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CMV: Certain felonies should be erased from criminal records after X amount of law-abiding, post-release years | We see that people who have felony records are much more likely to return to a life of crime after they’ve “paid their debt to society”. That’s because once you’re a felon, you’re a felon for life. That means finding a job that pays a living wage, going back to school or even starting your own business is extremely difficult. People are then forced to return to crime to provide for themselves and their families or they become dependent upon government assistance. Wouldn’t it make more sense to erase certain felony convictions after someone does their time and remains law-abiding for a pre-determined timeframe once they’re released? There has to be a way to redeem oneself, or there’s very little incentive to not return to a lifestyle that while illegal, paid the bills. | The purpose of a criminal record is so there is a record of somebody’s criminal activity. While most employers require you to disclose felony convictions on job applications, many of them are willing to overlook such convictions if they were long enough ago and there has not been any recent reoffending. Being released from an armed robbery charge last week carries much more impact than being released from an armed robbery charge 20 years ago with no continued offenses since then. | 102 | 592 |
ELI5: If two countries go to war, how can the opposing army know which army is theirs without accidently shooting their own teammates? | Does every army in every country have a different uniform? Or do they all wear camouflaged suits or something. | Different uniforms, identifying colors in helmets/on person, passwords/codewords and just generally if you're being shot at it's likely it's the enemy firing. Also officers are briefed which direction enemy is at and they brief their people.
Comms, comms, comms. Very important. | 988 | 748 |
If it were raining on a planet in a binary system, i.e. with two stars, could there be two, non-concentric rainbows in the sky? | I don't know if concentric is the right word. I'm not talking about typical double rainbows that occur on Earth. I know rainbows are caused by diffractio of sunlight through spherical raindrops and occur at a certain angle. But if there are two sources of light, can there be two rainbows or is the result just one, extra vivid rainbow? | Yes, the requirement being that of a normal rainbow, with the sun behind you, and the angles of internal reflection in the water droplets. The two suns would have 2 positions (though both behind you as you looked at the rain), and each could set up that geometry such that the rainbows would have two independent positions, and the rainbows could even overlap. | 67 | 297 |
Every time I look this up, I get conflicting answers - can anyone delineate the conditions under which it is valid to use a one-tailed t-test, as opposed to a two-tailed one? | Thanks in advance. | Hypothesis testing is fundamentally designed to control your type 1 error: the probability of mistakenly rejecting the null, when the null is actually correct. In laymen's terms, we might interpret this as "the probability of wrongly taking action if we're in a situation where we shouldn't take action".
By design, hypothesis testing will fix this probability at a pre-specified rate, regardless of other types of mistakes (more on that in a second). In the most common significance level (95%), this means that there is a 5% chance we will mistakenly "take action" in cases where there isn't actually an effect happening. Note that this doesn't inherently tell you anything about how you perform in cases where there *is* something happening; that's covered by statistical power.
Now, a t-test is comparing two values (usually sample mean vs. null, or sample mean vs. another sample mean). Suppose we "take action" if either value is evidently greater than the other. This is the two-tailed test: there is a 5% chance that we mistakenly conclude one value is greater than the other. Since either outcome results in taking action, there is a 5% chance of committing a type 1 error.
Alternatively, suppose we only "take action" if value 1 is greater than value 2 (e.g. if some new strategy out-performs an old strategy). If there isn't any actual difference between value 1 and value 2, then it doesn't actually matter if we mistakenly conclude value 2 > value 1, since we won't "take action" in response (we'd simply keep the old strategy). This means that our outcome has only a 2.5% chance of a type 1 error where we mistakenly take action, so it doesn't make sense to report a 5% type 1 error rate. To address this, a one-tailed test is actually the equivalent of a 90% significance test, but only looking in one direction (looking for value 1 > value 2).
There are other valid ways to handle critical regions, and not all hypothesis tests are as symmetric / well-behaved as the simple t-test, but this is sufficient for a beginner's level. It also ignores any consideration of statistical power. Note that if you are performing a one-tailed test, this means that you would know which direction to look at *before collecting any data*, strictly from the context. | 15 | 15 |
ELI5: Why humans are so inclined to seek any form of "drugs" | It seems every culture we know of have only one thing in common. They all discovered alcohol. They drank for recreation. Hell, agriculture itself was discovered by accident in the making of alcohol. Marijuana, methamphetamine, heroin, the list goes on. | Neurotransmitters are a kind of chemical found in the brain. The brain uses them for many things, and one of those things is to reward you for good behaviour. Good behaviour can include activities that increase your likelihood of surviving and spreading your genes - things like eating tasty food (to make your body stronger) or having sex. When you do these things, your brain will release, among other things, dopamine or serotonin, which are two types of neurotransmitters.
Drugs are a way of bypassing the good behaviour part and going straight for the rewards. Its like eating your dessert without having to eat the vegetables first. They're a quick, easy way of feeling good, without having to go to the effort of doing the activities that normally make you feel good.
Now, Our current brain physiology evolved long before we could make alcohol or other drugs. The neurotransmitters were not designed to be used in this way. You also get far larger releases of neurotransmitters from drugs than you would naturally. Drugs are basically a way of hacking your brain to feel way better than you could have without them.
The cost, of course, is that our brains are not meant to handle those levels of neurotransmitters. If not used with caution, drugs can upset brain chemistry and cause depression, aggression, etc. They can also make us less sensitive to the reward chemicals, so that we need more of them to feel anything.
Sometimes, we can control it and act rationally, using drugs sparingly. But sometimes, the reward can be too irresistible, and can sometimes override our rational thinking or decision-making. This is especially true for people who have suffered in their lives and struggle to feel good naturally (like with PTSD, for example). In certain circumstances, and with certain drugs, people will do things that they would never normally do (e.g. stealing), just to secure their next dose of artificial reward. The pull can be just too strong. This is why addiction is so dangerous.
Edit: spelling | 21 | 15 |
How come we are able to detect planets thousands (millions?) of light years away from us, but we have yet to determine with 100% certainty whether or not there is a ninth planet in our solar system? | Our main method to detect planets orbiting distant stars is by observing the star when the planet moves in front of it. This briefly makes the star appear dimmer as the planet blocks part of the light of the star. If this happens on a regular interval, we assume that this dimming is caused by a planet and its periodic orbit.
An additional planet in our solar system can't be detected this way, since such an object would never come between the Earth and the Sun. Since this hypothetical planet would be far away from the Sun, it would only receive and reflect a small amount of light, making it very hard to detect. Detecting a very dim speck of light amidst a sky full of objects that are much brighter, without any idea about where to start looking, is worse than finding a needle in a haystack. | 559 | 754 |
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[Star Wars] So, if Jedi are not supposed to have relationships... | Does that means they are all virgins?
Where applicable, of course. | Depends on when they're found and if they follow the rules.
Generally, the Jedi like training recruits as younglings, individuals who have yet to reach whatever version of puberty their species has. This allows for a far higher success rate of their indoctrination program, not to mention younger individuals tend to be extremely efficient learners from the academic to the acrobatic. There are times, however, when an older recruit is brought before the Council and they choose to go ahead with training for whatever reason has merited their attention. If a 17 year old human, for example, starts training (something quite rare), he or she may not be a virgin.
And, of course, there's Anakin. During the Clone Wars, General Anakin Skywalker married then-Senator Amedala, and they conceived twins. This is all covered in the epic poem *Star Wars*, which is required reading at most schools. While it's not known if this calamity was typical of Jedi breaking their vow, it certainly doesn't speak well of it... but it does happen now and again, and the results can be more than a little problematic.
There is, of course, retirement, too. Jedi do take an oath and serve, but it's not always a lifetime of service. If a Jedi can demonstrate that they have the emotional stability and maturity, they can leave the order and marry and have kids. There's likely a test of some kind they have to pass, as the Jedi love tests. | 27 | 41 |
ELI5: What’s the visual difference between hue, shade, tint and tone | As a monochromat, I hear these words tossed around sometimes when talking about color, and the explanations I have gotten have all relied upon color. | That’s wild you can’t see colour at all. Can you see objects under all wavelengths? Red light, etc? Do you think you see contrast better?
Hue: wavelength of light
Shade: how much black is added
Tint: how much white is added
Tone: the whole range from black to white
Saturation: how much grey is added | 155 | 79 |
ELI5: Why are there gusts of wind? Why don’t they just disperse and even out? Where do big pressure changes COME from??? | Maybe you can ELI7 because I’ve taken three college level physics courses but I just don’t get this: where do temperature and pressure changes come from that are so powerful we get 50mph+ gusts? Why don’t those differences just disperse outward and equalize from wherever they’re generated? How can I be standing on one side of my yard and a gust of wind be displacing the trees 30ft away??? | They do equalize outward from where they are generated. They get generated in areas with stark temperature differences, typically lakes or mountains, or as a result of weather (like rain). Water’s high heat capacity means it doesn’t change temperature as quickly as land, so air passing over it gets heated (or cooled) depending on solar intensity and time of day (a lake will stay warm at night but the ground wont).
So these systems are created over large bodies of water typically, radiate outward, but given the size of them “outward” tends to be well across the nearest landmass, while the other radial side goes out to sea and dissipates over a distance. And if not much is there to bump into it then the wavefront doesn’t really get stopped by much. | 13 | 26 |
How do infrared cameras work? | I know that infrared waves are the same as heat waves, and I know that you can take advantage of these ways in the same way as you can with the visible light, but how does it work? An infrared picture contain red and blue colours, but are these colours determined to be used for specific intensities of infrared or what?
| Infrared, visibile light, ultraviolet light, etc.. All of these are electromagnetic waves of different frequencies. Infrared cameras work pretty much the same as visible light cameras, only their sensor is sensitive for longer wavelenghts of electromagnetic waves. | 12 | 22 |
ELI5: How can car dealerships on radio claim they'll accept payment from people with bad/no credit? Doesn't this destroy the idea altogether? | They usually use your job or your property as collateral/a form of credit. Sometimes the same types of ads will say this. "Bad credit? No credit? Your job **is** your credit!" Basically, you will be approved for an extremely high interest rate and if you don't pay, they'll automatically deduct missed payments from your paycheck at work. | 399 | 720 |
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If mass matters in the solar system with relation to gravity (Jupiter vs Mercury for example), why doesn't that apply to mass of smaller objects (a feather and a bowling ball). Why do those two fall at the same rate? | For some people equations work best to explain something, so let's give this a try.
Force of Gravity (F) = G*m1 *m2/ r^2
Say m1 is the earth and m2 is the bowling ball or feather. And they are both the same r from the center of the earth.
Now the rate they fall is determined by the acceleration with the following equ:
a = F/m2
Sub this into the first equation.
m2* a = G *m1 *m2 / r^2
the m2s cancel out and your acceleration is just dependent on the earth's mass. This works since the acceleration of the earth is so small. If two objects with similar mass was used then you couldn't just look at one since both would be moving towards each other.
a = G*m1 / r^2
| 16 | 37 |
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[Star Wars] Why can’t Jedi or Sith use the force to crash/crush enemy vehicles or starships during battles? | It takes practice and concentration. Something like a starship or large vehicle is usually beyond the capabilities of your average force users. In the middle of a battle there's too much going on to try and create a force crush unless you're a powerful force user and not busy trying to not get hit. | 50 | 44 |
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ELI5: Why do tree trunks have a ring for every year the tree was alive? Why are those rings formed at all? | When a tree is growing, they tend to do so in patterns of fast growth in the spring/summer and slow growth in the fall/winter.
The fast growth isn’t as dense, and is a lighter color, while the slow growth is denser and darker.
There are exceptions to this rule though. Drought/flood/disease or other factors can disrupt the growth cycle. | 43 | 39 |
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What do "best practices" look like in modern software development? | Let's say I'm joining a new team - there's a lot of talk about best practices, but it's not always clear what they mean (or Team A's best practices might be different from the Team B I'm used to). What are some good examples to look out for, or to try to bring to the table to improve the quality of the new team?
Reading through the [Joel Test](https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2000/08/09/the-joel-test-12-steps-to-better-code/) which I frequently see "checked" on StackOverflow job descriptions, I can get a rough idea for "how it works", (namely, a good company will make efforts to improve the developer experience with good tooling etc) but I'm more looking for the under the hood best practices, for actual design, code and architecture. Any thoughts or suggestions on the below, plus anything I'm missing?
* Design patterns (functional, object-oriented, singletons, etc)
* Documentation (jsDoc or similar)
* Code generation tools (lanugage / framwork dependent)
* Specifications e.g. Swagger, Postman, OpenAPI, client design specs
* Storyboarding e.g. Sketch, Figma
* Database diagrams e.g. [dbdiagram.io](https://dbdiagram.io)
* Architecture e.g. monolith vs. distributed / microservices
* Version control e.g.Github
* What else?
Thanks for the suggestions! | I don't think the specifics of generated documentation, API specs, or DB diagrams really matter so long as the team has a standard way it's done. Ideally most of your artifacts are generated from code specifications so they can never diverge from reality.
As for design patterns and architecture, consistency is king. Some apps are better as monoliths, some are better as microservices; some apps are better planned as agile, others as waterfall; some apps are better as functional, others turn into spaghetti. But all code is bad if you have to guess module to module which styles to apply.
I would add:
* Can you test all the code in one step?
You're going to be testing code frequently on your machine and in automation, it better be easy and repeatable.
* Can you rely on the integration test environment's results?
If you can't, it's likely you'll miss real issues due to "just another flake" and then you're testing in production.
* Do business and engineering agree on the importance and direction of the software?
Poor communication and relationships with the people who bring in the money is a fast way to get the project killed.
* Are releases automated?
People make mistakes, especially in high-stress situations. Don't let it be you.
* Can you turn up a new non-prod environment in a day?
The process for starting environments should be well documented/automated rather than in people's heads.
* Are most on-call issues covered by playbooks?
Mature teams have playbooks for handling common issues to prevent mistakes and ease investigation burden. | 10 | 34 |
CMV: All places in which people are incarcerated, detained, etc. should be completely open to journalists and the public eye. | **CMV: All places in which people are incarcerated, detained, etc. should be completely open to journalists and the public eye.**
I recently heard the news about the [supposed whistleblower who alleges mass hysterectomies are occurring at an ICE Detention Center](https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/like-an-experimental-concentration-camp-whistleblower-complaint-alleges-mass-hysterectomies-at-ice-detention-center/). Obviously we don’t yet know how truthful these claims are, but regardless of their accuracy, but that itself is another problem: that we don’t know. We should be able to know exactly what is going on in these places so that we could confirm either that there are problems or that things are fine. All of these records regarding what goes on in places like this, including the way people are treated, medical records, how facilities are run, etc. should be open to the public. Journalists should have mostly free access to tour the facilities. This shouldn’t just be for detention centers. That’s just one example. Other normal jails and prisons should have to be just as transparent.
Of course, I’m willing to acknowledge the following exceptions:
​
1. The identities of the individual prisoners/detainees.
2. Information that would specifically allow for easier break-ins or escapes.
3. Any information found in investigations/interrogations by the facility that would compromise said investigations should it be released (ex. information a cop gets from interrogating a detainee, information received at Guantanamo Bay from a terrorist that is necessary for national security).
EDIT: To clarify when I said “medical records” I’m not referring to information on the conditions of specific patients, but rather all actions taken by any medical facilities, and certainly not specifying which patients this was done to.
EDIT 2: I’m not responding to any more comments along the lines of “tHaT sOuNdS LiKe A zOo”. I’ve addressed that point sufficiently in various replies to the same arguments over and over again and I find it mostly tired and unconvincing at this point. I will make an exception for any arguments that actually expand on that discourse in a reasonable way instead of repeating it. | > We should be able to know exactly what is going on in these places so that we could confirm either that there are problems or that things are fine.
It's simply not possible. Either you will make every piece of information public which will make it impossible to fulfill your exceptions or you will keep those exceptions and create a blanket of loopholes to hide things if they would be needed.
Publicizing information isn't the way to keep institutions safe. Safeguarding whistleblowers and creating overseeing bodies is the way. | 808 | 9,707 |
ELI5 what mainframe computer is and how it works | Lets say in your job there are occasionally really hard math problems that need to be solved. So the company has someone really good at math sit by your desk and solve the problems when they come up. But people who can solve really hard math problems are hard to find and get paid a lot. Since the problems only come up occasionally, the math person isn't doing much most of the time.
So your company decides that instead of having a math person at every desk, they will set up a room full of math people. Instead of having your problems solved at your desk, you will send them to the math room where they will be assigned to someone to solve. Since multiple people can use the same person they need less math people and the ones they have will be working most of the time. Plus, when you have a really really hard problem multiple people can work on it together.
That is basically what a mainframe is. A computer designed to handle a large amount of operations as quickly as possible for things like data and transaction processing. | 157 | 34 |
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CMV: It is unfair to complain about business owners and CEO's wealth but give celebrities a pass. | I had been thinking this over for some time, but the recent New Yorker article wherein Jamie Lee Curtis mentioned she has [Never done a hard day's work in her life](https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-new-yorker-interview/jamie-lee-curtis-has-never-worked-hard-a-day-in-her-life?utm_source=pocket-newtab) pushed me over the edge to make a CMV.
Some CEO's seem to make crazy amounts of money for doing almost nothing, others work for [$1 a year](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One-dollar_salary) and only make money if the company stock increases under their leadership. Some (Like Ford) have a nepotist dynasty in place, others hire inside or outside talent.
To hold Jamie Lee Curtis up as my example of celebrity decadence: she is a beneficiary of nepotism, has a net worth of $60 million, admits herself she hasn't worked hard for what she has, and declared that "doing her part" for climate change was met by [installing solar panels and driving a hybrid car](https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=12&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwivteTapaHmAhXhw1kKHSBgA3UQFjALegQIAxAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.eonline.com%2Fnews%2F272788%2Fwhy-is-jamie-lee-curtis-going-green-we-re-melting&usg=AOvVaw1zg35QSsROb_kJfuKVeWNw).
I think it is just bias and anti-corporate sentiment that makes some people complain endlessly about CEO compensation and not actor compensation. | The important difference between business wealth and entertainment wealth is how they affect other people.
Celebrities aren't in charge of very much. They have few employees. They aren't in politics. They have money but not *power*.
Business wealth relies on extracting surplus value from both employees and customers. They are often okay with unethical labour as long as they are someone else's labourers in a foreign country. Their customers never come first, not truly, because quality is limited by cost and profit. They're also okay with environmental harm which is a burden affecting everyone. And they certainly do like to influence governments. In other words, big business has money *and* power.
Jamie Lee Curtis may only be making a token effort with her solar panels, but she doesn't spend millions lobbying against renewable energy industries. | 78 | 178 |
[George Orwell's 1984] Are the proles part of the Party? | I know the proles have to follow Party law. I know the Party produces all higher materials for the proles (such as porno mags, and other luxury items), and the proles are not required to participate in the Two Minute Hate.
But, are the proles considered part of the Party nonetheless? Does the Party consist of three levels: the proles, the Outer Party, and the Inner Party? Or is there the proles, and the Party? Two separate, distinct political entities? | It's very complicated and difficult to talk about with any certainty, because it would vary in application from department to department, but the proles, inner party, and outer party, are not distinct political entities, but distinct social entities. There is only 1 area of politics, but this is displayed in different ways to the 3 social areas of Airstrip 1.
They are *not* a part of the Party, but *The Party* is in some ways just a gross simplification of the idea of class or social differentiation. No one would talk about the Proles in terms of politics, but in the ways that social scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, or whatever, talk about different social groups.
They explicitly say that if a Prole works their way up and tries to gain admittance to the Outer Party they will be killed. The same is true for Outer Party members working their way to the Inner Party. It's because there is no party, there are just class and social lines that are enforced with violence. The terminology of politics is used to justify what is happening, but there hasn't been any true Party since they won the revolution. | 63 | 61 |
Does the brain process images faster than computers, and if so, why? | I have read that computers can run calculations much faster than the human brain. But then at the same time, it seems as though human/animal brains process images much faster than even the best computers. For instance, with facial recognition. Why is that? | Computers and brains process information very differently. Artificial neural networks, though inspired by our (1950s) understanding of the brain, are not a good model of how the brain actually works. The brain has as many glial cells as neurons, and does as much "work" using chemistry as using electrical/ion channel signaling.
As a result, the performance capabilities of brains and computers are wildly different. There are only a tiny handful of tasks - facial recognition being one - where the performance of brains and computers can be meaningfully compared. There is no "why" to this - it's just that in the range of tasks where brains are better and where computers are better, there wind up being a few where they're about the same.
Computers are generally getting better as our hardware and (more importantly) or algorithms improve, while brains are staying the same. So we should expect, in general, that tasks where brains and computers are close to each other today, to be dominated by computers in the future. | 20 | 17 |
ELI5:why do many former drug addicts become religious after rehabilitation? | As the title says, i've been wondering about this for some time now. | Most 12 step programs have a significant religious aspect to them. They use the fact that these are people who, when they choose to live for themselves, make poor decisions. Getting them to live for "A higher power" is one of the more successful ways to rehabilitate them. | 26 | 18 |
Is getting published as an undergrad possible? | I'm currently in my fourth and last year of my undergrad in Communication, and I had the opportunity to complete some of my own research with the help of a grant. Now that the research is done, I want to publish the report. My supervisor said that it's a long shot, but I would like some second opinions. In particular, they said that me being an undergrad might immediately disqualify me from a number of journals.
Do undergrads not get taken seriously when submitting to journals? Is the content of the manuscript the only thing considered with peer-review/publication standards? Any tips for an inexperienced researcher?
In my admittedly biased assessment, the work that I have done is on par with many other articles I encountered. This is the closest I'll probably ever get to publish something, so I want to increase my chances as much as possible. Or at least be told honestly that I don't have a chance.
Thanks. | Many journals review papers double-blind: the reviewers don’t know who you are, and you don’t know who they are. The bigger issue is that if you don’t have a mentor for this project, you may not know whether this work is new and noteworthy, and if they are you may still struggle with writing the paper in the manner they want. See if this professor can help guide you through the writing process, and that will help a lot. | 51 | 39 |
CMV: The use of titles/honorifics is arrogant and there should be no social obligation to abide by them. | I see the whole prospect of expecting someone to use their title as really arrogant whether it be nobility titles, academic titles, titles of authority, etc.
The way I see it, if I were to address the president as Obama instead of Mr. President, the Pope as Francis not using Your Holiness, or a respected scientist just by their first name not using Dr., etc, they would understand that they are being referred to and that is the only purpose a name is really supposed to serve.
Expecting to be called by a title feels to me as if they think they should be seen as superior to others and hence arrogant. | Titles and honorifics are a recognition of the work and/or contribution that somebody put in. With the exception of old-school nobility by birth, such titles are *earned*. They cost society little, but they act as a social reward (and possibly incentive) for doing the work, effort, and contribution. They are a sign of social respect for what that person has done.
Now, you personally may not respect that person or care about how or why they got that recognition, but then there is a social cost to you when other people are put off by your failure to respect the work and effort of others, the social institutions that we've built, and the social norms for how we recognize these things.
In that context, it is *you* that are arrogant. You are thumbing your nose at both the effort and contribution of the person who earned that title as well as the social agreement that this is how we show respect for such things. You think you are so important that you can just ignore the principles by which everybody else in society uses to interact. It means you aren't trustworthy or predictable in how you will behave around or with others, perhaps being disrespectful or embarrassing to be around.
If you have reason to not respect a particular *individual* because of something bad that person did, you may take exception from applying the title to *that person*. But forgoing the whole thing because you don't want to do it is like doing anything rude just for your own interests: refusing to hold doors open, cutting in people's lines, downloading a car. Well, not sure about the last one.
| 26 | 19 |
ELI5 What is it that makes it so computers can't solve captchas? | It requires image recognition capabilities that don't yet exist outside some advanced machine learning laboratories.
Asking a computer to look at a cluttered image of a street corner and identify a fire hydrant is not something it is going to be able to do unless it's had a lot of practice identifying fire hydrants from multiple angles, zoom, color, etc.
Humans are able to solve them because we process things differently. We can look at that image and process that fire hydrant, based on prior knowledge of what a fire hydrant looks like. | 26 | 27 |
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ELI5:Scientifically, what is "intuition"? | Scientifically speaking, what exactly is intuition? Is it a culmination of unconscious intelligence or something else? | One author has defined it as the subconscious reaching a conclusion before the conscious mind even knows there is a question. For instance, you might see a shady-looking dude approaching you in a dark parking lot and your hair stands on end long before you process that he's walking too fast, maybe has clenched fists, and has murder in his eyes. In other words, your brain goes from A to Z before your conscious mind his even evaluated the situation. | 34 | 19 |
ELI5: What is different with sport bikes that make them sound so high pitch compared to cruisers that sound so deep? | The RPM (rotations per min) at which the different motors operate, and their respective power bands, because of their different uses.
Cruises tend to have larger overall engines, working at a relatively low RPM to keep the bike, well, cruising. They have a wide power band (to oversimplify, the same amount of power at most RPMS) That is to say, best in a straight line, with few dramatic changes in speed or direction necessary. They They're build for style and comfort.
Sport bikes, in contrast, operate at a very high RPM range, with a narrow power band (meaning it makes most of it's power in the high RPM range, so it needs to stay revved up). They're build for speed and agility.
TL;DR the two engines are doing two very different things, so they sound very different. | 20 | 49 |
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What are the common argument types for vegetarian/vegan diets? | How can the varying *prominent* moral arguments for vegetarian (or vegan) diets be distinguished/categorized? In other words, what are the most prominent types of arguments (perhaps utilitarian, virtue, etc.) for vegetarian diets, and what are some examples of each?
Additionally, what are the most common responses to these arguments from defenders of the moral permissibility of eating meat?
I am trying to avoid the length of SEP articles while aiming for more than just a couple sentences explaining each approach. What is *most* important for me, is identifying philosophers associated with specific accounts of vegetarianism/vegan arguments (hopefully specific works). | The three main vegan ethical theories are utilitarian, rights-based, and virtue ethics.
Utilitarian veganism is most famously defended by Peter Singer. Singer argues that if we view human suffering as worthy of moral consideration, there is no reason to exclude animals from this same consideration.
Rights-based veganism is defended by Tom Regan. Regan argues that harming animals is not wrong just because of the suffering it causes, but specifically because we owe something to animals as conscious creatures capable of suffering. They have rights in the same way that humans do.
Virtue ethical veganism is defended by Cora Diamond. Diamond argues that we should respect animals not because it’s wrong to hurt them, but because hurting animals is not something that a virtuous person does, in the same way that we don’t eat corpses because eating a corpse is not something that a virtuous people does.
In terms of responses from meat eaters to these ethical theories, there really aren’t any. There’s an entry on r/askphilosophyFAQ that addresses the most popular arguments for eating meat and why they aren’t popular among philosophers. | 24 | 19 |
I believe the pharmaceutical industry has strong incentives to avoid curing diseases CMV | > Give a man a fish, feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime
In the logic of the quote above, I believe the pharmaceutical industry has a stronger incentive to 'give a man a fish' - i.e, to develop drugs that will manage diseases and their related symptoms. I do not believe that it is in their mandated profit-seeking interests to develop drugs that would turn a theoretically chronic disease needing constant drugs into a cure which would only need one cycle of treatment. | One thing you have to keep in mind is that while this may be true about the companies in isolation, things like medical research hospitals and universities are also researching these things as well. These are direct competitors to the pharmaceutical companies in this sense. If a university publishes a cure for cancer, the pharmaceutical company has been beaten to the punch, and they can't patent this cure and sell it, while also losing the demand for their non-curative treatments, so they have an incentive to find it themselves. | 76 | 107 |
ELI5:when you flush a toilet, how does the water get sucked? Is it by a vacuum or the just the additional water that is added | I'm asking in regards to conventional toilets not airplanes | Conventional toilets work on water being added from above. The force of the water rushing in and then pouring over the top of the S-bend sucks the contents of the bowl out. When the flush cycle completes, the toilet trickle-fills the bowl a bit more in order to wash the sides of the bowl and fill the S-bend to the point that an air seal is created to keep the smell out.
Conventional toilets do **not** work on siphons. If this were the case, when one toilet in the house flushed, all of them would, because they are all connected to a common sewer stack. In reality, the stack is vented to the outside above the rooftops to allow pressure to equalize, preventing one flush from causing a cascade.
**TL;DR:** Toilets flush from the action of the water surging into the bowl and over the S-bend. No vacuum, suction, or siphon is involved, as sewer systems are not designed for that.
**Edit: I've been corrected by people more knowledgable in plumbing. There is a siphon involved, but only through the S-bend.** | 10 | 28 |
ELi5: How are artificial flavors made? | Without getting too detailed, scientists place the chemicals of the desired food that they want to replicate, into the food that they are trying to create. Flavors are normally very complex, with sometimes hundreds of different chemicals to create a single taste. But many flavors, particularly fruit flavors, have just one or a few dominant chemical components that make up most of the taste. They place these components into food in order to give it a certain flavor. For example, if you put Octyl Acetate -- what mainly creates the flavor of Oranges -- into a piece of bland gum, you have successfully created Orange flavored gum. | 56 | 220 |
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ELI5: What are SPACs (Special Purpose Acquisition Company) and what do they do? | When a growing company wants to go public as an IPO, the traditional process requires a lot of disclosures, accounting, paperwork, filings, legal fees etc. as the company readies itself for public stock sale. This can take a long time and be costly.
n alternative method is a SPAC. This kind of company raises money from (usually very well heeled) investors with the goal of short circuiting that process. The investor money is pooled and a SPAC is formed that does nothing, but announce plans to acquire other companies. The SPAC then goes public with a very simple IPO (simple because the company does nothing, yet). Then the SPAC acquires a real company that wants to go public. Now the stock in the SPAC is really just the valuation of the acquired company and the acquired company is for all intents and purposes public, skipping all of the usual process. | 43 | 54 |
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The top journal in my field constantly asks me for peer review, at what point is it reasonable to ask for a position on the editorial board? Is that ever even an option? | So as the title states, the top journal in my field of speciality constantly invites me for peer review, invitations which I generally accept. In the past year alone I have done 7 peer reviews for this specific journal. Admittedly, I do frequently submit my reviews late due to competing commitments or get disinvited because the number of required reviews is reached (I assume they over invite in those cases, since I have often been reviewer #4 on some manuscripts).
I also peer review for several other journals but less frequently; I feel this journal takes an unusually larger chunk of my review time and I wonder if it would be possible to approach them to be considered for their editorial board? Is this even something that one does or just waits for an invitation (if that ever comes)? Given that performing reviews as just a peer reviewer takes a lot of time and brings very little added value to my CV, I think having some sort of formalized position would at least justify me prioritizing this journal's reviews on a more timely basis than I have been up to now. | A couple of thoughts:
* If you review frequently for the journal, then sure, go ahead and ask about the possibility of an editorial board position. Of course, be sure to phrase your request in very professional and positive terms. You really respect the journal, it's your go-to place for the latest and greatest in your field, you have reviewed for them frequently in the past, and so forth. Don't let any hint of the idea come across that this is a quid pro quo situation, i.e., that you've done a lot of review work for them in the past and now you'd like to be rewarded with a position. In strict numerical terms, the journal has very few editorial board positions but many, many reviewers, even reviewers who review multiple times per year, so in that strictly numerical sense, your situation is likely not special.
* The other point is that, even if it's ok for you to ask about the possibility of an editorial board position, it's another matter entirely as to whether this is a good idea. You yourself admit that you frequently submit late reviews (the bane of any editorial board member's existence), and so it might be wise to ask whether you truly have the time available in your schedule to serve as an editorial board member, which is a whole new level of work entirely compared to being an ordinary reviewer. | 120 | 129 |
If the sun were to suddenly turn 90 degrees, making its equator a meridian, what would happen to the solar system? | Since the Sun is the most massive body in our solar system and also has the highest gravitational pull (due to its distance to the other bodies in our solar system), the effects of the rotation of the Sun must be examined in two cases:
If the Sun rotated about its center of gravity by 90 degrees, nothing appreciable would happen to the solar system because the Sun's center of gravity would exist in the same position in space.
However, if the Sun rotated by 90 degrees around an arbitrary point that was not its center of gravity, the orbits of the bodies in our solar system would change due to the stronger or weaker gravitational force. This is due to the respective increases or decreases of the distance between the center of gravity of the Sun and the orbiting bodies' centers of centers of gravity. Elliptical orbits would similarly have to be reevaluated, as the Sun may no longer exist at the foci of the ellipses.
**tl;dr** The answer depends greatly on whether the rotation is about the Sun's center of gravity. | 19 | 66 |
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ELI5: At what point in history did we decide cats and dogs can be domestic animals? They had to start out in the wild at first. What made us choose them over others? | At what point in history did we decide cats and dogs can be domestic animals? They had to start out in the wild at first. What made us choose them over others?
| Some wolves were friendly enough that early man learned to "trade" food with them, and in exchange the wolves stuck around and provided security and possibly even helped in the hunt. Wolves are social animals like humans, so there was a level of innate understanding that we could build on. Over time, their descendants were bred for friendliness and various working tasks... eventually, they moved right in with us.
As for cats... I've heard it described that they're the only animal that domesticated themselves. Wild cats learned to associate humans with food and shelter... eventually, any offspring that was friendlier and more domestic were kept and less friendly ones were tossed out. Over many generations, this resulted in the fat, furry, lazy bags of evil we know as domestic cats today. | 56 | 60 |
[DC] Does Batman have eye screens? | When he's drawn with pure white eyes is that just to make him look more mysterious or is it supposed to be like his cowl has something built into it to protect his eyes? | Yes. Modern interpretations even have either contact lenses or lenses in the cowl which provide a HUD and several vision modes. There's even microphones and comms antennas in the ears to account for them covering Bruce's actual ears. Man thought of everything. | 58 | 67 |
ELI5: Why mixing all colours of the rainbow creates white but mixing lots of paints creates brown | Bonus: why does the mixing of, say, red and blue create purple, even though red and blue both have greater wavelengths? | Subtractive vs additive light. Paint absorbs all light but the color they emit (red paint absorbs all light but red), light emits only the color (red light emits red light). When you mix two lights, you mix the wavelengths, when you mix paints you are combining what colors they absorb, mixing more colors means they absorb more colors, leading the color they emit to turn very brown. | 511 | 314 |
CMV: I don't think it would be immoral to clone a Neanderthal. | It's widely accepted in the scientific community that cloning a Neanderthal (or other extinct homo ____) for scientific reasons would be immoral. I disagree. We could learn so much from it, and there is no reason why a Neanderthal clone couldn't live a happy life. We don't know exactly how it will be once it's alive, because we don't know how intelligent Neanderthals were (could they even understand language? It's likely but we don't jnow.) However, we know they had larger brains than us, so there's a chance they could have been just as smart, and if not, we already have special education and social services for people that are mentally deficient compared to the rest of society. A volunteer couple of anthropologists could raise the Neanderthal on their own as if it were their child. The way I see it, the worst possible case scenario is that you have an essentially retarded human (which is ok, they already exist and can be happy), or best case scenario it could be an excellent student and star linebacker on the high school football team. We also know that Neanderthals mated with humans, so it could have a very satisfying sex life as well. I don't see a downside to this anywhere and it would be a HUGE benefit to our understanding of human evolution. Why is this seen as so immoral?
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | A child or person of diminished mental capacity can't on their own agree to participate in scientific research, they have a parent or guardian consent on their behalf and there are generally much stricter guidelines on their participation than regular adults. A Neanderthal would exhibit similar issues, there's no clear agent who could consent for them. Their entire existence would exist for scientific study, there's no particular benefit for them and there may be significant downsides, many people would consider the level of observation such a creature would have over their life to be a detriment. | 23 | 80 |
Best Book on Hegel for the Layman | I am getting very into the history of ideas. I just finished Age of Anger by Mishra, and I am excited to start diving into some other books. I am reading about Rousseau atm, and I am going to meander my way into the German thinkers soon. I have read overviews of Hegel's philosophy, the way he shaped Marx, and the influence of his work. I am not a big fan based on what I read, but I would would like to understand him better. I have not attempted any of his books yet. This is partly due to intimidation (I heard that one of his books has an intro that is 500 pages long), and partly because I have heard he is one of the most difficult philosophers to understand. Are there any books out there that explain Hegel's ideas in such a way that the average reader (that would be me) can understand and critique? Preferably I am looking for a book that discusses his ideas, but also his life. I see that Charles Taylor wrote a biography that looks interesting. Is that a good place to start? If not, are there any better books you all would recommend? I appreciate any and all input. Thank you! | I'd heavily recommend *Reason and Revolution* by Herbert Marcuse, particularly if you are interested in Hegel's influence on Marx and how Hegel fits into the broader Enlightenment tradition. It's not really a neutral academic intro - Marcuse certainly favored an interpretation in line with the Left-Hegelians, and wrote the book in part as a critique of fascist interpretations of Hegel - but Marcuse displays a strong understanding of the texts, and explains Hegel's philosophy and historical context with readable and engaging prose. | 13 | 29 |
How was the permeability of free space derived? | It seems really strange to me that it is a constant with respect to pi. What were the calculations to derive that the permeability of free space is equal to 4π×10^−7 V·s/(A·m) | Well... there's a fixed relationship between the permitivity and permeability of free space (c^2 = 1/(ε0μ0)). In the SI system of units, meters and seconds are both defined, and therefore c is fixed. We then *defined* the permeability of free space, which in turn fixes the permittivity of free space.
So in short, that value is defined, not derived. In other unit systems, they define a different value for the permeability and permittivity. | 11 | 33 |
When new elements are created in the lab, why do we smash together individual atoms instead of just smashing two bigger clumps together? | Surely if our goals is to perform thousands and thousands of collisions, wouldn't it be easier to collide larger clumps of atoms than single atoms? Or is it something about the acceleration process that prevents us from doing that? | To reach the speeds at which collisions will cause the nuclei to interact, we have to ionize the atoms and accelerate them into a beam in a particle accelerator. There are many atoms in the beam - it's not as if we're performing the experiment one atom at a time - but the process of ionizing and accelerating breaks up any multi-atom clumps into a stream of separate ions. | 27 | 33 |
Why does cold temperatures dry clothes? | In a rainy day, if I leave wet clothes in a bedroom with a heater, they will dry.
And if I leave wet clothes in a bedroom with cold air conditioning it will dry.
Why? | Important part is the that liquid water will always just spontaneously evaporate with speed depending on a number of factors like: temperature, humidity of the air, and airflow over the surface.
An AC lowers the air temperature, slowing down evaporation, but also lowers humidity, speeding up evaporation. AC also creates a draft in the room, speeding up evaporation.
Once you get to freezing temperatures the water will solidify and no longer evaporate. | 66 | 19 |
Can anyone explain the aspect from quantum theory that gives the possibility that if I throw a ball at a wall, there's a one in a gazzilion chance that it will go through the wall? | There's not really any *single* aspect of quantum physics that could interpreted that way. Rather, there are a variety of paths you can take that lead you to that place.
For example, consider the ball-wall system as a metaphor for a particle on one side of a potential "wall." It's possible, under the right circumstances, for the particle to appear spontaneously on the other side of the "wall." This is called quantum tunneling, and it's essentially the basis of … well, *chemistry,* really. So it's rather a big deal.
Or you can think of the ball-wall interaction as a scattering process. When a particle gets into a situation in which it can scatter off something, there exists a probability that it *won't* scatter, and instead will just pass right by as if the thing weren't there at all. So in a sense, all the particles in your ball could just *fail* to interact with the wall, thus slipping through it like smoke through a piece of cloth.
Then there's the uncertainty principle. The momentum and position of a particle are Fourier transforms of each other. That means when the momentum is highly localized to a specific value, the position of the particle is spread out over all of space. Which means there exists some probability of detecting the particle a squillion miles from where it was one instant ago.
But it's important to remember that macroscopic things — where macroscopic isn't rigidly defined, but instead is really rather circularly defined — don't behave that way. An electron will tunnel readily out of a potential well. A cricket ball will not tunnel through a cricket bat, no matter how hard the batter protests that he *really did* hit it. | 62 | 43 |
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Why are so many philosophical texts difficult to read? | For example Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is notoriously difficult to read or grasp. Why do so many philosophers have such impenetrable prose in their writing? Do they not wish for laypeople to not read their books and only academics? I often think common people have to rely on predigested pop philosophy to come in contact with the philosophy the writers meant to communicate. | > Why are so many philosophical texts difficult to read?
Because they're discussing the technical details of an academic discipline.
> For example Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is notoriously difficult to read or grasp. Why do so many philosophers have such impenetrable prose in their writing?
While it is quite likely that someone unprepared to tackle *The Critique of Pure Reason* will encounter a great deal of difficulty with it, it's no less likely that they would encounter as great a deal of difficulty with an advanced text in physics without having any preparation in *that* field. | 45 | 30 |
What brain function takes over when I'm able to zone out while driving and still navigate turns and make stops without incident? | While driving to work today, I began thinking about something completely random but it took over my conscious mind and I wasn't actively concentrating on driving. When I "came to" I had driven miles down the road. Why didn't I wreck and how can I exploit this in other areas of my life? | The brain forms neural connections based on common activities. The more often you do the activity, the more connections are formed, thus improving the throughput across the 'ol synapses. The reverse actually occurs as well: if you don't do something for a long time, the brain scavenges some of that material, and downgrades the path in favor of something you do MORE often.
The practical upshot of this is that, if you do something constantly, and it's reasonably repetitive, you don't have to put much attention into it...The channels are so optimized, that it's not conscious anymore.
The problem is when you break the habit. When you get up in the morning, get in the car, and *don't* go to work. When you're driving down the road, and something unexpected happens. This is basically the same across all learned behaviour. | 78 | 232 |
Does anyone have any book recommendations pertaining to environmental economics? | A Course in Environmental Economics: Theory, Policy, and Practice by Daniel J. Phaneuf and Tilman Requate.
I took a couple classes with Professor Phaneuf and he’s absolutely brilliant. This book does a good job of laying out the theory behind the models used and provides real word context of how we use them. | 15 | 44 |
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In microeconomics, the goals of the household and firm are presented as equations- but do we have one for an efficient government? | Yes. It depends on what you're modeling, but usually for questions about what the government "should" do, we use a type of model called a "social planner's problem" (SPP). Here, we have to make assumptions about everyone's utility and the relative weights that we put on their well-being. Sometimes they assume an all-knowing planner, and sometimes they don't. For instance, it's impossible for the government to know everyone's preferences better than themselves for every good.
Usually, the planner is trying to allocate resources to maximize collective utility. This differs from a competitive equilibrium (CE), in that that problem revolves around what people do in their self-interest. Often social planner problems will revolve around when the results of the SPP and CE are different for some reason, for instance if there's an externality.
On the other hand, sometimes economists model government actors not as benevolent social planners but as self-interested agents with their own agendas. This falls under a theory called "Public Choice". | 38 | 42 |
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ELI5: When I leave a glass of water over night, why are there air bubbles in it the next morning? | Atmospheric gases such as nitrogen and oxygen can dissolve in water. The amount of gas dissolved depends on the temperature of the water and the atmospheric pressure at the air/water interface. Colder water and higher pressure allow more gas to dissolve; conversely, warmer water and lower pressure allow less gas to dissolve.
When you draw a glass of cold water from your faucet and allow it to warm to room temperature, nitrogen and oxygen slowly come out of solution, with tiny bubbles forming and coalescing at sites of microscopic imperfections on the glass. If the atmospheric pressure happens to be falling as the water warms, the equilibrium between gas molecules leaving and joining the air/water interface becomes unbalanced and tips in favor of them leaving the water, which causes even more gas to come out of solution. Hence bubbles along the insides of your water glass.
- Scientific American article | 1,556 | 1,906 |
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ELI5: How do people sleep with their eyes open? Are their eyes still sending visual stimuli to the brain? | the eyes send visual stimuli even when they're closed, your ears send stimuli all night as well (as do most senses). your alarm wouldn't wake you if they didn't. the brain just tunes out minor stimuli | 28 | 35 |
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ELI5: Why do scientists commonly say that a planet cannot support life, if we don't know what type of life we're looking for? | When people say that a planet cannot support life, it's interpreted that it's human life that can't exist, but if we were truly looking for alien life then surely we don't know what conditions are required, so we could be overlooking planets that could posses life. Is it just a method of searching for life based on what we already know, or something else?
Edit: There have been some great answers and explanations, Many thanks to everyone! | >Is it just a method of searching for life based on what we already know
Pretty much. Our understanding of the development of life on Earth is that it required the presence of liquid water (and some other relatively common trace elements). Although forms of life exist which live outside of environments with liquid water, they all originated from the first cell. They are also almost exclusively small and boring (and their cell is still water filled).
Given that we don't know of any other way life could start, we discount planets which orbit either too far or too close to their host star for liquid water to exist on their surface. We also focus on rocky planets, although a gas giant in the "habitable zone" would almost certainly have some rocky moons which might have water. There is a growing number of candidate planets which are in, or on the edge of, the habitable zone. With a suitable greenhouse effect, there could well be liquid water on some of them (the habitable zone is therefore a somewhat fluid term).
There's no reason that life couldn't originate elsewhere as you said, but we don't know what to look for so we don't make any assumptions/statements about planets out of the hospitable zone being capable of supporting life. | 478 | 1,431 |
ELI5: What "Real Hacking" Is | Everytime I see a post about supposed hacking scandals across the web, it's inevitably met with responses like "those guys weren't hackers, they just did xyz, anyone could do that"
What exactly does more sophisticated hacking entail that these people are not doing? What kinds of things are difficult to achieve and require a high amount of skill vs. just abusing simple already known exploits?
Any insight very much appreciated! | Exploiting a computer system requires you to first identify a vulnerability. To be able to find a vulnerability in a program that you don't have the source for (you don't get part written for humans, just the part written for the computer) requires a person to know about all different kinds of vulnerabilities and be able to spot them by testing or by examining the program using special tools like debuggers and decompilers.
Once you have found a vulnerability, you have to figure out what you can do with it. Maybe there's a way to make the program crash. Maybe you can get access to parts of the computer that are supposed to be protected. It takes a great deal of patience, knowledge, and skill to do this.
Sometimes a vulnerability becomes very well known and information (or, sometimes even whole software applications!) on how to exploit it becomes public. Using that public information, a person with much less knowledge and skill could exploit the vulnerable software just like if they'd figured it all out for themselves. | 69 | 129 |
ELi5: What are the colors and shapes I see when I'm in a 100% pitch black room with my eyes wide open? | Those shapes and colours are called ‘phosphenes’. This is the result of your brain ‘seeing’, interpreting and offering stimuli to you.
Your eyes are connected to your brain through particular pathways. But also your visual part of the brain can be stimulated not just through your eyes, but you also see colours when you rub your eyes, bang your head, these are the result of information coming to your visual cortex part of your brain from ‘biophotons’ as sources inside your body.
Both are why they are seen in the dark. There are actually about 15 different documented shapes, stars, patterns, grids comprising phosphenes that most people see in the dark!
The parts of the neuro cortex responsible for sight, was trained, and remains ready and healthy to serve you and prove our senses and awareness active when you encounter photons to stimulate the cells, rods and cones in your eyes or chemicals and electrical signals via our brain and body and transmit those signals.
* It is your eyes doing the sensing, and your brain the seeing. Colors and shapes are proof of activity and test signals from your brain, a work out letting you know everything’s well and firing, the axions and synapses active, excersized and working. So enjoy the show! | 331 | 462 |
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ELI5: Why do US gold coins have a particular value (i.e $25) attached to them if the gold itself is worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars? | https://invest.usgoldbureau.com/50-gold-american-eagle-1-troy-oz-gold-coin-bu?custentity_campaign_search=AdWords&custentity_campaign_type=Search&custentity_campaign_keyword=&custentity_campaign_family=87949694839&gclid=CjwKEAjw7e66BRDhnrizmcGc8VcSJABR6gaR9zFCXoZwkHfWOavCR60v6-V9fu2QMKgkZcwwScg2tBoCxBHw_wcB
| In order to be minted as valid currency, they must have a value assigned to them. Since the value of gold fluctuates, it makes no sense to print actual value. Instead, the mints choose smaller denominations, knowing that no sane person would actually spend the coin as currency at that value. | 24 | 20 |
[DC] What is Hunter Zolomon's power. | What does altering time relative to himself mean? | The equation for velocity is speed = distance / time. The Flashes alter the first part of the equation, while Zolomon alters the third part - while they move fast because they increase (S)peed, Zolomon alters the (T)ime part - effectively making himself faster by reducing the time element of the velocity equation.
In other words, instead of making himself *faster*, he makes the time it takes to do something *shorter*. | 37 | 20 |
[SUPERMAN] When Kal was first launched to earth, wouldn't he be completely vulnerable to most of earth's diseases? | Most diseases are species specific or limited to one or two species. As an alien, he's likely not vulnerable to any Earth based virus. Plus while the sun didn't give him full powers until he was a teenager or grown in most continuities, it still may have done enough to protect him from diseases. | 44 | 33 |
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[Local 58] Would it be possible to survive the events of “Weather Service”? If so, what would you need to do to survive? | Let’s say that hypothetically, the events of the Local 58 video called “Weather Service” occured. It is dangerous to look at the moon and mirrors are also dangerous. Would it be possible to survive this event? If so, what would you need to do to survive? | First likely a non see through thick umbrella ,tape a lot of tape to stop reflections, a hammer to break mirrors and likely and make sure nothing reflects and a bunch of other things then you should maybe be able to walk around normally or bunker down until done only leaving with the super umbrella to get supplies also I’m not sure if mirrors are actually deadly it could be safe since two voices seems to come from it but that’s just me | 18 | 93 |
ELI5: If there were no poor people and everyone in the world made a good living, how would that change things from how they are now? | There are no poor people, everybody makes more than enough to get by, how would it change every day life? I'm sure it's a substantial change but i'm having a hard time imagining it. | Leaving out the problem of how to get to such a state of affairs, there would be some obvious results:
There would be no more economic refugees. People wouldn't try to move from poverty stricken places to rich countries in hopes of earning a living. There would be no more "Foreigners coming to take our jobs" as some politicians call it.
There would be no more outsourcing to poorer countries for mere economic reasons. If the average wage in China and India was the same as in the US or western Europe there would be one less reason to move factories there.
You would have to pay fewer taxes. There would be less money spend on helping poor people obviously.
There would be less crime. People would still commit crime, but the sort of crime that is the result of poverty would be less.
There would also be some obvious negative consequences:
Most of the stuff you buy at the store is cheap because the poor people making it are earning so little money for it. Prices at McDonalds would rise if the people making the burgers were earning more.
Some resources like oil would get more expensive simply because there would now be more people trying to buy it.
So if everyone in the world earned at least as much as the average American does today that money would suddenly would not buy as much as it does today. You would need to raise the bar again and again...
It is not clear whether there exists enough wealthy and resources on the world at present so that there actually is 'enough' for everyone.
Just to get an idea of how massive that problem actually is it perhaps would help to know that a large percentage of the owlrd population lives on less than what a dollar can buy a day. Some figure say that half the population in 1990 liven on less than a dollar while more recently it was only about a quarter or a fifth of the world that lived on less than $1.25 a day, but these numbers aren't really thought to be all that reliable. | 17 | 35 |
ELI5: Can mobile phones get viruses like other computers? If not, why ? | Why don't we have to worry about our iPhones or Droids getting viruses or malware like we do with laptops or other computers? | Generally speaking: yes, they can.
However, they are far less targeted than PCs, and their operating systems are generally far more restrictive than PCs. Windows for example allows you to execute and install pretty much anything you want, while an iPhone (not jailbroken) will only allow you to install apps from the App Store, which have to go through a verification process by Apple first. | 43 | 81 |
How do computers do mathematical functions? | What I am wondering:
* Is there a faster method for multiplication than repeated addition?
* (I have heard somewhere on YouTube that this can be used for division.)
* Is there a faster method for exponentiation than repeated multiplication?
* If such methods exists, can they be continued (efficiently) for [hyperoperation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperoperation) (mainly [tetration](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration) and higher)?
* Can it be interpolated just as easily with floating-point operation?
* How about inverses, such as [super-logarithms](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super-logarithm) and [super-roots](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetration#Super-root) (inverses of tetration)?
* How is modulation performed?
* How are the following operations performed? (Obviously, symmetries can be used to the computer's advantage)
* Interpolated exponentiation
* Interpolated factorials
* Trigonometry
* Including the inverses
* Logarithms
* Desmos can do calculus. How is that even possible?
* Can all math operations be done in O(1) time (namely relative to the values, not the number of bits)? If not, which ones can not?
​
I have a decent idea of how addition/subtraction works:
* For integer addition:
* XOR + AND carry, add the carry bit to the next bit.
* Another more advanced trick would be using the fact that adding 1 to a string of *k* binary 1s will result in a binary 1 followed by *k* binary 0s.
* For integer subtraction:
* Abusing integer overflow by adding the flipping all of the bits of the second argument and then adding 1 achieves this.
* For floating point arithmetic:
* The exponent of 2 would have to be taken into account.
* Negative numbers and subtraction however, I would imagine, are more complicated (probably not that much though). | There are whole fields of computational arithmetic and numerical analysis.
In many cases the algorithms follow similar systems to what you would do by hand. The Multiplication that we learn in fifth grade, shift-and-add, are the same, except that it’s a binary shift.
Division is a shift and subtract, just like long division. The minor difference is that if you guess the wrong quotient bit, you can make the next one negative and then clean up at the end.
Things like square root are done with successive approximations, just like Newton did by hand. | 23 | 19 |
ELI5: Why does pushing on your closed eyelids gives you weird visions? | I can feel even depth of it (no drugs involved) and it's really weird, because i can see sometimes similar visions. | Increasing the pressure inside the eyeball (eg. by gently pressing on them, raising blood pressure due to coughing or exertion, etc.) directly stimulates the cells of the retina, causing them to signal as if they were detecting light. These non-light images are called 'phosphenes'. | 354 | 633 |
What are the disadvantages and differences of the Windows 'registry' model vs. whatever Mac OS X and Linux use? | I've heard for years that the registry "sucks" and it's the prime culprit for Windows installs seeming to decline in performance over time. So what makes whatever Mac OS X and Linux uses better? Why doesn't Microsoft abandon the registry already if it "sucks" and is there a practical way to "clean up" your registry and make a Windows XP or Windows 7 machine "run like new" without a total OS reinstall? | Explained like your five:
The Windows Registry is a big truck made to hold everyones stuff, whereas in MacOS and Linux everyone has their own car. The big truck is really powerful, but as more and more people throw their junk on it, it slows down and starts to get passed by all the little cars.
Now that that's out of the way:
Microsoft has abandoned it, its usage in modern applications is discouraged, it's there for backwards compatibility. Microsoft likes to keep people happy by not breaking applications - to remove it would break almost everything that already exists.
The registry is a small source of slowdown, but in Windows 7 it shouldn't be enough to care about. I'd check other sources of slowdown like how many apps and services you have running. | 41 | 80 |
CMV: “Don’t talk religion/politics at a party” is just an admission that you don’t know how to navigate complex topics in mixed company | So I’m at a house warming party the other day for some late 20’s friends of mine. They’ve made an effort to make it calm and classy, there’s smooth jazz and dip and stuff. We’re drinking for a light buzz, not a blackout. So I’m chatting with a dude I don’t know, just small talk,I ask what line of work he’s in. He says he’s a chaplain in a hospice ward. This piques my interest, I’m agnostic but this is a neat corner of spirituality and we dig into the topic.
We talk for a while out on the balcony, like easily 30 minutes, and throughout this time people are filtering in and out of the balcony and the conversation. Most of them come out to smoke cigs, they jump in the convo with ease, chat while they smoke then they go back inside. But two different people, two different times, reacted to the topic like he and I were on the brink of a shouting match. Like visibly anxious. The second one even said “pretty soon we’re gonna have to pull you guys apart”.
I find this downright cringeworthy. It’s really not that hard to disagree with someone in a cordial way. The fact that these people need conversations kept to the most mundane, nerf topics is embarrassing. Small talk is a means of finding a topic, it does not provide the substance to get to know someone.
“Don’t talk religion/politics at a party” is propagated my poor conversationalists.
Change my view. | Part of navigating complex topics in mixed company is knowing when to engage in those topics.
Generally this means that everybody on board or listening is comfortable doing so.
There's nothing wrong with talking religion/politics with people who are fine doing so - the rule about parties so to say is because you no longer control this aspect about the potential participants in question. | 474 | 600 |
[Robotics] What happens if the two clauses of The First Law of Robotics conflict with each other? | So Asimov's first law of robotics states a robot cannot harm a human being, or through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. But what if someone was to point a gun at a person, and tell a robot it would kill them unless the robot itself killed a human? It obviously can't obey, but not killing a human is inaction that it knows will lead to the death of a human. | It would take the logical conclusion that would apply to the higher priority law which is the first law. It would do everything in its power to stop the gun from firing into the victim without hurting the shooter even if it means the robot is harmed in the process | 49 | 32 |
CMV: Getting permanently sterilized is something that should not be rejected by medical professionals unless it's illegal by law | I won't discuss the countries that have laws in place that are against sterilization and usually also things like abortion and sometimes even contraception, obviously I am completely against that but that's a different debate.
It is sad that in first world countries you can get contraception that is inconvenient and can even be potentially damaging to an extent, you can get abortion, but even so, doctors can refuse to perform surgeries that will leave a person permanently sterile, or will do the surgeries only if the person already has kids.
Here are few key arguments i want to address:
The surgery is legal, it just seems to be up to the doctors worldviews. This can make the surgery hard to obtain for people who never want kids or are under some arbitrary age range. If there is no moral issue in someone with 2-3 kids getting the surgery, but it is for someone with no children, then this is nothing but a rejection of childfree lifestyle.
The usual argument is that people change their minds. I just want to bring up that even underage children are allowed to have kids, and no one is pushing people to wait until at least 30 before starting to plan for kids because they might change their minds. It is a much worse situation to change your mind when you already are tied with a kid because then there's really very little you can do that isn't damaging for someone (while the childfree person who changed their mind still has some options to get into the lifestyle.) How is it ok to permanently commit to a lifestyle of having children under the age of 30, but it's not ok to permanently commit to a lifestyle of not having children even way past 30 in some cases. Not to mention that majority of people has kids by accident, whereas someone who comes to the clinic asking to be sterilized has actually put at least some thought behind their "life altering" (or should we say, life preserving?) choice.
As far as the doctors getting sued by the patient who changed their mind is concerned, I don't know the laws but if an adult patient signs a consent form I really don't see how it can end up being doctors fault. People are allowed to get all kids of plastic surgery they might one day regret, they can even surgically turn themselves into human lizards, we are understanding enough to let people change their gender, you can remove a whole organ for purely preventive purposes of getting cancer. Why is this an exception?
Every pregnancy is a health risk, so permanently preventing pregnancy (even if it would result in abortion) should always be permitted. However, even when there is additional concern for female health present doctors seem reluctant to offer treatments that can leave the woman sterile even if that is her choice.
Contraception is not 100% safe, and we have to stop acting like people who don't want children can simply opt to never having sex because that is incredibly harmful. Although I think men are more likely to be allowed vasectomy, in a climate where men have absolutely no say in cases of an accident and will have to pay child care for life, they should never be refused one in the first place.
As for women, pregnancy can cause hormonal changes that will affect her judgment when having to choose abortion, so why is she not allowed to make a preventive choice with a clear mind?
While some parents adapt and end up happy about their accidental child, accidental pregnancies should absolutely not be encouraged and can physically and mentally harm either parent and a child. I don't understand how a person who got sterilized but later changed their mind would have a case against the doctors who performed surgery over a person who asked for a surgery, got rejected, and now suffers from depression or physical damages caused by pregnancy (or depression and financial damages caused by their partner's pregnancy.)
Even pro lifers should agree with this as it would reduce the number of abortions. I am personally pro abortion but whether your concern is with the mother or with the child, not having to undergo one is a win win.
Fear of accidental pregnancy (either their own or partner's) can be especially damaging for people who do think things through and can damage their sex life, relationships, and psychological well being.
Finally, this is about dignity. Rejecting childfree adults' requests to have them sterilized to prevent still very possible accidental pregnancies should be illegal. As long as the doctors are legally protected by consent form, their personal views should be irrelevant and this needs to be approached as a preventive surgery. It needs to be recognized that there is always a risk of pregnancy for sexually active adults and that it is a harmful medical condition when it is unwanted. As long as people of all age groups and relationship status are allowed to procreate, same should be respected enough to be allowed never to procreate.
**EDIT:** so far the main reason seems to be that you can't force a doctor do do something against his will, which in this case depends purely on his personal values. I am a bit unclear how any legal procedure then gets to actually be available to citizens, for instance, if tomorrow all doctors refused to perform legal abortions would the response just be "tough?" Or in cases of preventive cancer surgeries, can the patient be denied making a safer choice ( for instance doing a full mastectomy) if the doctor thinks it's unnecessary and "wouldn't look nice" (since it seems doctors can be arbitrary)? Is gender reassignment surgery also something that depends on personal views of plastic surgeons?
If this really is so, then I learned something new (although I don't think it changes my view), but I will argue that the government should always make sure that legal options are available options, and that you can't work in certain fields if you personally or morally oppose them, just how you can't have someone whose religion is against blood transfusion to be a doctor in the first place. In case of law suits, i can not see grounds for one if the patient regrets the surgery they demanded to have, but I can see grounds for one if you suffer consequences because you were rejected a surgery (so a woman with depression caused by pregnancy could sue a doctor who didn't want to perform sterilization on her).
I'd also add that it's quite odd and indicative that you can find doctors who aren't morally opposed to physically altering their patients, not even to doing abortions (like I said I am pro abortion, but this is still a controversial topic for many), but one thing that is still so hard to obtain for many is sterilization when you never want to have children - same procedure that is obtainable to those who have a few, just to make it clear it's not the actual procedure that is controversial, it is the lifestyle.
**Edit 2:** it just occurred to me that in cases where doctors perform sterilization on some patients who get their personal approval because of their lifestyle (they already have several kids), but refuse it on childfree, this could be legal grounds for discrimination. A legal way of fighting this could be not allowing doctors to ask about patients family status at all, and allowing patients to file lawsuits if they feel they got refused based on lifestyle alone. Surely doctors who generally oppose these surgeries out of medical concerns won't perform these on anyone
**Edit 3:** I did award one delta because I received an exception to my view, but I can't say that core of my belief got truly challenged as yet. Few users, with u/Skysteps00000 being the most successful one, turned the debate towards whether or not permanent solutions are the best/safest for everyone, and u/Skysteps00000 raised a point that tubal litigation might be less effective for young women. I didn't do a good job pointing this out in my original cmv which is why i gave a delta, but I do accept purely medical reasons to refuse a specific patient (not sure what they would be in most cases but still), and while I believe the patient should still have the right to get a procedure done if that is their choice even if they are aware it isn't the most effective method, at least here I can see the doctor having a ground for a debate.
My main disagreement is with doctors refusing to do the surgeries because they don't want to allow a childfree person to make a permanent choice.
To other users who are debating best contraceptives - that is personal. You can't say that hormones or condoms should be acceptable for everyone if these people know they'd be safer and have to worry less if they get a permanent measure done, or if these just aren't working well for them. Also, it is weird to try to dismiss permanent sterilization as a medically valid option when it still does get performed on women (and men) who are deemed to be "done having kids" or too big of a risk of complications - and usually even that one is only taken seriously after they are done having kids. If a method is in use, then it is an option.
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> There is absolutely no reason why a legal adult would have a hard time getting permanently sterilized if they don't want children at all, as long as they can sign a consent form. | Why should doctors do a permanent procedure that makes someone sterile when they can more easily and safely do a reversible procedure that makes someone sterile? The law is irrelevant. Doctors should use the most up to date techniques.
Edit: Your argument reminds me of a time when stem cells were only able to be obtained from aborted fetuses. There was a big pro-life vs pro-choice debate. But now stem cells can be reverse engineered from adult stem cells, which makes the whole fetus issue obsolete. | 214 | 776 |
ELI5: Why do some drinks like beer or coffee make me have to pee so quickly and frequently? | The term for theses kinds of things is "diuretic".
They suppress the bodies natural mechanism for retaining water. When you suppress this, more water makes it through the kidneys and into the bladder and needs excreting.
These compounds do this by mimicking a hormone your body naturally makes to regulate the amount of water in your blood.
Diuretics upset the balance, make you pee more and then make you thirty - because they've made your body lose more water than it actually wanted to. | 45 | 71 |
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CMV: If marijuana should be legal, LSD should be legal. | 1. LSD makes people happy - not harmful.
2. LSD is safer than alcohol, on all counts.
3. LSD can generate tax revenue when legalized
4. LSD is not a neurotoxin and causes no physical harm.
5. LSD is not lethal and hasn't killed anyone.
6. LSD that's legal and regulated is safer than the shadiness of the black market.
7. LSD usage is a victimless non-violent crime.
8. LSD can be medicinal. Can help veterans with PTSD, under medical supervision.
9. LSD being Schedule-1 is based purely on anti-counterculture propaganda and not on science.
**EDIT**
Partial view change. I still believe LSD is safe 99% of the time. I still believe, by principle, it should be legal like Alcohol and Marijuana. Those of you saying that we should give adequate time to research it and allow the public to be more familiar with it, before we legalize it, I agree.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | More data needs to be gathered to support those claims. LSD use in humans has not been studied nearly as much as marijuana. In fact, a study last year was the first(at least public) in 40 years on the subject. | 75 | 190 |
ELI5: Why are cashews so much more expensive then peanuts? | Peanuts grow in the ground, can be mass harvested by machines, and are safe to eat in their raw state. Cashews have to be hand picked from trees, are highly poisonous in their raw state, in fact one of the most toxic substances on the planet. They have to go through a process of drying out and detoxing before they can be eaten. | 30 | 54 |
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CMV: The notion of changing and identifying as a different gender doesn't make sense at its core. | I believe that gender is a social construct. I also believe it is a social construct built around our sexes and not its own thing. Meaning that the initial traits each sex showed is how we began to expect them. Allowed for norms.
When one person, say a person of male sex, claims that he identifies as a girl (gender), why can he not simply be a man that acts more classically feminine. Is it not contradictory to try to fit a social construct, while simultaneously claiming that the social construct of gender is an issue?
Why not merge gender and sex, but understand both to be a 360˚ spectrum. If you have male genitals you are a man, if you have female genitals you are a woman, but that shouldn't stop either from breaking created gender norms.
I feel as though we have created too many levels and over complicated things when we could just classify to our genitals and then be whatever kind of person we want to be. Identifying gender as a social construct allows it to be a social construct.
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> *Hello, users of CMV! This is a footnote from your moderators. We'd just like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please remember to* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! If you are thinking about submitting a CMV yourself, please have a look through our* ***[popular topics wiki](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/populartopics)*** *first. Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | What you are referring to as 'gender' when you describe it as a social construct is in fact gender roles (or stereotypes). These are social constructed, yes, but they're not the same thing as gender identity (sometimes called subconscious sex), which is an innate characteristic and not socially constructed.
Trans people don't transition because we prefer one set of stereotypes over the other. We transition because it's human nature to prefer to express one's subconscious sex rather than suppress it, and having sexual characteristics that don't match what the brain expects is often a source of extreme distress. Adopting the roles/stereotyping associated with our genders is frequently necessary if we want to be taken seriously by non-trans people (and sometimes even in order to access medical care). That said, there are plenty of feminine trans guys and butch trans girls out there.
"Why not just be a feminine man/masculine woman?" looks logical at first glance, but it's a bit like saying "Why not just be a straight guy who works in theatre/straight woman who does construction instead of being gay?". Not all gay guys are femme theatre nerds; not all lesbians are butch construction workers, and even if they were, "just be straight and fulfill your identity by acting out a stereotype you don't necessarily even relate to instead of coming out" is seriously counterproductive advice to give someone who's not straight. | 83 | 342 |
How fast would I have to launch a radio for the Doppler effect to allow me to see the radio waves? | Do you mean to ask how fast a source emitting radio waves would have to be directly traveling with respect to you for you to detect the waves as visible light? If that is your question, then since visible light has a higher frequency than radio waves, the source would have to be traveling *toward* you at some speed *v*. So forget about launching it away from you. (Unless you reverse the situation: consider the source to be emitting visible light which is detected by you as radio waves.) Let *z* be the ratio of the observed frequency to the source frequency. Assuming that *z* > 1 (as in the case you describe), the speed of the source is given by
> *v*/*c* = (z^(2)-1)/(z^(2)+1)
This is a monotonically increasing function of *z*. For FM radio, the highest frequency is about 300 MHz. The lowest frequency for visible light is about 430 THz. So the smallest possible value of *z* is about 1.4 x 10^(6). For large *z*, we can Taylor expand to write
> *v*/*c* = 1-2/z^(2)
The radio source would have to be moving toward you at at least a speed that differs from light-speed by about 1 part in 10^(12). | 17 | 40 |
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ELI5: How/Why are we continually discovering more numbers of Pi? | I took Calculus in high school so I understand the concept of Pi but I just don't understand how we keep discovering more and more numbers in the decimal. I get that it's infinite but how are people discovering more minuscule numbers in it? | The dificulty with discovering digits of Pi, or other similar numbers, is in computing them, and verifying them.
Computing such number requires a lot of processing power and time, which is expensive.
Verifying usually requires the execution of other algorithms which also take a lot of processing power and time.
As time goes on, computers get better and can do more costing less, so new digits are found.
Newer methods compute digits are also discovered. | 21 | 17 |
ELI5: How do self driving cars work? Are their only approved routes where it can be on autopilot (more details inside)? | Would self driving cars only be able to auto pilot on "identifiable routes". For example, are essentially all roads programmed so that the car knows the amount of lanes (for lane switching, etc)? What about speed limits? Do they always know when to slow down/speed up? Merging with traffic? So many questions. | Lots and lots and lots of data and sensors, and programs smart enough to understand it all and react quickly to changing circumstances.
GPS is a basic requirement, telling the car where it is down to a meter or so of accuracy. That's not enough to necessarily distinguish lanes apart, though, much less know when another car is nearby.
Most roads in the US are mapped, either by government or private agencies working for/with the government. Sometimes this will include speed limits. You can see this in some current car nav systems that tell you when you're going over the limit for this part of the road.
Traffic data is collected both from transportation agencies that monitor congestion through cameras and the like and also from analyzing cell phone users on highways and seeing how they slow down.
Cameras in different parts of the spectrum (visible, infrared) record the surroundings, and advanced machine vision programs identify shapes and patterns to distinguish between signs, pedestrians, cars, lane markers, etc. You can also see this tech in action in current systems like the Subaru Eyesight safety package. Much of this technology was adapted from military use, where it was used to track enemy combatants and vehicles as they move.
When vision isn't enough, cars have other sensors to help cope. Radar, sonar, and lidar (lasers) work together to calculate distances and speeds of nearby objects both stationary and mobile. Onboard software classify them based on their size and motion (house vs car vs bicycle vs unidentifiable object) and try to react accordingly, either keeping pace with the car in front or emergency braking to avoid hitting the unknown obstacle up front.
Internal sensors on the car like accelerometers and gyroscopes and wheel sensors also help it figure out where it's going relative to where it wants to go, and the computer makes changes several hundred times a second to correct course and ensure stability and safety, far faster and more reliably than any human could.
Each and every one of these problems were very difficult to solve, and combining them into a self driving car is the culmination of decades of research across multiple industries. A lot of it comes from the military and aerospace, and a lot of it had to be purpose built for consumer use on highways. | 20 | 39 |
Why are farmers politically powerful enough to get large subsidies despite being a very small part of the population? | E.g. in the US and EU there are large subsidies for farmers. | There are various reasons, but one part of the explanation comes from the dependence of society on the resources provided by farmers. According to resource dependence theory, the power of social actors over others increases based on a) the value of the resources for the other and b) the exclusivity with which they are able to offer these resources to the other. Farmers provide society with an extremely valuable resource, namely food. Moreover, they (as a group) are the only ones 3ho can provide it.
Of course, there's more to it since farmers are not (always) a unified group. But this is definitely a factor contributing to their political power.
Source RDT: Pfeffer, J. & Salancik, G. R. (2003). The external control of organizations. A resource dependence perspective. Stanford Business Books, Stanford. | 64 | 100 |
ELI5: What is the dot/shape in your vision after looking into a light or the sun? | The light-sensitive cells need a little while to regenerate before they can detect the next photon. If all fire at the same time in a spot, you basically have a "hole" in your vision for light, or the color you looked at, until the cells recovered. | 12 | 31 |
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ELI5: Why are balloons so loud when popped | Ears work by picking up on subtle vibrations in the air. The compressed air in a balloon being suddenly released sends a shock wave through the air, much stronger than normal sounds, so it's crazy loud. (volume comes from the strength of the 'vibration') | 62 | 104 |
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Why can't we have a perfectly monochromatic light? | In my textbook, it says that (in the context of the double slit experiment) that a perfectly monochromatic light will be ideal for the experiment, but that simply isn't possible to obtain, and a range of about 10-15 nm wavelength is used. Why can't we have an exact wavelength? Is it because of the imperfections in the way we produce the light or is it something more fundamental like the Uncertainty Principle? | Even if you had some hypothetical perfectly monochromatic emitter, the process of turning it on and off introduces other wavelengths into the equation: the Fourier transform of a wave packet includes many terms. The only way you could have purely monochromatic light would be to have a monochromatic wave of infinite extent.
However, it's not really possible to have a perfectly monochromatic source in the first place. Transitions between atomic energy levels (the main mechanism behind lasers) are the best sources of monochromatic light, but even these have finite spectral linewidths due to thermal motion of atoms (Doppler broadening) and interatomic or electromagnetic interactions (Stark, Zeeman effects). | 35 | 20 |
ELI5: Why does it "hurt" when you swing at a baseball but miss? | Basically your brain analyses from past experience how much force you need to swing with to hit the ball, and usually goes overboard because you want to hit it hard. If you're just swinging in the air without an aim to hit anything, you're using less force.
Not connecting with the ball means the bat has excess force from the energy you put into it, making it swing further than expected because the force hasn't been transferred to the ball, and overextending or otherwise stretching our muscles which causes the pain. | 13 | 16 |
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Is corruption inevitable? | With the current political climate, I was musing on corruption and I was wondering if Corruption is inevitable once you are in a position of power. Is there a natural tendency for favoritism in people? In our daily lives, we all witness and are part of low-stake dishonesty which we often take for granted. Is political corruption the same but on a much more impactful level? I'm interested in this subject, could you point me to some references? Thank you! | In "Influence Science and Practice" Cialdini notes that reciprocation can tend toward corruption without any malicious intent. The example he gives is of a politician, who has come in at the end of a 12 hour day to 8 phone calls expecting a call back. 6 of the calls are from people he doesn't know. 2 of the calls are from people who gave $250,000 to help get him elected. He has time to make 3 calls. Whose phone calls does he return?
Or as Senator Clay Davis put it: "Ain't no soul in the *world* that fuckin' ungrateful!" | 39 | 56 |
What makes paper fresh from the copier hot? Why don't inkjet printers produce the same amount of heat as copiers do? | Laser printers and photocopiers don't work under the same principle as an inkjet printer. When you make a photocopy, the first step is to give an electrostatic charge to a special cylinder. That cylinder is coated with a material that becomes conductive when exposed to light. When the document is being scanned, a strong source of light shines on the paper and reflects on the rotating cylinder. The parts being hit by light (i.e. what is aligned with white on the original document) become conductive and allows the electrostatic charge to be grounded and discharge. What you are left with at the end of this process is a cylinder with an electrostatic charge only on areas that correspond to the dark areas on the document. The charge then picks up toner and rolls on a blank piece of paper with a heating element, which essentially melts the toner and makes it adhere to the paper. The paper then comes out of the photocopier with an approximate copy of the original document.
Of course, modern photocopiers and laser printers will digitize the original document and then use that digitized copy as the master to apply the charge on the cylinder and make a better copy with a single scan instead of having to pass on the original for each copy, but the core principle remains the same.
Long story short, the paper coming out is warm because a heating element is required to make the toner stick to the paper. | 190 | 203 |
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ELI5: What goes into the process of designing an automated factory? | How are they designed? Who is involved? Do companies buy machines from other places or do they build them themselves? | Lots of engineers involved. Assuming the company is already making a product by hand, a process engineer will determine how to convert the process to an automated one, an industrial engineer will determine how to efficiently set up the process, and mechanical engineers will make physical tools for each new subprocess. All this is performed simultaneously under the direction of a project engineer. | 10 | 42 |
What actually is Critical Theory? | It seems like it’s become a buzzword recently but I very often hear conflicting politicised definitions. Upon doing a quick google of the term I can’t say I found a consistent or understandable (at least for me) definition.
It often seems to be used in the same breath as other buzzword like identity politics or neo-segregation but I still have no clue as to how much they relate.
The general gist from what I’ve gathered is that it seeks to criticise society based on underlying social systems and structures as a conflict between oppressed and oppressor.
But I feel I’m completely wrong on this definition and am not sure how to remedy my misunderstanding. Not to mention the added confusion caused by certain prefixes such as ‘postmodern critical theory’.
What actually is it? | Nope I'd say that's pretty good as an initial definition. But some context might help. In the first instance 'critical theory' was a school of thought that emerged in Germany in the 1930s in response to dissatisfaction with orthodox Marxism. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno were early important figures here in the so-called 'Frankfurt School'. The argument was that orthodox Marxism had paid too narrow attention to economic issues and neglected culture (Antonio Gramsci in Italy took a rather similar view). This was why it had struggled to explain things like the willingness of the working class to divide up along national lines and fight for their countries in WW1 rather than show the kind of international solidarity that Marxism thought class consciousness would make clear to them was in their real interests. Another problem was the failure of the revolution to occur in the West, but had happened instead in Russia which was relatively economically underdeveloped and thus not ripe for the overthrow of capitalism (it hadn't even gone capitalist yet). So in many ways, critical theory began as a neo-Marxist critique of culture; Horkheimer and Adorno argued that oppression was deeply rooted in Western thought in Dialectic of Enlightenment, for example. Later figures like Jurgen Habermas from the 1960s onwards have added the problems of language to those of culture and have also moved in a more social democratic and less revolutionary direction while still retaining the desire to, as you put it, ' criticise society based on underlying social systems and structures '. There's a good but rather dense history by Martin Jay of the Frankfurt School. So see also Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, for a short sympathetic introduction. Of course, critical theory, since it is broadly on the radical left, also has plenty of critics! But insofar as it is a critique of capitalism it can also sometimes line up, oddly enough, with certain varieties of conservative thought that dislike the rationalist reduction of society to market relations. See Michael Oakeshott as a case in point here. | 83 | 149 |
[Pokemon] Why do the different city's gyms come at different levels of difficulty? | Aside from the fact that the gyms become increasingly more difficult due to your character needing to level up their pokemon, how can the gyms within a region have such a large difference in difficulty? | Well, the gyms are there with the intention of trainers progressing through them. So it's natural that there would be a difference in difficulty, so trainers can challenge gyms as they and their Pokemon grow. At least according to some sources (Pokemon Origins) the gym leaders each have a variety of Pokemon of different levels and pick the ones they use based on how many badges the challenger has. So, for example, Brock uses his level 12 Geodude and level 12 Onix when his challenger has no badges yet. | 85 | 58 |
ELI5: Why does paper turn hard after you left it in your pocket and washed the pants in the washing machine? | Paper is made up of fibres, during the manufacturing process the fibres are manipulated to form a nice thin mesh that allows them to flex. Once you put the paper in the wash it turns back to mush and forms into a random blob of fibres all stuck together and cannot fold as easily any more. | 16 | 28 |
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[ELI5]: When governments print more new money, who gets it first (and gets to spend it before inflation kicks in)? | To make it more clear. This is not regarding government printing money to replace decaying bills. I'm curious about how new money is introduced in the economy (someone must be getting it for free, right?) | This is a very complicated question, so I'll have to go through from the beginning.
First, I'll explain how the money supply can increase without the government's intervention.
Let's say you go to the bank and deposit $100. The bank then lends $80 to your friend Bob because he's taking out a mortgage on *Assassin's Creed* or something. Now you have your $100 in the bank, and Bob has his $80 in hand, even though he owes it to the bank. The bank only actually has $20, but Bob owes them $80. Bob goes and buys *Assassin's Creed* from Carly for $80. Now Carly has $80 and no debt, and you have $100 and no debt. So effectively, there is more money around (even though it all gets cancelled out if all the debts were paid back).
This is often a good thing in reality, especially in the business world. If you're a business owner and you take out a loan to start your business, if you make enough money to pay it back, you may not actually want to. You may want to continue to spend the money to improve your business. While you have that loan in the background, you are making money with your business faster than you would be without it, so you actually want to maintain the debt because you make more money that way.
Next, I'll explain bonds.
A bond is a fixed-term loan *to* someone by someone else. In our case, we care about government bonds, which are loans from the government. We will assume they always get paid out---the government always has enough money to pay for them. For instance, you might buy a $100 bond from the government that will pay you 2% each year. You pay the government $100, and the government will send you $2 a year for ten years, and then at the end of the ten years, it gives you back your $100.
Bonds can be traded, and they're usually traded based on their interest rate. If you sold your $100 bond to someone for $200, then they are getting a 1% interest rate on the bond. So when you trade bonds, you care about the interest rate on the bond. You might say "I'll sell $100 worth of bond at 4%". Note that you want to be selling a bond at a lower interest rate and buying at a higher one.*
Now, the central bank is the organization that "prints" money. They don't actually print money to change the supply, they just change numbers and their policies. Because things are mostly digital anyways, you can just think of them as having a limitless supply of money, but they can only use this for a few things, like buying bonds. Since they have limitless money, they also gain nothing from getting money---if you give them $100, it doesn't matter to them, since they already have infinite money.
The central bank's role is to use their infinite amount of money to control how much money supply is available. There are a number of ways that they can do this, but the most important (arguably) one is called *open market operations*, where the central bank participates on the bond market.
How it works is that the central bank decides that there is too much money or too little money, and they buy or sell bonds to move the bond price, which affects how investments get made.
An example is the best way to show this.
Suppose that the bond rate is 2%---people are buying and selling government bonds at 2%. The central bank decides there is too much money lying around, so they want to decrease the money supply. They set a new target rate, say 3%. Then they announce to the world that they'll sell government bonds at 3%. Suddenly, nobody can sell a bond for anything less than 3% because the central bank is providing a better deal. So the bond rate on the market goes to 3%.
Now, if you're a banker, and you have a bunch of cash lying around, you want to invest it. Never leave cash lying around. So you want to invest, and you look for people to loan money to. You see some guy looking to get a loan of 2.5%. You are considering making the loan, when suddenly the central bank moves the target rate to 3%. Now you can get a better deal from the bond market, since bonds have zero risk.** You're guaranteed to get paid your 3% if you buy a bond, but you might not see the money again if you make the 2.5% loan to this guy. There's no reason for you to make that loan, so you buy bonds instead.
This means more people want bonds, and there needs to be a place for those bonds to come from. That's the central bank again. People buy bonds from the central bank, instead of lending it out to the world or investing in stocks. The bonds don't get spent like money does, and the central government doesn't have anything to do with the money (remember, it has infinite money so it doesn't actually care that you just paid it millions of dollars). So the money supply goes down as money leaves the economy.
If the central bank wants to increase the money supply, they do the opposite. They announce that they'll buy bonds at 1%, and suddenly the banks are more inclined to lend money out because it's probably better for them than buying bonds. In fact, they'll sell their bonds to get more money that they can use to buy things. They'll sell them to the central bank, and then use the money they get to lend out to people and to invest, and bam! money goes back into the system.
There are other tricks that the central banks can use, but they generally all hinge on the idea of controlling how much money the banks keep and how much they lend out or invest, rather than actually just printing money and giving it away.
-* Yes, this doesn't quite make sense. There's some papering over the actual principal amount of the bond, but this is fundamentally how it works.
-** If the bonds aren't actually at zero risk, then you have problems like what's happening in Greece right now. If the government can't pay back its debts, it's a game of hot potato where there's billions of dollars worth of potatoes and everybody loses. | 24 | 49 |
What is expected to go on an undergraduate CV/Resume? | I am applying for a psychology REU for this summer and they have requested a CV/resume for my application. I am not sure what to put on there. If I were a graduate student or an upcoming professor, I might have a lot more material but as a young undergraduate I just don’t know what to put on it. Should any of my high school achievements go on there if they are pertinent? I’m looking for some advice so I can have the best chance for being accepted. | Your career services office is a good place to start, there might also be a branch of the graduate school/academic services that will look over your CV for you. Since it's an academic opportunity, run your CV past your faculty advisor for review. If you don't have an assigned faculty advisor, go to the prof you've worked with the most and trust. Give them at least two weeks heads up to review, they're busy. Typically you do not put anything from high school on your college CV, unless you won like a national award or something. | 36 | 72 |
Watching Planet Earth and the opening scene is a group of penguins grouped together in temperatures of -70c, how do these animals live in these extreme frozen places without freezing solid like something does when you put it in the freezer? | Insulation and food. Living beings generate heat through metabolism. What determines if you freeze to death isn't the temperature, it's whether or not heat leaves your body faster than it can generate more.
The bigger the temperature difference, the faster you cool, sure, but the better insulated you are, the slower you cool.
In short, the same reason you feel warm when you put on a coat. | 210 | 267 |
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[Smash Bros.] How does Smash work? | Do they just wait in a lobby to battle or get taken from their worlds when they are chosen? Certain characters have show prior knowledge of Smash such as Ryu in this trailer saying "So this is Smash."? Do they remember Smash offscreen in their own worlds? Does Mario have flashbacks of being sliced by Roy's Sword or Olimar have Flashbacks of The Villager's Murder Stare? What about Metal Face? How is he Alive? How do Mario and DR. Mario Coexist? | Most this knowledge comes from the Subspace Emmissary campaign.
They have pretty clear knowledge of it, as we see Pitt watching from his home dimension. Most the competitor seem to enjoy the challenge of the battle, and see it as a good way to pass the time. | 15 | 15 |
I think stereotypes are funny and people should lighten up, CMV | . | what special insight do you think that you have that gives you better authority than someone else as to what is and isn't offensive? if a black person says, "hey, that joke about black people being lazy hurt me a little. i know that you were just trying to be funny, but try to understand that those sort of comments mean something different to someone like me", what life-experience do you have to meaningfully tell that man that his feelings are wrong? | 44 | 53 |
Should I read Leviathan if I am interested in contemporary political philosophy? | Just wondering if the book has value besides being part of the interesting history of philosophy. Thank you! | Certainly it isn't strictly required reading but it is a kind of shared cultural background which could make work in the field easier to understand, plus it is a good book.
EDIT: Part 2 will make much more sense if you read part 1 as well. | 47 | 66 |
ELI5: why don't the parts of our skin that are always touching, like our toes, get contact sores? | Go hiking for several miles. Blisters and hotspots are a common injury. Many native people who walk barefoot, and long distance walkers develop a thick layer of hard dead skin on their feet to protect themselves. | 1,496 | 2,620 |
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When overweight people lose a lot of weight due to illness, is it kind of "helpful", "healthy" or "beneficial?" once they overcome the illness? | You'd get all the benefits of dieting to lose weight however you'd miss out on the benefits of exercise, in fact your cardiovascular health would be worse due to the lack of exercise when ill, which would also cause loss of muscle mass | 26 | 107 |
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ELI5: How does new city formation works in US? If me and my 50 friend purchase land in middle of nowhere, build homes and start living there, will it be designated as city by state government? | Each state is a little different, but generally it goes like this:
-Starts off as an unincorporated population area, and falls under the county. You'd pay county taxes, the sheriff would police the area, etc.
-Apply for incorporation...
-The county decides whether or not they want to give up jurisdiction, this doesn't always occur, for any number of reasons. For example, Paradise, NV - it's actually the "Las Vegas" Strip... but the county wanted to keep the tax benefits rather than give them up to Las Vegas or a new city. Paradise is an unincorporated area.
-If they allow it, you start a town with a post office, a fancy population sign, and you must elect a mayor or city council or other form of government.
Edited for format | 239 | 480 |
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Why do microwaves cook/heat things faster than ovens, when ovens reach higher temperatures? | e.g stick a Hot Pocket in the microwave and you’re good to go in about 2 1/2 minutes, but put it in the oven, and it takes about 10-15. According to the box, anyway. | A microwave works by directly causing heating in the food itself, which is a much more direct and efficient process. First a magnetron generates microwaves, which has some unintended energy loses that go to heating the magenetron. Next, the microwaves go into the cavity, and are absorbed by and heat the food. The air and microwave safe dish are transparent, so they don't absorb any of the energy and heat up. The walls are reflective, so they also don't heat up. So beyond the losses in the magnetron, the energy goes pretty much entirely into the food and it's the only thing that is heating up.
An oven is much more indirect. Firstly, an element is intentionally heated up to a few thousand degrees. That alone is a loss of energy simply to heating it up so much. The element then transfers heat either by conduction to anything it touches o by thermal radiation. The thermal radiation is much like microwaves, however the walls and dishes aren't transparent or reflective. Therefore a lot of energy goes into heating them to a few hundred degrees. The conduction happens to the air, which itself has to be heated to a few hundred degrees. Then the air has to move around the over by convection to heat the food. The walls of the oven are also quite a lot of surface, so a lot of heat is lost to the outside. Compare this to the much smaller surface area of the food itself you are heating in a microwave. In the end, it is a lot more inefficient as instead of slightly heating a magnetron in addition to the food, you've heated a substantial amount of metal, air, ceramic to a few hundred degrees as well as bleeding off more what to the environment.
A hot pocket is say 100g, and we'll say that's just water. So to heat that from say 0C freezing to 100C boiling, you need 42,000 joules of energy (4.2 J per g per C). You microwave consumes around 1000W of electrical power, so 1000 joules per second. Ideally, your hot pocket could be heated in 42 seconds. Due to losses, mostly in the magenetron, it takes 2.5 minutes. So about 30% of your electrical energy actually went into heating your food.
Your over on the other hand, let's say is also 1000W (though that's more like a toaster over). Assuming it's on broil, ie the elements are always on, it's using 1000W for 10 minutes. So that's about 8% of your electrical energy actually going into the food, the rest just heats the over and the air.
However, the oven is usually even slower. You usually don't use broil, but a set temperature, so the oven elements aren't on the whole time. They do this because both the thermal radiation and air heat just the skin of the food, potentially burning the outside and leaving the inside cold. The inside only heats by conduction of the beat from the surface, which takes time. As such, the elements turn on and off to maintain a lower temperature, slowing the cooking but allowing more even cooking. The microwaves however can penetrate further into the food, cooking it more evenly without the need for downtime to let the inside cook. In essence, the microwave is always 1000W, but the 1000W over may only be on half the time, being 500W on average.
So it's not just inefficiency of an oven heating a bunch of unnecessary mass in addition to your hot pocket, but also the oven needing to hold back on full power to avoid burning the outside of the food. Less power and less efficiency, means slower cooking times. However, a microwave isn't a magical quick and efficient solution to all cooking, as often the longer cooking time and slight burning of the surface that an oven causes are desirable. That's why your microwave hot pocket is soggy while the oven one is crispy. | 11 | 20 |
ELI5: How do our eyes "lock on" to objects, keeping them in constant focus despite movement, to the point where un-focusing takes conscious effort? | Our evolutionary needs required us to be able to narrowly focus on specific objects at specific distances, be it a branch we're jumping to grab, a predator hiding in the bushes, or a prey animal we're hunting. We developed the ability to control our eyes independent of our head (birds, for example, lack this and move their heads to see, not their eyes). Our forward facing eyes increase the overlap of vision from each eye and are adapted to increase depth perception, to better understand distance and relative motion of the things we're focusing on.
We have the ability to change the shape of the lens in our eyes which adjusts the beam of light we're "seeing", allowing us to track the image and keep in focus.
In short, our ancestors who lacked this focusing abilities missed the branch they were swinging for, didn't see the tiger in the grass, and didn't kill the food they needed to survive. | 14 | 16 |
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ELI5:What is a freebase drug? | I hear crack cocaine is the freebase form of cocaine. What does this mean?
What is freebase?
What is hydrochloride and why is it in cocaine?
Why can't people just smoke powder cocaine? | A lot of drugs are bases as in acids and bases. Since they are bases, they can react with acids to forms salts. The hydrochloride is the salt of the base and hydrochloric acid. The freebase is exactly what it sounds like, the base by itself, not a salt. Freebases tend to not dissolve in water and vaporize at lower temperatures, which makes them better for smoking. The salts tend to be soluble in water and often decompose rather than vaporizing, making them better suited to snorting. | 24 | 22 |
How early in life does a child recognize themself in a picture or mirror? | What you're asking is related to the mirror test, used to test development in children (theory of mind). Children usually recognize themselves with 65% accuracy at around age 2+, 50% at age 1. So yes, children recognize themselves around ages 1-2 in a mirror.
Lewis, M.; Brooks-Gunn, J. (1979). Social cognition and the acquisition of self. New York: Plenum Press.
Beulah Amsterdam (1972). "Mirror self-image reactions before age two". Developmental Psychobiology 5 (4): 297–305. | 15 | 21 |
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CMV: while both feminists and MRAs have valid points, they both blow their issues out of proportion. | I think depending on what you want out of life, there are key advantages to being either a man or a woman. Given what you want out of life, there is definitely discrimination that you will face as a man or a woman. That being said I think if you counted it up, feminism is *slightly* more correct(but given historical and geographical perspective, i would rather be a woman in modern western society than be a woman any where else in history or in the modern world. People who want real equality forget that were closer than we've ever been to an ideal that has never existed). I don't want to hear about prison, murder, rape, or other statistics about how one gender faces a higher risk (these follow a similar line: I would rather be a man in modern western society than any other place or time now or in history). I'm talking about male physical strength being an advantage, about female purchasing power.. etc. I think the patriarchy is bad for almost everyone who wants freedom in western society (i'm referring to these issues as we face them in my home country, the U.S.A). I think if you are a "macho", stereotypical manly man, who doesn't like expressing feelings and loves sports, or if you are an attractive woman, who takes stares, or rude comments in a more positive "flattering" way, who wants to become a trophy wife ( I know a college student much like this, who has no complaints about the sexual misconduct done to her, and claims that she wants an "mrs" degree, and spends more time attempting to "become more domestic" than pursuing her future career) you benefit from the patriarchy, but men who don't conform to our stereotype of masculinity, and women who want to make their own way are both oppressed in many ways by the patriarchy. What I'm trying to say is that feminism and mens activism are two sides of the same coin, and making it an "us vs them" is exactly what the patriarchy "wants" in order to hold it's position. Just how a political party would benefit from its rival party splitting in two (democrats in D.C benefit from the current splitting of the republican party, because they can gain more ground if their previously united opponent now fights itself as much as it fights them) . This is why I consider myself a family rights activist. I recently have become disillusioned with egalitarianism, and humanism, as terms." Family rights" doesn't have to be necessarily about families, but is the idea that we can have a group where men and women can voice their concerns with the patriarchy in the context of "we're all in this together" instead of turning it into a contest of who has it worse. I think a family rights group would focus on realistic equality. Realistic equality means not interpreting a man's higher chance of being murdered or a woman's higher chance of being raped as societal discrimination. Again, all these groups need to think about the questions they are really posing. Asking all men not to rape is like asking all humans not to murder: if it worked, we would have had world peace centuries ago. I'm talking about discriminations that are condoned by society. Mainstream society does not condone these crimes, we punish them. | These communities are formed around certain issues. The people who make up these communities tend to be more interested in or affected by these issues than the population at large. From the outside looking in, it looks as though they are blowing issues out of proportion. From the inside looking out, it looks as if society isn't taking these issues seriously enough.
It's also very easy for people to underestimate the severity of these problems when they haven't been affected by them. Often times, when these issues affect people that haven't previously experienced them, they will change their tune. This can be seen in many areas outside of gender politics as well, particularly with insurance and social safety nets.
Additionally, the squeaky wheel gets the grease. It's also worth noting that there isn't a lot of grease to go around, so the squeakiest wheel gets the most grease. | 21 | 61 |
CMV: There is disturbingly little diversity in the personalities of those in power (executives, media figureheads, star actors/directors, etc..) | Men and women get to their positions of power in all industries by "being go-getters", ignoring boundaries, and asking for forgiveness later because this shows competitive drive, which is necessary for a business to thrive your standard open market. While obviously not all of these people in power carry these principles over into their treatment of others sexually, we've unfortunately seen that a lot do.
Very few executives get to where they are at with reserved personalities and companies would be better off with a better diversity of personality amongst their leadership.
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> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | There is a documented psychological phenomena called "the out-group homogeneity effect" wherein people ascribe a lot of diversity between members of their own group while flattening groups they are on the outside of into broad stereotypes.
So the question is, is there actually little diversity in the personality of those in power (and how do we know that), or is it more likely that we see people in power in a certain way because they are in a group that is not us and holds a particular place in our world? | 26 | 16 |
How long after death does all electrical activity in the brain cease? | There’s multiple definitions of death, and it actually varies by area. Most definitions look at cardiac death and brain death. Cardiac death is when there is no heart beat. Without blood flow delivering oxygen to the brain neural activity stops in minutes.
Brain death is defined by certain testing parameters such as an apnea challenge or by cerebral blood flow imaging. Brain death can occur even with a pumping heart and most legal definitions of death accept this. With brain death there may be some electrical activity but it is without organization or purpose. Most times there is some residual electrical activity until blood flow completely stops following cardiac arrest. | 28 | 57 |
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CMV: U.S. Government interference made healthcare expensive. | My position is that the U.S. government is responsible for healthcare being so extraordinarily expensive.
The U.S. “health care cost crisis” didn’t start until 1965. The government increased demand with the passage of Medicare and Medicaid while restricting the supply of doctors and hospitals. Health care prices responded at twice the rate of inflation [Source](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/Holly1.png?itok=iDrzwxBU). Now, the U.S. is repeating the same mistakes with the unveiling of Obamacare (a.k.a. “Medicare and Medicaid for the middle class”).
Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote that medical price inflation since 1965 has been caused by the rising demand for health-care coupled with restricted supply. Robert Alford explained the minority view: "The market reformers wish to preserve the control of the individual physician over his practice, over the hospital, and over his fees, and they simply wish to open up the medical schools in order to meet the demand for doctors, to give patients more choice among doctors, clinics, and hospitals, and to make that choice a real one by public subsidies for medical bills". The majority of policymakers support either monopolization (e.g. typically Republicans) or nationalization (e.g., typically Democrats).
Both have claimed "physician supply can create its own demand," which means increasing the supply of doctors and hospitals will just motivate them to convince "ignorant" consumers to order more unnecessary and expensive health care. During the 1970s, Frank Sloan, a Vanderbilt University health care economist, explained the success of the most influential pro-regulation health care economist, Uwe Reinhardt: "His theories are highly regarded because he is so clearly understood. Unfortunately the evidence for them is not good; it is not bad either, it is just not there. And it would be a shame to see federal policy set on such a poor, unscientific basis." Since the early 1900s, medical special interests have been lobbying politicians to reduce competition. By the 1980s, the U.S. was restricting the supply of physicians, hospitals, insurance and pharmaceuticals, while subsidizing demand. Since then, the U.S. has been trying to control high costs by moving toward something perhaps best described by the House Budget Committee: “In too many areas of the economy — especially energy, housing, finance, and health care — free enterprise has given way to government control in “partnership” with a few large or politically well-connected companies”. The following are past major laws and other policies implemented by the Federal and state governments that have interfered with the health care marketplace (HHS 2013):
* In 1910, the physician oligopoly was started during the Republican administration of William Taft after the American Medical Association lobbied the states to strengthen the regulation of medical licensure and allow their state AMA offices to oversee the closure or merger of nearly half of medical schools and also the reduction of class sizes. The states have been subsidizing the education of the number of doctors recommended by the AMA.
* In 1925, prescription drug monopolies begun after the federal government led by Republican President Calvin Coolidge started allowing the patenting of drugs. (Drug monopolies have also been promoted by government research and development subsidies targeted to favored pharmaceutical companies.)
* In 1945, buyer monopolization begun after the [McCarran-Ferguson Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCarran%E2%80%93Ferguson_Act) led by the Roosevelt Administration exempted the business of medical insurance from most federal regulation, including antitrust laws. (States have also more recently contributed to the monopolization by requiring health care plans to meet standards for coverage.)
* In 1946, institutional provider monopolization begun after favored hospitals received federal subsidies (matching grants and loans) provided under the [Hospital Survey and Construction Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill%E2%80%93Burton_Act) passed during the Truman Administration. (States have also been exempting non-profit hospitals from antitrust laws.)
* In 1951, employers started to become the dominant third-party insurance buyer during the Truman Administration after the Internal Revenue Service declared group premiums tax-deductible.
* In 1965, nationalization was started with a government buyer monopoly after the Johnson Administration led passage of Medicare and Medicaid which provided health insurance for the elderly and poor, respectively.
* In 1972, institutional provider monopolization was strengthened after the Nixon Administration started restricting the supply of hospitals by requiring federal certificate-of-need for the construction of medical facilities.
* In 1974, buyer monopolization was strengthened during the Nixon Administration after the [Employee Retirement Income Security Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Employee_Retirement_Income_Security_Act) exempted employee health benefit plans offered by large employers (e.g., HMOs) from state regulations and lawsuits (e.g., brought by people denied coverage).
* In 1984, prescription drug monopolies were strengthened during the Reagan Administration after the [Drug Price Competition and Patent Term Restoration Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drug_Price_Competition_and_Patent_Term_Restoration_Act) permitted the extension of patents beyond 20 years. (The government has also allowed pharmaceuticals companies to bribe physicians to prescribe more expensive drugs.)
* In 2003, prescription drug monopolies were strengthened during the Bush Administration after the [Medicare Prescription Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicare_Prescription_Drug,_Improvement,_and_Modernization_Act) provided subsidies to the elderly for drugs.
* In 2014, nationalization will be strengthened after the [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patient_Protection_and_Affordable_Care_Act) (“Obamacare”) provided mandates, subsidies and insurance exchanges, and the expansion of Medicaid.
The history of medical cost inflation and government interference in health care markets appears to support the hypothesis that prices were set by the laws of supply and demand before 1980 and perhaps 1990. Even the degree of monopolization and nationalization promoted by politicians before 1965 was not enough to cause significant [cost inflation and spending increases](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/Holly2_0.png?itok=yLAbpEvK) until demands created by Medicare and Medicaid outstripped the restricted supply of physicians and hospitals.
Spending on prescription drugs didn’t accelerate until after pharmaceutical monopolies were strengthened in 1984. Spending has increased even less for administrative, net cost of private health insurance and nursing home care, and not much at all for dental, structures, equipment, public health, other personal and professional care, home health care, research, non-prescription drugs and durable medical equipment. Since the 1980s, the government has used its buyer monopoly power, through its Medicare and Medicaid programs, to effectively set price and quality controls (e.g., underpayments) on physicians and hospitals. For the same purpose, the Federal and state governments promoted the concentration of private insurance into buyer monopolies (e.g., HMOs).
The government has also encouraged clinics and hospitals to respond by merging into concentrated provider monopolies (while continuing to limit the supply of doctors and hospitals). These government-private partnerships called "managed competition" resemble centrally-planned fascism. Government sets prices, which has predictably led to reduced quality, rationing and other perverse gaming. Moreover, the bureaucracy has brought standardized care, higher administrative costs and high executive salaries. Although costs have continued to rise at the same double the rate of inflation, it is questionable the extent to which prices are now set by the laws of supply and demand. Obamacare is expected to expand coverage by about 22 million people with subsidies and another 17 million through Medicaid. Regardless how the current problems with mandates play out, demand will likely skyrocket without increasing supply proportionately. Higher prices and costs and/or lower quality can be expected to result in calls for nationalization (e.g., “single payer”) by Democrats while Republicans counter with private insurance and tort reforms. The search for alternative economic systems should include free markets through a closer reexamination of the health care marketplace before 1980 to 1990 to determine whether prices offered by physicians and hospitals were ever set by the laws of supply and demand.
To quote the great economic expositor Henry Hazlitt,
> Prices are fixed through the relationship of supply and demand. ... When people want more of an article, they offer more for it. The price goes up. This increases the profits of those who make the article. Because it is now more profitable to make that article than others, the people already in the business expand their production of it, and more people are attracted to the business. This increased supply then reduces the price.
The structure of the following argument will follow the Hazlitt quote.
**1) Prices are fixed through the relationship of supply and demand**
[Medicare and Medicaid spending as part of total U.S. healthcare spending as percent of gross domestic product.](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/Holly3_0.png?itok=1nXKD4PL)
In 1965, Congress enacted the Medicare and Medicaid programs (See link directly above). From 1966 to 1980, Medicare provided health insurance for about 20 million elderly. By 1980, Medicaid was covering about 12 million poor people. M. Stanton Evans claimed that by dumping "demand into our medical system, these government programs bid up all the factors of supply"
Other factors that also contributed to an escalation in demand for physician and hospital services before and after 1965 have included a growing and later aging population, rising personal incomes, private health insurance, breakthroughs by the American drug industry, and advances in electronic and mechanical devices. Unmet demand for physician services have persisted in rural and poor urban areas, preventive care, geriatrics, house calls, cost management, computerized medicine, entrepreneurism, medical supply, environmental, public-health services, mental institutions, prisons, drug programs, and military and foreign service. Physician services became the number one growth industry.
Health-care industry experts agree that the major service provided by the health care industry is rendered or overseen by physicians. Protected by licensure laws from competition by non-physicians, physicians control an estimated 80 percent of all health care expenses, including 70 percent of hospital costs. While some proposed reforms for reducing excessive demand have merit, their unpopularity has only served as an excuse to delay a supply response. Some have blamed government for subsidizing health care, and call for taxing employee benefits and even eliminating government programs. Others have blamed the unhealthy living habits of consumers, but it has proved difficult trying to deny them the freedom to choose how to live their life. Between 1965 and 1980, it is unlikely physicians and hospitals were creating their own demand since they were busy meeting the additional demands created by government.
In addition, patients subsidized by Medicare remained concerned purchasers that spent an average of 20 percent of their income on medical care, including purchasing insurance. Many blame third-party insurance for making consumers less accountable for spending. But consumers seek to spread risk by purchasing health coverage from third-party payers. Moreover, third-party insurance existed long before the health care cost crisis: [Number of people with employer-provided health insurance 1940 to 1960](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/Holly4_0.png?itok=M8S5pT8P). Since the 1930s, hospital groups like Blue Cross and physician groups like Blue Shield had been offering fee-for-care insurance programs to employers, who then offered them to their employees for premiums. The non-profit [Kaiser Permanente](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaiser_Permanente) contracted with companies to meet all of the medical needs of employees for premiums.
A free competitive market can still exist with third-party payment. Consumers want the most benefits for the lowest health care premiums and also want to limit employee wages assigned to health care coverage. Insurance companies and self-insured employers want to pay the lowest amount possible to physicians and hospitals. If the health care industry was indeed competitive at all supply levels, suppliers would aggressively offer insurers competitive prices for high quality services.
Insurers would have no trouble selecting health care policies for their policyholders that encouraged them to obtain the best service they could for the lowest cost. Consumers would protect themselves from unethical providers by taking their business to those who had a good reputation for quality work at reasonable prices without unnecessary services. In a competitive market, providers are forced to obtain this reputation or they go out of business. The supply and demand curves are both price-inelastic, as illustrated by mostly vertical plots: [Illustration of a Price-Inelastic Demand Increase to Higher Price for Health Care](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/Holly5_0.png?itok=6YLTxuPN). The demand for physician care is a classic example of a necessity with no close substitutes (i.e., licensing restrictions prevent substitutions from non-physician practitioners).
The price elasticity of demand is only 0.31 for medical insurance. This means the quantity that consumers demand will not change much with changes in price or the method of financing (i.e., people will pay whatever they can). The supply curve is also price-inelastic and not very responsive to price because physicians require many years of training. Since 1965, the demand curve has shifted toward more quantity demanded at each price. For example, the equilibrium point as shifted from E1,1 to E2,1. Since the supply and demand curves are price inelastic, increases in demand are amplified into larger increases in medical prices.
**2) The price goes up. This increases the profits of those who make the article.**
Since 1965, medical prices have exploded with physician fees,
see [An indexed comparison of inflation of total medical prices and physician services from 1950 to 1993 with 1950 base year](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/Holly6_0.png?itok=R96UGVQf). From 1965 through 1993, the price for medical care increased by 699% and physician fees 675% compared to only 359% for all goods and services measured in the Consumer Price Index. Today, medical prices and physician fees continue to grow at about twice the rate of inflation. Hospital prices have increased at almost four times. U.S. health-care spending has increased from 6% of the Gross Domestic Product in 1965 to 18% ($3 trillion) today.
Jay Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health wrote: "The solution lies ... in examining the forces driving the medical-care delivery system. This examination must focus on physicians". Economist Lawrence Baker reported that HMOs aren't achieving their goal of increasing the efficiency of the delivery of medical services because physicians have too much market power for the development of competition. Cost control incentives encouraged by competition for clients has been limited in health care because client demands have grown more than physician supply since 1965. Even when physicians work for health institutions like hospitals, physician number can limit the volume of patient care rendered and thus the extent to which competition for patients occurs between institutions.
In the absence of competition, not only physician fees but prices for every element of health care that physicians control inflated because there was little incentive to efficiently manage costs. The highly paid and hurried work week has reduced cost-saving and quality-improving innovative incentives placed on physicians. The lack of competition between hospitals and other health care institutions also limited cost control incentives placed on executives. The lack of competition between both medical institutions and the doctors that control most of their spending could explain why hospital costs have been inflating twice as fast as even physician fees. Hospitals are loaded with waste and inefficiency. For example, a hospital stitch costs more than $500 today. Health care may be the only industry in which suppliers blame technology for high costs. But researchers at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation reported that small medical expenses controlled by physicians, such as blood tests and ordinary x-rays, were responsible for medical inflation, not complex technologies.
The article stated that if the annual operating costs of the nation's more complex technologies — kidney dialysis, coronary bypass, electronic fetal monitoring, and computerized x-rays — were reduced one-half, the net savings would be less than one percent of the nations medical bill. They proposed income incentives for physicians as motivation for cost control. Some market opponents disputed that a free market could create competition since they claim a "surplus" of doctors in some medical fields and geographic areas had not brought price competition. However, evidence of this is limited to secondary care physicians, such as surgeons. Secondary care physicians, who derive more of their patient load from referrals, cannot compete on the basis of price unless the primary care physicians, that refer patients to them, are under competition to care about costs. Few primary care physicians would refer a patient to a physician taking aggressive price cutting steps because they would be viewed as "rocking the boat." The higher-paid secondary care physicians may experience some unemployment before a competitive surplus of primary care physicians can develop. Geographic studies involving cities with a "surplus" supply are based on physician-to-population ratios and do not take into account the fact that demand may be much higher in the cities. The collapse of demand during economic downturns has provided evidence that physicians cannot create their own demand. The AMA had to respond to low physician incomes caused by the Great Depression by cutting medical school admissions (and not creating their own demand).
During another temporary decrease in demand caused by the severe recession during the early 1980s, the Wall Street Journal reported: "good news, however to free-market advocates, who note that in a few cities price wars have cut medical costs ... doctors are also alarmed by the increasing number of physicians ... fear they won't be able to compete with other doctors".
**3) The people already in the business expand their production of it.**
The increase in demand allowed physicians to expand their practices to serve more patients. Since physicians actually worked a few hours less per week, the increased number of patients received far less attention and quality deteriorated. In 1972, the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that, "The average patient load and the average volume of units of patient care for the average physician has increased dramatically in the last five to six years. Medicare, Medicaid and the increased coverage of medical and hospital insurance have produced a skyrocketing rise in effective demand for medical services ... the demand could be met only by the existing number of physicians providing more units of patient care." They claimed the doctor shortage had increased the possibility of the kind of breakdown in the patient-doctor relationship that can lead to a lawsuit. Overworked practitioners have been rendering hurried, poor quality medical care, dangerously understaffed hospitals and medical facilities, waiting lines, and 36 hour shifts squeezed into 120 hour work weeks by many residents at hospitals. Many doctors have freely admitted to being too busy healing to keep abreast of new techniques and research ideas. It has been suggested that the long, hurried work week of physicians contributed to the high incidences of fatigue, depression, alcoholism, drug addiction, and suicide among doctors. The lack of competition has failed to drive out the estimated five percent of the physicians considered unfit to practice medicine. Recently, Harvard University's Lucian Leape has estimated there are approximately 120,000 accidental deaths and 1,000,000 injuries in U.S. hospitals every year.
The physician's lack of time to communicate effectively depersonalized care. The Wall Street Journal reported, "Many doctors concede that the increasingly impersonal tone of medical care makes bringing a (malpractice) claim easier". In 1994, a study reported in the Journal of the American Medical Association found that doctors could reduce the chances of being sued for malpractice by not acting rushed or being impersonal with patients. The consumer revolt to the quality deterioration was dubbed "the malpractice crisis." While the total dollars spent on health care in the United States increased about 100% from 1966 to 1972, [malpractice insurance increased 400% for all physicians and 425% for surgeons](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/Holly7_0.png?itok=U774bfXG). Higher rates were a response to increased losses by insurance companies. For example, Aetna's indemnity losses for both doctor and hospital malpractice suits in the United States went from $300,000 to $9.5 million per year between 1965 and 1968, respectively.
Malpractice Report Lawyers Sylvia Law and Steven Polan claimed, "Doctors are primarily responsible...A consultant to the American Hospital Association reported in 1976 that hospital personnel-controllable claims, such as burns, medication mistake, and blood-transfusion error, were remaining relatively stable, but physician-controllable claims were increasing rapidly." They add, "In the enormous quantity of research and literature generated by the malpractice crisis there is not a shred of hard evidence suggesting that the injuries of successful claimants resulted from anything other than avoidable medical negligence". To protect themselves against malpractice suits, physicians claimed they were practicing “defensive medicine” by desperately ordering more and expensive tests and procedures for patients performed by other paramedical personnel.
Polls have shown a majority will also protect each other by refusing to testify against other doctors in lawsuits. Those who have claimed the laws of supply and demand do not apply to health care have noticed that as doctors are added, prices do not decrease. They sometimes fail to consider that doctors can expand their services by spending more time on each patient and restoring quality rather than competing for clients based on price. One problem is that the consumer price index used by economists to measure the rate of inflation cannot measure quality. After 1965, prices (for comparable quality) likely rose faster than that measured by economists. After 1972, an increase in the annual number of newly-licensed physicians meant more demand was met and the attention to patients was likely being restored. During the 1980s, the malpractice crisis began to level off.
Still, the U.S. has “lowest life expectancy, at 78.2 years” among developed countries.
**4) More people are attracted to the business. This increases supply then reduces price.**
[As the laws of supply and demand would predict, the number of medical school applicants have consistently responded to increases in the demand for physician services and fees](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/Holly8_0.png?itok=WS_vmxHl). In the seven years from 1967 to 1974 the number of medical school applicants for a given year increased by 127% compared to only 35% for the seven years from 1960 to 1967. Today, medical school applicants are at an all-time high of over 48,000, as increases in physician fees remain at twice the rate of inflation.
But the U.S. failed to allow physician supply to respond to meet consumer demand. From 1965 through 1972 the number of newly-licensed U.S. physicians graduated each year from medical schools in the United States and Canada increased from 7455 to 7815 or by only 360 physicians! From 1972 through 1980, this amount gradually doubled [but the medical schools became even more restrictive as they annually rejected about 20,000 qualified applicants who tried to fill the unmet demand](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/Holly9_0.png?itok=NBuBALsM). Today, medical schools are rejecting 28,000 applicants.
The doubling in the number of licenses meant a mere 3.5% annual increase in the 418,000 total physicians in 1980. Since much of the increase in medical school acceptances since 1965 has been necessary just to keep up with the increased level of demand, only a fraction of the increase in enrollment has gone toward filling the shortage or back-log of doctors created by the 1965 crisis. If only 10% of annual physician output fills this back-log, a further doubling in the output would achieve competition eleven times faster. In 1980, the U.S. Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare said there was no clear analysis showing whether health-care costs would be reduced if the nation achieved a "surplus" of physicians because "we have never lived in an excess supply situation so we don't have a model that would give us an answer." Medical schools have been rejecting applicants that could have increased the existing quality of doctors.
The average rejected applicant of 1975 had higher Medical College Admissions Test scores than the average accepted applicant of 1955 (on the same test that was replaced in the 1970s). In the early 1980s, the handbook of the Association of American Medical Colleges stated that "the number of qualified applicants from the United States alone is over twice the number of places available." Admission remains so competitive today that only the very top students even bother to apply for limited places and most are rejected in a selection process that involves significant cronyism. Meanwhile, the U.S. has granted medical licenses to the 25 percent of all doctors practicing in the United States that were educated abroad, often at inferior schools. The states allow the AMA to control total enrollment at medical schools by allowing them to determine the number of medical schools, the cost of medical education, and the amount of subsidies. The subsidies needed for medical education has been used as an excuse for rejecting qualified applicants.
But the high cost of medical education was grossly inflated by a more than doubling in the ratio of faculty to students, and faculty salaries that dwarf the salaries of other professors (made only necessary by the need to lure physicians from an overly lucrative medical market). Moreover, total medical school subsidies are insignificant compared to the money lost by an uncompetitive market. Milton Friedman wrote that physicians prevent health-care competition by limiting the number of entrants into the profession. Another Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Samuelson of MIT wrote: "Because the demand for medical care is price-inelastic, restricting the number of medical students raises the price of medical care and increases the incomes of doctors”
Market opponents have not only claimed there are too many doctors but also too many hospital beds. In 1972, the federal government started restricting the supply of hospitals with certificate-of-need (followed by repeal of the Hospital Survey and Construction Act in 1974). Alaska House of Representatives member Bob Lynn argued the true motivation was "large hospitals are ... trying to make money by eliminating competition" under the pretext of using monopoly profits to provide better patient care.
From 1965 to 1989, the number of hospital beds and occupied beds (per population) declined by 44 and 15 percent, respectively. Today, the U.S. and Canada have less than 25 doctors and 30 hospital beds (per 10,000 population), compared to over 35 and 50, respectively, in most countries in continental Western Europe. Mark Pearson, head of Division on Health Policy at The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), discussed possible reasons the U.S. spends more than two-and-a-half times per person more than most developed nations in the world, including relatively rich European countries: “The U.S. has fewer physicians and fewer physician consultations relative to its population. The U.S. also has fewer hospital beds for its population size and shorter average stays in hospital relative to other countries. Indeed, the lower numbers of physicians could help explain why they cost more; there is less competition for patients.” He adds that universities in other countries are still able to attract the best students to medicine. The U.S. health-care market appears to behave according to laws of supply and demand (at least until the 1980s). Assuming government subsidy of the elderly and poor serves the public good, the cause of the “U.S. health care cost crisis” appears to be that government didn’t allow the supply of doctors and hospitals to respond to increased consumer demands.
Politicians from both major political parties created a self-fulfilling prophesy by assuming markets couldn’t work in health care. The obvious solution is to increase the supply of physicians and hospitals to meet demand. Unfortunately, if medical schools doubled their class sizes by next year, it could still take over 20 years to achieve the number of doctors relative to population found in continental Western Europe. Competition could be achieved quicker by relaxing the licensing requirements placed on para-medicals (e.g. nurses), and possibly also foreign educated doctors, to compete with U.S. physicians to the degree to which they are qualified. If Obamacare is still necessary, the additional demands created by subsidizing even more consumers will require even more supply. Regardless, all major health care policies implemented by the U.S. government after 1965 will likely need to be repealed and the “playing field” leveled so new entrants can compete against previously subsidized and now entrenched providers. [Supply and demand graphs can illustrate the supply shift needed to balance the demand shift since 1965](https://mises.org/sites/default/files/styles/full_width/public/Holly11_0.png?itok=EbN95ENE). Once consumer demand for quality has been satisfied, the supply shift will result in more quantity of medical care supplied, greater access to medical care, lower prices, increased efficiency and real growth. By the definition of price-inelastic demand, total medical expenditures must decrease (e.g., from spending area I to II).
During the past 48 years, the U.S. has paid a heavy price for denying potential competitors entry into the health-care marketplace. The nation has likely wasted the equivalent of nearly two trillion dollars per year (in 2012 dollars). The costs are bankrupting the country as the leading contributor to the $16 trillion national debt (through spending on Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security). Health care is also the number one barrier to America's global competitiveness (according to Edward Deming), and the largest contributor to financial stress and personal bankruptcies.
**Sources:**
First and foremost, the above is borrowed heavily from the work of Mike Holly at the Mises Institute.
[AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges)](https://www.aamc.org/). 2013. Medical School Admission Requirements Handbook.
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["How the Price System Works."](https://www.hhs.gov/about/historical-highlights/index.html) Section 2 HHS.gov. U.S. Department of Health & Human Services. 2013.
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Ribicoff, Abraham and Danaceau, Paul. 1973. The American Medical Machine. Harrow Books. 212 pages.
Richman, Sheldon. 2013. [The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics.](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Fascism.html) Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. December 27, 1979. The Wall Street Journal.
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_____
> *This is a footnote from the CMV moderators. We'd like to remind you of a couple of things. Firstly, please* ***[read through our rules](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules)***. *If you see a comment that has broken one, it is more effective to report it than downvote it. Speaking of which,* ***[downvotes don't change views](http://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/guidelines#wiki_upvoting.2Fdownvoting)****! Any questions or concerns? Feel free to* ***[message us](http://www.reddit.com/message/compose?to=/r/changemyview)***. *Happy CMVing!* | There are a couple reasons why you can't apply standard free market rationale to healthcare.
Healthcare costs are unpredictable and often catastrophic. It's the reason we have insurance. And because we have insurance, someone other than you and your doctor is making decisions about what treatments and medicines you get. That third party, in a for- profit system, makes money by not paying for your healthcare as much as possible.
That's actually one of the reasons single payer is cheaper. Not only is there a profit margin, but there's a lot of overhead involved in determining what care you can ration and deny your customers to maximize your profits without killing them or driving up your own costs. There's a lot of complicated math involved that just isn't necessary in a government funded healthcare system that just pays the bills.
The second reason free market theory doesn't work is that pricing is opaque and the product is extremely complicated. This means that there isn't comparison shopping. Without that, the impact of new providers entering the market is not highly price-depressive. | 12 | 30 |
ELI5: How is a currency's "value" determined? | Supply and demand.
If the demand for a certain type of currency increases (i.e. more people want it) and the supply stays constant, the value of the currency increases.
Conversely, if the supply of a certain type of currency increases (i.e. more of it is created) and the demand stays constant, the value of the currency decreases. | 18 | 72 |
|
ELI5 How do we know which colors different animals see? | Also, would we know if a specific animal had color blindness? | Dissect their eyes to see the actual color detecting cells and test what light they respond to.
The cone cells have specific proteins tasked with reacting to specific wavelength bands of light, you can expose those proteins to light in the lab and monitor their activity.
Since all animals are at least loosely related, there are only a few variants of these color detection structures and it's pretty easy to see which ones are present and which are missing. | 23 | 15 |
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