhere.\n\nLet me say that again. It is literally easier for a technical company to get an investor to write a check with 5,000,000 that's five miiiiiiiilliion dollars written on it, than to get anyone to write a check with a 50,000 - that's fifty thouuuuuusand written on it. as in, you can do the first in 3-8 weeks, and you coudln't do the second within 18 months.\n\nso, that's why.\n\nNext question!",
"People who have those jobs tend to also enjoy having something to do and having more cultural experiences. I grew up in a smaller midewestern city and I only go back every other year to visit family, same with Texas where i spent 8 years off and on when i was growing up, qnd texas actually has something to offer in a few of their decent cities. Sure, its cheap, but its also a terrible place to live as far as education and the availability of other well paying jobs.",
"I live in San Francisco and have worked for many tech companies. Living in the city is part of the perk. A couple years ago most tech companies were down in the bay area penninsula, but in the last few the trend has been to move to the city. Why spend a hour each way in traffic when I can be at the office in 10 minutes? Also almost all tech companies have a presents in the bay area. It's were the talent pool is.",
"Nice try, North Dakota Chamber of Commerce. \n\nSeriously, though. It's the natural tendency for industries to cluster around an urban hub over time. Think Detroit for the automotive industry, Houston for the energy industry, New York for finance. \n\nIf Facebook relocated to your quiet little state, they'd struggle to attract talent. And if they managed to survive that immediate problem, then eventually more companies would move in, home prices would rise, and one day you'll be back here asking the same question again.",
"In Silicon Valley, you can find multiple candidates for every highly specialized position in a tech company- unlike Minot N.D. You're a short drive to major venture capital offices unlike Elco. Besides, the people who tend to found new tech companies don't want to move to cheaper areas, as they already have roots in the valley. \n\nAlso... Nice weather. Natural disasters are rare. (Earthquakes can be prepared for.) Few annoying insects. Great food. Culture from every part of the planet.",
"Companies pay prevailing wages. Nobody pays you SF wages to work in Austin. If they did you'd see a lot of employees getting a serious boost in lifestyle and they might take it. But since you're going to have the same lifestyle, other than a big house in TX vs a condo in CA, you pick the place that suits you more. And CA is still the fantasy for many people.",
"The companies move to where the best employees (talent) are at. The best employees go to where the most employment opportunities in their field and the best networking opportunities can be found. This is the reason areas like Cali are expensive, because both employees and employers want to be near each other and it creates demand. The benefits of this arrangement far outweigh the cost of living increase that it creates.",
"First it's to appear successful and second a good air hub keeps clients.\n\nInteresting sidenote: I visited EA (electronic arts) when it started out in the Bay Area. Rented stripmall space, empty except for 3 folding tables, 3 folding chairs and 3 Apples or PC's (I forget which). They said they pooled their money to rent a business address to appear successful. They didn't expect anyone (me) to drop by.",
"A big company in my town (San Luis Obispo) is here because this is where the founder lives. He started in his garage. They just opened a whole campus for his company which now has over 1000 employees. \n\nDoesn't hurt that we are a college town which helps with getting qualified people on staff.\n\nBut our cost of living is insane.",
"Many Silicon Valley companies (mine included) are actually opening up secondary offices in Austin, Texas (Apple is another company that did so). Texas is much cheaper (taxes, housing and by extension employee salaries, operating costs, etc). There is substantial talent in the area as there are many universities within the I35 corridor (San Antonio, Austin, Waco, Dallas).",
"While California sure is an amazing state, is no one there worried about the big earthquake? \nFrom what I have heard Texans can be a bit weird, but I think I'd prefer to live in Austin. \nAlso why San Francisco? It is pretty, but it has pretty cold weather, limited space and the sea is absolutely freezing?",
"Well, \n\nThere is Research Triangle Park (RTP) in NC. \n\nPlus you will see a lot more popping up pretty soon. \n\nBut having an office in The Valley is like having name brand clothes. They even named a firewall after Palo Alto for F sakes. \n\nPlus everrryone has a satellite office where most work gets done.",
"One of the reasons the area is expensive is *because* of the high-paying tech jobs. If there is an area with high-paying jobs, you'll go there to get one. More people means higher housing costs, but you're willing to pay a higher housing price in order to access the high-paying jobs.",
"Many tech companies are actually moving much of their work force to the Midwest like the Dakotas etc. Because land is so cheap and the lack of internet traffic on local routers etc means they can have consistently fast internet and an eager workforce as the cities in the region expand.",
"Live in seattle. Amazon and Microsoft and Google and fucking every other company has decided to move here. They don't come because it's expensive, it becomes expensive because they come. After amazon moved in the price of a one bedroom anywhere in the city went up 200-500 dollars. \n\nEdit. Spelling",
"I work for a tech company based out of San Francisco, in a satellite campus in Indianapolis. As an Indy native, I can tell you that a lot of companies are doing just what you suggest and moving to cheaper cities, or allowing their employees to work from there.",
"This is one of the very few reasons i enjoy living in Oklahoma. Its not oversettled at all, and theres nothing but farmland for miles. If i need alone time to be with my thoughts, i only have to travel about a mile from my house.",
"Companies are there because thats where the qualified applicants are; job applicants come there because that's where the jobs are. \n\nThat's the state it is in now at least. A worthwhile investment if it means you can get some very talented people working for you",
"Microsoft is moving a bunch of stuff to Wyoming because there is a lot of space and they plan on using only solar and wind to power their building as it will cause as much energy to power as the whole city currently uses",
"There are companies (including Microsoft and Citi Bank that I know for sure) that setup offices in places like Idaho and North Dakota where the cost if living is lower. They're really just call centers though so don't get too excited.",
"The clustering thing is true, but a fair number of companies, driven by lower operational cost and a greater distribution of qualified technology workers, are moving from California to places like Utah and Texas, but this is a pretty recent development.",
"Tech companies need investors, so they go to areas where there are wealthy investors all around. When you have investors giving you money to be able to do your thing, you don't care too much about how expensive the area is.",
"World class employees want to live in world class communities. Independently, world class communities have high demand and low supply. Thus, the price is higher.\n\nTL;DR - people with desirable skills want to live in desirable areas.",
"Talent. If you're ok with employees working remotely, then you can likely find cheaper digs - but the best and brightest are in SV, plain and simple. \n\nSource: head of a small tech company in SF.",
"Tech clusters cities can also be found in Germany afaik, the idea being if you focus all the technology in one place you might get better results compared to all \"researchers\" being scattered around the world.",
"I am a dev and I want to live in cool places and I take jobs there. No one wants to work in Iowa or Montana. That means less talent and that is the money.",
"Maybe expensive areas like California are expensive *because* of the tech companies. Of course, better weather probably plays a big role too, but I don't think the relation is a one way street.",
"Better people there, hubs like silicon Valley attract the best and brightest from everywhere. \n\nNo one's moving to Arkansas to join the tech revolution but they will move to Santa Clara.",
"They often don't - I think this is why Vancouver, BC has almost no tech industry and yet Seattle, WA (much cheaper place to live) has a booming industry",
"Silicon Valley would be cheap as dirt to live if all the tech businesses went away or never got built there in the first place.",
"Because that's where the employees are. It's hard to find skilled employees in those other places, and difficult to encourage people to move there.",
"It's for the quality of people. You have a much better/bigger potential employee base in NYC with millions of people than some small town.",
"Most places get expensive because of the tech companies. Most tech wants to be close to investors and other companies and resources.",
"Keep in mind many places in Cali. were not unaffordable until the dot com boom of 2000 when property prices started escalating.",
"they are chasing where the programmers are, and that, in turn, makes the programmers go there. Its a self replicating process.",
"You ever tried to hire hundreds of highly skilled, highly educated developers? Good luck finding them in nowheres-ville, USA.",
"Agglomeration is the term we learned in economic geography. It's beneficial to be near others in your industry.",
"Last trend: Many tech companies are moving now to less expensive areas. Texas, Europe, China, Mumbai.",
"Because people who get paid well (often from successful companies) want a larger than life experience.",
"It's also because California/Seattle are desirable places to live. They need to attract talent.",
"Austin TX ever look there? It is not called silicon hills for nothing."
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster#The_Silicon_Valley_case",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_cluster",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Shockley",
"http://techcrunch.com/2014/07/26/the-first-trillion-dollar-startup/"
]
} | train_eli5 | Why do so many tech companies move to such expensive areas like in Cali? Do you really need a fancy office to build apps or Facebook? Why not be located somewhere cheaper cost of living.
| [
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0.03667... | ||
3a1vbi | why do pipe organs have such a deep psychological effect? | I didn't spend much time in church as a kid, but I am really into music. While each range of instrument (brass, woodwind, strings) definitely has its own feel and tends to evoke its own response, the effect of pipe organs seems to be either more powerful, or more universal. Is it psychological? Physiological? Aesthetic? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"cs8hqy9",
"cs8heyj"
],
"text": [
"There are several parts to this.\n\nThe simple part is that you've learnt, by associating pipe organs to specific events or scenes, that pipe organ means \"wow!\". This is cultural, someone who has never been exposed to pipe organ music, or who doesn't make that association might not feel the same reaction.\n\nThe other is due to the perception of loudness. Pipe organs are built with an array of pipes that all play together, filling out the spectrum from the high tones all the way down to the basses. This makes the organ feel much louder or more present than it truly is. In nature quiet sounds don't fill much of the spectrum, especially if they're tonal (ie: sounds like a note rather than a noise. e.g: violin vs rain). Most tonal sounds are animals, and the vocal chords of animals can only really fill one small frequency band. Human vocal chords can reach high notes and low notes, but not at the same time, at least not with a single human singing. Organs fill out a large chunk of the spectrum.\nAlso, organs are a wind instrument, so they tend to have a sustained level (as opposed to plucked instruments that have a sharp attack but then fade out over time), which also contributes to an increased perception in loudness.",
"I think the associations to family and church / religion play a part even if you aren't religious, but there's also infrasonic sound.\n_URL_0_"
],
"score": [
2,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infrasonic"
]
} | train_eli5 | why do pipe organs have such a deep psychological effect?
I didn't spend much time in church as a kid, but I am really into music. While each range of instrument (brass, woodwind, strings) definitely has its own feel and tends to evoke its own response, the effect of pipe organs seems to be either more powerful, or more universal. Is it psychological? Physiological? Aesthetic? | [
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-0.040... | |
9118hx | How are infants and toddlers able to take so much (relatively minor) head trauma on a regular basis? | It's pretty common that infants and toddlers are clumsy and, therefore, vulnerable to bonking their heads either by falling to the ground or by running into things. From what we know about head trauma and the pernicious effects it has on the brain, how are these younglings able to deal with such a regular amount of it? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"e2urfgd",
"e2uommm"
],
"text": [
"Compared to adults, kids are lightweight and low to the ground. A full on face plant for a toddler involves *way* less energy than it does for an adult. \n\nIf you want to work out how much exactly, you’re looking at half the mass times velocity squared.",
"Their skulls are not fully formed yet and still contain areas of membranous, yet strong tissue that can help absorb the impact of a fall. These areas are called fontanels. A primary function of these spots is to help the baby’s head contort a little more easily through the birth canal during delivery. However, it is said that a direct hit on one of these spots can be dangerous."
],
"score": [
9,
2
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | How are infants and toddlers able to take so much (relatively minor) head trauma on a regular basis?
It's pretty common that infants and toddlers are clumsy and, therefore, vulnerable to bonking their heads either by falling to the ground or by running into things. From what we know about head trauma and the pernicious effects it has on the brain, how are these younglings able to deal with such a regular amount of it? | [
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0.040296673774... | |
pjmvu | The Playstation 3 | Okay, first of all, go easy on me here about my video game ineptitude. The last system I bought was a Super Nintendo about two decades ago.
My girlfriend really wants a Playstation 3, especially for Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption purposes. I'm thinking about getting one for her as a surprise, so I can't really get details from her. But from what I've pieced together from things she's said, there are multiple versions of the Playstation 3 that have been released. I did some looking around at second-hand systems, but now I'm more lost than ever. What's with the different GB sizes? How do I know which system will play the games she wants? | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"c3pvkhr",
"c3pvkzc"
],
"text": [
"The Playstation 3 is a current-gen HD gaming console. It is known for it's astounding exclusives (games that only come out on the PS3), although it has a reputation for the multi-platform (games coming out on both consoles, and/or PC, as well) being created to a lower standard (due to lack of developer efforts, and not inferior hardware).\n\nThe current iteration of the PS3 is the PS3 Slim. It comes in a few different sizes (The GB's you are asking about). These are gigabytes, and reflect the size of the hard drive in the system. To be frank, unless your girlfriend plans to buy a lot of digital games, the 160gb model will serve her just fine.\n\nThe PS3 Slim plays PS3 games, PS1 games, Blu-Ray's and DVD's, natively. It does not support PS2 titles, if that is something she is interested in. There were previous incarnation of the PS3 (fat PS3's, as they are colloquially referred as) that DID support the play of PS2 titles, to varying degrees. These consoles, however, are now years old, very limited, will be bought second hand, and come with an eighth of the hard drive space. They're also disproportionately priced.\n\nHope this clears things up.\n\ntl;dr the 160gb PS3 Slim basic model will serve your girlfriend just fine, and is affordable.",
"All of them will play what she wants. The \"GB sizes\" are the amount of Hard drive space the PS3 has, similar to a computer. You can do a lot of things with this space, include download games off PSN, store music and video, and install games. Installing games can shorten loading times.\n\nThe sizes do NOT interfere with your ability to play games. ALL of them will do what you want. The higher priced models just have more space to them. \n\nThe other versions would be versions with different paint jobs, or different sizes. There is the \"Fat\" PS3 and the \"Slim\" PS3. One is bigger than the other. It is older, and includes hardware emulation of PS2 games. This means you can play old PS2 games on it if you wanted to.\n\nTL;DR: Bigger is better, but buy within your budget."
],
"score": [
9,
5
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | train_eli5 | The Playstation 3
Okay, first of all, go easy on me here about my video game ineptitude. The last system I bought was a Super Nintendo about two decades ago. My girlfriend really wants a Playstation 3, especially for Skyrim and Red Dead Redemption purposes. I'm thinking about getting one for her as a surprise, so I can't really get details from her. But from what I've pieced together from things she's said, there are multiple versions of the Playstation 3 that have been released. I did some looking around at second-hand systems, but now I'm more lost than ever. What's with the different GB sizes? How do I know which system will play the games she wants? | [
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-0.0757... | |
5qazs7 | Do fish, whales and other aquatic animals experience flatulence? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dcxqclc"
],
"text": [
"Yes. \n\n* [Whale farting](_URL_2_)\n* [Dolphin farting](_URL_1_)\n* [A whole write up](_URL_0_) on fish farting."
],
"score": [
3
]
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": []
} | {
"url": [
"https://www.quora.com/Do-fish-fart",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18BdyWPsn-k",
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdMcayWEnkk"
]
} | train_eli5 | Do fish, whales and other aquatic animals experience flatulence?
[deleted] | [
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-0.02482345513999462,
0.0490... |
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