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638azf | why is it when you cook food at 20% higher heat it cooks the food disproportionately faster? | If I am cooking this particular brand of chips at 180C it will take 40+ minutes, however if I cook at 220C it will cook in 20 minutes. Worth noting that is how long it takes for them both to be cooked all the way through to a good standard. So a 20% increase in heat decreases cooking time by > 50%. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/638azf/eli5_why_is_it_when_you_cook_food_at_20_higher/ | {
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"Well... what is heat? Is an increase from 180C to 220C a 20% increase in the amount of heat an object gets? If I start at 20C and I increase the temperature to 60C, am I getting a 300% increase in heat? Both are increases in temperature by 40C. Why is one increase 20% and one 300%?\n\nTemperature is actually a fairly complicated thing. It's a measure of how... thermodynamically active something is. Absolute zero, 0 Kelvin or -273.15 degrees Centigrade, is the point at which thermodynamic processes are barely active, basically unnoticeable. As temperature increases, particles start moving around faster and faster, certain chemical processes may trigger, more stuff happens. Entropy increases. Solids become liquids, liquids become gases, some solids just become gases straight away. Bodily functions can change significantly with a slight change in internal temperature.\n\nCooking is basically entirely chemical reactions. Most of the time, it involves heat, or some sort of temperature change, but sometimes it doesn't. If you ever make gravlax, you're basically curing fish with salt and dill leaves - no temperature change, but you're still killing off a whole lotta bacteria. \n\nLet's take the chips example. At what temperature would the chips simply not cook well enough? At 0C, they're basically solid. At 100C, you might start to get some cooking going, water's boiling, but chips aren't water. It'd take a very long time. You introduce more heat, bonds start breaking apart faster, more activity is going on, bonds break even faster as a result. Your cooking times basically increase exponentially. If you kept going past 220C, you'll hit the point where you're just burning your chips really quickly. Still technically cooking, just not the kind that you want.\n\nSo, yeah. Temperature is an indication of what kinds of chemical processes occur, and how fast they occur. And it's a bit surprising how sensitive some things are to temperature change."
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ny6nd | why some actors get famous for one role and then are never in anything else, while other extremely famous actors keep getting large roles. | Thanks :) | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ny6nd/eli5_why_some_actors_get_famous_for_one_role_and/ | {
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"- Their agent hasn't sold them enough to other producers for films\n- They're not that talented, or only skilled for one type of role\n- They're not willing to commit/travel/practice etc.\n- The market is over saturated with actors.",
"Shouldn't this be on a case-by-case basis?",
"It's called type-casting. Elijah Wood will always be Frodo. Zach Braff will always be J.D. \n\nWe develop an emotional connection to an actor's portrayal of a character and associate them with one another. Thus, if they play a *new* character it ends up taking away from the story.",
"Who did you have in mind?",
"Some people realize the point of money is to enable you to do things, so when they get enough to suit their needs they go and live life instead of working more. \n\n",
"LOL, reminds me of this pic:\n\n_URL_0_",
"Sometimes they're just shitty actors that found a role that fits with their normal mannerisms. When asked to do something different, they can't."
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9mvdkn | why does hot water feel hotter when moving your submerged hand through it, rather than holding it still? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9mvdkn/eli5_why_does_hot_water_feel_hotter_when_moving/ | {
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"Because there are tiny hairs and imperfections on your skin that trap air. This helps insulate your hand ever so slightly. When you move your hand it helps dislodge that air and now the water is touching more of your hand and water transmits heat better than air. \n\nSecond, when you put your hand in the water the water close to your hand won’t really move much after a moment due to drag (friction) this forms a laminar layer near your hand. As this layer transmits its heat to your hand it gets cooler and then the water next to it has to pass its heat to the layer and so on until it’s a game of “pass along”. When you move your hand you disrupt the laminar layer and now your hand is again touching the “hottest” water. ",
"Because as the heat transfers into your hand it is simultaneously cooling the surrounding water. Once you move your hand the hotter parts now come in contact again",
"Convection (motion of water) and conduction (moving heat from a cold to a hot object) transfer heat more effectively than conduction alone. Also, you form a \"boundary layer\" or a few mm thin layer of cooler water right by your hand, and you break that up when you move your hand (unless you move it at a constant velocity - that would just make it thinner). \n\nWhen you wear a jacket in the winter, you're reducing the effect of convection by giving yourself a physical boundary layer, which helps keep you hot in the cold air. "
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mr4ys | advantages of arm vs x86 instruction set architectures | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/mr4ys/eli5_advantages_of_arm_vs_x86_instruction_set/ | {
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"The x86 instruction set is large and may of its instructions are complicated to build into a chip. By comparison, the ARM instruction set has fewer, simpler instructions. Fewer instructions and simpler instructions means that manufacturers can build chips more cheaply and that the chips require less power to operate. On the flip side, many of the of the x86 instructions perform operations that would take many ARM instructions to accomplish, so x86 ends up generally having a performance advantage.",
"ARM processors are simpler than x86 processors. This means that they don't need as much power as x86 processors. That makes them better for things that don't have much power like cell phones.\n\nFor anything more complex, I would suggest perhaps [/r/AskComputerScience](/r/AskComputerScience).",
"The x86 instruction set is large and may of its instructions are complicated to build into a chip. By comparison, the ARM instruction set has fewer, simpler instructions. Fewer instructions and simpler instructions means that manufacturers can build chips more cheaply and that the chips require less power to operate. On the flip side, many of the of the x86 instructions perform operations that would take many ARM instructions to accomplish, so x86 ends up generally having a performance advantage.",
"ARM processors are simpler than x86 processors. This means that they don't need as much power as x86 processors. That makes them better for things that don't have much power like cell phones.\n\nFor anything more complex, I would suggest perhaps [/r/AskComputerScience](/r/AskComputerScience)."
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53aqfg | what is a blind and a double blind experiment in science? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/53aqfg/eli5_what_is_a_blind_and_a_double_blind/ | {
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"Blind: The participants in the study don't know whether or not they're receiving the treatment being tested.\n\nDouble-blind: Neither the participants nor the researchers know which participants received the treatment being tested (during the course of the experiment, in the case of the latter, they obviously find out after the fact who was treated and who received a placebo).",
"Think of it this way: suppose you were testing a new cancer treatment. In order to determine if the treatment is effective, you need to create a \"control,\" a second group that doesn't receive the treatment. In order to ensure that the placebo effect isn't responsible for any improvement, it is good practice to do everything to the control group that you do to the test group: put them in the same room, tell them all the same things, and administer a fake version of whatever treatment you're testing (say, a fake pill with no medicine). \n\nYou can't tell the test subjects which group they're in, because it would affect the results of the test. That's called a blind study. If you tell the subjects, then the placebo effect may be responsible for any benefits or detriments the subjects experience. However, if you were the person administering the pills to these patients, you shouldn't know which pills have the medicine either. Consciously or unconsciously, you may treat the control group differently and compromise the study. Maybe you have more sympathy for the control group that isn't getting the medicine, or maybe you treat them with more disinterest because you want to get back to the non-control group and see if there's improvement. Either way, the experiment is compromised. If the people administering the medicine don't know which pills have medicine and which don't, there's less chance of the study being compromised. That's a double-blind experiment.\n\nRemember, the purpose of an experiment is to alter only a single variable. Controlling people to that level is basically impossible, so it's best if the people administering the treatment don't know which is which."
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8mp995 | what creates different textures on the molecular level? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8mp995/eli5_what_creates_different_textures_on_the/ | {
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"It is all about imperfections. Most every day objects, like clothes, are made from smaller parts, like cotton fibers, and the spaces between them give them a texture. Wool sweaters have a rough texture partly do to these \"macro-imperfactions\". There are also the \"micro-imperfections\", which are like the fibers that make up papers, but those are often to small to sense."
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b2mo7u | how doesn't my cars remote work on other cars? like how isn't there another car with the same frequency if its even based on that? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b2mo7u/eli5_how_doesnt_my_cars_remote_work_on_other_cars/ | {
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"they use the same frequency sure. but there are unique identifiers in the transmitter and receiver. only if the transmitter sends the correct code the receiver is expecting does it unlock. for cheap systems, these are hardcoded so anyone that knows the correct code can unlock the door. thieves could monitor wireless signals capture the code and duplicate your remote. for more expensive systems, the transmitter/receiver can change the codes. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nit's like cell phones, they all operate over the same frequencies, but there are unique sims or esns for each phone. key fobs sorta work like that but are less complex."
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1lrmud | how can i suddenly remember bits of dreams from years ago? is my brain riffing on the spot and confusing it with recalling a vivid dream? | This happened to me today, as it will from time to time. The second part of the question is just pedantic Philip K. Dickish pondering on what constitutes a memory. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1lrmud/eli5how_can_i_suddenly_remember_bits_of_dreams/ | {
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"Goddamit this happens to me all the time, excellent question."
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9jb6ay | why we have to grind our teeth when we are angry or when getting into a fight | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9jb6ay/eli5_why_we_have_to_grind_our_teeth_when_we_are/ | {
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"I'm not an expert here but I don't think we \"have to\" grind teeth when angry or prepping for a fight. \n\nI've been in plenty of fights and been plenty mad at times and never \"ground\" my teeth. Clinched my teeth, sure. You don't want a sloppy jaw in a fight. That is how you get chipped/broken teeth or bite your tongue.\n\nIf your just angry don't grind your teeth anyway. It's a just a habit. One that the older version of yourself will thank you for ridding yourself of. \n\nNo really, train yourself out of grinding your teeth. They don't come back and not even dentist's mothers like dentists.",
"You don't grind your teeth but you should clench your jaw.\n\nGenerally in fights you tighten your muscles because they brace you for impacts better and protect you from damage when they are tightened. \n\nSimilarly with your jaw, if your jaw is clenched you are less likely to break it if someone strikes you there and less likely to break or lose teeth when it's clenched. That said it's small protection from a direct strike to the jaw and still a high likely hood of lost or broken teeth from a strong enough hit, which is why sports require mouth guards. "
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39hvm0 | if it's bad for a phones battery to overcharge, why is the charger not made to stop charging when the phone is fully loaded? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/39hvm0/eli5if_its_bad_for_a_phones_battery_to_overcharge/ | {
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"It does stop.\n\nOnce it reaches 100% it will stop charging. If your battery slowly drains to a certain level (95-99%), it will top up back to 100% and then process repeats itself.",
"Generally, they are (well, not usually the charger itself, but the phone will stop allowing the charger to continue passing current into the battery). It's not foolproof though - if this safety feature happens to fail for whatever reason, there is a chance that the battery could catch on fire, thus posing an obvious safety hazard. It's definitely better for them to tell you the *safe* thing to do, than for them to not say anything and risk an incident.\n\nAnother reason is because, once the device stops charging while on the charger, it continues to use battery power. This obviously causes the battery to slowly drain, and after a certain threshold (95% or so), it will again allow what's called \"trickle charging\". This is actually bad for the battery, due to the way in which rechargeable batteries work, and reduces the lifespan of the battery. It's actually better for rechargeable batteries to get as close to depleted as possible before charging again. They definitely can't let the battery run down low while you're leaving it on the charger though, because you don't want to remove it from the charger and have only a 30% charge, so the trickle charging at 90%+ is necessary to improve the user experience even though it damages the battery.\n\nThat's why it's highly recommended to remove it from the charger once charged, both for safety and for reliability of the battery."
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60sns8 | how to humans perceive a three dimensional soundscape with just two ears? | I understand the time discrepancy between the arrival of a sound wave between the two ears helps, but how can you distinguish between something that is immediately above you as opposed to behind you as the sound should be the same in both ears? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60sns8/eli5_how_to_humans_perceive_a_three_dimensional/ | {
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"It sounds more muffled than \"normal\" when heard from behind, since our ears are aimed more forward for picking up sounds. We aren't hearing a single lone unique sound out of nowhere (and if we are, we can't always accurately determine its location even on the left/right axis - ever try finding out exactly where a squeaky bed is squeaking from?) but we typically are hearing some sound that is at least somewhat familiar to us, and know how that noise sounds when it comes from behind.\n\nPlus the way it echoes in the area and in our bodies is different.",
"I was told numerous times that humans cant really tell up from down when it comes to sound. Therefore when installing surround sound for home theaters height of the speakers position is not important, as oppose position on X,Y plane.",
"Every time you hear a sound, you are hearing that sound twice. Once in the left ear, once in the right ear. After the sounds hit your tympanic membranes, your ear ossicles, and then act in the cochlea a set of neurons take the signals to a place in the brain where the precise timing of the sounds are compared. If the sound reached your left ear first, the sound reaching your right ear is slightly delayed - so your brain knows the sound came from your left (and vice versa). This helps you determine the X axis of sound.\n\nBecause of the shape of the ear is designed to funnel sounds into the ear canal, the sounds is altered slightly depending on the angle at which the sound bounced. This partially helps you determine whether the sound came from behind you or in front of you because the ear is angled partially forward - meaning sounds arriving from a forward position sound more natural because they entered the ear more directly. If they came from a region behind the head, they don't enter the ear as directly. These more minor discrepancies help you determine sounds in the Z plane semi-accurately - but when performing sound localization studies the brain often makes errors when determining sounds directly in front and directly behind an individual.\n\nHuman ears are fixed in place, so this sound discrepancy really only helps in the X and Z axis - not the Y axis. However, some animals, like owls, can actually move their ears. Because they can move their ears in specific directions, they can localize sounds in three dimensional space (especially in the Y axis) much more easily than humans can."
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3xzvs0 | obama and no child left behind | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3xzvs0/eli5_obama_and_no_child_left_behind/ | {
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"No Child Left Behind was a law passed in 2001, signed into law by George W. Bush. In broad strokes it required states to deliver standardized tests to all students in the state as a condition for receiving federal funding.\n\nIt has been replaced with the Every Student Succeeds Act, which Obama signed into law two weeks ago. It's not very different from NCLB, it just gives more authority to the States (and less to the Federal government)"
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2bz9yz | why does a 20x30 rectangle have less area than a 25x25 square, when the perimeter of each is the same? | I can do the math and understand that this is the case, but I simply cannot wrap my head around this. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2bz9yz/eli5_why_does_a_20x30_rectangle_have_less_area/ | {
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" > I can do the math and understand that this is the case, but I simply cannot wrap my head around this.\n\nThe shape with the smallest perimeter-to-area ratio is the circle. It's not possible to cram more space in a smaller perimeter. Thus the closer a shape is to being a circle, the more area it covers for the same perimeter. A square is closer to being a circle than a rectangle is, and thus a square of a given perimeter will cover a larger area than a rectangle of the same perimeter.",
"Imagine a rope with a length of 100cm (which is the perimeter of your shapes).\n\nSet that rope out so that it forms a square with 25cm sides.\n\nNow, take two opposite corners of that square, and pull them apart from each other so you get a diamond shape. Keep pulling until the corners are 50cm apart from each other... As you pull, you gradually reduce the area of the shape, so that eventually it reaches zero. You end up with two lines, each 50cm long, each made up from what used to be two sides of the square, lying next to each other with no area in between them.\n\nYou should hopefully be able to see from this that the area of a shape can vary quite a lot even if the perimeter remains constant.",
"Take a square. It has some amount of area and some perimiter x, yes?\n\nNo 'push in' the corners so that it now forms a cross [like so](_URL_0_).\n\nIt has the same perimeter yet bounds less area, no?\n\n",
"Look at the proportional change in the individual dimensions. Your first dimension goes from 20 to 25. This is a 25% increase. Your second dimension decreases from 30 to 25. This is a 16.7% decrease. While the perimeter is the same the area has changed be cause the scale has changed. "
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9b0bfp | corporate tax cuts | When people say they reinvest this money into themselves, what do they mean? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9b0bfp/eli5_corporate_tax_cuts/ | {
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"Walmart earned 127 million USD gross profit last year. They held on to some of that but also paid each shareholder a dividend of 2.04 USD for each common stock they held. You can see their dividend history [here](_URL_0_). \n\nAmazon has yet to pay out any dividends to their stockholders. They hold on to all of their profits and grow the company. So while stockholders miss out on a quarterly payout, they see the company grow in value (which is reflected in the stock price.)\n\nSo when a company is making a profit, it has 3 primary options:\n\n1) Save (invest) it - To survive an anticipated slow down or maybe they're looking to buy out their competitor.\n\n2) Spend it - Grow the company\n\n3) Distribute it to the owners - Stockholder dividends\n\nGrowing the company for Walmart in the past has meant opening more stores. \n\nGrowing the company for Amazon has meant, selling more than books, building server farms, buying Whole Foods etc. ",
"The general idea is this. A company has a certain amount of cash remaining after paying for its operations (basically all of its expenses). Say that's $1,000,000 profit.\n\nNow of that profit, the company has 2 basic choices. \n\n1. It can hold onto the money and use it for something useful, something to improve the company. Perhaps it would build a new factory or spend the money on R & D. Basically, you are taking today's profits and gambling them so that you can make higher future profits. This is how companies grow.\n\n2. The company can give the money to shareholders. This is done through a dividend or through a share buyback.\n\nLowering the tax rate means the company has more profit leftover to do those 2 things. The Republican idea on tax cuts is that if you tax corporations less, they will choose to reinvest the extra money into additional future growth thereby employing more people and growing the economy. That larger economy will lead to more tax revenues because more people will be employed. The logic seems sound, but in practice, it does not appear to actually work this way.\n\nThe truth is, this doesn't work for 2 reasons. The first is that many companies will choose option 2, just give this extra money to their ownership. The second reason that this doesn't work is slightly more complicated.\n\nThe basic idea behind this economic policy is that if companies only had more money, they would use that money to grow bigger and better. But, for most companies, available money is not what restricts growth. Most companies have easy access to financing, and the stock market to raise money if there's a business case for doing so. What's actually restraining growth is consumers.\n\nCustomers drive economic growth, not available financing. Corporate tax cuts don't make more customers and therefore don't increase demand. So corporations won't use that money to grow their companies because it's the availability of customers that's actually restricting their growth.\n\nYou can likely see my political bias showing. I'll try to make a more republican argument. The fact is that if corporations get to keep more of their own profits it doesn't matter if they chose option 1 or option 2. If they choose option 1, the investment won't drive growth but it will allow the company to lower prices or to take a risk on new innovation, something the bankers are unlikely to loan money to do. In addition dividends and share buybacks actually, put money into consumers hands since around half of all Americans have money invested in the market.\n\nEven though most of this money goes to the very uber-wealthy, those people are actually the people that drive economic growth in this day and age. Some of the most wealthy people in the country are actually innovators rather than just investors and those people getting a higher return on that innovation will drive future smart people to choose this kind of career rather than another kind. \n\nNow I'll do another round of democratic counter-argument. There's already a large income gap in this country. Allowing the 1% to keep more of their returns will only make this problem worse. While 50% of Americans are somehow invested in the market, the vast majority of their income is not earned through investments but rather through wages. A corporate tax cut is really nothing more than a gift to the investor class and does little to nothing to help working people.\n\nBeing uber-wealthy is already so much better than not bring uber-wealthy that we don't need any extra incentives to start to business or be an innovator, everyone that can do that already is. It's everyone else that we need to make life better for. In addition, there are many people stuck in poverty who never get the chance to take a risk and start a business because they are struggling to put food on the table. We should use this money to help the poor so that we can take advantage of all of that lost talent and actually grow the customer base of the economy, more disposable income for customers means more business for American companies and that will cause economic growth, not tax cuts."
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7kf5xf | if a big rig is considered a "semi" what is a full truck? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7kf5xf/eli5_if_a_big_rig_is_considered_a_semi_what_is_a/ | {
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"The word is an abbreviation for [semi-trailer truck.](_URL_0_)\n\nIt's not half a truck. Rather, the trailer is only half behind the tractor -- and half on top of it."
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eamds6 | how did we humans learn how to communicate with each other? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/eamds6/eli5_how_did_we_humans_learn_how_to_communicate/ | {
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"At the earliest level, we only knew how to grunt and screech, like any other ape. But we had the intelligence to try and communicate, and so when we needed something from someone, we developed specific grunts and screeches for specific things.\n\nPeople who were better at communicating were better at surviving, and so we bred ourselves to have wider ranges of sounds we could make and better control over our mouth, throat, and tongue.\n\nEventually, as enough people in a village or society got used to a specific sound referring to a specific thing, that sound became the name of that thing.\n\nOver time, we began to assign sounds to non-physical things, actions, and qualities, leading up to a true spoken language.",
"Point to an object. Make a sound, that is now the sound for that object. Then add in thousands of years of revisions and regions to get the languages we have today."
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17k1av | how has srs not been banned for sub invasion and deliberate downvoting? | Just a thought that pooped into my head.
Edit: I meant popped into my head | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/17k1av/how_has_srs_not_been_banned_for_sub_invasion_and/ | {
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"Because SRS does not officially support those things. It wouldn't be fair to ban a subreddit because of something it explicitly tells members not to do.",
" > Just a thought that pooped into my head.\n\nWas it a very shitty thought that \"pooped\" into your head, or perhaps you meant \"popped\"?",
"It'd probably set a precedent that would lead to most meta subs (eg. /r/bestof, /r/SubredditDrama, /r/worstof, & c.) being banned. Voting/commenting in linked subs isn't something unique to SRS, it happens in any sub that centres around linking to other reddit threads, even though they all officially decry it.",
"Back in high school, people would be nice to me because I couldn't understand if they were either being nice to me, or they secretly were making fun of me. They knew it annoyed the hell out of me because I have this inability to accept that some people were/are actually nice people.\n\nIts something like that.",
"Because it sets a bad precedent. However, the issues of downvote brigades can be mitigated through the use of NP-Reddit (Non-Participation), so when links are posted, users can only read content, not reply or vote.\n\nLinks typically look like this _URL_0_ \n\nHowever, I think 'NP' reddit is something that needs to be set up by each individual subreddit.",
"What is SRS?",
"Because they are officially against it, even though it can never be enforced. Also is that even against the rules? "
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1r1lun | what kind of circulatory system do spiders have? | It's almost 2am and I suddenly have a pressing need to know the answer to this. I tried googling it but my tired brain just got more confused. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1r1lun/eli5_what_kind_of_circulatory_system_do_spiders/ | {
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"It's called an \"open circulatory system.\"\n\nIt basically means that all the goop in them sloshes around freely inside of them. They're so small that a single heart valve runs from one end to the other, and the blood moves through the body cavity.\n\n > The spider's blood, called hemolymph, circulates oxygen, nutrients and hormones to the different organs in the body. The spider's simple heart -- a tube surrounded by a muscle, with a one-way valve on each end -- pumps blood into the body cavity, all around the spider's organs. Organs get oxygen because they're soaking in blood.\n\n_URL_0_"
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al0iyg | what is 99.9% "empty space" in an atom, exactly? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/al0iyg/eli5_what_is_999_empty_space_in_an_atom_exactly/ | {
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" > I read that an atom consists of 99.9% empty space (and the nucleus inside, too) - so what exactly is there? \n\nNothing. It's empty. If something was there, it wouldn't be called \"empty.\"",
"It's nothing, literally nothing. Theres a nucleus, which is very small and dense and consists of stuff (protons and neutrons), and then there are electrons which are incredibly small compared to the nucleus and orbit very far away from it. There's space in between it, in the same way the solar system is mostly empty space with a star and a few planets and an asteroid belt.\n\nThe metaphor isn't perfect and technically electrons behave more like a shell than orbiting objects but for eli5 reasons its close enough. In any case, there's nothing going on in that space except nuclear forces keeping those particles in orbit the same way gravity does with orbiting bodies.",
"There are forces in that space. It's inside an atom, so there isn't room for anything else.",
"Fields. \n\nIs the field around a magnet \"empty\" or solid? It's kinda both right? It seems empty, but it's not exactly **empty**. \n\nSure, light can pass through a magnetic field. So that is a point in favor of \"empty\". But another magnet would get repelled, so we can tell *something* is there that we can say distinguishes it from other **emptier** space. \n\nLook close enough, and these fields are actually the only way we know any solid matter exists at all. So I would say that it's not exactly \"empty\". "
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2vrk7f | what causes an spinning image to look like it is rotating one direction, stop, then appear to rotate the other direction? | This [video](_URL_0_) of a tire shows the effect at 2:00.
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2vrk7f/eli5_what_causes_an_spinning_image_to_look_like/ | {
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"This is called the [wagon wheel effect](_URL_0_). You perceive this because of the interaction between the timing of the spokes on the wheel, and the timing of the frames of the video. You can also see this with your eyes directly if the light source has a lot of flicker (as is the case with certain street lights). It appears to go backwards because you're actually receiving a fast sequence of separate images, and if the timing is just right, the next spoke will have moved into a position just behind where the previous spoke was in the preceding image.",
"Because for that moment where it stops, the speed of the tire matches the frequency that the camera takes pictures.\n\nLet's say that the camera records at 60 FPS. This means it takes a single picture every 1/60 seconds. So if the tire manages to do exactly a full loop in that time, then the picture taken will always see the tire in the same position.\n\nThe \"rotating\" is caused by the two being just slightly out of sync. If the wheel is slower, then with each loop it will fall ever so slightly behind and it will appear to rotate backwards slowly. If it is faster, then it will similarly rotate forward. ",
"The wheel is turning faster than the camera can capture video. If you were to mark a specific point on the wheel and track it's movement, you would see that the wheel makes almost an entire rotation, but not quite a full one before the camera can capture another frame. This means that by the next time the camera picks up a frame, the marked area is actually slightly behind where it was last frame, creating the illusion that it's moving backwards. It's called the wagon wheel effect if you want to read more about it. ",
"Let's say the frame rate of the camera is 24 fps, which means there's a new frame roughly every 0.04 seconds. When the tire spins slightly less than an integer number of rotations in 0.04 seconds, then it looks like it's spinning backwards. If you speed up, and the tire spins exactly 1, 2, 3.... or N amount of full rotations, then it looks like it's not moving. Drive a little faster and the tire spins 1.1,2.1,3.1.... rotations per 0.04 seconds and it looks like it's moving forward again.",
"Just a heads up, everyone, OP's video is way too loud. Don't wear headphones.",
"This is an effect called [aliasing](_URL_0_) and is an artifact of the video camera. It samples at a specific rate (e.g., 60 Hz). If the wheel is moving at that same rate it looks like it's not moving at all, because it makes one full rotation each time and is right in the same place every frame. If it's moving 59 Hz, it's almost making a full rotation but is a little behind each frame, making it look like it goes backwards (it *aliases* to -1 Hz); if it's at 61 Hz, it looks like it's going forward slowly (it aliases to 1 Hz)."
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2503q5 | without sequestering, how do courts ensure that the jury has not had any outside influence about the case? | Like in a case that might be big in the state, but not nationwide, how does the court keep the jury from looking at the news or learning about the case outside the courts? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2503q5/eli5_without_sequestering_how_do_courts_ensure/ | {
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"They use sequestering. Sorry if it sounds like a smart-ass answer, but the fact is that if they want to remove outside influence, that's how they do it. It's like asking, \"How do cops catch criminals without arresting them?\" Well, they don't, they arrest them."
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ek94ar | how do planes not become covered in ice when flying in -70f temperatures? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ek94ar/eli5_how_do_planes_not_become_covered_in_ice_when/ | {
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"Ice requires two things to form. It needs to be cold, which we have, and there needs to be visible moisture. Generally speaking at high altitudes there is very little moisture, and what moisture there is, is ice crystals which are difficult to stick onto an aircraft. Icing generally occurs at lower altitudes and is countered by anti-icing systems.",
"Planes try to avoid flying into areas that contain high amounts of moisture like clouds. When that isn't possible there are de-icing systems on the plane that prevent the buildup of ice around critical areas like the engine inlets and leading edges of wings and probes. They work by heating up or by passing bleed air from the engines underneath the surface or an electric heater. This is the reason why the leading edges of engine intakes on most planes aren't painted.",
"Planes DO accumulate ice. Not sure about -70F (at that temperature, air is pretty dry and may not have enough moisture). But at temperatures ranging from say, 20 to -20 deg F, a plane can definitely accumulate ice - on the wings, tail, and so on. This is why all commercially operated airplanes that are going to be flying in known icing conditions (at the right moisture and temperature combination for ice) are treated to prevent ice accumulation. There are several types of anti-ice and de-ice systems to prevent the airplane from becoming covered in ice, including spraying for the wing with chemicals.",
"At typical cruise levels it's too cold (-35° - > -60°C) and dry for it to stick, when in high level cloud - it's super cooled ice droplets. \nEngine inlets are another story",
"Besides the anti icing equipment on board it can also be worth mentioning that the hull of the aircraft becomes a lot warmer than the actual true outside temperature while cruising at high speeds due to thermodynamics, google \"Total air temperature\" or \"TAT\".",
"[_URL_1_](_URL_0_)\n\nIce on the wings is not a massive issue at high altitudes compared to lower altitudes as other answers have explained.\n\nHowever, the cold can have other effects, like causing small amounts of water in the fuel to freeze, which need to be mitigated (see BA38)",
"One thing that can cause problems is ice forming in the fuel. \n\n[British Airways Flight 38](_URL_0_)",
"Concorde flew so fast that friction heated up the outside skin high enough to impact the airframe structure so definitely no ice forming in normal operation. 😎\n\n_URL_0_"
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659cxh | why are some smells harder to wash out of your skin than others? e.g.; perfume vs. bleach | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/659cxh/eli5_why_are_some_smells_harder_to_wash_out_of/ | {
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"Some asorb in. Perfume is menthol based so evaporates. Where as bleach is acid based and will burn in to your pores"
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a6em81 | why do rooms look darker after spending time in the sun? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/a6em81/eli5_why_do_rooms_look_darker_after_spending_time/ | {
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"Your pupils constrict in the presence of bright light. After spending time outside, your pupils are constricted, so when you enter a darker room, less light is entering your eyes. Thus the room looks darker till your pupils adjust and widens up.",
"Your eyes need time to adjust to the different lighting.\n\nWhen you're in the sun you're pupils will contract because there's an abundance of light. When you enter a dark room, your pupils dilate, looking for more light."
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lv4qp | what is the acta and what will change in the eu if it's passed? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/lv4qp/eli5_what_is_the_acta_and_what_will_change_in_the/ | {
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"[The EFF has written this](_URL_0_), which is a little above 5 year old level, and is a good, short explanation which I think is a good place to start.",
"It makes the people who provide you your internet service (ISP) responsible for your actions -- similar to how your parents are responsible for any underage drinking that goes down in their house.\n\nOn one hand, it creates a clear chain of ownership for the actions of individuals -- essentially removing the middle man in the equation by making the middle man responsible for monitoring what his customers are doing.\n\nIn actuality though, it creates someone who cannot in any way be responsible for its users actions. It's about the equivalent to when you'll have your 6th birthday party at a playground, and the government says \"It's now illegal for children to yell in a park, please enforce this or you will be arrested\". They can't realistically enforce it in a way that would REALLY work, because kids will be kids and now the parents will pay for something they don't have control over. So likely, there will be ridiculous rules and thorough monitoring of everyone (which costs money, which gets passed to customer) for enforce this.\n\nForgetting the usual piracy argument, there are a lot of services which could be considered copyright infringement, and as an ISP they will probably 'outlaw' to avoid getting themselves in trouble. Things like youtube videos of your kid singing famous songs, let's play videos of video games, or your prom video where you use a popular song as the background music. All this falls into 'the grey zone' of possible infringement.\n\nEssentially, you'll have a super overbearing mother over your shoulder at your first day of school making sure you are aware of anything and everything that may or may not get you in trouble. And no one wants that extreme censorship, nor that overbearing monkey on your shoulder -- it's all very 1984-ish for every little return. You'll read about that in highschool.\n\nYour fat cats (rather than contacting your ISP) want to skip a step and have your ISP's police you, and it will be in the ISP's best interest (and no fault of their own) to take it to the extreme to protect their own backs.",
"[The EFF has written this](_URL_0_), which is a little above 5 year old level, and is a good, short explanation which I think is a good place to start.",
"It makes the people who provide you your internet service (ISP) responsible for your actions -- similar to how your parents are responsible for any underage drinking that goes down in their house.\n\nOn one hand, it creates a clear chain of ownership for the actions of individuals -- essentially removing the middle man in the equation by making the middle man responsible for monitoring what his customers are doing.\n\nIn actuality though, it creates someone who cannot in any way be responsible for its users actions. It's about the equivalent to when you'll have your 6th birthday party at a playground, and the government says \"It's now illegal for children to yell in a park, please enforce this or you will be arrested\". They can't realistically enforce it in a way that would REALLY work, because kids will be kids and now the parents will pay for something they don't have control over. So likely, there will be ridiculous rules and thorough monitoring of everyone (which costs money, which gets passed to customer) for enforce this.\n\nForgetting the usual piracy argument, there are a lot of services which could be considered copyright infringement, and as an ISP they will probably 'outlaw' to avoid getting themselves in trouble. Things like youtube videos of your kid singing famous songs, let's play videos of video games, or your prom video where you use a popular song as the background music. All this falls into 'the grey zone' of possible infringement.\n\nEssentially, you'll have a super overbearing mother over your shoulder at your first day of school making sure you are aware of anything and everything that may or may not get you in trouble. And no one wants that extreme censorship, nor that overbearing monkey on your shoulder -- it's all very 1984-ish for every little return. You'll read about that in highschool.\n\nYour fat cats (rather than contacting your ISP) want to skip a step and have your ISP's police you, and it will be in the ISP's best interest (and no fault of their own) to take it to the extreme to protect their own backs."
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w22mz | what's stopping us from building a real-life lightsaber? | Title. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/w22mz/eli5_whats_stopping_us_from_building_a_reallife/ | {
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"[Searched](_URL_2_)\n\nRelevant [discussion](_URL_0_)\n\nOriginal question by [PhoneySoprano](_URL_3_)\n\n > Theoretically, are they or would they ever be possible?\n\nRelevant comment courtesy [deains](_URL_1_)\n\n > Overall, to make something that can do everything a lightsaber can do -- cut through solid metal, reflects off other lightsabers, reflect laser \"bullets\", have boundaries made purely out of light, etc. -- would be impossible.\n\n > And even if it wasn't, the practicalities of such a weapon would be completely absurd. There's simply no way a lightsaber could be considered a useful weapon outside of a Hollywood setting. As the old saying goes, never bring a sword to a gun fight.",
"because the force is not strong with this universe.",
"The main issue is getting the laser to stop. We have lasers, and we can get them very very hot. But you cant just stop it. Think of how you would make a flashlight only shine a few inches? It is the same issue. "
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390z83 | if it takes ~1000 gallons of water to produce a pound of beef, why is beef so cheap? | The NYT has this interesting page, which claims a pound of beef requires 786 gallons of water to produce. A Stanford water conservation site claims 1800 gallons.
_URL_0_
_URL_1_
My cheapest tier of water costs $3.49/'unit', which is $4.66 for 1000 gallons of water. This suggests that _just the water cost_ of a pound of beef should be close to $5. I buy [ground] beef at Costco $3 per pound. What gives?
edit:
I have synthesized what I thought were some of the best points made (thanks all!)
* This number represents primarily untreated water e.g. rainwater and water pumped directly from aquifers by farmers.
* In the US, there are indirect subsidies to the price of beef, as components of their feed are subsidized (e.g. corn).
* Farmers are free to raise their cattle in places where water is cheap
* Obviously $3 ground beef is the least profitable beef obtained from a cow – they are getting what they can for that cut.
* It seems clear that, in the context of the linked articles, these figures are misleading; the authors are likely not expecting the reader to call to mind a slurry of rainwater, runoff and treated water. In the case of the NYT article, the leading line is that the average American "consumes" this water. Obviously there is very little to no opportunity cost to farmers benefitting from rainwater, and it is not fair to say that by eating beef your are "consuming" the cited amount of water.
edit2: Tears of joy are sliding down my gilded cheeks. I would like to thank my spouse preemptively, for not chiding me for reading these comments all day, my parents, for spawning me, and /u/LizardPoisonsSpock for providing that sweet, sweet gold.
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/390z83/eli5if_it_takes_1000_gallons_of_water_to_produce/ | {
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" > This suggests that just the water cost of a pound of beef should be close to $5. I buy beef at Costco $3 per pound.\n\nWater aside, I think you're missing the fact that different cuts/varieties of beef have different prices, and Costco is a warehouse store with almost 700 locations across the US -- things are cheaper at Costco because you're buying more, period. But there's still a difference in price between a 1 lb. porterhouse steak, 1 lb. of Wagyu rib roast, and 1 lb. of ground beef.",
"Because most of the water used in growing the beef falls from the sky for effectively free. \n\nYour water is expensive because it's purified and piped directly to your home, and the rancher or farmer has no ability to sell his free rain water to you. ",
"A good bit of it is that most ranches don't operate on city water. They get their water from wells, which cost money up front but you don't have to pay for the actual water.\n\nSo they don't have to pay \"per unit\" of water, just the up front cost of the well and whatever upkeep it needs.",
"You aren't paying agriculture prices for water, which are closer to $1 for every 1500 gallons. Cows aren't nearly as picky about their water as most humans are, and agriculture water is highly subsidized in many places.",
"A combination of factors:\n- meat subsidies\n- cheap availability of land\n- mispricing of water generally in areas like California - recognizing that most farms get water from wells on their own land - they still draw water from a common water table available to everyone and the lack of a regulatory framework in drought ridden areas has led to this mispricing\n- mispricing of other utilities like transportation (roads), and electricity\n\nBefore people jump on this, let me explain. There are a lot of good reasons to keep farms in the country (self-reliance, etc.) so making a conscious decision and keeping core pricing of water / electricity / roads low so the industry flourishes makes all the sense in the world. But doing it on a state by state basis, where a drought state like California supports a massive amount of subsidized farming is less than ideal. Not effectively managing the water table in that state due to lack of a framework is poor management and detrimental in the long run. ",
"The real question is what the heck kind of beef are you buying for 3 dollars a pound??",
"Meat manufacturing uses water in many different ways: directly to the cattle, growing feed for the cattle, and cleaning in the processing facilities. The exact amount of gallons/lb is difficult to narrow down because of all the factors involved, but most of the water is used in the growing of feed for cattle. Corn and soybeans are major crops used as cheap feed for cattle production in the US because of government subsidies for the farmers growing them. These subsidies make it cheaper to sell to large scale meat manufacturing facilities, ultimately making it cheaper for meat to be produced and thus carrying the benefit of low cost production to the consumer. If you live in the US and pay taxes, chances are you've already paid for a good portion of that pound of beef, and the price at the super market is just paying the rest. ",
"Lots of beef is raised in areas where there isn't enough water to raise crops economically. Since there isn't enough water, it doesn't make economical sense to try and raise crops. But you can put cows out on that same land and they will do fine. It takes a lot of land, but this kind of land isn't all that expensive and most places have agricultural exceptions for property taxes. The water costs are mostly free, as it comes from the sky. There aren't a lot of ranchers who buy water to grow grass. As it stands, beef prices are off the charts right now because drought of 2011 caused them to sell off most of their broodstock and they are still trying to build their herds back up to previous production levels. ",
"It's not 1000 gallons directly. Most of the water is used to grow the feed (wheat/soy/etc). The cow eat the feed.",
"Farmers aren't charged for irrigation water the way you are charged for potable treated drinking water. (It's still an issue in drought states because it's making all fresh water more scarce).\n\nMeat animals and the feed they eat are heavily subsidized in the US [ via the Farm Bill and state/local subsidies.]( _URL_0_) In other words taxpayers help to keep the cost of beef artificially cheap. \n\nAlso be aware that vast amounts of public lands aren't accessible to the public and aren't allowed to have a natural ecosystem because of grazing leases. Public resources give [\"welfare ranchers\"]( _URL_1_) dirt cheap land to feed their cattle. On top of that, tax money is used to fund extermination of natural wildlife that ranchers feel competes with their cattle water or food. For example the Bureau of land management has spent a fortune removing most of the horses from public lands and now has about 30,000 in holding pens. ",
"Because 60% of statistics are made up on the spot and the remaining 40% are computed by scientists or food 'journalists', many of whom have a bias due to either their worldview or narrow field of study. Basically, the publications in which you find these numbers have an axe to grind and the fact is, you can't prove them right or wrong because in many cases they're just pulling the numbers from disparate sources, i.e. they will combine a study saying it takes x amount of water to grow a pound of corn, and it takes x pounds of corn to raise a pound of beef, plus the water the cow drinks, plus the water in the processing plant wash the carcass, etc. \nThe vast majority is in the crop's water use, which over most of the united states is natural rainfall (free). Also, they are not taking into account the water use of other kinds of beef, the numbers you see are a 'worst case scenario' where the cow receives all of it's nutrition from irrigated crops rather than some portion of perennial forages. It's also a misnomer to assume all of this water is 'used' because much of it becomes vapor over the Midwest or is absorbed as manure into a landscape that can recycle it for benefit, not like a factory, toilet, or carwash where the water is likely unusable or is discharged into a hardscape with no utility to the environment. ",
"I thought this response from Josh Velson, on Quora, was worth quoting, particularly his comment that for each type of water, it is crucial to consider the [value of] alternative uses. Damn I love the interwebs.\n\n************************************************\nAmong other things, those estimates account for the water used to grow the crops (much of which is rain) and water used for irrigation (much of which is given at little to no cost from natural runoff or taken from groundwater aquifers at low cost - under a 50 cents per metric ton). Only a small amount of that - roughly 20 gallons (according to this widely cited website: The Hidden Water We Use - National Geographic) - is actually used for drinking and processing. \n\nWhat gives is that most of that water just doesn't cost anything, much of it because it literally falls from the sky. Most of the Great Plains farmland used to produce feed grains is rainfed. Embedded water estimates are useful, but it is still more useful to be considering the alternative use of that water. If the alternative use is replenishing unsustainable withdrawals from fossil aquifers, then that's a good thing (and in truth that's most of the result of marginal decreases in water use from meat consumption). However, there is a point at which much of that water will simply go down the Mississippi, so it's important to realize that this isn't just sitting in a big reservoir somewhere that's being depleted. There are natural environmental inflows of water as well as withdrawals.\n************************************************\n",
"A lot of people are failing to mention government subsidies given to farmers for water used in agriculture. These government subsidies ensure that farmers are able to obtain water for very little to no cost. Thus driving down the price of beef and other crops and meats.",
"I've come to find majority of most organizations outside of the those that are experiencing this drought, don't know jack shit about how the water is actually used.\n\n",
"1. most of the water are not 'chargeable' (e.g. rain, etc)\n2. subsidy for many parts of beef production line (e.g. water, grains)",
"Not an answer with respect to water, but there are a lot of subsides which decrease the price of meat. For whatever reason, governments tend to set-up large incentives to produce meat.\n\n_URL_0_\n\nThe article above gives some statistics, as well as some judgement, but I'd look at it from a non-judgemental point of view. Without the subsidies and other incentive programs, the cost of meat would be much higher, and people would consume a lot less meat.\n\nSome scientists are advocating farming insects as they are lower cost and more nutritious. I would suspect that in the absence of subsidies, the profitability of insect farming would increase.\n\n_URL_1_\n\nTLDR: Meat would be a lot more expensive if it wasn't for subsidies and other programs.",
"well. if christy clark, the premier of British Columbia, Canada, can sell Nestle water at $2.85 per million litres, a cow doesn't cost a thing.\n\ni'd rather have the water go to the cow, quite frankly.",
"So we're still paying over $5 per pound, it's just partially coming out of our taxes?",
"A lot of places, including the Upper Midwest where we raise a lot of cows, you can get water for basically free by pumping it out of the ground. It's not like farmers are paying market rates to a city water treatment plant. ",
"Government subsidies. The us gov pumps tons of money into corn production, cows eat corn. When you have really cheap feed that can be sold under production cost, the cost to get an animal to market starts to drop. \n\nWhen you look at the additional costs, like fuel involved in pumping the water, harvesting the corn, processing the corn, shipping the corn, transporting the animals, butchering the animals then getting it to farms, the cost of a lb of beef would be much higher.\n\nWe all know that red meat isn't the best for us. Wouldn't it be in our best interest to cut beef subsidies and let the whole supply demand thing work out for $45/lb steak, which would drive our beef consumption down and increase our intake of more sustainable protein sources like chicken and other small animals.\n\nThe effects of cattle on the environment are horrible. CO, methane and destruction of pasture land. \n\nSmall animals are much more efficient to raise, we need to eat more chicken, rabbit, and eggs.",
"I'm gonna be that guy and say relative to the protein content, beef is not that cheap.\nThe amount of water to produce the same amount of protein in let's say, black eyed peas; is dramatically less. You can also buy beans for dirt cheap. \n",
"In British Columbia, Nestle pays $2.25 (Canadian) per million litres at their bottling plant near Hope.",
"It takes thousands of gallons of water a year to produce all this urine that I am making and that's free. lol",
"When the water is used, it doesn't disappear into a magic void.\n\nIt comes back, eventually. \n\nIt make take X gallons to make something, but unlike something like fuel, the water comes back. It may however be moved somewhere else and then have to be brought back in.",
"Basically this is the new talking point for the global warming alarmists and the peta lobby. I would take these\"facts\" with a grain of salt. ",
"The figures are not at all misleading. The water most definitely *is* \"consumed\", and the irrigation water are the same bodies of water as sourced for drinking (e.g. aquifers, rivers). It directly contributes to the water shortage. Your drinking water comes from precipitation as well.",
"My family had a cattle ranch for beef, we also have land that we lease for grazing. On the ranch there are ponds that they drink out of. We also grow alf-Alfa for feed. It's not until they are nearing slaughter that they are sold to a feed lot where they are fattened up on things like corn, which is often irrigated. How much irrigation depends on rain fall. \n\nThe amount of fresh water needed to produce beef is much lower than the headline indicates. ",
"I worked in Material Handling at a beef packing plant for two months. My job was loading boxes of product into trailers, 8 hours a day. Ground beef is by far the most common product coming off the line. It's also the cheapest one to make; as the carcass moves down the line, everybody has a specific cut to take off, and that's all they do all day long, slice the same cut of meat. Once every cut has been removed, the ground beef is just the scraps that are still attached to the bone. There's a couple of guys who move 4 ft tall boxes of meat scraps to a giant meat grinder via forklift, it gets dumped in the machine with the ammonia and out come perfect logs of ground beef.",
"Have you seen how much Nestea gets charge for water in Canada? Pittance. Literally millions upon millions of gallons, almost free. Water is dirt cheap it seems. ",
"Too lazy to search if this had been posted. \n\nSome cuts of beef are considered less desirable or may be larger pieces. Other cuts are smaller and highly sought after.\n\nGenerally speaking beef is cheap, but some of these cuts are very expensive and balances out the cost of cheaper cuts. \n\nNot sure what this adds to the discussion, I just figured I'd point it out. ",
"Those numbers are based on quantity of grass eaten, and the calculated amount of water needed to grow that grass.\n\nIf that water is being provided without treatment or irrigation (AKA rain), then that entire cost is nonexistent. There's not really any cost for that grass there - you just need a lot of land and some maintenance facilities.",
"water is reusable, beef not so much unless you count crapping it out and the eventual return on growing stuff with the decomposed crap. \n",
"the truth is two fold - first it is a bit disingenuous to say that one pound of beef requires 1000 gallons of water - this is taking into effect the grass that the cow eats as well as water that is not used up but is actually passed along as part of a cycle - the water is not gone. second, beef is expensive compared to nearly any other category of food.\n",
"You call ten bucks a pound for ground beef cheap? ",
"In response to your edit, the point most people try to make when making this claim is that for every 1 pound of meat we could have made many more pounds of vegetables/grains/ legumes/etc with that same amount of water, regardless or where the water came from.\n\nThe top comment in this thread is overly simplistic and it's sad that it has so many more upvotes than any other comment. Meat is still, by far, a very inefficient form of food (not to mention many other externalities like animal welfare and pollution). ",
" > Obviously there is very little to no opportunity cost to farmers benefitting from rainwater, \n\nOf course there is. That water is going to produce plant biomass. If that rain water is used to grow alfalfa or feed corn, it's not used to grow peppers or wheat or cotton or okra. It's the very definition of an opportunity cost - the water is there, and must be spent (mostly, ignoring changes in storage), but can only be spent once. ",
"ELI5: What rubric is used to determine water consumption?\n\n* How much water does a 1m^2 plot of grass consume in the same amount of time as the cow? \n* How much water does a 1m^2 plot of dirt consume? \n* How much water does a 1m^2 plot of water consume?\n* Is not a cow just a more efficient, mobile pond that has decreased evaporation and a wider area of irrigation? There is an entropic effect, sure, but energy is introduced into the system by photosynthesis- is not water merely a conduit? Water is removed from the system 1) when the cow is removed and 2) from evaporation.\n* Given that unused land will either behave as a plot of dirt, grass, or water, and not as a plastic sheet which prevents absorption and just moves water downhill, is the discussion about water input in these farms really relevant?",
"This wasn't a bad ELI5, you actually pre-empted all the points I was about to make with your summary of what's here.\n\nI feel like 1000 people just realized that what they pay on a sticker at a supermarket has no bearing on the true cost of the product to them in real terms.\n\n",
"The cows aren't stupid enough to drink expensive bottled water, knowing that the water straight from their tap is more than adequate and much more environmentally friendly. \n\n\ntyl; Cows are smart.",
"It's sort of a silly calculation to make. I personally have probably required almost 2 million gallons in my lifetime, based on the often referenced 100 gallons per day per US citizen. Does that mean the earth has 2 million fewer gallons of water because I have lived? No, of course not. Same for the cow. They drink from ponds, streams, and water troughs. They don't drink from municipal water supplies. They piss it out, sweat it out, and breathe it out. It evaporates and joins the water cycle again. No harm done.",
"Because they are including feed in the balance they are doing what the activists call telling the whole story so as to garner support. What they are actually doing is misrepresenting things to create sensation and sell more news advertising space. Notice the Millennial friendly info-graphic presentation, with everything stated as absolutes? That is to draw in the younger generation with a specific bias. \n\nIf they misrepresent the amount of water it takes to actually produce these items it has more effect. They don't want to take the actual amount of water used that is competing with human consumption. That would be much lower, and not as sensational. The use of statistics has been around for quite a while. Even to the Twain era: \"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.\"\n\n",
"Aside from the points you raise, and the fact that most farms use groundwater or surface water over municipal water, my question when I hear these statistics is usually something like:\n\n\"How many of those gallons are unique?\" and \"How do those gallons break down?\"\n\nThat is to say, how many would that same area of land use if it were not being used for cows. If a rancher grazes 50 cows on 75 acres, and needs 1000/gallons per cow over the cow's lifetime...\n\nHow many of those gallons would the forage use if the cows were absent and the pasture left fallow?\n\nHow many of these gallons are for washing the cows or equipment? If the rinse water drains into the pasture, or under it, the water is used twice. Once to wash the things being washed, and again as it's absorbed by the plants.\n\nMore times if you consider that the plants would use moisture excreted by the cows, assuming they are well hydrated.\n\nIf the cows pasture at least part of the time, some of the water may be available from a natural pond or stream, or diverted from a natural source to a water tank.\n\nIf the cows are not pastured, the same sort of questions could be asked of the fields where the feed was grown. \n\nThe same poundage of chickens, or pigs could be asked.\n\nI think the more important question is how much of the water is * removed * from the system by the raising of cattle. Raising 100 head of cattle in an industrial farm (the sort with pens only) is going to use water very differently from a rancher who raises 100 head of cattle a few miles away, but lets them range on 200 acres with a spring in it.\n\nThis in turn will be different from a ranch outside of Portland, OR, where a farmer builds a tiny dam to back up water that falls regularly on his ranch, forming a pond that eventually overflows into the watershed, but creates a small pond the cows can access before it does so.\n\nThe Nevada industrial farm is almost certainly operating in a water deficit and having to truck/pipe in extra water to augment their groundwater, at least sometimes. The Nevada ranch is probably water neutral if the spring is perrenial and produces even in droughts. The Oregon ranch is also water neutral, operating in an area with far more water than the ranch could ever hope to use. To imply all three are the same in terms of 'water responsibility' is ridiculous on the part of whoever made the statistics.\n\nI'd rather see the statistic designing people produce more telling metrics than simply taking numbers and making them sound good/evil when there are several very important factors they've simply ignored.\n\nEdit: since the article is about the California drought, at least in part, we could substitute California for Nevada, but the principles are the same regardless of geography.",
"As someone who lives where we don't have to pay for water:\n\nPaying money for water? What is this, the shittier parts of the USSR?",
"Well, where I'm from, we sell water to commercial outfits, for about $3 per million litres. So that would reduce the cost significantly... plus, y'know, rain.",
"Several replies miss the main reason why beef is so inexpensive. The water for raising beef cattle and their feed (corn, grains, etc) is heavily subsidized by various state & federal programs. I haven't worked out the exact #'s, but wouldn't be surprised if the cattle farmers pay 1/1000 what individuals pay. The cattle also get graze on public land for almost free.\n\nGiven these two things, it's no surprise that the cost of beef is low.\n",
"Where I live, water falls from the sky as rain (its free). The grass grows and the cows eat the grass. If there is a drought, the farmers/ranchers sell off their cattle if there is not enough rain to support the cattle. When the rain comes back, the farmers/ranchers increase the herds again.",
"Water costs different amounts in different places. I know one rancher that pays $5/acre-foot of water on some of his land, and $120/acre-foot on other parts of his land (they're not contiguous). One acre-foot is 325,851 gallons, according to Google. His water rights go back more than 50 years on some of the land.\n",
"two of my aunts, one uncle, a neighbor, and until he died, my grandfather were professional beef farmers. They had no other jobs- they raised cattle and contracted those cattle to other contractors, slaughterhouses, or in one very very fortunate case, directly to the restaurant chain itself.\n\nThe original article isn't horribly inaccurate in listing what it takes to raise a single food-cow. But, to the right farmer (or at least one that begins in an advantageous position) it doesn't cost much to raise a cow...and the cost gets lower with each head you take on. \n\nSince this article deals mostly with water, I'll start there. All of the aforementioned family members are fortunate in that they own land with river or lake frontage. The cows don't cross the river. In all the time I've been alive (30+ years) only one has even tried. It died, and my grandpa was pissed because it was a write-off, but that's just one walking hamburger in 30+ years. So the cows mostly just hang out, eat grass, fuck eachother, have calves, drink from the river, and then get slaughtered and sold.\n\nThe start-up costs were immense, but like the heavy boulder, the farm is on a roll and doesn't show many signs of stopping now. I suppose some sociopath could come dump bleach or Ebola or something in the river on a hot summer day, but beyond that...my family looks to have a pretty solid (admittedly, not six-figure) income for the foreseeable future.",
"Beef is cheap???? Where do you live?",
"I don't know how true, untrue, or misleading these statistics are. But I have a better question; why does it matter? And since when did we start judging the worth of human activities by how efficiently and or minimally they allow us to live? How much water does it take to produce the average Hollywood movie, which produces no food? Are we guilty of over-consumption for enjoying non-essential human activities? Is every human endeavor for which necessities are consumed in order to produce art, music, literature, architecture, any convenience, fancy or pleasure a waste? If so, then where the hell do we think we're going with this whole civilization thing?",
"I'm thinking it comes from the rain, and they piss it out so it goes back into the oceans.\n\nBesides it's just a scare tactic to make you guilty eating the beefs.",
"_URL_0_\n\n > Crop irrigation accounts for 95% of water use by the beef value chain, according to the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association...\n\n > Activities such as taking a bath requires up to 70 gallons of water. A five-minute shower uses 10 to 25 gallons. A running toilet can waste up to 200 gallons of water daily. **More than 713 gallons of water go into the production of one cotton T-shirt.** The New York City water supply system leaks 36 million gallons per day. It takes 39,090 gallons of water to manufacture a new car. At one drip per second, a faucet can leak 3,000 gallons per year.",
"The water cattle drink is not as expensive BECAUSE: Water quality makes a difference too. Cows can and will drink water that no human would.\n\nThis from a farmer. ",
"Because that stat is complete bullshit?",
"What the shit!? \n\nYou American has the average income of $50,000/year and get to buy meat for $3/pound!? \n\nWe Indonesian, only make about $5,000/year and have to buy it at $5/pound, FML.",
"While I believe u/crustybreadneck 's answer to be correct I also believe it to be incomplete. Another reason it is so cheap is because the calculations you are quoting take into account how much water it takes to grow x amount of food cows will eat, but not where that water comes from. And a lot of it I'm sure comes from the sky where water is relatively free. These pounds of beef also cost many meters cubed of oxygen but we don't quote that cost as if the farmers were obtaining their oxygen from oxygen bars.",
"Cheap?! We rarely get beef anymore because it's so goddamn expensive! ",
"To start with, you can [buy a million litres of water for $2.25](_URL_0_).\n\nIf you are a big company you can buy tons of water for just a few cents and use them as you please, they cattle farmers don't go buy a gallon of water on their closest Walmart but use water bought as a business client.",
"It might be worth noting that Grocery Stores typically make very small margins off of meat. It's put way in the back, and is priced really competitively because that's what draws a person into a grocery store, and then they're forced to walk to the back of the building to get what they came in for. When you grab a pack of steaks, you might also buy a bottle of coke or chips, which the grocery store makes much larger margins on, even though you can get it anywhere. ",
"The water we drink is purified and then \"enhanced\" with minerals. Water for livestock is usually from rainwater, a well or river.",
"I'm so high, I read this as it takes 1000 gallons of water to produce 1 pound of bees. I died laughing to myself since I am alone in this car and probably the only one who will find this funny. ",
"The government subsidizes meat and dairy. In other countries it is expensive and as a result, many people in poorer countries are vegetarian or eat less meat and animal products",
"The average price of water in the United States is about $1.50 for 1,000 gallons. At that price, a gallon of water costs less than one penny.",
"You are also Declassifying the level of the water in the cow. Over the course of life, you are going to put 1800 gallons of water into the cow. At a simple rate of say... $4/500 gallons, meaning for just 1500 you would spend $12 in water over the course of it being raised.\n\nThat cost, is dispersed over the cost of the entire animal, not just the ground beef. Per pound, most meat is sold minimum hang weight, of around $8.49/lb. For a 800lb cow, thats only around $0.03/lb for the water.",
"because...that's bullshit, maybe?",
"Because these statistics take into account the water to feed the farmer, the farmer's wife, the grass, and the bullshit to make up facts.",
"Because water falls for free from the sky. There is a recent push by the government to charge for it though.",
"Well jesus. It's not like the water fucking disappears. It just goes through the cow and collects a few more things on its way.",
"By my calculations, the price of a gallon of Fiji water is $9. One pound of meat should cost $9000 in water costs alone. ",
"This includes all the rain water used for growing the food for the animals etc. \n\nAlso water is extremely cheap in most parts where animal farming is big.",
"3$ a pound? I need to get a costco membership.",
"Why are beat up used cars so cheap when practically nobody could reproduce even 1 piece of it? Yet pop songs bring in money for DECADES to some stupid ass songwriter?",
"Wait what ?\nBeef is freaking expensive where i live (france).\nPork is cheap."
]
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| [
"http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/05/21/us/your-contribution-to-the-california-drought.html",
"https://sustainable.stanford.edu/water-wise"
]
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"http://www.pcrm.org/good-medicine/2007/autumn/health-vs-pork-congress-debates-the-farm-bill",
"http://www.publiclandsranching.org/book.htm"
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"http://www.care2.com/causes/the-true-cost-of-meat-demystifying-agricultural-subsidies.html",
"http://phys.org/news/2013-05-large-scale-edible-insect-farming-global.html"
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"http://beefmagazine.com/blog/cattle-aren-t-water-guzzlers-they-re-made-out-be"
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"http://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2015/02/24/Nestle-Pays-Nothing-to-Bottle-Water/"
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5nh0g1 | what happens when our lips are chapped? | More specifically, what causes that and why does licking them make your lips worse?
EDIT: Thanks so much for so many responses. This place is always helpful. :) | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5nh0g1/eli5_what_happens_when_our_lips_are_chapped/ | {
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"The external covering of your lips is essentially a thin layer of skin. Like all skin, it can get dry. Poor hydration, sun exposure, and cold weather can all dry out and irritate your skin, lips included. When you lick your lips, you're rubbing your tongue over that skin and wearing it down through contact and saliva. Do that repeatedly, and your lips will dry out even more since saliva is not moisturizing, but rather is full of enzymes meant to break down food. Stay hydrated and keep chapstick on hand to prevent chapped lips and stay comfortable! :)\n\nEDIT: I realize I made it sound as if saliva can break down skin. It can't. My point was more to note that saliva's purpose is not skin moisturization, but something else entirely. When you lick your lips, you make them wet, but it evaporates quickly. Through evaporation, even more moisture is pulled out of your lips. Don't lick your lips!",
"The skin on your lips is thin and sensitive. It prone to drying out when you're dehydrated or when it's licked. The reason licking your lips causes chapping is because your saliva contains digestive enzymes that are designed to break down food and the acidity of saliva can really dry out your lips over time (I chronically lip my lips and I always have dry lips!).\n\nThe best way to make sure your lips aren't dry is by drinking plenty of water, moisturizing them, either with a lip balm or something like coconut oil, and stop licking them!\n\n---\n\n**EDIT:** You well-researched bitches making me look dumb, STOP IT! I now understand that saliva isn't acidic! I just assumed it was because of the digestive enzymes, I made the assumption it was acidic.\n\nThe more ya know, I guess! Thanks for commenting. :*",
"The skin on your lips lacks sebaceous glands, which means unlike most of your skin it can't keep itself lubricated with natural oils.\n\n**Edit** Sebaceous glands are the little oil producing 'pouches' that are at the base of each individual hair inside the hair follicle. The oil comes out of your pores and is there to keep your hair and skin lubricated, conditioned, pliable, and healthy. \n\n**Edit 2** Several folks have brought up fordyce spots. These *are* a sort of sebaceous gland associated with the lips, but they're only along the edge of the lips, or what is known as the \"vermilion border\" (these harmless spots are also found on the penis, scrotum, and labia). I am not a doctor but it doesn't seem like they're *as* well equipped to keep lips from chapping in many conditions, and the enzymes from our own saliva can override any benefit they may try to contribute if you lick your lips too much. The rest of the lips are high and dry, so to speak.\n\n**Edit 3** Some fellas with beards have mentioned not having as much trouble with chapped lips since growing said beard. I'd never even considered this until now (girl here, can't beard) but I would believe that the oils from your beard would make it to your lips and keep them moisturized and happy. \n\nGood discussion, everyone! And thanks for keeping me fact-checking. :)",
" Follow up question. \n\nIf someone had a bad habit of picking at the skin of ones lips and ....peeling them and it sometimes bleeds.....Does that do anything bad? Will it give the person cancer?\n\n",
"You're dehydrated, that's it. Also if your dog has a dry nose or licking it you need to give it water. Dogs don't have lips so there is no indicator other than the nose. ",
"Follow up question, why does the skin of the lips sometimes seem to basically detach itself with water, say, after a shower?\n\nIf you remove it, it doesn't hurt and there's perfectly normal skin underneath, so it makes it seem like it isn't replaced naturally like most of our skin.",
"Follow up question: why do (most) chapstick brands create a dependency that results in my lips becoming even more disgustingly chapped than they were before? I have not tried all brands, but I haven't ever had a brand that didn't cause this problem. Currently I use Aquaphor with varying results.",
"Follow up question: If I lick my lips then rub my finger on them to get the rough skin off to now have the underskin as the top layer, why is it that they don't get chapped anymore? Is it because that layer isn't as damaged?",
"Is there any consequences from ignoring dry lips? ",
"The thin layer of specialised skin on your lips gets damaged or dried out. Our saliva actually does more harm than good. The best thing to do I just keep drinking water.\n\nOn a side note: many chapsticks actually contain chemicals that dry your lips out, causing you to need more chapstick. Always check the ingredients. ",
"I've been really dehydrated lately. Are you a chapstick salesman? I could use some. My face is starting to get chapped too.",
"Lips get chapped when they become dehydrated, or sun burnt, or go through too many hot/cold cycles (anecdotal). As has been noted, licking your lips exacerbates the problem, while a good lip balm helps a great deal. What has not been noted yet, that I have seen, is that a diet high in omega-3 containing fish, or omega 3/fish oil supplements seem to help a noticeably when taken in sufficient quantity - at least 1200mg per day. \n\nI have always had a problem with chapped lips during the winter, but over the past year, I've been very regular in using omega 3 supplements, and my lips have, thus far, done wonderfully during this winter season. Gone from using lip balm 2-3x a day in past winters to less than once a week this winter. Worth a try and tons of other health benefits too! \n\nSource: I work for a fish oil producing company.*\n\n_URL_0_\n\n*That is a lie. \n\n",
"Vaseline (petroleum jelly) works amazingly well. Slather it on before bed and in the morning lips are soft and moisturised\n\nEdit: corrected \"lather\" to \"slather\".",
"Lack of humidity in the air during the winter months is known to cause chapped lips. Saliva from the tongue can further strip the lips of moisture, causing more dryness.",
"Late but if anyone knows:\n\nEvery time I get a mouth wound that lasts a week or two, my lips goes flaked like that. Why? \n\nIn addition, I have a nasty tendency to pull that off, which makes the kids worse, as well as contribute to even more flaking. So, sometimes a quarter square centimeter of lip is ripped off...",
"How do you keep chapstick for more than 24 hours with out losing it?",
"Why is it whenever I use a chapstick (brand new one not already used) most times it will make my cold sores come out shortly after?",
"Follow up question, why does it seem as if some people don't ever get chapped lips or never use chapstick at all when my lips will look awful and bleed if I stop using chapstick?",
"Did anyone else lick their lips after just reading the title? Haha 😂 ",
"My understanding is that mouth breathing is a huge part of this. When your lips are slightly parted all the time, saliva is constantly dribbling out of your mouth, causing your tongue to swing into action subconsciously and lick. As many people have already stated, licking makes the chapping worse. I've always thought it was because licking removes the few oils that are actually on the lips, making them dry out more. Just like excessive hand washing leads to chapped hands, because oils are being removed.\n\nAlso, mouth breathing pulls dry air over your lips repeatedly, which can't help.\n\nIn the winter, your nose is more likely to be stuffed, so you're more likely to mouth breath.\n\nNext time you see someone addicted to lip balm or with chapped lips, watch their mouth for a while. They're probably a mouth breather.\n\nAnyway, I haven't used lip balm in 20 years, and here's my recommendation:\n\n1. Nose breathe exclusively. Keep that mouth closed, keep your tongue suctioned against the top of your mouth (google tongue posture for more info).\n\n2. NEVER lick your lips.\n\n3. (Maybe?) Eat a diet higher in saturated animal fat.",
"My mom always told me that over chapped lips could be a gut problem, but what do I know lol",
"Pro Tip: When its really cold out don't breathe through your mouth if you are not wearing chapstick or other protection. Breathe through your nose. Its cool to see your breath but your lips will chap up in no time.",
"Idk but I literally melted a nearly finished tube of blistex with a hair dryer the other day and poured that over another tube I have after rolling it down as far as it would go to form a btw full tint... I don't leave the house without my blistex",
"Read this before bed last night. Thought last night that I hadn't gotten chapped lips in a while and woke up this morning with it. Few hours later and now it's bleeding too.",
"May I add a question? When it's cold, I usually breath through my mouth. When I'm walking to work, my lips won't chap in the typical sense, but rather, they peel and get creamy. It's disgusting. Why does this happen? ",
"For me, I find it's directly related to being dehydrated. If I have them, I know I need to drink more, and the problem fixes itself within an hour or two. \n\nI will always remember a story of some people lost in a desert (after a plane crash, perhaps) and the details of how their bodies reacted to the dehydration. Lips were the first to go. The description was horrific. While I know I'm in no danger of being in that extreme of a situation, it's in the back my of mind.",
"At first I thought this was as question regarding what happens when your lips are chopped off. Feeling a bit morbid atm. "
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3lawc7 | how condensed milk turns into caramel? | I was watching a cooking video and he boiled some condensed milk and it turned into caramel. Anyone know why it turns into caramel? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3lawc7/eli5_how_condensed_milk_turns_into_caramel/ | {
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"Milk naturally has sugar in it, lactose. When sugars are heated, sugars breaks apart and form all sorts of new compounds, flavors and aromas and colors we call caramel."
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3hva8z | why do formula one look like super technological advanced driving vehicles, while nascars just look like cars? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3hva8z/eli5_why_do_formula_one_look_like_super/ | {
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"Nascar and stock car racing evolved out of redneck bootleggers with a carload of moonshine trying (and usually succeeding) to outrun law enforcement back during prohibition. They did this using every day vehcles, perhaps with modified angines and suspension, but they were still \"off the shelf\" or \"stock\" cars.\n\nThese days, they only LOOK like regular cars, of course. They are extremely high tech cars, nothing really \"stock\" about them at all. But they LOOK like regular cars because of tradition.",
"NASCAR has a TON of rules to ensure that everyone's car is nearly identical as much as possible. The point is to emphasize the drivers skill and take engineering out of the equation. A forumla 1 car on the other hand is designed to be as fast as human engineering can possibly build.",
"Different styles of racing appeal to different people. Open wheel racing is cool because it's really fast and the cars are the most advanced. Stock cars are cool because they're (at least notionally) related to the car out in your driveway and because they're beefy enough that the drivers can hit each other a bit without destroying them. In Europe they have things like DTM which are pretty similar to NASCAR."
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2101vy | laser printers | I've always wondered how these magical beasts work. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2101vy/eli5_laser_printers/ | {
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"There is a drum in the printer which is statically charged, but covered in a material which causes the charge to dissapate when exposed to light.\n\nThe laser is used to draw a negative image of the print on the drum, the drum then passes over toner which is attracted to the remaining charge, before being pressed against the paper."
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8q6asw | how is it more profitable to produce new porn instead of recycling overabundant available supply? | At this point it feels like porn is everywhere and in limitless supply. From a purely economic perspective how is it still profitable to produce new videos when producers could simply rerun or recycle what they already have and never run out? The sheer quantity available is already enough to guarantee that someone could never watch every video of a particular fetish (nothing too specific).
Enlighten me ! | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8q6asw/eli5_how_is_it_more_profitable_to_produce_new/ | {
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"For the same reason why we keep creating new kinds of food instead of just making more of the old food: Humans like variety.",
"Quality of technology keeps evolving. You can now have crisp images even for VR. \n \nIt is also a ludricus money making machine, so producers wants to get some of that. Technology have go cheap enough that even the amateurs can get a bit of that money pie. \n \nSo if there's still demand, progress and creation will also be going.",
"Every year new porn stars popup, new trends come up, and new fetishes are born. Porn producers create new porn videos for their paying members. Would you pay to watch the same videos over and over again? If producers \"recycle\" their videos you think members would stick around and pay a monthly premium to watch the same videos. No one would. You're forgetting about the part where some people actually still do pay for their porn. Producers create videos for these people. Although every year that number is getting smaller and smaller. The camgirl industry is taking over. Probably already has or will soon. ",
"The subject matter is kinda silly, you're really just asking why in a marketplace with a lot of content do companies continue to update their product or release new content when they could stay the same and sell the same thing.\n\nThe answer is simple: their competitors would release new/updated content and get more customers and thereby get more money (yay free markets!). Also, the market's environment always changes: generally in video right now there is higher and higher definition, different surround sound, virtual reality videos, and new laws and regulations passed or revoked opening up or closing certain content for consumers. You either adapt and succeed or you become a dodo / internet explorer",
"because 4 billion people are still trying to find the perfect porn video where the guy behind the camera keeps his mouth shut the entire time and the stunt dick also doesn't say anything stupid during the money shot.",
"They haven't stopped writing books or making movies yet so why stop making porn.......?",
"This is actually happening, if you happen to search for free porn nowadays, most of the content isn't newer than 2008... those were the glory days of free internet porn. Guess it speaks to my voracious online porn consumption habits/the narrow niches i'm into, but i'm getting bored with it, and I found this post while searching reddit to see if anybody else had noticed this trend.",
"Due to pornhub, it’s gotten a lot less profitable. There’s a series by Jon Ronson on _URL_0_ about the breakdown of the porn industry. Jobs have become scarce—few and far between. Former filmmakers are getting by by doing “bespoke porn”—custom porn shoots for single buyers that contain the exact scenario they dictate and that you can’t find on pornhub. They’re also making porn to cater to search terms. So rather than just doing a generic porn, they’ll make them so they contain valuable search terms, multiple ones if possible, like MILF and BBC or step-daughter and cheerleader. Etc. if they make a porn for home video, within days it will be uploaded to pornhub for free. Sometimes they’ll put a clip from a porn on pornhub and then charge to watch the rest. But in general it’s hard to recoup costs when people just immediately pirate it. Due to the popularity of search terms, it’s actually become less desired to be a woman between the ages of 21 and 30, because that doesn’t fill a niche. Either pass for a teen or a MILF or a GILF or some other niche, not generic pretty young woman. "
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8mc9tf | how does a metal detector not detect itself? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8mc9tf/eli5_how_does_a_metal_detector_not_detect_itself/ | {
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"A metal detector puts out a magnetic field and looks for disturbances in it caused by the presence of other metals. It doesn't detect itself because it is constructed to recognize its own field.",
"The \"sensor\" part of a metal detector is made of coils of wire, usually in a plastic of epoxy shell.\n\nMetal detectors don't detect metal directly. They detect changes is magnetic permeability. They send out a magnetic signal and measure how the surroundings effect it. Sure, many parts like the arm are metal, but they don't move relative to the sensor. You use the detector by sweeping it from side to side. If there is a metal object, the magnetic permeability is different and when you sweep the sensor through the space around the metal object, it beeps. Only change in metal-i-ness around the sensor makes it beep, and the metal arm doesn't change.",
"Metal detectors don't detect metal so much as they detect *change* in the amount of metal around them. \n\nAll alone, the metal in the detector serves as a baseline that goes up as it gets near other metal sources.",
"A metal detector doesn't detect itself in the same way a scale doesn't weigh itself. It *does*, really, but it's calibrated in a way that makes that measurement the zero point.",
"The detector coil is part of a tuned circuit that can induce an electrical current into any metal around the coil assembly. The amount of current induced is determined by the conductivity of the metal and it affects the tuning of the coil detector circuit. That change of frequency is converted into an audible signal such that the tone heard is changed by different metals, so an experienced detectorist can tell the difference between rusty iron and gold, for example.",
"Jaden? What have I told you about posting in ELI5?",
"The metal detector creates a field and measures things that disrupt that field. \n\nOnly metal that is moving relative to the detector and this field disrupts the field, which causes them to be detected. This is why the detectors are swung back and forth while detecting.\n\nParts of the detector itself are moving with the field that it creates and have no motion from the detector’s perspective. Therefore they do not disrupt the field and are not detected.\n"
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b6fdl6 | what is bankrupcy? where does the debt go? | I was reading a post that bankrupcy protects assets (car house etc) within limits. So if i by a house and declare bankruptcy it won't get taken away? Why wouldn't more people do that?
What's the difference in chapters?
I realize it ruins your credit for 7 years but wouldn't it be worth it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b6fdl6/eli5_what_is_bankrupcy_where_does_the_debt_go/ | {
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"You’d likely lose your house. The assets you keep are decided by the court based on what you need to keep your job. It will also decide what gets sold to give something to your creditors. \n\nThe debt after that goes away and your creditors will charge off your unpaid debts (meaning it costs taxpayers)\n\nAlso if it’s determined that you planned the bankruptcy after buying things, you’d be guilty of fraud. ",
"There are other kinds of Bankruptcy where the Debtor proposes a plan \nover time to pay off creditors. That’s chapter 11 and chapter 13. All the chapters are\nto the bankruptcy code. This is considered a better system than Debtor’s prison which is \nwhat was used in England before the American Revolution. ",
"Chapter 7, your creditors write off your debt, so it is effectively their loss.\n\nChapter 11 or 13 requires you to make \"reasonable payments\" to your creditors for up to 5 years, in 13, if you can not pay off your debt in that time, the rest is written off.\n\nHow many and what of your assets can be protected varies drastically state to state but While it may eliminate your personal liability for secured debts like your mortgage or car loan, (you can choose to reaffirm the debt instead), you still have to make payments because the creditor can also act against the asset and take it from you.\n\n > Why wouldn't more people do that? \n\nIf you rack up debt with the intention to declare bankruptcy, you are committing fraud. I hear prison is not for everybody.",
"Real life lawyer who does bankruptcy here.\n\nThere are two types of bankruptcy that you, a regular person, would be looking at. These are Chapter 7 and Chapter 13. There are other chapters, but those are for other situations, like businesses or fishermen, and we don't care about those.\n\nA Chapter 7 is called a \"liquidation,\" but, don't panic, that name is extremely misleading. 99% of the time, you don't actually lose your stuff. This is the default bankruptcy, where your debt just gets discharged and that's the end of the story.\n\nA Chapter 13 is called a \"restructuring.\" This is only used in situations where a person doesn't qualify for a Chapter 7 (e.g. their income is too high) or they have stuff that we can't protect in a Chapter 7 (e.g. too much equity in a house). In this type of bankruptcy, you have to make payments to the trustee for 3-5 years and then your debts get discharged.\n\nUnder any type of bankruptcy, you are given very generous exemptions. Exemptions are like buckets that you can put your stuff in in order to protect it. For example, under the Federal (default) rules, you are given $3775 in motor vehicle exemption that you can apply to a car. This means that you can protect up to $3775 worth of equity (value - loan) in a vehicle. Due to how quickly vehicles go down in value, it's very rare for the motor vehicle exemption to not cover the entire amount. There are exemptions for houses, household goods, clothing, etc. Some exemptions, like for child support due or retirement accounts, are infinite.\n\nThere's also a magical exemption called the D5, or \"wildcard\" exemption, which you can use on anything. Own a car worth more than $3775? Throw some D5 on it. Have a bitchin' scooter? D5 it. The most common use of D5 is to protect cash and money in the bank. The value of D5 is a flat amount plus a portion of the unused home exemption, and it's extremely generous. \n\nTo answer some of your specific questions:\n\n > What is bankruptcy?\n\nBankruptcy is a Federal process that discharges debt and protects you from creditors. Once you file, you get the protection of the Automatic Stay, which ends any collection activity against you (including foreclosures, lawsuits, etc).\n\n > Where does the debt go?\n\nIt gets discharged, meaning you don't owe it anymore. The creditor can write it off as a loss if they want. \n\n > So if i by a house and declare bankruptcy it won't get taken away?\n\n99% of the time, correct. What matters here is your equity (value - loan). As long as you have enough exemptions to protect your equity, nothing happens and you keep it.\n\nIf you don't have enough exemptions to protect your equity, there are several options. Many States have bonus house-exemptions that you can switch to. You can also do a chapter 13 and pay in the unexempt portion through the plan. You can also \"buy back\" the unexempt portion by paying the difference to the trustee. Also, if the unexempt portion is small, it's often not worth the trustee's hassle to sell the property. \n\nBut, no matter what, **if you want to keep the house, you've got to keep the mortgage, too.** You'll have to sign a reaffirmation agreement (keep the debt alive contract) to keep the house.\n\n > Why wouldn't more people do that?\n\nBankruptcy is actually extremely common. Just so far this year, my office has filed a couple hundred. I'm personally filing four this afternoon. In my district (which covers half of my State), we're already up to about 1500 filings. \n\nFilings are down lately, however. From this time 5 years ago, we're at about half of the filings that we were. This is because the economy is doing very well, which means that more people are earning too much to qualify for Chapter 7. People also have way more equity in their houses now, which is getting harder to protect. Just a few years ago, everyone was upside down in their mortgages and earnings were low, which was perfect weather for bankruptcy.\n\n > What's the difference in chapters?\n\n7 Discharges debt and is easy and great. 13 Is a payment plan for 3-5 years. 11 is for businesses. 12 is for fishermen and farmers. We don't talk about those last two.\n\n > I realize it ruins your credit for 7 years\n\nThis is a **huge misconception.** It's one of a number of misconceptions pushed by the only real loser in the bankruptcy process: unsecured creditors (credit card companies and medical debt).\n\nYour credit report is literally just a list that one company publishes about what other companies have said about you. It's 100% up to a person reading that report what they want to do with it and how they want to use it or consider it when dealing with you. There are no rules forcing them to behave a certain way for a certain score.\n\nThe day you file, your score goes down. Within about 3-6 months from discharge, it's usually around where it was before you filed. After that, it keeps going up. The exact amounts and trajectories depend on your behavior (e.g. taking on new loans, defaulting on new loans, inflating it through secured credit, etc). \n\nIn fact, within a week of filing, you are going to get flooded with junk mail trying to get you into a car loan, private loan, or credit card. Once you file, you become their perfect customer. This is because, once you get a discharge, you can't get another discharge for 8 years. This means that you are on the hook for that debt for at least 8 years, and, when you default, they've got at least a few solid years of garnishments they can squeeze out of you.\n\n > wouldn't it be worth it?\n\nUsually, yes. As long as you owe more than the filing fee (335 here) plus the attorney fee (~1000), and you don't have any special circumstances that make it risky (income too high, too much equity), it's worth it.\n\nIf you get yourself a good lawyer, it's a very easy, very streamlined process. You'll need to do very little leg work yourself: get a bunch of documents (2 years of tax returns, 7 months of paystubs, titles, etc), take two boring hour long online courses (e.g. _URL_0_), and go to a 15 minute meeting (341 hearing). ",
"\\ > I realize it ruins your credit for 7 years\n\nThis is regarded as a \"public record\" and it stays on your credit report for 10 years.\n\nBut BK doesn't really \"ruin your credit.\" It does drop your credit score immediately, but most people find they can get credit cards, loans, even mortgages, as soon as two years after the discharge IF they have their financial act together.\n\n & #x200B;"
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8lnyo5 | how do some companies hold so much cash? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8lnyo5/eli5_how_do_some_companies_hold_so_much_cash/ | {
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"The term \"cash\" is used to refer to the liquid assets a company holds, almost none of which is literal *cash*, and often very little of which is just money in bank accounts. For companies such as Apple, their \"cash\" is primarily treasury notes and short-term corporate securities. These are low-risk assets earning below the inflation-rate interest that can be cashed out in the near future, or very easily sold to other investors at extremely short notice. They're used as safe places to park billions of dollars that are slightly less wasteful than just sitting in bank accounts."
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6c1ekt | how do big transactions (weapon sales to states) between large entities work? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6c1ekt/eli5_how_do_big_transactions_weapon_sales_to/ | {
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"If we're talking specifically about weapons sales outbound from the US, they are a lot of the sales are brokered by the Department of Defense, through the [Foreign Military Sales](_URL_0_) program. \n\nBasically, defense contractor sells to the federal government like they normally do, then the government then resells the stuff to the foreign country. Advantage here is that the US government guarantees payment. Often the US government is providing loans or other aid. \n\nForeign countries and defense contractors can also do Direct Commercial Sales, which is just like any other private sale with a few exceptions. Normally big payments up front are required, since it's hard to go after foreign governments if they don't pay. Also, private arms exports require licenses from the Dept. of State. "
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cpl3na | why are vineyards always in hilly regions? | I've been driving around northern Michigan recently, and got too thinking why winery's/vineyards are all on hills. Does elevation change have something to do with it? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cpl3na/eli5_why_are_vineyards_always_in_hilly_regions/ | {
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"They aren't always. In California, they're in fields like normal crops. But the tendency may be because hilly land is harder to build on and farm with conventional crops. The land is cheaper and doesn't make vineyards that much more expensive to operate.",
"Wine grapes are best when they “struggle” from lack of sunlight and rainwater. This is because the skins are where the flavor is, and smaller grapes have less “insides” compared to skin. So if you want grapes for juice or eating, you grow them in a place with ample water and sunshine.\n\nBut for wine, hillsides are optimal because the grapes spend part of the day not getting sunlight, and the rainwater moves down the hill. Both things cause the vines to struggle,"
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3qz29x | how is it that smoking makes a person 2,500% more likely to develop cancer of some sort but it's not 100% guaranteed that you will | I read an article on r/fitness and it said a person is 2,500% more likely to develop cancer if they smoke. How is this not guaranteed that you will? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3qz29x/eli5_how_is_it_that_smoking_makes_a_person_2500/ | {
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"2500% means 25 times more likely. 2500% of 3 is 75. So if, say, the non smoking population have a three percent chance of developing lung cancer this would mean smokers have a 75% chance.\n",
"2500% more likely means 25 time as likely. If your normal chances are 1%, and smoking increases your chances 2500%, that means your chances are now 25%, still less than 100%.",
"1% is just a fancy way of writing one out of hundred. It is the same as 1/100 or 0.01. Percent just means per hundred. \n\n2,500% is just a fancy way of writing 25.\n\n2,500% of $1 is $25.\n\n2,500% more means that the result is 26 times the original.\n\n2,500% increase of $1 is $26.\n\nIf the normal rate of getting cancer is (for example) 1% of the population increasing that by 2,500% just makes it 26%.\n\nAs long as the normal rate is less than 3.846% you can increase that by 2,500% and still have less 100%.\n\nOr to put in another way: as long as your normal chance of cancer are less than 1 in 26 you can increase that to be 25 times greater and still not be certain of getting cancer."
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20fqvo | how do we know when a car accident occurs whether the offender was texting while driving or not? | Do they get out of their car and say, "Sorry, I was texting!"? I'm sure that in some instances people confess to texting while driving, but are there instances of people checking the offenders phone to see what times they sent texts or anything like that? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20fqvo/eli5_how_do_we_know_when_a_car_accident_occurs/ | {
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7i4uh4 | how does eye dilation by an optician work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7i4uh4/eli5how_does_eye_dilation_by_an_optician_work/ | {
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"I hope to distill this down, it's a little complicated because it involves pharmacology and physiology. \n\nSo the reason you want to dilate the eye is to take a good look at the structures at the back of it. The body has two basic systems, states of being if you will: 'fight or flight' and 'rest and digest'. Each of these systems helps you do different things. The 'rest and digest' part controls the system that makes your pupils constrict (small): the eyedrops an optician uses *inhibits* (stops from happening) the 'rest and digest' system of your eyeball. When you tell your body to NOT constrict your pupil, the pupil dilates. \n\nTL;DR in not so ELI5 terms: topical anti-cholinergic. "
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qrbs8 | how do starcraft 2 commentators at major league gaming events comment on what's happening without giving away what's happening to the enemy team? | I dunno if I phrased that well.
I've never been to a MLG tourny, but I'd imagine they'd have the screens of computers projected so people could watch — right? Wouldn't that give away secrets to the other team? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/qrbs8/eli5_how_do_starcraft_2_commentators_at_major/ | {
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"The two opposing players are in sound proof rooms on the main stage during the high profile matches. During preliminary matches, the commentating is happening in a different room from where the matches are being shown (and the game projected on big screens in that room only). This is far enough away from the where the matches are being seen so that no one can hear the commentating, and there are event officials who watch out for people who may be sharing information. It's pretty easy to catch any cheating, if someone who was in the main stage room walks up to a player and whispers something in his ear while he's playing you generally know he is up to no good. As far as I know there aren't any reported instances of this happening or even any accusations of the sort in an MLG event.",
"Booth he is mostly cosmetic and In **most** tournaments there was no noise cancellation foam or whatever you call it in. Is made to give players privacy so they can focus on game and not crowd outside.\n\nBig head set are not noise cancellation ether they dont have active noise cancellation software only some passive muffle you get by good design BUT they emit white noise than is all you hear and you don't hear anything out of it.\n\nUnder headset with white noise you have normal ear buds that play in game sound. \n\n",
"I'm not sure what you are asking. \n\nThere can be two possible questions you can be asking\n\n1) When two players play each other, can they hear commentators/see screen so they know what the other guy is doing?\n\na) No, as superawesomeguy stated above, the tournaments have soundproof booths where the players play (facing AWAY from the screen) and they wear two sets of headphones so they are isolated from the outside world. \n\n2) When they brodcast games, can other players watch and try and figure out play styles/secret builds of other players? \n\na) Yes, they absolutely can. That is one of the reasons a lot of players don't do well. For example, Greg \"Idra\" Fields is known to have a REALLY safe style of play. He never goes for a quick army, always opts to go for a quick economy. Back when the game first came out, he was a monster (and still is if he can make the game go into the 15-20+ min mark) But, now he is not doing very well at tournaments because everyone knows what he likes to do and everyone tries to end the game early with him because they know he is really strong in the late-game. \n\nEdit: Studying opponents is a part of the game. For example, in one of the MLGs (Anaheim I believe?) the Slayers team (composed of mostly Terrans) came and DOMINATED zergs with Blue flame hellions (a unit that was considered decent but never crucial in compositions) and because of this, they changed the metagame (the current \"standard\" for a specific matchup) for TvZ (now almost TvZ the Terran opens up with hellions). On an unrelated note, they used hellions so effectively, a unit that had almost no changes in a year was nerfed because they showed its true potential. ",
"In addition to what everyone here is saying about sound proof booths, sometimes players do hear things. It doesn't happen *too* often when sound proofing is involved, but during Brood War (and SC2) matches if the game observer spots an early proxy/cheese, the crowd and commentators will all start gasping really loudly... if a player hears this they will suspect something, because why else would everyone gasp so early in the game? It's hard to tell if a player hears the crowd though, because you have to take them at their word, and if they say they heard nothing, there's not much you can do about it.\n\nAn example would be a game BoxeR was playing, his army was about to run into lurkers but BoxeR immediately turned his units around for no reason - people speculate it was due to him hearing the crowd go apeshit over what he was about to do (step into lurkers and die). Maybe it was his star sense/experience, or maybe it was his ear hacks."
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2uh169 | why does plaque only build up near the heart, causing heart attacks? why aren't kidney attacks, liver attacks, etc, more common? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2uh169/eli5_why_does_plaque_only_build_up_near_the_heart/ | {
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"It does build up other places. Heart attacks and strokes are just the most dramatic and immediately dangerous. \n\nYou have two kidneys. The liver is somewhat protected because it has a veinous blood supply in addition to an arterial one.\n\nLegs are a pretty common place for PAD to appear.",
"Vessels can clot in other places. Vessels can clot anywhere in the body (like say strokes in your brain, or deep vein thrombosis in your legs.) Heart attacks get attention because they're more dangerous.\n\nHeart attacks are caused by a clot in the coronary arteries which are the narrow vessels that supply blood to the heart muscle. A clot in a similarly sized vessel in your leg wouldn't be life threatening at all, I don't know that you'd even notice it. But a clot in the coronary arteries can cut off the oxygen supply of the heart muscle, which leads to the death of that muscle tissue (which is called a myocardial infarction or MI). The death of this tissue makes the heart's work harder, which can lead to (if I recall correctly) congestive heart failure (a long term condition) or death. ",
"All of those things occur, and they're called infarcts (or ischemia) meaning that the tissues is not getting enough blood flow to meet oxygen demand.\n\n\nIf you get critical narrowing of blood vessels to your leg muscles you can get something called claudication, which is the leg muscle equivalent to the chest pain you would experience during a heart attack\n\nIn your kidneys, it would be hard to notice because you likely won't feel any pain. You might have some blood in the urine, and some diminished kidney function but you probably wouldn't notice. \n\n\nWhen brain infarcts, it's a stroke. \n\n\nTL;DR: Infarcts and ischemia of other organs and tissues are very common but are described using different terms.\n\n\n(This is really oversimplified and there's literally entire areas of study dedicated to very specific areas of ischemia research... please don't let reddit crucify me.)\n "
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yknig | what's the "#mm" for in front of camera lens? | Amateur here.
I got a Lumix GF3 last year and it came with a zoom lens. Someone told me I should have gotten the pancake lens instead and I really wish I did. I needed the zoom lens for a project long ago but now I have little use for it. It's a pain to carry around being that it's not a DSLR nor a regular point and shoot. I always have to carry the lens in a separate padded pouch.
I looked online for Lumix's 14mm asymmetrical pancake lens and realized it's way out of my price range (I found them for +$300 and I know this is average prince for a good lens). I found several other pancake lenses from other companies but I realized they're all not "14mm". What is this "14mm"? Will anything more or less not fit my camera? What is the most "basic" type of lens? Where can I find cheap lens for an amateur photographer like me??
Thank you guys so much!!! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/yknig/eli5_whats_the_mm_for_in_front_of_camera_lens/ | {
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"Reasonablefocal length explanation here: _URL_0_\n\n14mm means it's a really really wide lens, suitable for stuff like broad, sweeping landscape photos. Pancake is the actual shape of the lens, it's a physically flat one. The 14mm doesn't actually indicate whether it will fit your camera or not.\n\nBest advice for a beginner: get a variable focal length lens to start with, something like an 18-55 mm, a 28-80mm or similar. This basically means that you can use the lens to zoom in or out from the subject to catch more or less of the scene. \n\nFeel free to follow up if this isn't clear, and welcome to the funky world of photography!\n",
"The measurement given in mm on lenses is the *focal length*. Let's forget about the actual physical definition but rather talk about what the focal length means for your pictures: Lenses with a lager focal length will act like a telescope, i.e. showing a more narrow angle of view, which makes appear things larger. Small focal lengths will show a larger portion of your surroundings (extreme cases are fisheye lenses). Obviously, there is an area where the shown angle of view is similar to what we are used to as humans (about 50°).\n\nSo what focal length produces this angle of view? This unfortunately depends on the size of the image sensor in your camera, but photographers came up with a quite reasonable system to estimate the angle of view for a certain focal length and a certain sensor size. This is the rule: on a 35mm film camera, a focal length of 50mm produces a angle of view of about 50°, this is called a standard lens. Lenses with a significantly larger focal length are called telephoto lens, those with a smaller focal length are called wide angle lenses.\n\nBut wait, you said that you have a GF3, which has an Micro Four Thirds sensor (much smaller than a 35mm film frame). So the sensor will only \"see\" a smaller portion of the picture, which gives us a smaller angle of view AKA telephoto lens. This is where a thing called *[crop factor](_URL_1_)* comes in. For a Micro Four Thirds sensor this is 2. So if you want to know what focal length is a standard lens for your camera (and gives us an image angle of 50°) take the 50mm we talked about earlier and divide it by two. So a 25mm lens for your camera will give you the same image angle (50°) like a 50mm lens on a 35mm film camera and this again looks like you see through your own eyes. The 14mm you talked about looks just like a 28mm lens on a 35mm camera which is quite a wide angle.\n\nI have a hard time giving advice for a lens for your camera, but you can't go wrong with a lens that covers that standard range of about 25mm (again: for your camera). If your zoom lens already does that, then experiment and find out what focal length actually does (it's more than just making things bigger or smaller, see the example image in [this WP article](_URL_0_)). After your own experiments you will know better what lens you really want/need."
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217j74 | what is really happening to people when they start to talk in tongues and claim that they have no control over their body? | Is there a medical explanation for this, or is it really divine intervention? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/217j74/eli5_what_is_really_happening_to_people_when_they/ | {
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"I thought speaking in tongues was a language that was directly spoken between you and \"God\". Growing up in Church and see this, I assume now it was nothing more than overwhelming emotions from people and whatnot. The sort of feeling you get in a big crowd, go with the flow sort of deal. \n\nEverytime the pastor did that \"speak in tongues\" or the 'hand on the head healing move' (where you are supposed to fall backwards under the power of the 'holy spirit'), I literally just stood there thinking WTF until they push you harder and you realize \"oh, i guess I am supposed to fall backwards\".\n\nI think its mob mentality and people just get caught up in the moment.\n",
"They are mimicking what they have seen other people do, it's a public demonstration that you subscribe to the communal beliefs. It's a mixture of peer pressure and religious fervor.",
"It's like when you listen to music, sometimes you get really, really into it and start tapping your foot, humming it, maybe you get up and start dancing or even shout out loud \"WOOOO! this song rocks!\" while you continue to play air drums while bobbing your head back and forth . You definitely could control all of these actions even if you wanted. \n\nPraying in tongues is the same way only instead of controlling the urge, you just let whatever emotions flow. Definitely not divine intervention",
"It's people babbling and a feeling of euphoria. Like being high without drugs. \n\nIt's not a language. It's gibberish. The \"tongues\" are always in sounds that are part of the persons native language. "
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4vldma | bonds (finance) | I have trouble understanding bonds because as far as I can tell they're not any different from loans. What characteristics are supposed to set bonds apart? I'm learning about them in a macroeconomics class but I don't understand what's unique about them. Examples would be helpful too.
As a side note, what is their relationship with "securities" that I keep reading about?
Thanks | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vldma/eli5_bonds_finance/ | {
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"When a company needs money to expand it has two options: Loans and bonds. From whom the money is borrowed sets the two apart.\nA loan is money borrowed from a banking institution and a bond is money borrowed from the public. The advantage of choosing to issue bonds over making loans is that bonds are issued by the company itself giving the company more power to lock interest rates at a longer term than a bank loan (which generally is variable over time, allowing the bank to make more money off of interest fees).",
"The biggest difference is that you can trade bonds easily. Loans tend to be between a bank and a person/organization. They can't be traded usually. Bonds are basically IOU's. You can sell them to someone else or buy them from someone else.\n\nSecurities are any type of tradable financial asset. This includes stocks, bonds, cash, etc.",
"If you're a corporation and you need to borrow money, you have two basic options: loans and bonds. In the case of a loan, you make a deal with a bank: the bank gives you a lump of money up front, you make monthly payments, and every month, the amount you owe (after making your payment) increases by an agreed-upon fraction.\n\nIn the case of a bond, you print up a bond, a contract that says, *five years from now, our company will pay the owner of this bond ten thousand dollars.* Then you take that bond to the stock market and auction it off. Depending on how solid your business is, and how likely people think it is to still be in business five years from now, it might sell for $7,500 or $8,000. The difference between the face value of the bond ($10k) and the actual sale price is, basically, the interest your company is paying.",
"Say a company, Jones, Inc. wants to borrow $100 million. They can approach a bank and ask to borrow the money. If the bank agrees, the bank will ask Jones, Inc. for lots of information about the amount of assets Jones has, the type of revenue Jones expects to receive, the basis under which Jones expects to receive the revenues, and the intended use of the loan proceeds. Often, a bank will sell some or all of the loan to other investors after it closes, perhaps splitting the loan into pieces along the way. Sometimes, a bank will represent multiple lenders at the outset - for example, if there is no single bank willing to risk the entire $100 million, there could be three who are willing to risk $50mm, $25mm, and $25mm. \n\nBonds take that a step further - at the outset, the loan is intended to be divided into lots of little tradeable securities (a security means something like, a tradeable piece of a larger asset) and \"sold\" to investors. Another way to describe it is to say, lots of different investors - the bondholders - will be lending the money to the bond issuer. \n\nBecause of the different dynamics where the lenders will be thousands of people or entities as opposed to one or maybe several banks, the issuance process is different. For a bond issuance, Jones, Inc. would bring in *underwriters* to commit to buying (lending to Jones) and re-selling (finding investors to take on the loans) set amounts of the bonds. The underwriters are paid by making a small markup on the interest rate - if the bonds are advertised to the public at 5%, they will be issued to the underwriters at 4.85% or something. The *lead underwriters* do more - they represent the public in the negotiation and issuance of the debt. The lead underwriters oversee and negotiate the drafting of the loan terms and prospectus. The lead underwriters do the diligence that a bank would do by reviewing the financial statements of the issuer and making sure that the disclosures are up to snuff. Once the lead underwriters, and to a lesser degree the other underwriters are satisfied that everything is in order, they transfer the $100mm to the borrower/issuer, and sell the bonds, representing the debt, to the public. \n\nOnce the bonds have been circulated to the public, the bonds are often freely tradeable among investors, almost as if they were stocks. If the debt were a loan, and the lender were a bank, the bank would expect periodic updates as to the financial condition of the borrower. The bank would have certain rights regarding repayment, such as a lien against receivables, or a security interest in a building. Lenders (bondholders) have similar rights in the bond scenario. They receive information about the borrower's financial condition through public disclosures, and they exercise their rights through a *trustee*, a designated financial institution who is in charge of representing the interests of the bondholders. \n\nIf all goes well, the bondholders receive periodic payments until the final due date, when the balance is paid off. If Jones, Inc. struggles and cannot repay the debt, they might go into bankruptcy, or could be forced to renegotiate terms with the bondholders, either via the trustee, or, in extreme cases, directly with the bondholders. "
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2jaq6v | how are china and india not huge powers in international soccer? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2jaq6v/eli5_how_are_china_and_india_not_huge_powers_in/ | {
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"In India the most popular sport is cricket, and they are the current Cricket World Cup holders",
"For much the same reason that the USA isn't, either. It's not yet a hugely popular sport in those countries, which means that there is neither the money nor the glamour as incentives to encourage large numbers of young people to take up the game. The young people of China, India, and the USA (amongst others) channel their sporting passions in other directions.",
"The sport is not big in these countries. Countries like Australlian and New Zealand are rugby country's, India is a cricket nation, USA plays Baseball and American ''Foot''ball (among others ofcourse). \nIn the future when the population wants to play a lot of football they ofcourse have the chance to becomea huge power. \n\nIDK this for sure (and it is not meant as racist at all) but i think that also they body types of the asian (male) population is a factor. Sport like football also require a certain hight and physical prowess. Being tall and strong gives you a certain advantage, ofcourse this does not mean that it is impossible that people without these abilities can become football superstars but it makes it a little bit harder. The same can be seen by Marathon runner where the Ethopians have advantage because of there physical builds, Africans with 100m running and Europeans with cycling. "
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20fdv9 | what's so wrong with steaks cooked well done? | I am not trying to cause a deep internet argument, but I genuinely have been eating steaks cooked well done for my whole life. Just want to know why well done steaks are seen as such an insult to beef before I decide to order one as rare or medium rare. What makes steak okay to eat rare but not other meats such as chicken.
Excuse the ignorance, seriously looking for someone to enlighten me. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20fdv9/eli5_whats_so_wrong_with_steaks_cooked_well_done/ | {
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"A big problem is that a very expensive steak and a very cheap steak are virtually indistinguishable when they are well-done. It doesn't matter how fine the marbling of the fat, how lovingly it was dry-aged, all of those things that make a great steak a GREAT steak are utterly obliterated when overcooked. Plus, it is not nearly as tender or juicy. That's why so many people are aghast: if you cook a rib-eye steak well-done, you might as well have had a slab of cheap london broil for all you're getting out of the experience.",
"Germs in cows largely don't affect humans, and beef is normally produced in such a away that the only human impacting germs are on the outsides of the meat (thus are killed as soon as the meat's edges get to 160 F which is nearly instant). \n\nSteak is prized mostly for it's tenderness (other cuts of beef are equally delicious but much tougher) so cooking a steak to match the cheaper cut of meat is something of a waste (just get the cheaper cut simmer it long enough to become more edible). ",
"Your cake day is also steak and bj day. Funny you asked this question today.",
"One big difference: [All chicken you buy in the US is likely infected with salmonella while we do not allow beef to be sold that is tainted with e. coli](_URL_0_). So eating rare chicken will likely make you sick while eating rare beef should, if properly checked, be benign.\n\nWell done beef is usually very tough and a lot of the flavor that comes from the \"juices\" is gone, because the juices have evaporated. \n\nA properly cooked rare/medium rare steak is very tender and juicy. That means it feels like it is melting in your mouth and is a lot more flavorful. \n\nHowever, you shouldn't feel pressured to eat steak any other way than the way you want!",
"I'm not a culinary expert but I can answer the health part of the question. Certain meats (chicken, pork, turkey for example) carry a high risk of causing illness when not fully cooked. This risk is lower in beef, which is why you can eat it with a pink center and still have a low risk of becoming sick.",
"So it's ok to eat the blood that's coming from the steak? It's red so I'm assuming it's blood.",
"With steak, most of the harmful bacteria is on the outside and is killed when the steak is seared. With chicken, handling is generally less good at preventing contamination of the meat -- most bacteria will be in the gastrointestinal tract and skin. Chickens are smaller so the meat is closer to the gastrointestinal system where much of the bacteria is from, and they also are not skinned until later in processing, if at all, which gives more opportunity for bacteria to travel into the meat. I can't find a stat for beef, but here's a disturbing consumer reports article on how contaminated chicken is in the US: _URL_0_ . If you were very careful about he handling of a chicken, you could actually eat it raw (In Japan, for example, you can find chicken sashimi).\n\nNote that things turn tables again with ground beef. When you grind the steak up raw, the bacteria on the outside is now mixed into the middle, so having an undercooked hamburger is more likely to make you sick. But again, with proper handling (such as in-house grinding) this is less of an issue.\n\nedit: a word\n\n",
"Steak connoisseurs tends to react badly to taking a good steak and preparing it well-done because the process of overcooking it removes most of the effort that went into making it a good steak. It would taste about the same as a $5 steak from Safeway. \n\nBut if you like the taste, by all means buy those $5 steaks and make them black. Just don't waste your money on expensive meat. ",
"Biting into a rare, or medium rare steak is a taste explosion. Well done, for my tastes presents too much \"char\"......steaks ought not \"crunch\"",
"One reason restaurants don't like it is because generally people who order well done steaks will say something to the effect of \"but I still want it to be juicy.\" You can't have it both ways. You can either have a juicy steak or a well done steak. When you inevitably complain that the steak you had us burn to a crisp isn't juicy, it's irritating.",
"I've been eating overcooked steaks nearly my entire life... On my 20th birthday, my girlfriend made me a medium-rare steak with this mushroom peppercorn sauce... I was born anew. That was the moment I realized that steak wasn't supposed to just taste like tough hamburger. My life changed forever. ",
"My tastebuds LOVE the carmalized, char on the outside of a beef jerkied filet mignon. Never gonna have it made any other way. Burn that shit.",
"Steak is flesh. Flesh contains proteins. Many of these proteins bind to our \"taste buds\". \n\nProteins denature or break apart in the heat, so if you cook a steak well done, you're not getting as much flavor.\n\nThat's why, traditionally medium or medium-rare is the standard because it's cooked enough to be healthy, while still preserving many of the proteins. \n\nThe issue is that if you have a high quality/super flavorful piece of steak, and you cook it to death, well... it's like buying amazing fruits and throwing it in a blender. Instead of enjoying the higher quality, you are reducing it to a state that is used to compensate for an inferior piece of meat. \n\nBeef versus chicken/pork/fish. We don't get as sick from eating raw beef as we do from eating the other animals. Moreover, those three tend to eat a lot of crap whereas beef typically only eats grass.",
"I don't usually care for steaks at restaurants unless they know how to do steak. The tough, hammered down on the grill piece of cardboard steak sucks. I usually order mine medium-well. I like a little pink in it, not bloody. Some grilled mushrooms on top is the best.\n\nIf I make it at home, it's seared quickly on both sides, moved to the cold side of the grill, the flames choked down, and a box of mesquite chips added on the coals. (Don't use gas, you heathen.) Low heat for about 45 minutes. Comes out amazing! Makes all the neighbors jealous, or they call the fire department due to the smoke. Allow meat to rest for ten minutes after removing from the grill. Never, ever stab your steak- use tongs. Interior usually has no pink left, but is juicy. ",
"As an Argentinian, I know a thing or two about steak. There is nothing inherently wrong with a well cooked steak, but it's not the best way to enjoy such a meal. It's like drinking warm coke with no bubbles or boiled ice cream, you might like it, but you are still wasting perfectly good food by removing a lot from the experience. \n\nBoth low and high temperatures damage the meat. Frozen meat doesn't taste the same as fresh meat. Both freezing and overcooking break down the cells that make up the meat, and change the taste. \n\nOf course, uncooked meat isn't good either, just as a frozen coke will not be very good, there is a perfect point. \n\nThere is that perfect medium-rare spot in which you retain all of the flavor and juices without eating raw myoglobin. \n\nEDIT: Also, if you are from the states, they are probably cutting the meat wrong too. Try and find a store that carries Argentinian-style cuts. UK-style cuts are good too.\n\n",
"Because well done steaks taste like garbage and any harmful organisms that infect steak stay on the surface and the middle can be completely raw or even still cold in the middle (blue rare) without hurting you. Things like salmonella that infect chicken make their way deeper in the meat and must be cooked all the way through to be safe.\n\nI like my steak medium rare.",
"If you go to a seak house order it 'bleu rare' once. The outside is cooked but anything deeper than 2-3mm is raw with the center cold. Absolutely amazing. Outside has marinade flavor, inside beef flavor. Perfection on a plate",
"The real problem you have is that you probably haven't eaten high quality meat before. **All** of the crap you find in grocery stores or super markets is low grade meat. If you are to buy this meat and cook it rare, it would be chewy and flavorless. This is what I find with most people who get their steaks well done...\"Well, I tried my buddy's rare steak at Outback, and I didn't like it all! I'll stick to medium well. Thank you!\" However, once you go to a real steak house (my go to spots in Vegas is Strip Steak at Mandalay Bay or B & B Trattoria in The Venetian), then you will truly experience what a rare steak is supposed to taste like. You will no longer be satisfied by the dried husks you cherished from your past. You will have to scour local butcheries and meat shops to find that certain grade of prime dry-aged beef. You will begin to search for restaurants that only serve grade 5 [Wagyu]( _URL_0_). You'll have to buy an immersion circulator, so that you can perfectly sous vide your steak to 118 degrees...not a degree more. Soon, you'll understand the obsession of quality meat, and it will make you cry at your earlier sins of overcooked flesh. ",
"Steak is only exposed to air (and therefore bacteria, etc) on the outside, so once the outside is cooked, it's perfectly safe to eat the raw inside. Steak becomes tough when it is fully cooked, losing juice, and along with them, flavour and tenderness. If you're going to order an expensive cut of meat fully cooked, it's like making a mcLobster out of a lobster that was just killed, kind of.",
"It's just a question of taste and purely subjective.\n(As, in fact, precisely what 'well done' or 'medium rare' etc actually is - it'll vary from restaurant to restaurant, chef to chef)\n\nExcept in a comedic sense, e.g Ron Swanson. If you think about it, he is a parody - an object of ridicule. So anyone seriously expressing his opinions doesn't realise we're all laughing at them twice a week on BBC 4.\n\nSome people think (whether they like rarer meat because of it, or are put off rarer meat because of it) that it's blood that drips out. This is not the case.",
"But... dat [Maillard](_URL_0_) flavour."
]
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| []
| [
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.cpr.org/news/story/how-safe-food-we-eat"
],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.consumerreports.org/cro/magazine-archive/2010/january/food/chicken-safety/overview/chicken-safety-ov.htm"
],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[],
[
"http://www.buedelmeatup.com/2012/12/04/the-difference-between-kobe-and-wagyu-beef/"
],
[],
[],
[
"http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maillard_reaction"
]
]
|
|
an2ir6 | when breathing, how do our lungs stay "clean" from foreign objects in the air? | I was in a room at work recently that had a mold issue and someone made comment that mold was going to grow in my lungs. I am fairly certain that's not a thing that happens but it got me curious about the possibility of something like that occurring and how our body would handle it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/an2ir6/eli5_when_breathing_how_do_our_lungs_stay_clean/ | {
"a_id": [
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" > I am fairly certain that's not a thing that happens\n\nIt kinda is. Depends on mold of course, but its a possibility.\n\nOverall however, your nose acts as a filter to get some random shit stuck (and come out with mucus). If you breathe through mouth however, or there's a lot of bad stuff in the air - it will absolutely go down to lungs, and lungs won't stay clean.\n\nThere's nothing worse than inhaling dry cement... One of the most painful ways to die.",
"The respiratory system has several ways to prevent harmful substances in the air from entering the lungs. Hairs in the nose help filter out large particles. Microscopic hairs, called cilia, are found along the air passages and move in a sweeping motion to keep the airways clean. Our airways are also coating in mucus, which catches things like dust, allergens, viruses, bacteria, and other harmful substances. Things that do reach the deeper parts of the lungs can often be moved up via mucous and coughed out or swallowed.\n\nThat being said, it is possible for stuff to get into the lungs. Sometimes pathogens will get through and will make you sick, including bacteria that cause pneumonia and tuberculosis for example. Fungal spores can get into the lungs too, but fungal infections in the lungs are rare in people without preexisting lung diseases or compromised immune systems. That being said, mold exposure can make you sick even if it doesn't get into your lungs, so it's best to avoid being in a room with mold if possible, or if not, to at least have a proper face mask.\n\nIt's also possible for particulates to reach the lungs and get stuck there, such as asbestos. That's why workers who might be exposed to asbestos or other particulates wear special dust masks to keep these dangerous particulates out."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[]
]
|
|
79hfqu | why do we still have those big brick converters for computer chargers? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/79hfqu/eli5_why_do_we_still_have_those_big_brick/ | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Heat and cost\n\nThe devices used in converting the power produce heat, you need enough volume and surface area to dissipate that heat into the keep things from getting too hot\n\nThey could spend more and get some exotic parts to reduce the heat generated, but since laptop chargers aren't a commodity item and you rarely buy another one there is no selling point for spending more to make it smaller. Would you really decide against a laptop just because it has a larger charger? Probably not. Would you decide against it because it costs 5% more? Probably",
"Those big bricks are actually transformers, converting AC power from 120V (in the US) to whatever voltage the computer is designed to take. Sometimes but not always, the brick also has a \"rectifier(?)\" that converts the AC power to DC.\n\nTo handle a particular voltage or amperage, usually you need components of a particular size. This is separate from the shrinking of integrated circuits, like the processor in your computer. To reduce the size of these components, likely the most effective thing to do would be to reduce how much power your computer uses. This would increase how long it takes to charge your laptop or the processing power of your computer, so the chances of this happening is pretty slim."
]
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| []
| [
[],
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|
||
347egw | why is there a fire fountain of burning oil at oilrigs/oilswells? | ELI5:Why is there allways a fountain of burning oil thats burns at oilrigs/oilswells?
It burns none stop, how is it not a waste of oil?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/347egw/eli5why_is_there_a_fire_fountain_of_burning_oil/ | {
"a_id": [
"cqryh9h",
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4
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"text": [
"Burning oil well is a problem. But typically it's burning natural gas. Because it's not cost effective to transport natural gas to market. And you don't want to store a flammable. Do you just burn it",
"That's not oil burning, it's gas. Oil comes out of the ground as a frothy mix of gas and oil. A device at the well-head separates the gas from the oil, and sends the oil into a pipe-line. A lot of times, there is another pipe-line for the natural gas, but if there isn't? It just gets 'flared' off. The cost of natural gas is almost entirely in the pipelines and storage necessary to bring it to market. A lot of times, a well is just too far away from existing pipelines to make it economical to build new pipes and to try to recover the gas."
]
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| []
| [
[],
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cy2xux | why, after drinking, does some areas of your body hurt to touch? | Say after a night of fairly heavy drinking, the following day some places are very tender and almost sore to touch, especially your chest, top of you back, arms, etc.
Any explanation for this? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cy2xux/eli5_why_after_drinking_does_some_areas_of_your/ | {
"a_id": [
"eypdj7p"
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"text": [
"It's cancer.\n\nBut seriously, it's most likely dehydration which can cause muscle and joint pain. That's why it's a good idea to drink lots of water before going to sleep."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
2k8fzk | injecting significant amount of air into the body | We are talking about injections in class, everyone thinks /knows enough air in the vein/arteries will kill you.
How much does it take to kill you? What exactly happens when lethal amount of air "kills" you? and what if the air bubble is injected into the muscle instead of blood vessel? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2k8fzk/eli5_injecting_significant_amount_of_air_into_the/ | {
"a_id": [
"clixjry"
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"text": [
"I hope you're not thinking about experimenting with this. (If you do, you have my vote for next year's [darwin awards](_URL_0_))\n\nYour blood vessels are of all shapes and sizes...well, okay, mostly tube-shaped, but with many different diameters, so even a tiny amount of air can lead to a gas embolism.\n\nIf you inject some air into a vein, it will be pumped along with the blood to the lungs, and it's not usually as dangerous as the alternative (although it can kill you, so once again, don't do it). The alternative being an arterial gas embolism. The air bubble can simply get trapped in an artery, and stop all blood flow beyond that point. If that happens in your femoral artery, your circulation will be weakened or cut off (ischemia) in your entire leg, and unless treated very quickly, your leg is probably going to die. I'll let you imagine if the carotid arteries going to your brain get blocked...\n\nIt would take a bigger bubble than an accident with a needle is probable to cause in order to block up these large arteries, or the heart directly, but even small embolisms can be quite nasty. so \"how large\" in measured in millilitres\n\nThe tricky thing about the vascular system is that it goes everywhere, so even injected intramuscularly, the air bubble can block off circulation locally, or get swiped away through blood vessels and clog up some other place."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[
"http://www.darwinawards.com/"
]
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|
|
5kxyj3 | why is cutting a sheet of paper a good test for the quality of a knife? | Whenever I see a video detailing the quality of a knife, one of the standard "go-to" tests is cutting a single sheet of paper. To me, a knife would be more impressive if it cut through a much harder material than paper. Is there a reason that the paper test is a good indicator of knife quality?
EDIT: Grammar | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kxyj3/eli5_why_is_cutting_a_sheet_of_paper_a_good_test/ | {
"a_id": [
"dbrf8yz"
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"text": [
"It's not a measure of the quality but rather the sharpness. Paper is pretty flimsy and so when a dull knife is put to the edge it just flops over and doesn't get cut. However when a really sharp knife is put to the edge it immediately starts to slice so the paper don't flop over. "
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
2lv1kc | what really goes on during nuclear peace talks? | As I look at the picture in [this article](_URL_0_), I am left with the pressing questions of what it must be like to be in the room. What gets discussed? Are these people prepared enough to talk about it? What else gets brought up? Is it awkward? Is it effective?
| explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2lv1kc/eli5_what_really_goes_on_during_nuclear_peace/ | {
"a_id": [
"clyfi3j"
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"text": [
"The central problem of nuclear disarmament talks is figuring out how to make an agreement that can be verified and enforced so that one (or both) sides do not cheat. It is understood that all nations are capable of deceit in the never ending maneuver for power on the world stage. Most nations would be more than happy to figure out a way to become the world's only nuclear power, at which point they would have an amazing ability to dictate terms to other nations. At the same time, nations also understand that nuclear proliferation has made the world an extremely dangerous place for everyone, and we would all be much safer if nuclear weapons could be eliminated or at least reduced. So that is the challenge of such talks. I believe that most negotiators are entering into these talks with good intentions. But diplomats are answerable to assorted Presidents, Premiers, Prime Ministers, and other rulers whose intentions are often not as good. So it is tricky."
]
} | []
| [
"http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/11/10/us-iran-nuclear-talks-idUSKCN0IU0KO20141110?feedType=RSS&feedName=wtMostRead"
]
| [
[]
]
|
|
2ugcjg | why is most football played in the winter? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2ugcjg/eli5_why_is_most_football_played_in_the_winter/ | {
"a_id": [
"co84xoy"
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"score": [
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"text": [
"It is mostly played in the Fall. College and High School start in August. NFL in September. 90% of all games are done by December first. The remaining ones are just more high profile. "
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
||
408r6n | how can the lottery be a tax on "stupid" or "poor" when it only costs $1? | I find $1 in change in my dirty pants pocket or my couch. Might as well put it towards the ability to win millions, even if the government tax the winnings. What am I missing? I get odds and chances, but for a dollar, seems worth it. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/408r6n/eli5_how_can_the_lottery_be_a_tax_on_stupid_or/ | {
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"text": [
"Hang around the corner store for an hour or so and you'll see at least one person blow 50+ dollars on the lotto. ",
"Because they keep on buying tickets, its not a one time purchase. Especially when they have the mindset \"if I keep playing eventually my turn will come up\"",
"You'd be better off putting the 1$ into a jar and using it to make small purchases; the odds of the lottery getting you any profit long-term are nearly 0.\n\nIf you want to turn some money into a lot more money relatively quickly you should look into high-risk high-reward investments. The lottery, by design, is a bad bet.",
"The Powerball, which is the one in the news this week, is actually $2. But the issue isn't the large number of people playing now but who rarely play at other times.\n\nThe issue is the large number of poorer people who play regularly. Not everyone, and maybe not even a majority (I don't know any authoritative numbers), but certainly there's the reputation that many people who bet on the lottery regularly are not particularly well off, and who don't understand the statistics nor the power of long term investment. ",
"You do know people are allowed to buy more than one lottery ticket, right? \n\nIf you spend a dollar a week just for funsies, yeah, that's not a big deal.\n\nSome people spend $100 a week on the lottery instead of using that money to improve their situation. That's a problem."
]
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ajxrl9 | how does c-4 work | It looks just like a thing if clay with a device that sends an electrical signal through but there’s gotta more to it, right? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/ajxrl9/eli5_how_does_c4_work/ | {
"a_id": [
"eeznm0a",
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"text": [
"The \"clay\" is a mixture of plasticizer and explosives. This gives it the ability to be formed around an object. The device that you see in it doesn't send an electrical pulse, it's actually a smaller explosive. C4 by itself is actuall pretty stable. You can throw it, you can stomp on it, you can even set fire to it and it'll just burn. It takes a sharp blast to set it off and that's what the wired device is. \n\n & #x200B;\n\nYou send a pulse to the blasting cap, it goes off, and that shock is what sets the C4 main charge off.",
"C4, or plastique explosives was developed during WW2, by the British. They referred to it as RDX, or Research Development Explosives and it’s use became quite apparent when plasticizer was introduced, it was as a pliable multi use explosive. \n\nAs seen on many war movies, it’s pressed on, slapped on or applied in some fashion and fused with the appropriate initiator and boom! It’s generally issued in a military green cellophane wrapper and weighed approximately 2.2 pounds. In Vietnam this stuff was used to stump trees, breach walls and make landing areas, LZ’s. My favorite use was taking my K-bar and cutting a piece about the size of a sugar cube and ignite it to heat my C-rats and coffee. I wouldn’t recommend this to the untrained, because as it burns, it becomes unstable and potentially could detonate. C-4, like any high explosive requires an initiator that can bring the appropriate shock wave. Usually a electric or non electric blasting cap or detonating cord (det-cord) "
]
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[],
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3v6n0w | - why is it summer in australia and winter/fall in north america | I know it has something to do with the earths axis, but I can't seem to get my head around it . Explain how the different seasons work in the different hemispheres .
Explained: thanks for all the awesome reponses. I feel like I learned something !!!
| explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3v6n0w/eli5_why_is_it_summer_in_australia_and_winterfall/ | {
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"text": [
"I'm sure someone could give a better answer. The ELI5 answer is it has to do with earths tilt and axis as its orbiting the sun. During the Northern hemisphere is more exposed to the sun. During the Southern hemispheres summer it is more exposed to the sun. Perhaps [this](_URL_0_) image will help.",
"Draw a line from the North Pole to the South Pole and then imagine this line is a stick. Now imagine holding this stick up next to the sun. If you hold the stick right next to the sun, one side of it will get lots of sunshine, and the other will get none. \n\nNow if you slowly move the stick away from the sun, it will get less and less sunshine. This is because the sunshine radiates out in all directions from the sun. When the stick is really close, even the sunshine that is coming out at an angle relative to stick still hits it. As you move the stick farther away, more of the sunshine misses the stick. \n\nNow if you tilt the stick to the side, so the bottom is closer to the sun and the top is farther away, the bottom gets a little bit more sunshine than the top does. \n\nThe Earth is tilted like this and the small tilt accounts for the temp differences between the Norther and Southern Hemispheres. As the Earth revolves around the sun, the tilt stays the same so eventually the Northern Hemisphere is closer and the Southern Hemisphere is farther away. ",
"Pretend you and your friend are cold and there's a fire in your fireplace...but there's only one chair close to the fire. The other chair is on the other side of the room and nailed to the floor.\n\nYou sit near the fire first while your friend is in the back of the room. After you get warm y'all swap. You go to the back of the room while your friend warms near the fire. Y'all continue doing this for the rest of the night.\n\nThis is what the tilt of the earth's axis does. It only allows one hemisphere (northern or southern) to be nearer the sun. In June, July, and August the northern hemisphere is closer to the sun. In December, January, and February the southern hemisphere is closer, and therefore warmer.\n\n*EDIT: Also, at the time the hemisphere is closer to the sun it is getting a more direct hit from the sun's rays while the other hemisphere is getting a more angled hit from the rays...spreading their energy over a larger area.",
"Let's do an experiment here. Of course you don't have to actually do it, just imagine how you would do it.\n\nTake an orange or other similar round object. Stick it with a skewer, going across the whole fruit. Now mark a given point on the surface with a marker, a knife, anything that allows you to distinguish that point. Make it relatively close to where the skewer exits the fruit (less than half an inch or so).\n\nNow, hold the skewer, extend your arm and start rotating the orange around the skewer. Just turn it, just rotate it, watch the red dot go around.\n\nNow, notice how I didn't tell you what direction the skewer should be pointing as you rotate it. If you're like me, you're likely holding it with the tip pointing towards the ceiling. This is where the Earth axis thing comes into play.\n\nThe orange, of course, is the Earth; the skewer is its rotation axis; the red dot you made is wherever you happen to live. Your head plays the role of the Sun; so, the half of the orange that you can see corresponds to the part of the Earth that is having daylight at that time, and it is the night time in the parts you cannot see.\n\nIf you're pointing the tip of the skewer straight towards the ceiling, that's not how the Earth's axis actually works; you'd have to tilt the skewer. For example, let's say you're now pointing the tip of the skewer to the wall right above the door of the room. If you spin the skewer again, the red dot (assuming it is close to the tip of the skewer which is now facing away from you) will be less visible than it was before. If it is too close, you might not even see it at all while you're rotating the orange. The fact that you don't see the red dot a lot means it is winter where it is.\n\nNow here is the trick: if you start spinning your own body, while remaining in the same location, you'll be simulating the Earth's movement around the Sun. Keep your hand extended and rotating the orange; while you do it, start changing the direction you're facing. Let's say first you were facing the door; every time you spin is one year (same as every time you rotate the orange is one day). Now, stop with your back to the door.\n\nThe tip of the skewer is now probably facing *away* from the door. But, in real life, your hand isn't there; in real life, the Earth's axis keeps pointing to the *same* direction along the year. It always faces the direction we're using the door to represent here.\n\nSo, now you'd have to move the skewer so that the tip is pointing more towards you (and the door, since your head is now between the skewer and the door). Now, if you rotate the orange, you'll notice you see the red dot much more often than before. In fact, if it is close enough to where the skewer exits the orange, or if you tilt the skewer enough, you're able to see it the whole time. The fact that you are seeing it more often means it's summer where the red dot is on Earth - your face is the Sun, and the red dot is getting much more sunlight, right?\n\nSo, this is basically it: because of physics, it is as if there was a huge skewer stuck across the Earth. It enters the planet on the South Pole and exits at the North Pole - in fact, this is the very reason why those points are the poles, because they are where the Earth's axis of rotation touches the planet's surface. The Equator is the line which is at the same distance from both poles.\n\nNow, we tilted the skewer, it was pointing straight up but we moved it so it pointed to a point above the door, right? The Earth's axis is also inclined from a direction straight up. It is easier to think of this inclination as happening between the Equator (the bulge of the orange, the furthest from where you stuck the skewer and from where it came out) and the plane of the Earth's orbit. In our example, the orbital plane (called the *ecliptic*) means the height of your extended hand; you probably weren't holding the orange way high when it was close to the door and near the flood when it was facing the window, but rather you probably held it at about eye height or a bit lower. So this plane where the orange rotates is the ecliptic, and it is inclined with respect to the Equator; but the direction where the North Pole points (which is the Pole Star) remains constant throughout the year.\n\nSo, when you're facing the door, the red dot doesn't get as much sunlight, so it is winter; when you're back is towards the door, the red dot gets as much sunlight as possible, so it's summer. During spring and fall, the skewer isn't pointing either towards you or away from you - it sort of points sideways - so the red dot gets an intermediate amount of sunlight.\n\nPhew, this was much longer than I thought it would be!"
]
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| []
| [
[
"http://c.tadst.com/gfx/600x400/earth-seasons.png?1"
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5kuj56 | why do smaller animals tend act more tough than larger animals? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5kuj56/eli5_why_do_smaller_animals_tend_act_more_tough/ | {
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"text": [
"it could be because theyre typically prey (given their size) so instinctively they need to be ready to defend themelves. this also would explain other behaviors such a quickness, hiding, and any behavior that makes them look menacing (such as puffing out fur/feathers)"
]
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| []
| [
[]
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|
||
23zrw4 | what happens when i see something that makes my spine tingle? | For example, if I see a dead body, or rea an inspirational quote, or look a someone I love... What's happening? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/23zrw4/eli5_what_happens_when_i_see_something_that_makes/ | {
"a_id": [
"ch27qng"
],
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"text": [
"I don't know what's happening, but you'd enjoy /r/frisson."
]
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|
69gef5 | how can i use public wi-fi safely? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/69gef5/eli5how_can_i_use_public_wifi_safely/ | {
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"text": [
"Use a VPN to encrypt and secure your internet traffic. I use Private Internet Access which seems to work well. Their apps for mobile devices are pretty good too. \n\nAlso make sure you have turned off sharing on your computer, turn off network discovery and file sharing if not done by default, to stop people on the local network seeing any of your file shares they may be able to access."
]
} | []
| []
| [
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|
||
5ay0ok | - why does hollywood keep churning out terrible sequels and remakes, that no one likes or asked for? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5ay0ok/eli5_why_does_hollywood_keep_churning_out/ | {
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"\nBecause people keep watching them. \n\nSequels have a built-in fanbase. Fans of the first movie will probably see the second movie, even if it gets bad reviews (which all of them don't necessarily). \n\nHollywood movies cost like 100+ million dollars to make. That's a big investment. The best way to make people confident in that investment is to show them that 50 million people went to see the first movie, and that research shows 50 or 75% of people who saw #1 are gonna see #2, that's a pretty damn convincing story. \n\nAny time $100 Million or more is on the line, investors are going to lean *heavily* toward the safe, predictable option. New IPs, new stories that push boundaries are never safe or predictable. Great movies flop in the box office all the time.",
"Because they make money. Despite the fact that everyone knows that sequels and remakes are of lesser quality, they still go out and watch them because they want to catch some of the enjoyment of watching the originals.",
"Somebody's watching them, and as long as a movie franchise continues to be profitable, studios will keep making sequels.\n\nIt was mentioned before, but spending millions to make a movie is a big risk and studios aren't really interested in making innovative, groundbreaking movies as much as they are interested in making money. They might set some money aside for a movie that could be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar or a small budget movie that might turn a profit and get film critics talking, but the blockbuster sequels and remakes are the movies that make the money to fund the small films.",
"One thing to keep in mind is that Hollywood producers have to decide to throw millions of dollars of their hard earned money on what basically amounts to a 5 minute elevator pitch for a movie or maybe a whole script if they're lucky. It's not like they get to see a whole finished product of a film and say, \"hmmm that looks good, let's make that.\" They practically have to blindly put their money into something with no real way of measure how successful they'll be. So, with that in mind it makes sense that they try to stay as close to a sure thing as they can get, and sequels and remakes are sure things, they might not make as much money as the original but you generally know what sort of financial return to expect.",
"A good website reference for a question like this is _URL_0_\n\nIt's like when people ask how Adam Sandler gets to keep making movies. Up until recently, he's been a money factory.\n\nYou have a hypothesis that Hollywood doesn't have a good reason to make X sequel. We'll take a recent one that is still in theaters: Jack Reacher 2.\n\nThe first one was reviewed fairly well (62% rotten tomatoes). It had a production budget of $60m, and made $218m worldwide box office.\n\nThe second one in theaters now has been reviewed poorly (37% rotten tomatoes). It had a production budget of $60m, and so far has brought in $97m worldwide box office. It's not the hit the first one was, but it's not a bomb (money-wise) at this point. They'll probably stop making them, but they had to try based on the take from the previous Jack Reacher film.",
" > Terminator 2: Judgment Day: 200 million\n\n > Tron: Legacy: 170 million\n\n > Rambo: First Blood Part II: 150 million\n\n > Pitch Perfect 2: 180 million\n\n > Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me: 200 million\n\n > Bad Boys II: 140 million\n\n > The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge Out of Water: 150 million\n\n > The Matrix Reloaded: 280 million\n\n > Rush Hour 2: 225 million\n\n > Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues 130 million\n\n > Despicable Me 2: 370 million\n\n > Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: 425 million\n\n > The Karate Kid, Part II: 115 million\n\n > Hannibal: 165 million\n\n > Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen: 400 million\n\n > Mission: Impossible 2: 215 million\n\n > Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: 210 million\n\n > Ice Age: The Meltdown: 200 million\n\n > Aliens: 85 million\n\n > Monsters University: 270 million\n\n > Scary Movie 3: 115 million\n\n > Rocky III: 125 million\n\n > Iron Man 3: 400 million\n\n > Paranormal Activity 3: 100 million\n\n > X-Men: The Last Stand: 235 million\n\n > Jurassic World: 600 million\n\n > Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: 300 million\n\n > Fast & Furious: 155 million\n\n > Rocky IV: 115 million\n\n\nI just can't think of a single reason why they would continue to make sequels.\n\nHollywood makes great sequels, and terrible ones. They make great original screenplays, and terrible ones.\n\nI'm not entirely convinced that sequels are by and large worse than original screen plays in terms of ratings. We probably just have a bias towards remembering them more because we either liked the original and they ruined it, or we hated the original and we are baffled there was another movie made."
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j62e4 | explain yawns like im 5.... | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j62e4/explain_yawns_like_im_5/ | {
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"This may be more like ELI11 but I'll give it a shot.\n\nA yawn is essentially breathing in a lot of air and breathing out that air all in sequential motion. It also stretches your ear drums, which is why yawning sometimes causes them to pop. \n\nWhy we yawn? Well...No one is really sure. There are a lot of theories but none of them have been confirmed. \n\nSome people think that we yawn because we need air so we take in that deep breath, although this has been disproven as yawning actually lowers the air in our bodies. \n\nAnother reason is that a yawn may signal that you need to stretch your muscles. I'm not entirely sure on the reasoning behind this one but I recall reading something about how yawning increases your alertness, thus following with the whole contagious yawn. Meaning that a yawn is a signal to others (as well as yourself) that you should be alert and stretch your muscles. \n\nI recall that some people believe it might control the temperature of the brain but for that one I have no explanation what so ever.",
"This may be more like ELI11 but I'll give it a shot.\n\nA yawn is essentially breathing in a lot of air and breathing out that air all in sequential motion. It also stretches your ear drums, which is why yawning sometimes causes them to pop. \n\nWhy we yawn? Well...No one is really sure. There are a lot of theories but none of them have been confirmed. \n\nSome people think that we yawn because we need air so we take in that deep breath, although this has been disproven as yawning actually lowers the air in our bodies. \n\nAnother reason is that a yawn may signal that you need to stretch your muscles. I'm not entirely sure on the reasoning behind this one but I recall reading something about how yawning increases your alertness, thus following with the whole contagious yawn. Meaning that a yawn is a signal to others (as well as yourself) that you should be alert and stretch your muscles. \n\nI recall that some people believe it might control the temperature of the brain but for that one I have no explanation what so ever."
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3c02g6 | who the heck is victoria? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3c02g6/eli5_who_the_heck_is_victoria/ | {
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"This is a better question for /r/outoftheloop. [This is on their front page, it's got everything you want to know](_URL_0_). "
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"https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_was_riama_along_with_a_number_of_other_large/"
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3br9tx | why does mcdonald's receive so much more criticism than, say, coca cola or other sweet beverage providers, whose products are just as unhealthy? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3br9tx/eli5_why_does_mcdonalds_receive_so_much_more/ | {
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"Honestly, I feel that Coca-Cola gets a lot of criticism, too. How many times have you seen \"You can clean your toilet with a can of Coke, why are you drinking this?\" or \"I left a tooth in a can of Coke overnight, and you won't believe what happened!\" on a Facebook feed?\n\nBut yeah, as others have said, McDonald's is such a cultural icon, it becomes the poster child for everything wrong with fast or processed food. You don't often see that kind of criticism of Burger King or Taco Bell, though their food is arguably just as bad for you, because McDonald's is just so damn big.",
"Low hanging fruit. It's easy to pick on the big/popular people/groups (USA, Google, NATO, China, that bitch Stacy from Biology). \n\nThey aren't saints, but they are just a restaurant trying to bring us the cheapest fastest crap that we're willing to buy. They're very good at it. We're generally good at eating it. They're certainly no different than Wendy's, TBell, and Jack in the box, etc...\n\nPeople are need to realize that they are responsible for the crap they put in their bodies. They are responsible for teaching their kids to be responsible. Personal responsibility seems to be at an all-time low in this country.",
"I dislike them because of how they gear their marketing towards children. It's almost like brainwashing, and altogether disturbing to see a clown and toys being used to sell junk food disguised as a meal."
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59v6ja | how do heat shields used to reenter the earth's atmosphere work? | Following up on my question about reentering the Earth's atmosphere.
_URL_0_ | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/59v6ja/eli5_how_do_heat_shields_used_to_reenter_the/ | {
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"The heat shield needs to do two things. First, it needs to isolate the shield from the rest of the craft and not conduct very much heat into the craft it is protecting. Second it needs to survive the heat itself without failing. To do the second they are usually made of very heat-resistant materials such as ceramic, and are designed to ablate in order to shed excess heat. The heat shield is a consumable which can be replaced every launch.",
"There are three primary kinds of a Thermal Protection System. The Shuttle relied on silica tiles with the lead elements of the wings reinforced with carbon reinforced-carbon plates; this system was simply very resistant to temperature, and kept the heat from transferring to the airframe.\n\nHowever, it is often more efficient, mass-wise, to have a material that is gradually vapourized and carries away heat as it does (i.e. ablates). Hence its widespread use in non-winged entry vehicles, which frequently drop the heat shield once it's done its job.\n\nThe last version would require an onboard coolant to be actively run through the TPS, and has never been used.",
"Reentry heat is created because the air in front of the spacecraft is compressed, and thus heats up. If this air transfers it's heat to the spacecraft, it too warms up, which is bad for the things inside.\n\nThere are various ways to deal with this.\n\nAblative heatshielding will evaporate and release gasses when heated. These gasses then push the hot gasses away from the rest of the spacecraft.\n\nA thermal soak heatshield merely absorbs the heat, and transmits is very slowly to the spacecraft. Sometimes, the heat shielding is removed via explosive bolts or another detachment mechanism, before it can transmit it's heat."
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16xupb | why is the high amount of weight i lose in the first couple weeks of a diet/workout plan "mostly water weight"? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/16xupb/eli5_why_is_the_high_amount_of_weight_i_lose_in/ | {
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" First off your muscles need something called glycogen for energy. So your muscles store glycogen and the necessary amount of water to use the glycogen, water breaks down glycogen in a chemical reaction but your 5 and I'll spare the details. Now when you start a diet you eat less food than what you normally need to create something called a \"calorie deficit.\" What happens is your muscles use up the glycogen in your muscles, and your out of energy for the time being until your body can make more energy from fat in a process called \"Ketosis.\"\n Now since your body doesn't have the glycogen it just burned from the lack of energy your body releases the water that was needed to use the glycogen. Your body holds about 2.7 grams of water to every 1 gram of glycogen, so as you can imagine your body releases a lot of water.\n As a wrestler I've seen friends who can \"cut\" or rapidly lose about 4 or 5 pounds of weight in a day. Even if your on a diet you need to be aware of dehydration and keep drinking water. On a workout plan you can lose a lot of sweat from excessive cardio which is how wrestlers can \"cut\" pounds a day, but these are not permanent losses as eventually the body needs to re hydrate itself and will gain the weight back."
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43tai9 | how does libertarianism come to terms with monopolies and polution | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/43tai9/eli5_how_does_libertarianism_come_to_terms_with/ | {
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"Poorly. The idea that one company could pollute the environment and harm everyone else indirectly is something that Libertarianism isn't really prepared to deal with. Ideally, companies that pollute would be boycotted by consumers, and thus the market would apply pressure towards companies to behave in a reasonable manner. In reality though, a large enough company wouldn't be able to be damaged in such a fashion, and thus get away with it.",
"Ok, I'm no libertarian, but I've see two camps of thought for pollution:\n\n1) The citizen's sue the polluter for violating their well-being. This runs into some obvious problems with the longevity of pollution, the non-immediate effects, proving who caused the pollution, and all those details.\n\n2) Anyone who does anything to piss off anyone else has to worry about them hiring a hitman. Which will somehow keep everyone nice. \n\nAs for Monopolies, nearly every libertarian I've talked to has claimed that the free market will keep monopolies from developing and that all instances of monopolistic behavior in the past was just and example of government interference. ",
"In libertarian views, \"you have go pay to dirty my shirt.\" This was Milton Friedman's reply to fossil fuels. He believed in a tax. \n\nIf we had implemented a tax back then, we could have avoided CAFE, the pinto, 'light trucks', and other nonsense.\n\nFriedman pointed out that market monopolies aren't stable. If the government gives one person access to a natural resource, that is a designated monopoly. Telephony was a monopoly. Etc.\n\nPeople were worried Sears and Kmart might merge back in the late 70s turning their oligopoly into a monopoly. Look where those companies are now.\n\nUnless a company's monopoly power is by power of the government, there is really nothing to worry about.",
"Libertarians don't believe in no government. They just think it has limited and specified roles. I don't see any particular reason to think that environmental regulation couldn't be one of them.",
"This isn't really libertariansism, but it is based on laissez faire economics, which is a big part of libertariansism.\n\nMonopolies: There are two kinds of monopolies. There are natural monopolies and unnatural ones. Natural monopolies are ones that form because it doesn't make any financial sense to have two companies. In your city, there is one water company. It doesn't make sense for two or more companies to dig entire plumbing networks underground. This is fine in the libertarian mindset. On the other hand, there are unnatural monopolies. Thats when I open a store and bribe the government into closing down competing stores. That isn't acceptable.\n\nPollution: There is a concept in economics called an externality. If I sell you a tree, you pay me $10. But say the tree increases society's quality of life by producing extra oxygen and reducing CO2 in the atmosphere. The government would pay extra to support trees because there is an extra benefit that isn't being paid for in the $10. You'll pay $9, and the government would pay me an extra $1.\n\nOn the other hand, there are negative externalities. Say a fracking company makes $100/barrel of oil. But they cause $10 of environmental damage. The fracking company has to pay the government $10 to cover the cost bring the total cost to $110.\n\nDealing with positive and negatives externalities are the only circumstances where laissez faire economists (and libertarians) tend to support subsidies and taxation. Otherwise, they feel like most taxes and subsidies are just ways for government officials to steal from people or waste money on inefficient programs."
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88to5v | what's the difference between a "game designer" and a "game programmer" | I know there is a lot of people who aspire to make video games (myself included), however I did look up jobs and two popped out to me. Senior Game Designer and Senior Game Programmer, I was always under the impression that the person who did the coding also decided mechanics.
I would assume that Game Developer is for those who would want to be in the creative process, likely being in the board room discussing ideas and work flow while the game programmer is the one getting it done. Both having their merits. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/88to5v/eli5_whats_the_difference_between_a_game_designer/ | {
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"A designer decides on game mechanics, creates levels, balances gameplay related values and many other things depending on the type of game.\n\nA programmer is the one that actually makes the game *do* that stuff, or at least creates the tools and systems that allow designers to do it themselves.\n\nThere can be a bit of overlap though. \n\nA gameplay programmer will probably make some decisions about some of the fine details of the gameplay, but in general will program it to the designer's specification.\n\nAnd sometimes game designers might do a bit of basic programming, which would typically be referred to as scripting. This might involve using a simple programming language like Lua, or a visual scripting system where you create game logic by connecting boxes together in a graph. This would be done within a sandbox created by programmers, so it's really a way of piecing together functionality that they have provided.\n\nIn a small indie studio you might get people who both design and program, but bigger studios would usually keep them as separate disciplines.\n\nA game developer is anyone involved in the development of a game. So that includes designers, programmers, artists and possibly other roles. Although I think some companies define a \"developer\" as just programmers.",
"Game designers spend more of their time focused on the overall user experience. They plan features and designs, tweak until things feel right, and so on. Some designers will plan out huge swaths of a game, and others will be focused on individual things such as features, levels, UI, or so on.\n\nGame programmers spend more of their time focused on implementation and tools. They write code, fix bugs reported by other teams, and so on. Some programmers work on rendering engines, or gameplay scripting, or other things entirely.\n\nOn a very small team, you may find individual people filling multiple roles, so it's likely that a programmer will have some design + art input. On a bigger team, especially a team with 100+ workers, people are more likely to have specifically defined roles.\n\nIf you're just now getting interested in game development, you can learn the basics of both roles and see what appeals to you.",
"game designer: we should make the game in a ring world where you can see the other side of the world just by looking up.\n\ngame programmer: if (player.viewport.azimuth > 60) player.viewport.blend(world.mirror()) "
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5jqdbt | how do f2p (free to play) games make money? | League of Legends makes $150 million a month. DOTA 2 comes in second at $23.4 million. For games that are free-to-play, where is all the revenue coming from? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5jqdbt/eli5_how_do_f2p_free_to_play_games_make_money/ | {
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"Micro transactions. The game might be free to play, but lots of people will happily pay for in-game items or perks that will give them an edge over everyone else. Also known as Pay to Win.",
"Look at the amount of stuff League of Legends or Dota2 (on the steam marketplace) sells. Now, this sort of stuff took some money to create, for artist, programmers, QA and so forth. But once that thing is created, you can reproduce it for free.\n\nSelling it to 1 person, or 100.000 is in practical terms the same amount of income. Once enough people bought a specific item, the cost of developement are amortized. At that point each sale is almost all revenue. You only have to pay some money for the money transaction (handling creditcards yourself or having a 3rd party do that for you), and after that, all that is left is money for the company. \n\nPure revenue.\n\nThere is is nobody having to sell you the item, there is no physical shelf space which must be rented, there is no material cost, there is no production cost, there is no shipping cost... in practical terms.\n\nSure you have to pay for the server infrastructur, but those are mainly there for the players to come into your game and play the game. Those can mostly be compared to marketing cost, as the game markets your cosmetics.\n\nThe actual cost for the items may be a cent for every so hundredthousands of transactions.\n\nWith such a huge profit margin per item, you can earn some pretty crazy amounts of money.",
"By selling various items in-game that can be of various types:\n\n- Cosmetic items. New skins and such for characters/weapons/etc. This is where LoL makes money.\n\n- Faster progress for a set amount of time. i.e. +50% experience in World of Tanks, plus 100% experience in War Thunder.\n\n- Faster progress for some amount of progress, such as buying card packs or adventures in Hearthstone.\n\n- Different items that cannot be unlocked through free gameplay, i.e. unique planes and tanks in those same two games that are otherwise impossible to have.\n\n- Parts of gameplay that are locked unless you pay for them, such as in Knights of the Old Republic. The game is free for a very large portion of the game, but the most recent storylines have to be bought to be playable.\n\n- Access to Closed beta for new parts of the game can be sold for money as well.\n\n- Quality of Life improvements are another thing that some games sell, such as much bigger inventory space for instance.\n\n- Donations, such as Dwarf Fortress.\n\nIn essence the game can be played for free, you download it and there you go. But there are then various things in-game that you can pay for if you want to.",
"F2P games make there money by things such as ads, micro-transactions, or by premium memberships, which would left you skip the ads and stuff."
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8h3hkr | how do studios hire babies for movies? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8h3hkr/eli5_how_do_studios_hire_babies_for_movies/ | {
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"The same way they hire other actors. Their are agencies that represent child actors exclusively, and that includes very young children."
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cb78z3 | why do some countries use second-level domain country codes (._url_1_ or ._url_0_) and others do not? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/cb78z3/eli5_why_do_some_countries_use_secondlevel_domain/ | {
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"TLDR: The DNS is a total mess where none of the established rules really matter.\n\nBack in the days when DNS was brand new some nations decided that it would be a good idea to use second-level domains to have their own versions of .com, .net, and .org\n\n._URL_1_ is supposed to mean a commercial business in the UK\n\nWhile other countries like Canada adopted second level domains to refer the provinces\n\n._URL_0_ New Brunswick . Canada\n\nThis implementation was up to the various nations, and since it was a new technology they just kinda ran with it.\n\nHowever in the real world people soon abandoned these standards because they weren't enforced. Web developers and companies used different top-level domains as marketing gimmicks instead of what they actually stood for.\n\nCanada for instance rarely uses the provincial domains anymore. While companies are using Domains belonging to the island chain of Tuvalu .tv and claiming it means television when it doesn't.\n\nWhile other companies bought up every of .org, .net, and .com domains that were even remotely close to their company name just to prevent other companies from using them.\n\nKnowing this kind of thing drives my OCD mad.",
"Real answer? Be because each country can decided to use and divide their top level domain code however they want.\n\n\nOriginally, there were only 7 top level domain suffixes - .com, .edu, .org, .net, .gov, .mil, and .int\n\nAfter the forecasted success and exponential growth of the internet, the TLDs were expanded to include the ISO two letter country code for every country, and delegated ownership to those countries (or some appointed representative organization for that country).\n\nSo, really, ._URL_1_ exists because that's what the UK wanted to use, and ._URL_0_ exists because that's how Canada wanted to use their TLD."
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j2wrk | can someone explain to me (li5) how insurance companies could ever catch you committing fraudulent claims? | Specifically, I have renter's insurance which includes my laptop. They claim that I would be reimbursed for damages, even for something like spilling a beer on my computer. Is there anything (besides ethics) to stop me from "accidentally" spilling something on my computer and receiving my payout? Also, this of course applies to a larger scale, like kicking over my motorcycle or anything of that nature. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/j2wrk/can_someone_explain_to_me_li5_how_insurance/ | {
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"In the case of the laptop hypothetical you posed, there isn't much they can do to prove fraud (although I might poke around for evidence someone did their first cloud backup ever a day or two before the accident). But then again, what have you gained? Insurance companies are protected by two things in this case: your deductible (probably $500) and the fact that you're out a laptop after all is said and done. Sure, you can destroy a $700 laptop to get $200 in post-deductible money. But you still gotta go replace your laptop. Net lose.\n\nIn areas where deductibles aren't high enough to remove the incentive for fraud, insurance companies tend to conduct more serious investigations. Car accidents, medical insurance claims and something like your home burning down will have the insurance company putting serious time into investigating your case if there's even a hint of suspicion."
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3dl3i9 | why are for-profit universities so lousy? | To be clear, my question isn't *how* they're bad. I've seen reports on how virtually all for-profit universities charge massive amounts for useless degrees. My question is what causes this to be a near-universal rule. In the majority of situations (at least those without a monopoly), capitalism generates competition and thus encourages the best to succeed. Why isn't that the case here? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3dl3i9/eli5why_are_forprofit_universities_so_lousy/ | {
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"Market forces don't really work well when the consumers of the product are unable to tell whether it is a good deal or not. Most people who attend poorly-performing for-profit colleges are under-informed about the quality of the product they are buying. Many are attending using credit which makes people less vigilant about ensuring it is being spent wisely.\n\nThese are people who are drawn in by a sales pitch which says that they will improve their skills in a short period of time, but once they get there, if they realize they are being duped, they have already accumulated so much debt that they often just plow through to the end in order to have something to show for it.",
"* They typically force the students to rely on federal grants/loans to pay for their tuition.\n* Tuition rates are usually at or above private college levels\n* Want to change majors? Even within the same discipline? You most likely can't.\n* Want to transfer your credits to a different university? There's usually no equivalent so all of those classes are essentially worthless.\n* Depending on your degree you are seeking: sub-par experience versus their public state college equivalent. \n* The recruiters are usually forced beyond reason to recruit any and every student (whether they are financially able to or not) and usually have a \"quota\" to keep their job.\n\nJust a few examples that I can think of at the moment. "
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28huyv | why are car models only manufactured for one year, and then discontinued? why aren't older car designs still being produced, given that people will pay ridiculous amounts to restore a classic car? | For instance, restored classic cars can be sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars, but do car manufacturers even see any of that money?
People love the appearances to the point that they will drive a car with expensive and hard to replace parts that are decades old. So why not produce cars in the same style, but with modern parts, since there is definitely a demand. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/28huyv/eli5_why_are_car_models_only_manufactured_for_one/ | {
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"because of innovation, those old classic cars aren't as safe or cost efficient to run. They would also lose a lot of value if you could just go out and buy one right now. "
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2pr2pb | where do massive companies such as samsung, apple, and walmart keep all their millions/billions of dollars? in one big bank account, multiple, or invested in assorted holdings? | And when we see massive sales such as Facebook buying WhatsApp for 16 billion or Google buying Motorola (since sold though) for 13.5 billion, how is that money transferred? One big check from one big account, or a transfer of shares of an equivalent amount, or a mixture of both? What banks do these massive companies commonly use? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/2pr2pb/eli5_where_do_massive_companies_such_as_samsung/ | {
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"This is a super-simplistic answer to a very complex topic.\n\nLarge banks and financial services firms have departments that cater to cash management for corporations. Basically, the money that shows up on company's balance sheets as \"cash\" is held in a variety of ways, primarily demand deposit accounts (checking) and \"the money markets\" (which is just a way to say very safe bonds of highly-rated governments, agencies, and corporations that are about to be repaid in 30 days or less so there is little risk of loss). Also, a lot of this money is held overseas. Accounting rules govern what you can invest in and still call it \"cash\". \n\nBig corporations have a treasury management division of their finance division that tracks all of the cash in and out, invests the money and redeems investments as needed, and makes sure enough cash is available for forecasted needs. Often, they will sell bonds or borrow money for very short terms to smooth out cash flows.\n\nWhen we see huge corporate transactions, often a lot of money does not transfer. While the headline may say $16B, the deal may include a lot of contingent payments and a huge portion is often in stock. As far as the cash, it typically travels in one giant wire transfer from one account to another. The stock is usually authorized by the acquiring company's board, and a bookkeeping entry is made to issue new shares (or spare shares that are just sitting on shelf). \n\nWhat banks do these companies use? The behemoths, mostly. Look at a table of the biggest banks (Bank of America, JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, etc., as well as firms such as Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, Vanguard, PIMCO, etc.)"
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1m0obu | historically, what events have lead to such poor relations between the us and iran? | I've seen posts involving Iran's potential nuclear weapons, but I'm looking for more of a historical, rather than contemporary, perspective. | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1m0obu/eli5_historically_what_events_have_lead_to_such/ | {
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"Iran has historically been mistreated by Western countries (Britain, Russia, and the US to be exact). During the early 20th century, Britain and Russia fought for power and control of Iranian oil and land while the people began to call for nationalizing Iranian resources and having a democratic government. Soon enough, the US wanted in on Iranian resources and the best way to do that was to develop a relationship with the Shah of Iran. The Iranian people overthrew the Shah of Iran and implemented a leader (Mossadegh) who was going to bring democracy to the people and nationalize resources. In 1953, the CIA launched operation AJAX which overthrew Mossadegh and put back the Shah in power(while completely controlling the Shah). This angered the Iranian people because all their progress was reverse. Eventually counterrevolutionaries arose and the Islamic revolution happened(Shah got kicked out, Ayatollah came in). One of the biggest talking points of the Islamic revolution was ridding Iran of Western powers that had tried to control their country and drain the people of their resources (called Gharbzadegi or \"Westoxification\"). The Islamic revolution quickly turned into something that the citizens of Iran didn't want (but that's a whole other story). \n\ntl;dr OIL"
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7h7kao | the concept of "1 hour on this planet is 7 years on earth" in the movie insterstellar. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7h7kao/eli5_the_concept_of_1_hour_on_this_planet_is_7/ | {
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"It's a concept called time dilation. According to Einstein's theory of relativity, time isn't a constant. Time moves at different speeds. Time moves slower when you are effected by gravity (or moving very fast). The more gravity the slower time flows. So if you were very close to a black hole (as the planet in Interstellar), small bits of time there are the same as large amounts of time elsewhere. ",
"Because of Gargantua’s (the black hole the water planet orbits) massive gravitational pull it causes a massive distortion in space-time. This distortion allows for time dilation. Time dilation is a difference in elapsed time measured by two observers either because of velocity or by being differently situated to a gravitational field.",
"Time is relative just like movementon. An ant on a fast moving car is moving slowly relative to the car, but 60mph relative to the ground.\n\nIn high gravity, you move slowly through time relative to earth.\n\n",
"All right, so I've always wanted to be a teacher because I LOVE breaking down things and explaining them, so I ask that OP (/u/Deadwalker123) confirm whether or not my following explanation helped you understand the concept. \n\nImagine you're God and you're sitting in a room with with thousands of TV sets hooked up to VCRs. You have 2 identical copies of the film Interstellar on VHS and pop one into a VCR labeled PG (for Planet by Gargantua) and the other into a VCR labeled PS (for Planet by Sun, i.e. Earth). \n\nNow assume that these VCRs play at different speeds based on the amount of electrical current you feed into each one. \n\nFor instance, if you feed in 100 percent of current, the film's runtime will clock at 3 hours (rounded up for convenience). If run the VCR at 50 percent current, the entire movie will appear to play back in slow-motion, and the runtime will be 6 hours, and at 150 percent of current, the film will appear to be playing in fast-forward, and the runtime will be 1.5 hours. \n\nHere's where it gets interesting. Say the actors in the film are fully conscious, and to them they're just living their lives. They have no idea how much speed their VHS is being played at because if it is only going at half-speed, *everything* is going half speed from their perspective. \n\nPeople are running at half speed, gravity is working at half speed, their very thought processes are going at half speed because molecules, photons, and electric impulses are going at half speed. \n\nBack to our VCRs. PS (planet earth) runs on 100 percent current, and PG runs at 5 percent current. You press play on both PG and PS at the exact same time. In 3 hours the film will have rolled credits on PS but the movie will just be getting started on PG, because PG is running on a fraction of the current. \n\nTo take the example further, let's assume that you (as god) have each planet running on separate VCRs, and this tape playing back in \"realtime\" and recording rather than simply playing back a film. You invite over two friends, Garry, and Sally, to sample some planets you constructed. \n\nGarry hops into PG and Sally hops into PS. You sit down and press play on each and just keep watching. On PS' screen Sally is moving at 100 percent speed exploring town, making friends, dating, getting married having kids, getting old. At the same time, Garry, in PG--which is running on a fraction of the juice, appears to be moving through molasses. In fact, he barely seems to be moving at all. \n\nRight before Sally is about to die of old age in PS, you press STOP on both VCRs and have Garry and Sally hop back out into your office (Actually. Garry hops, Sally needs help because her knees are shot and she has arthritis). Sally is all wrinkled and old, and Garrry has barely aged a day. Thing is, their experience of time was the same in that Garry had no idea he was being played back in slow motion. \n\nDoes that explain it? (If you like and I have more time later, I can try to explain why gravity has this affect on time and our experience it using the same examples) \n "
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4vjutu | why are some genetic abnormalities (like being double jointed) way more common than others (like having six toes)? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4vjutu/eli5_why_are_some_genetic_abnormalities_like/ | {
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"Allele frequency is different depending on the selected trait. Albinism/Melanism are both incredibly rare. Additionally, certain traits are sex-linked (color blindness) or recessive. \n\nIf you look to which genetic differences cause early (pre-mating age) death or prevent mating (due to social stigma/what people find attractive or actually causing an inability to mate), you'll find traits that are similarly rare.\n\nInterestingly enough, polydactyly (six toes/fingers) is a dominant trait, but is incredibly rare in allele frequency and in phenotype (physical expression) as most people usually have the extra digits removed.",
"\"Double jointed\" is a misnomer. It's just a matter of someone having lax ligaments and tendons that allow their joints a greater range of motion than normal. ",
"Several factors can cause a particular DNA mutation to be more likely to occur. For instance, a larger gene is more prone to errors. Genes can be thought of as individual codes that are read. If a gene has a somewhat repetitive code, this can make it easier for a mistake to be made. Also, some mutations are only expressed on a particular sex chromosome. A male, for example, might suffer from a Y-chromosome disorder because he is XY. A female, won't suffer the same disorder since she's XX. Then there are allele frequencies. A particular abnormality might be expressed from a gene that's caused by let's say B gene. Some disorders only need one big B to be expressed so if one parent is bb and the other is BB, their Bb child could suffer the same abnormality. \n\nNatural selection also plays a role. A person with a beneficial abnormality could better their chances of survival and thus be more likely to procreate and pass down that gene. People with more detrimental mutations are less likely to be able to get a chance to pass their genes on to offspring. "
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f8gy46 | how can type 1 diabetes have any hereditary components if having it was a death sentence over 100 ago? | Wouldn't all genetic traces of it had been destroyed prior to the 20th century? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/f8gy46/eli5_how_can_type_1_diabetes_have_any_hereditary/ | {
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"Because people carrying it had complications or died from it AFTER they conceived children.",
"Insulin was only discovered 99 years ago and we’ve only had synthetic “human” insulin for a little over 40 years. Before that, times were a little more difficult",
"Are you familiar with sickle cell anemia? Illnesses with a genetic component don't mean that everybody who has genes that contribute to diabetes will definitely get diabetes. It's not dominant the way that the color of a flower petal is like you learn in school. \n\nSo for example if somebody with type 1 diabetes dies young, their asymptomatic sister might still have kids and the genetics that lead to diabetes if mixed with someone else's recessive traits. \n\nThe sickle cell anemia example is the clearest example I can think of because there are advantages to having Aa genes when aa would cause problems and AA wouldn't give protections against malaria.",
"Type 1 diabetes is a complex genetic disease, it shows up in several genres and can manifest for several combinations.",
"42% of people with type 1 are between 31-60.\n\n_URL_0_",
"Because it's not fully hereditary. Some genes mutation increases the risk but it's not a strict genetic disorder. If you have type 1 diabetes, your children are not doomed to get type 1 diabetes.\n\nWe don't really know why type 1 diabetes happen and how the environment plays a role, but AFAIK there is no \"type 1 diabetes gene\". You have genes that increases the likelihood of getting it, but it's not a fatality.\n\nNow, even if it was fully genetic and fully deadly, it could still not disapear. Duchenne muscular dystrophy is deadly and kills young boys before they hit 20 and by the time they reach 15 they are completely disabled, so very few, if not any, Duchenne myopathy patient ever had children.\n\nYet, the disease remain and is not super rare (1/3500 male birth). Why ? Because the mutations frequencies causing the disease is pretty high. Plus, the mutation occur on the X chromosome and is recessive. Since women have two X chromosomes, they are usually safe from Duchenne (Although girl with duchenne myopathy do exist). And since male only have one x chromosome, if their mother is a carrier of the genetic mutation and transmit the \"bad\" X to her son, her son will get Duchenne.\n\nBut most of the time, the woman will not know that she carries the gene until the kid develop the disease. So you have unaffected carrier of a genetic deadly gene mutation that transmit it to their children who die out without having kids. And since the mutation is fairly common, the number of unaffected carrier stay stable through time."
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1kxv8z | why do airplanes use green camo instead of blue? wouldn't it make more sense, since they would be less visible on sky? | Thanks! | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1kxv8z/eli5_why_do_airplanes_use_green_camo_instead_of/ | {
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"What airplane uses green camo?\n\nThe only reason I could hypothetically see why would be to protect from being destroyed while on the ground. But if pure camo was required then we have camo nets for exactly that situation.",
"I would think camo that helps when its landed would be more valuable than when its in the air...\n\nPlanes can't really sneak around, quite loud, and its radar and tracking planes need to worry about in combat, not so much the naked eye.\n\nAll speculation of course!",
"First, look at the purposes of camouflage on aircraft. In past and present years they had three different goals--disguise the aircraft on the ground, Disguise the aircraft in the air, or a scheme to make it difficult to judge an aircraft's distance away, speed, altitude, etc. Green camo falls into the first category. \n\nGreen camo was common decades ago (WWII for example), In those eras most reconnaissance was still completed by aircraft and bombings were done based on visual recognition--green camo made it difficult to see aircraft on the ground. Keep in mind that many of the airstrips of the time were simple and there weren't many hangers. Modern grey camo is the best choice for aircraft today. We don't see blue sky everyday and grey has been found to be the best choice for all weather conditions. In reality, camo matters far less today in an era of advanced radar, weaponry, and GPS.",
"I'm sure any jets you see painted in camo are painted camo on the top only, and grey underneath, which is the side you see while its airborne.",
"There was not much need to camo a plane in the air, keeping it hidden when it was on the ground vulnerable was much more important.\n\nIn the 2nd world war they did try painting them blue, but due to the way the human eye works this just made them stick out more. Funnily enough, if you want to camo a flying object the best colour is pink, no I don't know why either!",
"An airplane spend most of its time sitting on the ground. While sitting on the ground, it's good to blend in with the surroundings for fear of being bombed or strafed by enemy airplanes.",
"As a fan of \"QI\" I remember an episode where it has been revealed pink was once used in the times of the world war era, sorry for not having much info, perhaps someone else can search/link the story?",
"It all depends on the time of day, year and month the flight was taking place in. An aircraft isn't painted once and thats it. They're painted multiple times. In regards as to why some aircraft were pink, which the British utilized more than other nations, is because they were ideal for flying early at sunrise and sundown at low heights. Its all explained in this easy to read article!\n_URL_0_\n\nEdit: Also. Location, location, location! No use having a sky blue aircraft in a green field, is there??",
"Although its been said I'd say its because the green camo worked better on the ground. A plane in flight can take evasive maneuvers, but a plane on the ground is a sitting target, so the on ground camo is more important than inflight camo. (note: I'm no expert, but I did stay at a Holiday Inn) ",
"Combat aircraft are most vulnerable to attacks from above. A top camouflage scheme to match the ground makes them harder to see from above. They are painted grey, grayish blue, or grayish white underneath to make them harder to see from below. ",
"On the ground, planes aren't the most maneuverable things. So they are painted to conceal themselves whilst on the ground as it is slightly harder to take them out in flight. "
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20yp8s | what was the original "roses are red" poem? | And how did it become so influential? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/20yp8s/eli5_what_was_the_original_roses_are_red_poem/ | {
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251cbp | how can microsoft make an operating system that the majority of computers in the world use but they aren't able to make a search engine or browser that is as successful? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/251cbp/eli5_how_can_microsoft_make_an_operating_system/ | {
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"Because they made a deal with PC manufacturers in the day that their operating system would come pre-installed on all their computers. The overall difficulty of replacing your operating system prevented the majority of people from buying and installing a new option, especially since the cost of Windows was already figured into the cost of the computer, so they'd have to buy two operating systems. \n\nInternet browsers, though, can be replaced for free with a few clicks. Choosing a different search engine is a simple matter of typing in a different web address. Once people were able to exercise their options, they did, and overwhelmingly told Microsoft to shove off.",
"From a legal point of view, it's worth noting that Microsoft are considered to have a monopoly on operating systems.\n\nWhat that means, is that they're not allowed to use their dominance in operating systems to enable them to gain an advantage in other fields.\n\nOne example of this is when they bundled Explorer with Windows and made it the default browser for all Windows users. This would have meant that Explorer would have become the dominant browser simply because people would have used it without considering other options, by virtue of it being part of Windows. This was deemed illegal in many parts of the world, and Microsoft were forced to give users an explicit choice of browsers.",
"Many, many reasons. Here are some of those reasons:\n\n* Core competency - Microsoft is a software company. It is not per se a search engine company. Furthermore, search engines are a relatively new area as opposed to, say, operating systems or office suites.\n\n* Foothold - Microsoft has a MASSIVE foothold on the desktop, and it used to be stronger. For various reasons, including price and compatibility, everyone went with DOS in the 80s and 90s, even though at several points better OS's were available (e.g. DR-DOS or OS/2). However, all the multitasking and process protection (huge buzzwords back then) in your OS won't do you any good if you have to cough up a few thousand bucks to buy all new software - remember, back then a lot of the time a word processor's basic package might be $300-$400 a pop. People want to know their software is going to continue to work for years to come and they're not going to have to relearn everything because the OS company decides that it's time to use a \"new and improved\" (and expensive) paradigm. Even today, backwards comparability is huge, and as such Microsoft has a great deal of inertia.\n\n* Developers - similar to \"foothold,\" there are a lot of people who know how to write code for Microsoft operating systems. A LOT. Other OS's generally require you to write different code using different API's. Even compatibility layers like Wine for Linux can be hit-or-miss at best, and sometimes basically useless for a particular program. Chances are if you want a commercial success for a desktop program, it's going to be written for Windows, Unix or Apple. Despite years of effort on Linux and a number of successes at making it much easier to use, Unix remains for tech geeks and has much of its commercial software designed for extremely high-end equipment, and Apple's something of a niche onto itself (and Mac OS X is a Unix, no less, so it can also benefit from Unix to at least some extent).\n\n* Piracy - Microsoft's dirty little not-so-secret is that piracy helped them achieve dominance over PCs in the 80s and 90s. You can't pirate a search engine, and it hasn't been practical to pirate a web browser for at least a decade. While Microsoft does not get money from that pirated install, they do get DOMINANCE, which can be far more important than per-unit profits in some cases regarding software; it helps to ensure that programs are being written for your operating system and that in order to be compatible with everyone else (pirating and non), your paying customers will want to maintain compatibility.\n\n* Bundling - Microsoft managed to get some deals in that essentially forced companies to bundle their software with computers. This is what is known as the \"Microsoft tax,\" e.g. in many cases they have to pay that cost for every last PC that goes out the door whether or not it has Windows on it. If I recall correctly, in some cases it required them to NOT have an option to not have Windows on the machine.\n\n* Internet Explorer's Success - IE is a bit of an odd duck. It bore the benefit from bundling for eons, and is so ubiquitous that to this day, IE6 is something that drives web developers mad - and many still have to support it because of the multi-million dollar internal systems that rely on it for many companies. That is not what I'd call a failed browser. However, the situation is different here. In some ways IE is playing catch-up to other browsers, because for a long time people were a lot more naive about computers and thought IE was the only Interweb Browser there was, if not believing it was the Internet itself outright. In other cases people just prefer other options. IE's a lot better than it used to be in terms of security and updates, though. And it's still got a very health percentage of the market.\n\n* Ease of transition - As someone else mentioned, OS's are hard to replace. Office suites can be hard to replace (though LibreOffice has done worlds for that). Browsers are fairly easy to replace with fewer compatibility problems so long as you stick with the big boys, however, and it only takes a few keystrokes to change search providers.\n\n* Traditional strategies don't apply - The old mantra was that Microsoft's strategy when dealing with new technologies that it couldn't outright crush was often 'embrace, extend, extinguish.' What this means is, instead of outright trying to kill or out-compete a lot of technology, instead Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon - then made Microsoft-only parts - and then got everyone using those, letting it control it - and then just killed the entire thing, or folded it into its own technologies to be buried. Probably the most noteworthy case of this happened with Java. Their Java implementation, Visual J++, included a lot of Microsoft-only extensions. Sun, who did not want to reach the Extinguish phase, brought them to court, and Visual J++ was killed. This is one reason why C# is around now, and there is no default JVM on vanilla Windows. Although it's arguable they've tried just that with some web technologies, and arguably it's worked, it's a lot harder to do that with Google, if it can even be done at this point.\n\n* Natural life cycle - Companies are not always going to be dominant forever. That's why they try to establish monopolies, in hopes of staving off the end. Although computers evolve rapidly, at some point, this business model may work on a more permanent basis than it has in the past. That point does not seem to be now. Sometimes this works, and for a long time it looked like Microsoft would be insurmountable. However, Microsoft toppled IBM, which itself seemed insurmountable. It may be Microsoft's turn. But note IBM is still a massive and extremely powerful technology company, even though they don't have as much to do with the PC as they used to.\n\n* Agility - Microsoft has a lot of problems with inertia, as do many companies. This links with the 'core competencies' idea, in that it's harder for them to adapt to a changing world. This was a result of Microsoft being in denial about the importance of the Internet for several years, going so far as to launch their own online network that doubled as an ISP (Microsoft Network) as opposed to just going for a straight-out ISP. This affected their strategies and architecture in the 1990s a great deal, and in some ways they're still playing catch-up.\n\nThere are probably many other reasons I haven't touched on, but this is all I can think of for right now. However, it is important to note that IE is NOT an unsuccessful browser, unless your definition of successful requires 70-80% or more of the market. In fact, it used to have just that kind of market share. In fact, in its heyday it was so successful that it essentially took the idea of paying for a browser out back and shot it in the head. As stated, large amounts of software rely on IE6, to the chagrin of many developers. At present, it has a very large market share, and a huge user base. It is not what it once was, especially now that people are computer literate enough to install Chrome or Firefox, but it's not out of the race by a large, large margin. And the 'bundled with Windows' aspect still gives them a serious edge.",
"None of the replies so far answer why it is so hard for them to make a good search engine or browser. Why bother answering if you don't even bother to understand the question?\n\nThe truth is probably that Microsoft has become a big slow bureaucratic mess. Often when a company becomes huge, it become bloated and set in its ways. Managers start focusing on their own well-being instead of the good of the company. Lots of time is spent on office politics, bickering and blackpainting the competing teams within the company. Risky projects with a high failure rate are abandoned because nobody wants to look bad. The best talent leaves for companies with enjoyable work environments. The mediocre office drones that have managed to get themselves cosy positions by bullshitting and kissing ass get left behind. The development of new revolutionary products are left to the startups, which are then often bought for way too much money by the incompetent CEO. \n\n_URL_0_\n\n_URL_1_\n\n_URL_2_",
"I just want to throw out there that Microsoft Windows isn't installed on the majority of computers. That trophy goes out to TRON, which is found on everything from toasters, to cellphones, electronic sub-components, cars... The number of devices is in the billions. The second most installed operating system is Linux. It's installed on the vast majority of servers that make up the internet, and the majority of the internet is some sort of Unix derivative. But the internet isn't what gives Linux its dominance, that would be the cellphone market. Android is a Linux distribution.\n\nMicrosoft has a small market share by today's standard, merely the desktop market and anything that is their own platform. That doesn't mean they don't have monster control, influence, or money.",
"I'll add Antitrust on the browser or search engine. Microsoft was forced to add Choose Your Browser on installations of Windows OS, instead of just the usual IE. Known as Browser Choice Screen (BCS).\n\n_URL_0_",
"id say its the amount of customization that is offered by other browsers its mostly the fact the a lot of people use ad block on chrome and Firefox and im sure that ad block cant be used on internet explorer ",
"Also would like to point out that while a perceived large group of users run Windows, it's still terrible. There just weren't as many options for OSes back when they were a thing, unlike how there are a plethora of search engines and browsers.\n\nIt'd be like, if all there ever existed were iphones, for years and years, and then only just now other phones were coming into the market. The whole market would be saturated with iphones, but that wouldn't say anything about how good they were, just how long they've been around."
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"http://www.theverge.com/2013/11/12/5094864/microsoft-kills-stack-ranking-internal-structure",
"http://www.businessweek.com/stories/2005-09-25/troubling-exits-at-microsoft"
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3eatbp | shaken vs stirred | I used to work behind a bar, and while I know the difference between shaking and stirring and when to use each, One thing that has always got me is that some people claimed that a shaken cocktail will taste significantly different to an identical, but stirred cocktail.
Is this true? If so, Why? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3eatbp/eli5_shaken_vs_stirred/ | {
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"The James Bond books were actually satirical and campy. The reason Bond wanted his cocktails stirred is because Ian Fleming was parodying spy authors who wanted to portray their protagonist spy as \"sophisticated\" by having him order a cocktail with a seemingly frivolous instruction that's supposed to let the reader know he can taste the difference.\n\nIn actuality, it's better to be stirred than shaken because stirring will mix the vodka and vermouth better since it's more turbulent.\n\nThere's also the alternate guess that James Bond liked shaken cocktails because when the bartender's female she may also shake her ass and her hand near her mouth."
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3cbosb | why is rape in prison go unpunished? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3cbosb/eli5why_is_rape_in_prison_go_unpunished/ | {
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"It's not allowed... But say you're in prison and a gang rapes you. You tell on that gang. Where are they going to go? Another prison? No, they just get some privilege taken away... and now there you are... mere feet away from them. You think they're going to just leave you alone now because you might tell on them?\n\nSo most rapes go unreported."
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b0sav5 | how does the british constitution work? | Theresa May's party leadership coup, her multiple failures to pass her landmark legislation despite her party majority and it literally being her mandate, her dodging, then no longer facing no-confidence votes, her inability to manage her cabinet, and the simultaneous defection of the Labour MPs to the Independence party has revealed to me I have NO clue how the British constitution works. What are the rules? Bonus how does the May premiership fit in contextually? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/b0sav5/eli5_how_does_the_british_constitution_work/ | {
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"The UK does not really have a constitution. There is no singular document that is the highest authority on the government can and cannot do. \n\nInstead it has a collection of hundreds of thousands of act of Parliament dating back centuries that are interconnected and often contradictory. Some of the acts limit the government, some grant them special extra powers, and some craft laws for the country. ",
"The Brits don't have a specific constitution, the British government developed much more organically than the US or the Colonies did so instead they have centuries worth of legal precedent and various documents, declarations, and laws that dictate how the government works in lieu of a constitution.\n\nNominally the head of state of England and the UK is the Queen, she is functionally a figure head. Most of the real power sits with the Prime Minister and the cabinet.\n\nBasically May will remain in power until such a time as she willfully resigns, dies, or her party loses power. Losing a no-confidence vote forces the government to either hold an election or forces the PM to resign.\n\nTheresa May is the Prime Minister because she is the leader of the party with the most seats. If at the end of the next election another party gets the most seats, then their leader will become Prime Minister.\n\nIf her party is re-elected they May will once again be PM. Assuming she hasn't resigned or otherwise been forced out by the party.\n\nOfficially the individual that leads the party that wins the election has to ask the Queens permission to form a government of the people. Unofficially this is just a formality. Although the Queen could refuse it would probably be political suicide and could topple the monarchy.",
"You're not alone being confused by the system - part of the problem we're having is precisely because this is a difficult situation for our constitutional and political system to handle.\n\nI'm not sure how best to answer this question, because it means describing the UK's political (and legal) system from the ground up. So I'll address each of your points in turn and hopefully they'll coalesce into some kind of coherent picture.\n\n > Theresa May's party leadership coup\n\nTheresa May is the leader of the Conservative party. The rules of the Conservative party say that if a certain number of MPs write a letter saying they have no confidence in their leader there is a leadership contest. This happened and May won the contest.\n\nSince she won the contest she has a kind of grace period during which she can't be challenged again, which makes sense. Of course if she decides her party hates her and she can't manage them she might be pushed into resigning.\n\nHad she lost, whoever won would become the new Prime Minister. That's because we, the electorate, don't vote for *Prime Minister*, we vote for MPs from particular parties (at least, generally... see below). So it's not so much \"Theresa May\" in power as \"the Conservative Party\". That can seem a little strange - that the Prime Minister can be determined by the rules of the Conservative Party, or whichever party is in power, but it's the way our parliamentary system works.\n\nAfter this Conservative Party vote there was also a motion in the House of Commons of no confidence in the government. This was called by the Labour party. This *is* part of the constitution, a legal procedure. Had this succeeded, the Conservative government would have fallen and there would have been a general election. \n\n > her multiple failures to pass her landmark legislation despite her party majority and it literally being her mandate\n\nGovernments are under no legal duty to do what they say in their manifesto, nor are MPs obliged to vote for it. Of course they may get punished by the voters if they don't, but that's another matter. The thing is that what was promised in the Conservative manifesto is sufficiently vague enough to encompass a range of different options. Some MPs will say May's deal doesn't meet the promises made, others that it does but it could be a lot better, and probably some Conservative MPs never agreed with the manifesto in the first place (and that's without talking about DUP MPs).\n\nIncidentally, the Brexit deal is not legislation, it's more along the lines of a vote on a treaty. IIRC this *was* a constitutional question, settled by the courts, over whether the government had to consult parliament on a deal.\n\n > her inability to manage her cabinet\n\nThe PM's main powers over cabinet ministers are the ability to fire them and the precedent of collective responsibility. May's problem is that these are influential people and she needs their support. Because she's politically weak it's hard for her to fire people. To make matters worse, she needs to keep a certain number of pro-brexit ministers in her cabinet, and there's a really small pool of MPs who are suitable. (Editorial comment: because most pro-brexit Conservative MPs are absolute idiots. And some of them are ministers.)\n\nCollective responsibility is one of those informal rules of British political life. It means cabinet ministers publicly support positions agreed in cabinet. But it's not an absolute rule. Ministers will break the rule if they think something is important enough, or they think they'll get away with it.\n\nWhat we do have is a big political problem because there's no clear constitutional solution to the deadlock in parliament.\n\nThe way parliament works - mostly yes or no votes on things - works well when there's a binary choice - \"do this or do that\" - or a clear majority for one of a range of options - \"take the deal\". The problem we have is that none of the options being proposed can get a majority. No majority for May's deal, no majority for no deal, no majority for a referendum, etc.. And the way the system works, constitutionally and practically doesn't offer a clear way to resolve this problem.\n\nIn a normal situation a PM might call a general election to try and get a bigger majority and new mandate. But May can't do that here because 1) she tried that already, 2) she might lose, and 3) it doesn't necessarily solve the division *within* her party (not to mention the Labour party). The British political system is not good at dealing with divisions within parties (if you're a voter, what do you do if your local Labour candidate thinks one thing and the official position is the opposite?).\n\n > the simultaneous defection of the Labour MPs to the Independence party\n\nParties in the UK, like most democracies, are a way of squashing together people with different views into a functioning group. They have to follow certain rules, but they get the benefits of being in the group - not least that people will vote for them because they want \"a Labour government\" or a \"Liberal Democrat government\". \n\nSometimes those differences get too great and people leave the party. The issues within the Labour party are a whole extra topic to get into. What is slightly odd about the system in the UK is that an MP can win an election as, say, a Labour MP, leave the party (or even defect to another party) and not have to resign and face a new election.\n\nNote that The Independent Group is not, yet, a formal political party, though it seems to be heading that way. In constitutional terms that doesn't make a huge amount of difference."
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35n8n2 | why did anthony weiner get pressured to resign from office for sending some sexual pictures to people flirting with him online, when other politicians have been in all out affairs yet they retained office with no trouble? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/35n8n2/eli5_why_did_anthony_weiner_get_pressured_to/ | {
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"I believe he resigned to protect his wifes political career. Huma Abedin was assistiant to Hildog when she was Sec of State. She is look upon as having potiential to hold a high office position. The other reason is to stop the press from looking into his sexting history. He was only exposed for sexting a couple of people that were following him on twitter. I highly suspect that he was doing it much more than a few times. ",
"To be fair, all politicians caught in an affair or with explicit photos exposed are pressured to resign - that wasn't unique to the Weiner situation. Whether they resign or not can be based on a number of factors, such as how conservative their district is, who the affair was with, whether their media staff handles the PR, how early they admit to the claims, whether it was conducted during official business or in an official location, and how strongly their party wishes to distance themselves from the person in question. \n\nThere was likely added pressure in the Weiner situation due to the release of the graphic images and not just the hearsay of an affair.",
"He actually tried to deny sending photos at first saying his phone had been hacked... Effectively lying to the public for a week until he could not get out from all the jokes.\n\nI honestly think he resigned due to pressure from party leadership. If he hadn't lied at first he may have been able to bounce back.\n\nOh and his name also didn't help slow the media circus.",
"A large part of it has to do with their constituencies. I live in Louisiana, where David Vitter keeps being reelected and will probably be elected Governor. We know that he had an affair with a DC madam, we know that he admitted it, and we know that he apologized. Why is he still so popular?\n\nBecause having an affair in Louisiana isn't as bad as having the right politics is good. Are you anti-Obama, anti-Common Core, anti-science? Then you have a bit of a free pass to do whatever you need to do. Weiner was from a much more liberal New York, where politics can't always trump personality.\n\nAs they say here in the south, **it's only a scandal with a live boy or dead girl.**",
"Mainly it seemed to be because of how much time he spent continuing to deny it even after he was outed. He kept on digging the hole, focusing more and more attention on it - attention due more to the fact that he kept denying it even after it was out, than to the actual thing he did. By the time he gave up digging the hole, he probably resigned out of embarrassment! But also out of the fact that so much attention had been paid to his sticking to his lies in the face of evidence, that he damaged his credibility far beyond what the original scandal would've done.",
"His problem wasn't dick pics or infidelity. Most people don't care much about those. His problem was getting caught committing the most heinous sin of his/our age.\n\nHypocrisy.",
"John Edwards and Eliot Spitzer are two other well known Democrats who were forced to resign after a 'sex scandal'. Meanwhile the Republican party that votes adamantly against gay marriage for the sake of 'family values' and votes for abstinence only education programs instead of programs like planned parenthood that distribute condoms and birth control, are able to pretty much do things at their discretion after a 'sex scandal'.\n\nFor example:\n\nRepublican Senator David Vitter's phone number was found in a rolodex of a DC Madam and its been rumored that he likes to wear diapers like a man-baby, but he's still in office. But if he resigned, the Democratic governor of his state would have appointed a Democrat to his Senate seat, so Republicans all publicly forgave him. Meanwhile this guy advocates for abstinence only education, probably because he could benefit from it, but in reality it doesn't work, so maybe he did get this 'education'.\n\nRepublican Governor Mark Sandford snuck off to Argentina for a few days to be with his mistress. His office lied to the state police reporters on his whereabouts for days. He stayed in office until his term ran out and now he's a Congressman.\n\nRepublican Senator Larry Craig solicited sex with a male undercover police officer posing a prostitute at an airport bathroom. He finished his term and didn't seek reelection, but their was little to no effort from his party base to force him to resign. This guy is also adamantly against gay marriage. BONUS: Here's what he said in 1999, \"...Bill Clinton is a bad boy – a naughty boy. I'm going to speak out for the citizens of my state, who in the majority think that Bill Clinton is probably even a nasty, bad, naughty boy.\"\n\nRepublican Senator John Ensign had an affair with his female staffer and gave her family (the husband) almost $100,000 to keep quiet about it so the affair could continue. He only resigned immediately before the Senate Ethics Committee could issue any punishments and a whole two years after the 'scandal' broke out.\n\nWhatever Anthony Weiner did with his Weiner was certainly not as scandalous. But Obama still went on national TV and said he thinks that Weiner should resign. If Weiner held a strategic political seat in a swing state, then he'd most definitely still be in office today. The fact that Weiner was a rising star made other Democrats with similar aspirations less likely to support him. Also, Weiner's Congressional seat represented Manhattan, so their was no fear that a Republican would have the opportunity to take that seat in an election and the NY Governor was a Democrat, so he'd replace Weiner with another Democrat.\n\nEdit: Grammar\n",
"A little sex scandal won't necessarily end your career if your party thinks your value as an asset outweighs the embarrassment you've caused them, but Weiner wasn't well-liked by Democratic leadership to begin with and they were happy to seize the opportunity to be rid of him. He was a bit of a demagogue [with a penchant for breaking ranks and criticizing the party.](_URL_1_) I'm having trouble finding sources about tensions between him and other Democrats from before the scandal but [this article](_URL_0_) touches on the point.",
"More than anything I think it was his name that got him. \n\nI mean, come on! His name is Weiner! He must have dealt with the fallout from that his whole life. And then to have a dick pic bring you down...fuckin irony man.",
"Because 6 hard inches of evidence is an easy sell to any news or gossip outlet. It was too much for him to be able to perform his job. He was going to spend all his time apologizing for his dick.",
"Because he spilled his spagett to the press in a really embarrassing way, then decided to resign so he could keep sending dick picks to strangers?",
"Probably had to do with the fact that he had no concept of damage control and continued to lie and attack instead of quietly owning it and disappearing for a month while shit blew over, or else finding a more effective way to silence Breitbart. Doesn't help that Weiner's a really obnoxious guy that isn't even liked amongst his political allies. I'm guessing Nancy Pelosi wasn't too happy about having to get an eye-full of his balls because he literally made a federal case of his indiscretions.\n\nSituation was complicated by the fact that he's Huma Abedin's beard, and was thus indirectly making trouble for the Clinton dynasty with his antics.",
"Before the scandal, Weiner in Washington was known as a righteous defender of liberal values. He slammed Republicans over their rejection of Obamacare. He would boisterously go on Fox News and take them down a notch. Weiner was considered the no. 1 bachelor on Capitol Hill before he got married. He was the guy who had it all; morals, looks (lol), character, charisma, and power. \n\nWhen the whole story unfolded, Weiner lost all of his righteousness and moral high ground. He was a newlywed who had cheated on his equally influential wife and lied to the public after being exposed. The jig was up for Weiner. He couldn't legitimately portray himself as the perfect guy politician any longer. \n\nClinton was different. I think everyone knew he was a womanizer (he had a scandal during his first campaign). When it comes to Republicans, they've always practiced the whole \"Do as I say not as I do\" thing. Republicans will tell you what's the religiously moral thing to do and when they slip-up, they'll just say the whole \"I ask Jesus for forgiveness. Only God can judge,\" thing that teenagers on Facebook say after doing something stupid. People buy that shit up because it does the job of sounding sincere and religiously spiritual which voters love. ",
"What I don't get is why don't politicians say \"My affairs have no impact on my ability to preform my job\" since that's 100% accurate.\n\nI don't understand why this is such a big deal to begin with. ",
"Um, his name is Weiner?",
"He was a vocal and active member of congress that denied the visual of his member in the 24 hr media circus.",
"It's a hard question, because politics are never black and white - everything is a shade of grey (no pun intended). How the public reacts to any given scandal depends on a number of factors - and those factors can be very hard to figure out even with polling. So we're often left with educated guesses.\n\nSo here's mine. I think you can recover from an affair because that is something that cool, sexy people might do - it lends you a sort of trench coat, back-alley bravado that can be attractive on an almost animal level, and that can lead people to irrationally overlook your sins. Sure, it's worse than what Weiner did - but, hey, sexy people will sometimes bump strange uglies, and we love electing sexy people. \n\nBut you can't recover from being a goofy wannabe horndog with a silly crotch shot and the alias Carlos Danger - particulalry not if your real name happens to be slang for penis - because you look like, to put it in animal terms, a real loser. And no one votes for a loser. In nicer terms we might say that we just question his judgment - I've heard that a lot. But I think what people mean when they say it is that the poor loser can't even have an affair properly. I mean, dick pics that are easily forwardable? Carlos Danger? What a putz. At least Spitzer actually got some - he had to pay for it (another mortal sin, because winners don't pay), but at least he got some. Weiner didn't even manage, and his lousy attempts made him look like a desperate pathetic dip. No one votes for that. ",
"Because his last name is Weiner and the Weiner sending photos of his Weiner idea has totally crushed his political career.",
"In all fairness, since Weiner sent photos of his wiener to an underaged girl, he *should* have been prosecuted, not merely allowed to resign.",
"Dick pics were a sort of new thing in the public conciousness. I can imagine a lot of normal, older, politically-significant men thinking \"affairs, well everyone does that. But sending naked pictures to a girl you don't know, that's *weird*.\" \n\nSexting seems normal now (and proabaly did then, to the internet-savvy), but was pretty novel to me; I considered it an especially funny and interesting sex-scandal.\n\nPlus, like people mentioned, he lied hilariously (\"Is that my dick? I have to check on that.\"), and every situation is different.\n",
"After the first story, and denial, and comfirmation, Weiner wasn't pressured too hard to resign. They story then was about it affecting his NYC mayoral run.\n\nWhen he continued it and was caught again, weeks later, he lost all credibility and was pressured by colleagues, etc, to resign.",
"Part of it probably had to do with the nature of his sexual misconduct. Not that what Weiner did was more immoral than the others, but it was more immature. Seriously, who sends dick pics from a cell phone? Insecure, lonely losers who haven't mentally graduated from high school and don't understand the first thing about privacy on the internet, that's who. Does anyone really want *that* guy making important decisions?\n\nHe didn't just demonstrate that he's a hypocrite. We're used to politicians being hypocrites. He demonstrated that he's a moron. ",
"Carlos Danger. How do you recover from that? ",
"Several factors, most of which have already been mentioned. \nFirst, it was a sexy story. Rather than being a boring affair, it had the element of being geek chic: texting diq piqs online with computers and cell phones. Second, the dude's name. Third, his location. He is in the media capital of the world, where tabloid rags like the Daily News and the NY Post LIVE for this stuff. Fourth, his personality. He was actually vying to be the next mayor, but he always came across as being obnoxious and annoying, even to people who agreed with his position. Fifth, the incessant lying. Sixth, \"Carlos Danger\"? His story became increasingly absurd to the point where even his friends in the media thought he was a diq. When Jon Stewart turns on you, you are SOL. Finally, the MF is ugly as balls. He looks like a human chihuahua and turned people off with his abrasive noo yawka persona. Nobody here mourns him. ",
"Because Weiner was a dick after the affair, and didn't have the balls to stand up to the media who were trying to shaft him and paint him into a dark hole.",
"I think a major point I haven't seen made yet is also that there is that its kind of tough for a politician to get any respect when there are photos of your junk floating around the internet and in the hands of your political enemies. While politicians have a long history of having affairs and getting caught in them, having actual pictures of the Weiner in question is a contributing factor. If you are a political operative the last thing you want is to have to endure the ongoing discovery of new pictures bouncing around the internet and going up censored and uncensored on all the sites. \n\nAlso he didn't stop doing it, even after he resigned and unsurprisingly kept lying about it, so on a purely tactical level, good call for the people who didn't feel like keeping such a political liability around. ",
"Weiner sent dickpics to people who didn't ask for dickpics and didn't want dickpics. That makes him the online equivalent of a flasher. It makes perfect sense to distinguish -- morally and legally -- between people who have affairs and creepy, nasty flashers. \n\nI'm not saying that's the explanation for why dems reacted the way they did -- the real explanation probably has a lot more to do with people's puritanism about the very idea of online sex or sexual self-portraits. But as a non-puritan, the thing that made me lose faith in Anthony Weiner as a leader was the revelation that he was sexually harassing and nonconsensually flashing total strangers. Before that, I was a huge supporter -- even planned to support Franken-Weiner 2016! ",
"Showing your penis to strangers over the Internet is considered extra deviant. Certainly more deviant than screwing even another married woman.",
"A lot of people are talking about his lying, but isn't it more that he used campaign funds to perpetuate the lie, which is borderline legitimate fraud. ",
"Another thing is that Weiner was pretty vocal and would shout and make a scene over things on the floor when in a debate. He was really pushy about some things that were important to the left...and mostly things that were uncomfortably close to being simple truths, i.e. hard to deflect the criticism. The right had it out for him and he just kept giving them ammunition as if they didn't have everyone and their sister honeypotting or digging around in the net looking for dirt on his ass. It's not just denial, it's the second round of cheating when the first round hadn't even faded yet. He kept at it and was caught more than once in quick succession.",
"IIRC weren't the photos sent to people who didn't actually want them?",
"While Weiner did resign from Congress over the dick pix, he did not resign from politics. \n\nIn the NY Times he asked for voters to give him another chance. We did. When he announced that he was running for mayor of nyc, he immediately became # 1 in the polls. It was only after it came out that he was still doing the same shit and hadn't changed at all that we NY'ers lost faith in him. \n\nWiener was given a second chance. That's something that most people who screw up like he did never get. He could have had a comeback, but blew it. ",
"adults can have affairs, but weiner's sexting was juvenile and salacious. besides lying about it when caught lube handed, the details were embarrassing and showed an unflattering, narcissistic side of the guy, lacking in the gravitas one might expect in their elected representative - \"hey, look at me, baby! look at my fine body! oh yeah, baby, here's my big hard cock!\" geezus. hard to look at this guy without laughing, and shake his hand? nope. in the end, it a huge distraction, the jokes were too much to overcome. ",
"Because his name is Weiner.\n\nThat's not a joke. It made the media more eager to cover it. It made individuals more likely to share it. It made more people aware of it and put more pressure on him.",
"Name one politician that sent **dick pics** that were released publicly that didn't resign or get forced out... nCheating is not the same as having multiple pictures of you naked being passed around. I believe a few of the girls also had direct text evidence - again, how often has a politician survived that? \n\nBill Clinton came closer than you could imagine to getting impeached for having an affair and lying. Lying is the edge - you can come back and sometimes you can't. Letting CNN get ahold of you showing your cock is something else."
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1amfyf | why are cops in the us allowed to break into your house without a warrant when there's a party? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1amfyf/eli5_why_are_cops_in_the_us_allowed_to_break_into/ | {
"a_id": [
"c8yr0tq"
],
"score": [
16
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"text": [
"They aren't. They do not have the lawful authority to break into *any* private structure, business or residential, in the absence of something called *exigent circumstances.*\n\nBasically, an exigent circumstance is any situation in which *not* acting creates an unreasonable risk of harm to something or somebody. If a policeman were walking down the street and heard cries of \"Help! Help!\" coming from within a private residence, that policeman would (probably; depends on the exact circumstances) have the lawful authority to make entry to that residence, up to and including breaking the door in. That's because under that circumstance, the policeman would reasonably suspect that somebody was *actively coming to harm* in the residence at that time, and that waiting could cause that person to come to still greater harm.\n\nBut a noise complaint does not create an exigent circumstance. If somebody calls in a noise complaint on you, the police will come to your house, knock on the door, and *ask* to be invited inside so they can check things out. They will not break your door in, because there's no reason to believe it's an exigent circumstance.\n\nHowever, there is also the matter of what's called *probable cause.* Probable cause is the legal doctrine that says sometimes peace officers — policemen, sheriffs and so on — have the lawful authority to conduct an arrest or a search right there on the spur of the moment, without getting explicit judicial approval (i.e., a warrant). If a policeman comes to your door in response to a noise complaint, looks past you into your residence and *sees people snorting white powder,* that policeman will have the lawful authority to enter your home with or without permission and determine whether that white powder is a controlled substance.\n\nSo the short answer to your question is that police cannot break into your home except under exigent circumstances, and they can't even enter your home without permission without probable cause, and a noise complaint *by itself* creates neither."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
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|
||
6d299e | can someone explain why bailing someone out of jail is a thing? if someone is a threat to society, how does money make it ok for them to be walking around the streets, even if just temporarily. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6d299e/eli5_can_someone_explain_why_bailing_someone_out/ | {
"a_id": [
"dhz6zc3",
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"score": [
112,
11,
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2,
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"text": [
"People have a right to be tried in court before they are imprisoned. Usually, it's not possible to get someone a court date immediately. \n\nBail is a deposit that someone puts down to be free until their court date. If they run away, they lose the money. If they show up to their court date, they get the money back.\n\nBail is not a way to buy your way out of jail time.",
"The idea is to ensure that a person returns to court when required for hearings or their trial.\n\nDespite common belief on Reddit, the courts do not want people to sit in jail *just because*, and many people facing charges have lives to get to - family to take care of, jobs to work, etc.\n\n But they also have to work with the fact that a lot of people are facing serious jail time and may not return if they're just let out until trial. So the bail system exists to give the courts some collateral since a bailed suspect only gets their money back if they return to court.\n\nAnd besides that, for the actually dangerous prisoners (such as murder suspects), bail is either not an option or is set to an extremely high dollar amount.",
"You don't go to jail because you're a threat, you go to jail because you are on trial (or will be on trial) and the court wants to guarantee that you actually show up. If the court deems you a serious threat to the public, or a serious flight risk, they will not grant you bail. But for more minor offenses bail is an alternate way to guarantee that you show up for your trial.",
"not all crimes are violent, and some don't justify sitting in jail until the court date. some court dates take years to come to pass. plus folks are innocent until proven guilty. and judges won't allow bail in cases where the accused shouldn't be out and about in society.",
"Judges will evaluate if someone is a danger before allowing them bail. So a violent murder wouldn't be allowed bail in the first place. \n\nHowever, a public urinator or someone simply caught with possession of small amount of drugs aren't necessarily threats to society, but would cost money to house them in a cell until trial.",
"Invalid premise. If someone is determined by a judge to be a valid threat to society they are not granted bail.",
"There are lots of good answers here explaining how bail works, but I haven't seen a direct answer to the question \"why do we have bail when someone is dangerous?\"\n\nOne answer is that (in the USA at least) we have a constitutional right to bail, in the 8th amendment, which goes hand-in-hand with the constitutional presumption of innocence. So bail generally isn't meant to keep a dangerous person locked up - its to assure that a presumably innocent person shows up to court so the government can try to prove the accusation. \n\nSo a reasonable bail is a constitutional presumption in most criminal cases. \n\nIn every state I know of, and federally, there is NO presumption of bail in the most serious cases (rapes, murders, etc), usually known as \"capital cases\", because they are the ones that carry a potential sentence of life imprisonment or death. This is also true in many drug trafficking cases. In those cases there is a legal presumption that a person accused of the crime will be a danger to the community and/or a risk of flight. A defendant accused of these crimes is still entitled to a hearing on bail, however, where he can try to show that he is not a danger or risk of flight. "
]
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1v8m3e | why the u.s(or other governments) can pass laws affecting people that are not their citizens. | This mostly occurred to me relating to the NSA, saying they don't have a domestic spying program. What in the law allows them to pass laws relating to foreign people? If nothing, how did it become acceptable legal practice? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1v8m3e/eli5_why_the_usor_other_governments_can_pass_laws/ | {
"a_id": [
"ceps7p2"
],
"score": [
6
],
"text": [
"They aren't passing laws to which foreign people are subject. They are merely spying on them. All spying is an extra-legal practice. Notice that most all governments have very strict laws against spying, yet most of them still have spying programs."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
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|
11snut | why is it more common to pee on yourself in your sleep rather than to poop yourself? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/11snut/eli5_why_is_it_more_common_to_pee_on_yourself_in/ | {
"a_id": [
"c6p8gta",
"c6p8h15"
],
"score": [
14,
6
],
"text": [
"It takes more effort to poop than to pee. One requires relaxing muscles, the other requires pushing with them.",
"I'm no expert but i think it takes muscles to push poop, where as it takes muscles to hold pee in. I figure when you sleep, said muscles relax so they can't push poop but they can release pee. That'll be $.05."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[]
]
|
||
4kivri | how grocery store cashiers kept track of what was on sale before barcodes. | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/4kivri/eli5_how_grocery_store_cashiers_kept_track_of/ | {
"a_id": [
"d3f81lo",
"d3f81ya",
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"d3fam5o",
"d3fcbjt",
"d3fclne"
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"score": [
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6,
2,
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"text": [
"There was a sticker on every single item with the price on it. They rang up the price on the sticker. If the sticker fell off, they would call for a price check, and someone would run down to the aisle to find an identical item with the price on it, and report back on what the price was.",
"Items had prices labeled on them. During a sale, they would just change the label. All the cashier does is just type in the price on the price label, add up all the prices of your goods, and done. ",
"Price tags attached to the goods directly, logs, and stock-taking. If a price changes, they have to change all the tags. In some parts of the world, they still use the old system. ",
"Some smaller businesses still don't have/use barcodes. A lot of the information comes from 1) knowing your stock/inventory and 2) the good old \"price check\". Also, good recording keeping is a must in these instances. \n\nSource: I am a small business owner for 18 years that does it all by hand still - with the aid of a computer for record keeping and tax purposes.",
"IME, we got the next weeks sale ad a few days in advance and had to remember the sale prices before it started and kept it at the register for reference. There were also double sided paper signs hung in the front glass so you could glance over for confirmation. \n\nOne store tried a \"system\" of putting a small red dot on sale items next to the paper price sticker, but then they had to be picked off when they went off sale and sometimes people would pick them off of sale items and put them on regular price items and swear that they were on sale because of the red dot, then a five minute wait for a \"price check\". \n\nSometimes they just weren't picked off by the stock people and then would have to fill out a price adjustment sheet and wait for manager approval. Also, making a low wage, you picked up on what items were on sale quickly, especially good sales. ",
"In older days as well they wouldn't necessarily change the price on every single tag in the store each time something went on sale. They would put the price in a circular like your local newspaper and it was the customer's responsibility to bring in the coupon/ad to claim the discount. Then it was simply a matter of keying in the price on the coupon or discounting whatever %. This trend of prices fluctuating on a daily or even hourly basis is new, because the technology has only now made it possible."
]
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||
6ivevp | the american court system | Federal court, Appeals Court (assuming this one is only for appeals), Circuit Court... what do they all mean? How is it determined what court gets what case? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/6ivevp/eli5_the_american_court_system/ | {
"a_id": [
"dj9fo0u",
"dj9g1p6"
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"score": [
3,
9
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"text": [
"Everything starts in the district court of the aggrieved party. Let's say you live in Brooklyn and want to sue over a hypothetical law that bans giving knit items via Reddit Secret Santa - you wander over to the Federal courthouse and file a lawsuit against the US government. Since you live in Brooklyn, your district is the Southern District of New York, which covers NYC and its surrounding areas.\n\nYou win your case, but for whatever reason the government decides to appeal. The appeal to the Federal Court of Appeals, which is divided up into twelve \"circuits.\" So, circuit courts and appeals courts are pretty synonymous in what they do - they're the 2nd level of the federal judiciary. You win your case again.\n\nThe US Attorney handling your case files an appeal to the final level of the federal court system - the Supreme Court. They take a look at the cases that preceded the appeal to them and ~~tell the US Attorney to piss off~~ decline to hear the case. Your victory stands!\n\nUnfortunately, things aren't so great in other parts of the country. Out in the Middle District of Alabama, a judge decided that he was going to rule in favor of the US Government. The plaintiff appealed, and the Court of Appeals for the 11th circuit sided again with the government. Now you have two circuits that disagree with each other, so when that plaintiff appeals his decision to the Supreme Court, they go, \"Really? C'mon guys, this is ridiculous,\" and accept the appeal because now they need to tell everyone what the correct way to handle Redditors who give knit gifts via Secret Santa is.\n\nThe Supreme Court bundles your case and you pick a single attorney to represent your cases. After all of the arguments are made and cases are rested, the Supreme Court rules 8-1 that the law violates the Constitutional rights to Speech and Assembly and overturns the law. Everyone is now free to send knit gifts through Reddit Secret Santa again.",
"The United States is a federalist system where the state governments are basically separate from the federal government. As a result, the states and the federal government have separate court systems.\n\nBoth systems generally work the same and have three levels of courts. Almost all cases start in the lowest level of court, the trial court. Someone who wants to challenge a judgment from a trial court can appeal to the next level court, the appellate court. Appellate courts generally have to hear all cases that are appealed to them. If someone wants to challenge a judgment from an appellate court, they can appeal to the highest level court, the supreme court, but supreme courts can usually pick which cases they want to hear.\n\nAt the federal level, trial courts are called District Courts, appellate courts are called Circuit Courts or Courts of Appeals, and the supreme court is the Supreme Court. The names vary at the state level (for example, the trial courts in New York are branches of the New York Supreme Court for some odd reason). As a side note, the Circuit Courts are called that because the judges used to go from town to town on a circuit to hear appeals.\n\nIn the federal system the same court hears both civil and criminal cases. Whether there are dedicated criminal and civil courts at the state level depends on the state.\n\nState courts can hear any case whether it's on an issue of state law or federal law. Federal courts can only hear cases that involve federal law (this is called federal question jurisdiction) or that involve parties from different states (this is called diversity jurisdiction). Most of the time a case that can go to federal court will end up in federal court, but that's because one side will usually prefer federal court. All cases can stay in state court if both sides want to stay in state court.\n\nIt's important to note that federal courts do not review what state courts do. If you get a judgment in a state court, you can't challenge it in a federal court. Your only option is to appeal in the state system. The one exception to that is that the US Supreme Court can hear cases involving federal law from state court if the person challenging the judgment has exhausted all of their appeals in the state system. This usually only happens when a state supreme court makes a decision based on something in the Constitution and the US Supreme Court wants to say something about it.\n\nThere are also a lot of random specialty courts that don't neatly fit into the above. Most states have some type of small claims court designed to be easy to use without a lawyer. Most cities also have municipal courts to deal with things like traffic tickets. Typically those cases get appealed to the trial courts in that state if appeals are possible. \n\nThe administrative departments of the federal government also often have their own court systems (Immigration Court, Social Security Administration, Department of Labor, National Labor Relations Baord, etc.) Those courts deal with regulations made by the relevant departments. For example, if you want to complain about a social security disability determination, you would go through the Social Security Administration's hearing process. Administrative courts are run by the departments they're in and technically aren't part of the judicial branch (they're under the executive branch). Judgments from those courts are typically appealed directly to the federal appellate courts."
]
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| []
| [
[],
[]
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|
9wa5tf | how do washing machines “sense” a load and how was that technology developed? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9wa5tf/eli5_how_do_washing_machines_sense_a_load_and_how/ | {
"a_id": [
"e9j52p9"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"If I was a guessing man I'd say with a pressure sensor and that technology has been around since we learned to weigh shit (or any other substance)."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
||
7zqvo4 | optometrists‘ air puff test | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/7zqvo4/eli5_optometrists_air_puff_test/ | {
"a_id": [
"duq1m67"
],
"score": [
2
],
"text": [
"The puff test diagnoses glaucoma. Glaucoma happens when there’s too much pressure behind the eye. The puff test can measure the amount of pressure that is happening behind or within the eye. If it’s a high number, you have or are predisposed to glaucoma. If it’s a low number, you’re good (for now)"
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
||
1fi5g2 | please, why do i keep seeing rail cars seemingly abandoned on tracks? | I take a commuter rail to work and back, and note several cars of varying sorts (flat, double stack, box and so on) located on tracks. Why is this? | explainlikeimfive | http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/1fi5g2/eli5_please_why_do_i_keep_seeing_rail_cars/ | {
"a_id": [
"caahf42",
"caavv98"
],
"score": [
2,
2
],
"text": [
"They'll come back to get it later. It's not like anyone is going to *steal* it.",
"Because of the lack of shipping business, the railroad companies have a major problem of storing all of their unused rail equipment. It's not like there are train car parking lots all over the place, these things were designed to be in constant use, all the time. So, they leave them on disused rail lines, hoping that they'll be able to come back and get them before they deteriorate. And like mobyhead1 said, it's not like anyone can steal them (easily).\n\nSource: NPR. (they did a story about this exact thing)"
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
[]
]
|
|
8tcn30 | why can't some fractures fuse together and how long can a bone survive in a nonunion before amputation is the only option? | [deleted] | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/8tcn30/eli5_why_cant_some_fractures_fuse_together_and/ | {
"a_id": [
"e16xkmr"
],
"score": [
22
],
"text": [
"The vitamin structures of the bone are what decides if the bone will fuse or not. A bone can survive in nonunion for almost a whole year before amputation is necessary, believe it or not. And I will note that there has been cases of patients growing metal knives out of their hands after improper fusing.\n\nSource: physician "
]
} | []
| []
| [
[]
]
|
|
3k4p4z | why was greenwich mean time changed to coordinated universal time? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/3k4p4z/eli5why_was_greenwich_mean_time_changed_to/ | {
"a_id": [
"cuuqm8c",
"cuusvok"
],
"score": [
4,
20
],
"text": [
"It happened about 40 years ago. The difference is that GMT is a time zone and UTC is not -- UTC is the time that time zones are based on. GMT is UTC+0.\n\nIt's also a nice, neutral way to refer to the world's standard time without referring to a specific geographic location. So, in that regard, it's pretty much like using CE instead of AD for dates.",
"It wasn't. GMT was changed to UT1. \n\nGMT and UTC are actually completely different: GMT is time based on the *sun*. \"Mean\" in GMT refers to the fact that it is based on *mean* (i.e. average) solar time. On the other hand, UTC is *atomic* time, based on vibrations of radiation given off by atoms. At the precision of milliseconds, the Solar day is variable in length, Earth's rotation is slowing, and a solar day is no longer exactly equal to 86,400 seconds. These clocks therefore tick at different rates.\n\nBut it makes sense that atomic time should roughly agree (i.e., be \"coordinated\") with solar time for practical purposes. That is why, every once in a while, a leap second is added to UTC: to keep it within 1 second of GMT (or really, GMT's successor, UT1).\n\nTL;DR: GMT (or really, UT1 now) is solar time, whose rate of flow is slower now than in the past, and varies at the level of milliseconds because of changes in the Earth's rotation rate. UTC is atomic time, with an absolutely constant rate of flow that must be periodically adjusted (\"coordinated\") to stay within 1 second of UT1."
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
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|
||
9l5l35 | how did the presidential alert work? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/9l5l35/eli5_how_did_the_presidential_alert_work/ | {
"a_id": [
"e7462ba",
"e746gz9",
"e746ha7"
],
"score": [
2,
4,
3
],
"text": [
"Yeah, it just sends out a mass text to everyone. As long as you have a password/encrypted phone, you’ll be fine. Apple has the safest/most unhackable phones right now, as far as I know. ",
"Cellular networks have had a feature (for Amber Alerts etc.) for some years where they can send SMS messages to every subscriber unit (fancy term for \"phones\" and \"mobile devices\") in their entire network... with the capability to restrict it to a certain geographic area (e.g. only cells with the metro Chicago area). In this case it was an all American carrier, all coverage msg. \n\n_How does a carrier know your phone is in its coverage?_\n\nYour phone is constantly listening for and talking to cell towers using the same cell technology its designed to support (GSM, 3G, 4G, LTE whatever). When you roam into coverage of a new carrier, the radios at the base of the nearest cell tower will query your phone for some identifying bits - your IMEI, carrier ID etc. There are boxes in the cell network which do the work of determining a) are you allowed to use _this_ network? i.e. is this your carrier or is there a roaming arrangement with your carrier? b) is this cell the one that gets a strongest signal to your phone? (if not find a better one and hand off the call to it). \n\nSo not only does a carrier's network know your phone is within its network, it knows what cell you're currently talking to. Furthermore, triangulating comparative signal strength from adjacent cells can pinpoint your cell to within a few feet. So they know where you are. \n\nHowever, its unlikely the government is tracking you. The presidential msg was simply \"send this to every subscriber unit in your CONUS coverage network.\"",
"Think about a local radio station you listen to. They always ask callers where they are located because they are broadcasting a signal with a general range but have no idea of the recipient's exact location when they received it. "
]
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| []
| [
[],
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||
45lz77 | why are speakers always round? | explainlikeimfive | https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/45lz77/eli5_why_are_speakers_always_round/ | {
"a_id": [
"czyp7p5",
"czypact"
],
"score": [
4,
2
],
"text": [
"The \"diaphram\" of a speaker is round because getting a diaphram tethered as a square or something with corners would result in what a sound engineer would call \"non-linearities\". Basically, it would be hard to get a uniform movement of air across the face of the diaphragm because the corners would move disproportionately to the edges of the flat sides. (note that \"not uniform\" is maybe overly eli5 - it isn't really correct, but the ratios of movement from the edge of the diaphragm to the center would be different in corners than on flat edges) This makes for a really hard design problem that simply goes away with the use of circle.",
"Speakers work by moving a diaphragm back and forth that is stretched pretty tightly. If the shape of the speaker were anything but round, this would create uneven pressure and could create rips or at the very least a shorter lifetime for the speaker. On top of this, the act of creating the complex sound waves that a speaker must create to simulate a guitar and a piano and a drum and a vocalist in your ear all at once would be incredibly difficult, if not impossible. \n"
]
} | []
| []
| [
[],
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