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What are some ethical issues/dilemmas in computer science? | I’m trying real hard to find a topic for a paper I have to write for an International Baccalaureate (IB) class. The topic has to be about an ethical issue or dilemma that is occurring in computer science.
Two topics I’ve found so far are ‘How much protection is enough for web users’ and ‘Are victimless crime better received than crime with human victims’ (for example is hacking someone as bad as physical assaulting them).
Thank you to anyone who helps! | 26 | Some obvious ones:
* Is mass surveillance for counterterrorism ethical?
* Are you obligated to falisfy data when not doing so causes an unethical outcome in machine learning? Consider a simple machine that decides whether or not to approve a loan - it works well, but looking at the weights of the net tells you it only really considers ethnicity. Removing this from the data results in noticeably worse predictions. Are you obligated to remove/falisfy the data? What if the net is so big and complicated that you can't tell exactly how it makes its decisions? What if, instead of removing the data, you just increase the size of the net massively and retrain it (starting with random weights again)?
* A machine learning based industrial machine fails in software and kills a worker. To what extent are the developers of the machine to blame for the death? Inverted: you use machine learning to build an industrial machine. It's much better than the standard, but, unlike the competition, it has an error rate, and this could result in deaths. Is it ethical to release/sell the machine?
* Related to the above: should machines be able to own copyright? Consider a machine that reads all the novels in the world and learns to write novels, and ends up successfully publishing, with the programmer only acting as its agent. Does the machine own copyright? Is the programmer stealing from the machine if they claim the book is their own?
* Is mass-publishing/social media ethical? Consider the Arab Spring, organised via Facebook, and the recent phenomenon of 'fake news'. | 18 |
ELI5: When your first response to hearing a new song is negative, what happens in the brain that makes us start to like it after hearing it over and over? | 20 | One theory that explains why we enjoy music is that our brain rewards us for making correct predictions. Being able to predict things had obviously been important for the survival of our ancestors, that's why our brain evolved to be this way.
So when we listen to the beginning of a melody, the brain tries to predict the rest. If the prediction is right, we are rewarded with joy and consider the melody logical and beautiful. This also explains why we enjoy rhymes.
Now, if the sequence of sounds didn't make much sense in the beginning, with each repeated listen we kind of get used to it. Our brain remembers how the melody ends, so it predicts the ending right this time and we start to enjoy it. Of course, for this to happen we should be free from stronger feelings (like the annoyance of being forced to listen to a song when it happens against our will). | 24 |
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eli5: Why are there so many bad chemicals in cigarettes? | A cigarette is basically just paper, tobacco and a filter. So how do so many harmful chemicals get in them? | 1,357 | While a lot of the additional chemicals are ‘naturally’ present as part of the tobacco, there are a lot of additives as well, added by tobacco companies to help the smoker better enjoy the smoking process and increase tobacco consumption.
Smoke by itself is quite harsh, and so compounds like menthol are added in varying degrees (even cigarettes not marketed as containing menthol) to numb your throat.
Bronchodilators are added to help the tobacco reach inside of your lungs better, something typically not present in cigars where the smoke is intended to stay in your mouth. | 1,353 |
[Diablo 1/2/3] Who keeps all those candles lit? | I keep finding lit candles in all these dungeons, oftentimes no monsters present except for some zombies and the like. Who performs candle maintenance within Sanctuary's dungeons? | 28 | Well, with how prevalent magical loot is in all 3 games, it's not a large stretch to imagine that magic has crept into all sorts of professions. When even the most basic wizard or sorceress (read level 1) can conjure a fireball, a magically extended life for candles surely isn't that hard. | 28 |
ELI5: What are Lobbyists? | Example: people say there are special interest groups who "lobby" to keep marijuana illegal. What does that exactly mean? | 17 | Lobbyists are hired by a group of people to talk to legislators. Their job is to persuade them into your way of thinking.
Suppose you owned a logging company and people said "We want to end logging!" You would hire someone whose whole job it is to talk to the legislators and get them to vote no on banning logging. | 12 |
ELI5: How do fish survive tall waterfalls? | Not only survive the impact, but wouldn't they still hit the rocks at bottom? Why aren't there fish corpses all along the river banks at the bottoms? | 93 | Couple things contribute.
Fish are fairly small so they don't gather much kinetic energy. They're also shaped much more streamlined than most animals so they enter water much more smoothly and gracefully.
The surface tension of the water, which is usually what would kill, say, a human, is broken by the water tumbling down onto the pool underneath. That "impact" is more or less gone as long as the fish can reach the water "inside" the stream of the waterfall.
Usually there's also enough depth underneath for them to decelerate without dangerously impacting rocks.
That being said, it's not always a given that a fish will survive a fall. Whenever one of these conditions no longer exist, such as if the fish leaves the stream of falling water into falling through the air, there's a good chance of the fish being killed or at least stunned on impact. In fact, they can be stunned even when all of those conditions are favorable, simply if the fall is big enough. | 56 |
ELI5: Why aren't dogs subjected to the "law of diminishing returns"? I feel like my 8 year old lab still gets the same amount of enjoyment playing fetch as he did when he was a puppy--even after playing it practically every single day of his life. | And yet, nothing I do in my everyday life is as fun as it was the first time I did it. I feel like I am constantly in search of something new and exciting. What is it about dogs' brains that allows them to have practically endless joy?
Edit: Thanks for all the replies, and a special shoutout to /u/kouhoutek -- that was a great answer! | 5,661 | Humans tend to anthropomorphize their pets, and attribute human like emotions to their actions. That makes it easier to forget that they are animals and experience the world very differently than humans. What appears to be "joy" could be, and often is, something very different.
In the case of fetch, dogs have a hunting instinct that makes they chase prey and bring it back to the pack. Throwing a stick triggers this instinct, and their brains rewards them for following through. This "joy" is similar to what a human would experience when following the instinct to drink something cold when they are hot and thirsty, and would explain both humans and dog continue to feel a sense of enjoyment even after doing it thousands of times year after year. | 8,061 |
ELI5, Is the FBI and NSA running Tor? | Ever since the big bust of The Silk Road, why wouldn't the FBI or NSA build its own Tor network to track users in the dark web? | 104 | The relevant software is open-source and known to be reasonably secure. The FBI itself said it was mostly helpless against Silk Road and whatnot until the people messed up in their use of TOR to reveal themselves. (Things like client-side scripts, for example, should be off as it could potentially be used to figure out who you are despite TOR.)
It is theoretically possible to create TOR entry and exit nodes that are compromised to get some information, and if you have the majority of entry and exit nodes in your pocket you can basically consider TOR itself useless as a means of anonymity. | 36 |
I'm no computer expert, so forgive me if this is a ridiculous question: What would happen if computers switched to trinary instead of binary? | I don't know if this is even possible, but what if, instead of just 0's and 1's representing off and on, computers understood 0's 1's and 2's for off, half-way on, and completely on. Would that speed things up? Make hard-drives able to hold more data, etc? | 198 | Binary it's really better than any other system, it just happens to be the simplest and easiest to design. Any theoretical increase in performance has to be weighed against the additional work needed to design it, and in almost every case it just isn't worth it to do computation using something other than binary.
Designing hardware to operate on boolean logic is dead-simple, since you only have two states you can peg your logic voltage levels at the limits of your power supply and not really worry about it. Determining logic levels becomes a matter of "Is it below X volts? Logic 0. Is it above Y volts? Logic 1". This can be done pretty easily and wickedly fast, both essential properties for making fast circuits.
With >2 states, hardware complexity takes a decidedly nasty leap forward. It's a lot harder to make digital hardware that operates on 3 or more discrete logic levels than one that works off two since you have to include additional hardware to discriminate between them at every step of the process; you can't use the supply limits as easy references anymore since you'll have a third logic level floating somewhere in the middle that's annoyingly difficult to efficiently detect with great accuracy compared to how easy it is to differentiate just two.
That said, it's very common for circuitry to have a quasi-logic level called 'high impedance' or just 'high-Z'. Putting a logic line into high-Z effectively disconnects it entirely from any other inputs or outputs it's connected to, allowing useful functions like multiplexing lines together that you're sure will never have to drive it at the same time. It isn't true ternary operation since it really isn't a "true" logic level, but it's a quick glimpse into the strangeness that goes on when digital circuit design meets the real-world analog craziness that reality consists of. | 344 |
ELI5: In reading about NSA PRISM, I've seen multiple statements about how cellphones can monitor you even when powered off. How is this possible? Does this mean that cellphones are never really "Off"? | 24 | Yes, provided they have a warrant to do so, the FBI can remotely activate the microphone and monitor you. This came to light during the federal trial against John Gotti and the Gambino crime family. To make the gathered evidence admissible in court, they had to display the warrants and explain how the gathering took place. If you would like to research more about it (free of paranoid conspiracy theory) that's a really good starting point. | 14 |
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[DC/Marvel] Let's say the Kansas of the Marvel Universe was where Superman landed as a child and was raised similarly by that reality's version of the Kents so he establishes the same ethics and connection to humanity. How would this world react to having Superman in it? | 25 | For starters, Captain America and Superman are fast friends. They form a quick bond, akin to his friendship with Batman.
People of his power level aren't unheard of in Marvel (Thor, The Sentry, Hyperion, etc.), so he doesn't change the superhero game too much. Ultimately, Marvel's heroes just became more effective by the measure of one Superman. The public sees him similar to how they view Cap, usually on his side but capable of being turned against him. He joins the Avengers at some point, likely as a founding member (maybe one of the times they broke up then reformed). Clark can always be found where he's needed.
I haven't read many major Marvel events, but I'll comment on Superman during Civil War. Clark starts off on Tony's side, due to the destruction of the school. As time goes by, he grows more and more worried with the brewing conflict and Tony's increasingly desperate responses. Eventually, Clark defects and chooses to focus on minimizing damage and not picking sides. The absolute latest this could happen is the death of Goliath. If Superman is there when Bill dies, he takes the Thor clone down hard. | 20 |
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ELI5: How come when you stretch or get up fast you black out? | Sometimes, if I've been been sitting for awhile and get up to stretch, I black out. Usually, I lose my eye sight and have a headache, but only momentarily. Why is that? | 36 | When you stand up quickly after sitting for an extended period of time the blood pressure to your brain decreases as blood flow increases to your legs, and you experience a mild form of "postural hypotension". Postural Hypotension is a more severe form, that often results in fainting and is a real medical issue- often related to things like diabetes.
Edit: Used hyper rather than than hypo. | 24 |
[Peter Jackson’s King Kong] After Kong’s death from falling off the Empire State Building, what happened to all of the characters? | Was Carl Denham sued or made a criminal due to the destruction wrought by Kong? Did Jack Driscoll and Ann Darrow get married and have children? What happened to Jimmy and Captain Englehorn? Did Preston testify against Carl in court? | 46 | Denham managed to avoid arrest, but his reputation was ruined and he found himself facing multiple lawsuits. He was last seen boarding a ship for Europe, and is believed to have never returned to the United States.
Kong's body was argued over by the scientific community for several days, before the NYPD - eager to get the whole affair behind them - dragged it onto a barge, floated it out into the harbour, and sank it with the help of a couple of anchor chains.
Jack and Ann married and had moderately successful careers in theatre. Neither ever pursued film work again, but they were happy together to the end of their very long lives. They never really talked about what happened on Skull Island, but only because they didn't need to - they were there for each other, and that was enough.
Captain Englehorn kept on plying his trade on the open sea. In 1936 the tides took him back to Germany for the first time in over a decade. He did not like what he found there, and two years later he secured Canadian citizenship. During the Second World War he took part in the Atlantic convoys, managing to twice bring his ship to safe harbour after being torpedoed, and was decorated for bravery. The story of King Kong became a moderately interesting footnote in a long life of high adventure.
Bruce Baxter kept the moustache. Obviously. | 52 |
[The Simpsons] What ultimately became of Hank Scorpio? | The last time we really saw him, armed opposition forces were closing in. However, by the time the family returned to Springfield, a newspaper read: "Supervillain seizes east coast." Seizes. Present tense. He also apparently maintained the wealth and connections to purchase and transfer the Denver Broncos to Homer.
So...for how long did his amiable reign of terror last? How was he finally deposed? Was he? And why didn't he think of hammocks? | 127 | Apparently he seized the east coast. The fact that Homer no longer owns the Denver Broncos and that the federal government is in charge tells us that he was ultimately defeated. Whether he escaped justice, went to prison, or was killed remains to be seen. | 70 |
ELI5: why do snow storms not produce lighting like traditional thunderstorms? | It’s snowing and I just blew my own mind with the realization that I’ve never heard or seen lightening during snow storms, even severe ones. My thought is that it’s the same amount of moisture as a rain storm, so would it be due to pressure or temp differences? | 65 | It can thunder and lighting during a snow storm. It's called Thundersnow.
The Science
Also known as thunder snowstorms or winter thunderstorms, a thundersnow only happens when a rare set of conditions occur. In fact, people only witness about 6.3 thundersnow events each year. Typically between late winter and early spring when the air beneath the clouds is warmer near the ground than the air in the upper cloud layers. The cumulonimbus cloud (towering mass with a flat base at fairly low altitude and often a flat top, as in thunderstorms) must be lower than a typical thunderstorm, and the warmer air temperature must still be cold enough to form snow. Thunder snowstorms usually create snowflakes, soft snow pellets, hail and strong “gravity wave” currents of air similar to ocean waves. The lightning produced appears in purplish-blue flashes. | 54 |
[MCU] Who were the Avengers Initiative in 2008? | In 2008 Nick Fury tells Stark, "You've entered a bigger world" that he's not the only superhero in the world.
So who's he talking about?! Barton and Romanov would have been agents at that time, sure, but not really "superheros", Rogers is still under the ice, Banner is hiding somewhere and a pacifist, and Thor he's a myth, no one has seen him in like 1000 years.
We've seen others with powers on Agents of SHEILD that might have had powers at that time, but they're all locked up.
Basically, who's Fury talking about!? | 65 | Iron Man and Hulk were probably the big players. Ant-Man potentially, depending on if anything's revealed about Hank Pym previously using the suit. Cap was definitely known of by SHIELD, but wasn't known to be alive when Fury first met with Stark. They may have even known about Matt Murdock's enhanced senses, even though he only became a vigilante after the Battle of New York. Other than that, not many superhumans from that time are known of, at least to the general public, most appeared later on. | 65 |
[Magic the Gathering]What would a hero or a villain attuned to each of the five colors be like? | A short breakdown of the colors for some basic framework:
White: Peace, law, structured, selflessness, equality
Blue: Knowledge, deceit, cautious, deliberate, perfecting
Black: Power, self-interest, death, sacrifice, uninhibited
Red: Freedom, emotion, active, impulsive, destructive
Green: Nature, wildlife, connected, spiritual, tradition | 21 | **Heroes**
A white-aligned hero is pretty stereotypical. They fight for good, justice, law and order; what's right. They protect the downtrodden and oppose those who harm others. Think of the Knight/Paladin archetype; someone like Captain America.
A blue-aligned hero would likely be an academic or scientist, who uses their knowledge to help others. It could be someone like Iron Man who uses technological inventions to become a superhero, or simply a researcher who finds a cure for a disease.
A black-aligned hero is the anti-hero archetype; someone whose primary concern is self-interest, but will help others (intentionally or incidentally) when their interests align. Han Solo fits the bill, as do many other lone-wolf type characters.
A red-aligned hero will fight for what they believe is right - but not necessarily what society says is right. Red heroes often are vigilantes, operating outside the law but ultimately for the common good. They also may be motivated by their own emotional responses and/or a desire for revenge.
A green-aligned hero is less likely to fight crime than they are to seek social and societal progress. An activist seeking to prevent climate change could be a conventional example. If one were more the superhero type, they would likely seek out opponents based on their disruption of the social contract and the natural order, rather than what is strictly illegal or right/wrong. Captain Vimes is an unconventional green hero, as perhaps is Paul Atreides.
**Villains**
A white-aligned villain seeks oppressive order; in a word, fascist. They may punish people disproportionately to the crime, or criminalize minor infractions, for the sake of creating a world where no one can afford to do wrong (...or anything else). They often see people in strict "us" and "them" groups, and take extreme measures to protect the "us" while opposing the "them".
A blue-aligned villain is in many ways the inverse of the blue hero; an academic or scientist who uses their knowledge for harm. Again, they may use technological inventions for oppression or personal gain, or create ways for other people to harm each other, or attempt to stamp out knowledge and thought that doesn't serve their goals. They are likely to work from the shadows and employ trickery and misdirection. (MCU)Loki is blue.
A black-aligned villain is the classic. They're only in it to help themselves (or a select few they care about). They will sacrifice anything and everything to achieve power, especially if that sacrifice can be taken from others. They believe no one owes anyone else anything, and only deserves what they can take by force or cunning. Look no further than Sauron.
A red-aligned villain is out to have fun and/or cause chaos. They are the embodiment of "some people just want to watch the world burn", so of course The Joker is a prime example. Like red heroes, red villains will also often act out of a desire for revenge for some perceived wrong - even/especially if that revenge is against society as a whole.
A green-aligned villain will typically put a belief in an idealized natural order above people's real needs. A green villain may be the most likely to sacrifice themselves for their own cause, because their goal has no need for them (or anyone else) to be around to see it. A green villain may also believe themselves to be the one destined to carry out this task. (MCU)Thanos, for example, is a green villain who believes himself destined to restore the natural balance of the universe at any cost. | 46 |
[Fallout] What was the actual point of the Vaults? | The US at large knew the world was most likely going to go down in a nuclear hellstorm, but, rather than have Vault-Tec build a bunch of safe shelters, so a good chunk could survive the initial bombs, they went with saying that, then using the Apature style, basically if humanity somehow hadn't survived the initial blasts outside of the vaults, all that would be left is whatever "control" vaults, or the few vaults that had stupid tests that weren't deadly/mutagenic/brainwashing to insanity ,contained, because some morons at Vault-Tec decided to use them for SCIENCE! instead of what they were actual meant for.
So what was, as said, the point? it's clear, so far at least, that there is nobody left to Collect the data. | 24 | While many of the vaults have experiments running, the majority where "safe" tests and not expected to last for centuries. In addition there was a number of control vaults, and vaults specific for certain groups ment to survive the war.
Vault-tech's "plan" isn't coherent as it is a company run by many people with conflicting desires and obligations; but the long and short of it is to build test vaults to fund and do testing for the actual goal of leaving earth with the survivors of the actual vaults (who collected and researched that data from the test vaults and the wasteland).
Unfortunately they took too long and the war started earlier then they expected and was too disruptive to their infrastructure. Many of the actual vaults became groups like the enclave, but others would continue until their discovery centuries later, mostly by the master his supermutant armies | 34 |
ELI5: How did the word English word fanny, referring to a woman's pink bits, changed in American to mean ones buttocks? | 46 | It's not clear to me that the meaning changed in America. Some words changed their meaning in British English while preserving their original meaning in America. Anyway, in this case, the word comes from the diminutive of the female name Frances -- which indicates that maybe the British use is the original. | 23 |
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CMV: As a Libertarian, I believe in Net Neutrality because my data is a product of my own labor, which I own, and ISPs don't have the right to handle it | Net Neutrality should be upheld and enforced because ISPs don't have the right to favor or disfavor my communications because they are a product of my own labor, which is my property.
As I modulate a constant voltage through the assistance of computers or other machines the resulting bitstream is the fruit of my own labor. Since the signal I ask to pass through infrastructure owned by ISPs is the product of human labor its ownership by myself is justified. Therefore ISPs don't have the ownership rights or justification to discriminate upon that signal based on their own interests, whether that be the signal destination or the signal content. Net Neutrality rules uphold my ability to do this, whether they contain undesirable chaff through the body of Title II regulations or not.
Discrimination in the due process of delivering my bitstream to my destination based on technical reasons such as available bandwidth and lane availablility is fine.
I am not interested in the legalese of Title II regulations or discussing ISPs ability or inability to monopolize on last-mile connections, as I would like competition between service providers in their ability to reach me and provide said services. I see this as a separate issue, instead I would like to discuss ISP rights to drop my packets if they see it interferes with their interest in offering a competing service, such as VOIP when I use a competitor. Suggesting I can go elsewhere if I'm subject to throttling is beside the point, because I should never have been subject to throttling to begin with.
CMV
∆: [Ansuz07](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/6qytmy/cmv_as_a_libertarian_i_believe_in_net_neutrality/dl147hg/)
[BolshevikMuppet](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/6qytmy/cmv_as_a_libertarian_i_believe_in_net_neutrality/dl153qm/)
[AnythingApplied](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/6qytmy/cmv_as_a_libertarian_i_believe_in_net_neutrality/dl1pmnr/)
Net Neutrality is contrary to Libertarian principles
[V_varius](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/6qytmy/cmv_as_a_libertarian_i_believe_in_net_neutrality/dl1n9z2/)
There are many avenues in which to exhibit free speech
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Edit:Thanks to everyone who responded! | 73 | Speaking from a libertarian viewpoint here - if the ISP doesn't have a right to handle your data, why do they? Surely you need them to deliver your data to the source you desire; i.e., they are providing you a service. Thus, their ability to manipulate data speeds resides entirely within the contract you have made with them.
Why should the government interfere in network connections? Because you and the ISP are each providing the other a service - that is, engaged in a contract - neither party's rights are being violated. | 25 |
I just heard on NPR that 56 million years ago, the earth was 11 degrees warmer. How do they know this? | 22 | It is not "known." It's hypothesized based on indirect observations called proxies.
One of the best and most commonly used proxies for estimating paleotemperatures is the abundance of heavy stable isotopes of common elements like Oxygen. Two stable isotopes of Oxygen have atomic masses 16 and 18 and because of their difference in mass, molecules that include them such as water or carbonate (CO3), will respond differently during phase changes. Molecules containing the heavier isotope will condense out before the lighter isotope, a process called fractionation. However the exact ratio of fractionation depends on the ambient temperature at which the phase change occurs with the imbalance decreasing the warmer the temperature is.
So the ratio of 18-O to 16-O in ice (in the case of relatively recent records from e.g. glacial cores) or in the calcium carbonate fossil shells of animals (in very ancient records where there is no continuous ice record) can be measured and the temperature at which they formed reconstructed.
Generally multiple proxies are used and when they agree with one another, scientists are confident to put forward a temperature reconstruction. Other proxies that support the period of warming you're describing (called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum) include enrichment of deuterium (heavy hydrogen) in terrestrial systems due to more active evaporation of water from the oceans, and also study of fossilized bacterial lipids that were produced to regulate cell membrane fluidity and so are modified by the organisms in direct response to environmental temperature. | 47 |
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ELI5 Why didn't Italy ever colonise the New World? | With all the important early expeditions organised by Italian explorers (Columbus, John Cabot, Vespucci, Giovanni da Verrazano etc.), how come Italy itself never established a single long-term colony in basically a whole planetary hemisphere named for an Italian? Even the Dutch had an American empire. | 15 | During the Age of Discovery, Italy was not a country, but rather a collection of city states. England, Portugal, France, Spain, and the Netherlands were large strong nations that could pay for, and support exploration and then the subsequent colonization. During this time, the Italian states were fighting one another quite heavily and were not in a real position to explore and colonize. That's why all the Italian explorers went to foreign powers to support their journeys. | 31 |
Why is ‘only’ 4.5% GDP growth bad for China? | Per Howard Marks of OakTree, it would be the equivalent of negative growth in the US. Other than compared to expectations and history, it’s still ‘good’ or at least not disastrous, yes? | 46 | If you refer to Solow growth model, you will see that developing countries grow much faster than than the developed ones up until a certain point where they start catching up.
This is mainly due to the cost of technical progress (developing countries don't have to use own resources to innovate) and the capital accumulation (poor countries have low capital per worker).
China has been averaging around 7% GDP growth pa, therefore 4.5% is really critical. | 30 |
CMV: An opt-out organ donor policy is more effective than an opt-in policy and should not be morally concerning. | [A recent comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/76673p/cmv_i_should_be_able_to_sell_my_organs/dobpvgy/) in a CMV involving selling your own organs prompted me to create this post. The poster stated:
>Opt out assumes that your organs aren't actually yours to begin with. **It's a disgusting moral stance** that your body after your death is somehow community property. Sure from a practical standpoint it makes sense but **it's dehumanizing.**
My view has two parts which I'm open in having changed:
1. An opt-out organ donor policy is more effective than an opt-in policy at increasing donor registration rates, and generally more effective at providing more donated organs.
2. Switching to this policy is not a moral concern.
[As some background information](https://www.organdonor.gov/statistics-stories/statistics.html), the waiting list for an organ transplant in the US is over 116,000 patients long. 20 people die daily while waiting for an organ transplant. While 95% of people say they support organ donation, only 54% are registered organ donors. Due to needing very specific conditions in order to donate, usually only 3 in every 1000 donor deaths results in organs being harvested.
The US has an opt-in policy currently, most commonly encountered during motor vehicle registration when there is an option to register as an organ donor (though you can also just sign up online or via mail at any time). Several other countries or parts of countries have an opt-out system instead. There is some debate over how effective the difference is, but *in general* it seems to increase the number of donors. [Per a wikipedia article on the differences in results](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organ_donation#Opt-in_versus_opt-out), opt-out countries like Spain and Austria had much higher rates of donation than opt-in countries like Greece and Germany; 36/million and 21/million respectively compared to 16/million and 6/million.
[There is some evidence that opt-out can have a chilling effect on the number of actual donations](http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41199918) even if the number of registered donors increases; but each country has different rules about their system (making a clear comparison difficult), and overall the switch tends to increase registration by 25%. Assuming the US adopted such a system, registration would likely increase to 75 or 80%. So long as this is coupled with education and infrastructure support programs, it seems more likely that actual donations would rise (like with Spain) rather than fall (like with Wales).
What about the moral component?
The common responses I have seen against this on a moral level seem to fall flat (in my view). Some I've seen include:
* Religious concerns. [Most major religions support organ donation](http://www.donorrecovery.org/learn/religion-and-organ-donation/); even if people are part of a denomination which is against it, as long as they have an option to opt-out, this should not affect their concerns. Many opt-out locations also consult the family's wishes on the matter, [Spain and Wales included](http://www.bbc.com/news/health-41199918).
* Bodily autonomy issues. This is basically what launched this topic in the first place; the objection to your body being "community property" after death on its face flies in the face of the concept that your individual rights aren't being abrogated in the name of "the greater good." [But that doesn't make sense to me](https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/comments/76673p/cmv_i_should_be_able_to_sell_my_organs/dobrgbj/), because we already allow for some limitations on bodily autonomy for the benefit of society at large - namely, mandatory vaccinations. Opting out of vaccinations is actually more difficult to do than what an opt-out organ donation system would presumably require. After all, usually a reason must be provided for doing so; for organ donation, you'd simply check a box while registering your car or fill out a form online.
* State versus federal rights. The last objection I saw about opt-out is kind of a continuation of the last point. Basically, since states set the vaccination policies, it would be immoral to have a federal policy to do so for organ donation. A possible (or probable) compromise would be to have a federal body make recommendations, and the CDC would work with states and counties to implement them. The question of whether all states would actually move to an opt-out policy would come into question, however. Perhaps, like how there is no official federal drinking age of 21 but rather [all states have passed such laws in order to not lose their federal highway funding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Minimum_Drinking_Age_Act), some financial incentive from the federal government could make such a policy effectively mandatory.
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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!* | 130 | I actually agree with you but one concern might be that, just as today you cannot harvest organs unless you can prove the person is a donor, there might be people who have chosen to opt-out but died without proof nearby or available would end up having their organs donated against their will. | 11 |
Astronomy - If you were to inject a star's core with a piece of iron, would it die? | After watching how the universe works episode on extreme stars a question popped into my head. Can a form of life kill a star?
Lets say a civilization found a way to get a "care package" to the centre of a star with say a missile, and that package was filled with iron. Would the star suddenly die or would it reject the iron and not try to fuse it? | 30 | Iron doesn't kill stars, it's just that stars cannot use iron as fuel because the fusion of iron doesn't release energy. When iron accumulates in the core of a star, it means that the star has run out of fuel.
It's a similar relation to ashes and a fire. Ashes aren't what kill a fire. | 34 |
ELI5: In movies and TV shows, anyone shown as a patient in a mental institution are shown to be always wearing a robe and pajamas. Is this factual, or just for show? Also, if it is true, why do they do that? | 48 | From personal experience, no. We were told we could wear whatever was comfortable that obviously didn't go against the rules. There are always various rules about words or images on clothing, anything that could be used to harm yourself or others (some take away belts, shoe laces etc) | 31 |
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[MCU/Marvel] Why do superheroes not collaborate more/share resources in the marvel universe? | I've been thinking about this alot especially as a big fan of the marvel movies. Why do the superheroes not share resources/technology or aid more with one another in the marvel universe? I want to be clear i absolutely love these movies and these characters but they seem to constantly go "lone wolf" and put themselves or their mission in danger when it is completely unnecessary. Even if it meant waiting to resolve the situation until help could arrive to ensure the best possible outcome
For example in Spiderman- No Way Home, Peter Parker struggles tremendously against the villains in that film and it costs him his aunt may and nearly MJ. He did at one point have the help of Dr. Strange but in fairness they had a disagreement on the proper resolution to the situation so i will allow that. Why didn't Peter make a phone call or send an Avengers SOS to Sam Wilson, Hulk, Hawkeye, Antman or any of the thousands of people that showed up in the Endgame battle? He did have the help of the other spidermen but at that point he had already lost his aunt. In Endgame we see that the heroes were able to regroup and rally into a large fighting force really quickly if the situation demands it. The multiverse was literally tearing itself apart. In Falcon and the Winter soldier we see that Sam as the new Captain America had a pretty good handle on the situation but why not call Spider-man or Hulk for back up just in case? He clearly had to travel the long distance from Louisiana to New York, why not make a quick phone call to ask Avengers that might be nearby for help if they are available? If it meant saving more lives why not? Sam and Bucky are both military veterans and should know better than anyone the value of having a solid team and backup in any situation, regardless of how good of a handle you think you have on the situation.
Secondly, why dont the Avengers share technology and resources. We see in Falcon and the Winter Soldier that Sam is in dire financial straits due to the Avengers not actually paying him. Why is this? Even as an informal group why wouldn't Tony fund the group with paychecks and equipment? We see in Age of Ultron that he reformatted Stark tower into a makeshift base of operations. Why not make the Avengers unofficial stark employees so they could be compensated for their time? Peter seems to be the only one that received some manner of compensation in the form of a scholarship and a suit.
With regard to equipment i dont understand why Tony didn't give everyone a mini upgrade to their equipment. Spiderman receives an excellent nanotech suit but why didn't he give Captain America a suit that gives him a strength or speed boost? Hawkeye and Black Widow are incredibly skilled but a basic set of nanotech body armor, even without any bells and whistles would keep them much safer and maybe add a few additional tricks into their arsenal. I dont see why they would turn it down out of "personal preference" if it meant it an emergency situation that it might mean the difference between life and death for civilians or themselves. Quicksilver might've been saved incredibly easily if he was wearing a pretty basic Stark tech level set of body armor. Or Hawkeye could've saved himself if he had that shield generator that stark used in Endgame.
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For clarification im not saying the full might of the Avengers was necessary for every mugger and car crash. But for the big stuff... why dont they ask each other for help? | 34 | The first time the three peters fight together in no way home they’re swinging around uncoordinated and getting in each others way, it takes a pep talk for them to fight well together. And they’re the *same guy*. It takes some onboarding for a team to actually work. | 49 |
[star wars] what did the republic intend to do with the clones if they had won the war? | I'm talking about what the Jedi and republic thought would happen, because they have no idea of order 66.
Would they just keep the clones as soldiers in barracks?, Seems kind of inhumane... At least more than it already is.
I don't think they would kill the clones for many reasons.
The republic also isn't exactly the type that might allow them into society, just wouldn't work out well i don't think.
So what did the republic intend to do with them? | 28 | I'd imagine it was largely a "We cross that bridge when we get there" kind of issue.
The clones kind of showed up just as they were needed and for the duration of the Clone Wars, the Republic as a whole were more focused on surviving and beating the separatists than thinking about what they will do with the convenient army they had.
Since the Republic government didn't know about the Clones until the Clone Wars begun, there wouldn't have been time for any committees on the ethics and long-term sustainability of clone militaries and so I'd imagine there would be a general understanding that "what to do with the clones after the war" would be a lesser priority as long as the war went on.
Perhaps it was assumed they'd give the clones military pensions until they die in a few decades from their accelerated aging. Or maybe something similar to what the Empire did, keep the clones around as long as they're useful but phase them out to save money. | 45 |
[Pokemon Anime] Why did Prof. Oak arrange for 4 trainers to pick their starters in the same day when he only intended to give out 3? | He only gave Ash Pikachu after Ash insisted on taking whatever Prof. Oak had left. So he was just planning to give out Charmander, Squirtle and Bulbasaur.
What would have happened if all 4 trainers showed up at the same time? | 31 | It was clearly a first come first serve situation. Oak is a busy man, he has to care for all the Pokemon that his trainers catch, continue his research projects, and build an audience for poetry lovers.
Oak was already screwing with expectations, since the trainers would only get to pick what was left, rather then of all three options.
It's possible given that starters are bred and raised by specialists, that oak had made his requests unaware that there was more then three kids coming. One of the kids may have just turned 10 years old the other day, or their family just moved to pallet town which would throw off his carefully curated plans. | 34 |
Can someone explain Post-Modernism like I'm 5, please? | I just read White Noise by Don DeLillo. Strangely, I recognized it as post-modernist literature, but I can't really describe what exactly that is. I've read up on it on Wikipedia, but that was a can of worms. | 116 | What does it even matter? Nothing has any meaning anyhow. Even the meaning we project on things is a construct of the mind and the only thing that is worthy of attention is the richness of the individual experience, each of which differs from every other. | 133 |
ELI5: When there has been no rain & all the plants you want to keep around are dying, why do weeds thrive? Could we not "breed" that hardiness into our flowers & such? | 142 | For the plants that matter, like ones we eat, that kind of hardiness usually works against large yields. We need plants to perform very well and grow quickly to feed all of us. Weeds survive because they don't grow juicy fruit, or large edible roots. They just devote their all to... weedlike growth. | 72 |
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ELI5: When an app crashes and I send a report, what exactly does that do, and how is it used? | 50 | It tells the developer that the app has crashed, first of all.
But it can also tell the developer what you were doing, what screen you were viewing, what data you were using, what route you took to get to that screen, and so on.
All of this can help fix the bug. Obviously the developer needs to know what screen you're looking at. But it's not uncommon to find find bugs where the app crashes every time you enter a " character, for example. By sending the data to the developer, the developer can look at the report from dozens or even hundreds of similar crashes, and can realise that the " character is the common denominator.
Obviously this has privacy issues - it's up to you to decide whether your privacy is worth sacrificing in order to help make the app better. If you use the app for banking or drug dealing, then probably not. If you use it for looking at pictures of cats you might be happy to share this data. | 15 |
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ELI5: how does swatting your hand towards your face in a hot day provide cold breeze instead of hot air? | Or how any fast moving object also provides cold air | 31 | The air isn't cold.
The movement of it across a wet surface (e.g. your skin, your sweat, etc.) causes water to evaporate and moves the evaporated water away. Cooling a human is about facilitating evaporation - the human sweats, air moves across, which allows the water to evaporate, which cools the body (relatively speaking). Humans sweat, dogs pant, and moving air makes the process more efficient. | 24 |
[Batman and Robin] Why were a man and woman imprisoned in the same cell? | Surely locking up Mr Freeze and Poison Ivy together would be prohibited, especially when he has an admitted grudge against her. | 20 | It's *very* strongly implied not to have be done through official channels.
It's amazing what people will turn a blind eye to in normal prisons, never mind in Gotham, third time winner of america's most corrupt police force. No-one's going to particularly care if poison ivy ends up with some...extrajudical punishment. | 32 |
ELI5:Why does my arm feel sore after getting a shot at the doctors? | Just got a shot, arm feels really sore if I move it. Explanation? | 17 | The trauma of the needle itself isn't primary reason you're sore. You are sore because the vaccine is composed of adjuvants in addition to the inactive portions of virus that stimulate the immune system (so as to create better immunity) but this also creates local inflammation in the process. | 10 |
I understand the advantage of adrenaline when I'm nervous/scared, but what is the point of the overwhelming urge to use the toilet? | 17 | You should really look at this from an evolutionary point of view. You've got a point that for humans, who actually go to the toilet, emptying the bowels is quite the hassle and not compatible with quickly running away from danger or fighting your way out. When we look at other species however, it makes a lot more sense.
Digestion demands, paradoxally, quite a bit of energy. Furthermore, all the undigested food in the gut becomes nothing more than dead weight when you're running for your life. For example, if a deer is suddenly set upon by a mountain lion, it will immediately expel all food from it's gut, effectively making itself lighter, more nimble and giving it the opportunity to provide energy to the processes that are most important: running like hell. | 13 |
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ELI5: Why do people (myself included) slouch our backs? | And why does it feel so unnatural to keep a 'correct posture' after noticing I'm slouching and adjusting accordingly - is it more muscular, genetic...? Not trying to go hunchback by 30! | 67 | Because from an evolutionary perspective the human spine is a piece of garbage.
Our spines are curved into an S to begin with because we're upright and that places a strain on bones that evolved to be horizontal to the ground. Then we (as modern people) tend to spend all day sitting on our asses in one position getting fatigued. Our spines take effort to keep upright, and flopping backwards goes against the existing curve of the spine - so there's only one direction left to go. | 46 |
ELI5: What is happening to the human body during a seizure? | What are causes of seizures? And what is our body specifically trying to accomplish during the process of a seizure? | 20 | I know a little bit about this, so if someone wants to elaborate they can.
So every time you do something, your brain has a neuron that fires. Anything from a thought to an action creates a pulse from a neuron.
You see something, a neuron fires, you want to move your arm, another couple fire.
When you're having a seizure, neurons begin to fire randomly. causing (in most cases) involuntary muscle movement and unconsciousness.
edit: before i get comments saying there are synapses and goes over neural pathways, it's eli5. | 13 |
CMV: I have an urge to change my tax forms at work so that they don't take any taxes out. I'll save that money, and put it back in when the shutdown is over. I kinda feel like everyone should do this. | I feel like everyone could do this, and basically tell the government that if they can't play nice and share their toys, they can't play with them at all.
There is a potential that they won't care, because my income is still being reported, and I'm ultimately still responsible for - and will pay - said taxes (because I live in a society). Given that, the whole gesture may pretty much be a waste of my own time (both now and next Jan-April), and they will neither be affected, nor care.
On top of that, while I am not in the following group, a lot of people live paycheck to paycheck (if that) and might end up spending the money, and then end up owing tens of thousands of dollars that they don't have any more. So I don't really recommend doing this unless you're doing well financially and have good self-control with your spending.
But I'm fucking irritated, and I feel like I should do /something/.
I suppose the most direct route to changing my mind is altering this impulse to something more productive. Thoughts?
**Edit:** So, technically my "view" has changed from a practical standpoint (vis a vis, I can't do what I wanted to do, because Federal is pay-as-you-go whether I want to or not, and I live in WA so I don't have state tax either way). My moral dilemma remains, but it doesn't seem like anyone is keen to address it, so... I guess we're done here?
**Edit 2:** Ok, apparently I am (or rather, my employer is) only obligated to pay quarterly if my estimated liability says I need to, but if I change my exemptions to something higher, the estimation will be zero. The real value will be calculated at the end of the fiscal year and I can pay then. Technically, my original plan would still work, be legal(ish?), potentially net me some interest during the year, and probably still not phase the government (unless a bunch of people did it at once). Some very good points being made, so I guess we're not quite done here...
Also, it's the middle of the night and I woke up randomly. I saw the replies in my email, but I'm putting off responding directly to them until the morning proper (because sleep), but I will :)
**Edit 3:** Insomnia. Replied. Wee.
Keep'er goin'...
**Edit 4:** Holy fuck. Ok, someone please verify this thought I just had: Without getting into specifics, I make six figures. That means my liability is tens of thousands of dollars each year. If I hang on to that, and make just 1% interest in a year, that's THOUSANDS of dollars of interest that I'm giving away.
If the only thing we accomplish here is that I pay my taxes on full, but keep that interest, I consider that a win.
**Edit 5:** Yeah that was some huckleberry-bad sleepy-time math. It would have been potentially HUNDREDS* of dollars xD
\* Maybe, if I was really careful and deliberate.
But some good hints to look into investing. Not 100% on track, but good advice non-the-less.
Speaking of the thesis, responses seem to boil down to the following;
* You have to pay federal tax with each paycheck if your estimated liability says so, but;
* I could technically pull this off if I modified my exemptions, but;
* Modifying my exemptions inaccurately is still illegal and fine worthy (despite most people getting away with it because it's not often pursued), and;
* It would probably be a huge hassle, and;
* Since I'm paying anyway, and there isn't a massive amount of others doing this, it wouldn't really matter, but;
* It's good to think about civil disobedience and take interest and participate in your government, generally.
Auxiliary tip:
* If one has a fair amount of paycheck surplus generally, they should invest (safely, I'm thinking 401k and CDs, etc).
Anyone else have something to add? | 337 | I think you may be misunderstanding the appropriations bills. It's not that the government has no money, it's that it's not allowed to spend it (on certain things; other things are moving along just like normal) right now.
> An appropriation bill, also known as supply bill or spending bill, is a proposed law that **authorizes the expenditure of government funds. It is a bill that sets money aside for specific spending**. In most democracies, **approval of the legislature is necessary for the government to spend money**.
Passing the bill and ending the shutdown won't just make money appear in the government's account; it's already there waiting to be spent on appropriate projects and services.
If you could eliminate your withholding, which others have pointed out that you can't, the government would still get your money at tax time next year. Your withholdings going into the government's "account" doesn't affect whether the government can spend that money; Congress decides this and the president agrees by signing the bill into law.
Additionally, even without your paycheck withholdings, the government is still collecting revenue in the form of other taxes, fees, and loan payments.
Even though individual income taxes make up the bulk of government revenues, keeping this money from the government short-term won't do much because they have already forecast that money to come in by next April; they don't need it right now. | 64 |
ELI5: Why does alcohol normally come in 750 ml and 1.5 L bottles, instead of 1L and 2L? | 214 | 750ml was adopted as the standard for wine long before most of the conversion to metric for liquor. This came about because it was roughly the average size a glass blower could produce using one full breath of air back in ye olden times. This size was adopted by liquor produces for consistency despite what others have stated in this thread. The other sizes, however, have other reasons. | 43 |
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What is the orientation of a monarch caterpillar/butterfly while in the chrysalis stage? | Which way is it "facing"? Does it change orientations? | 144 | A caterpillar will, usually hang upside down from a branch when forming its chrysalis. Then the butterfly will emerge from the lower end, or the bottom of the chrysalis. Usually with its head poking out alongside unveiling its back and wings first, as the rest of the body then is pushed out. They then hang upside down while their wings dry out and unfurl until they can fly.
However during the chrysalis stage the body of the caterpillar kind of turns into a jelly and reforms. As the caterpillar basically turns into a liquid as it’s body under goes metamorphosis. During this time if you were to cut open the chrysalis it would still be oriented downward with its “head” facing down. But there wouldn’t be as much of a body depending on when you were to open it. More so just a goo or jelly of body parts on a vague insect shape | 91 |
CMV: A post-scarcity economy would be communist | In the writings of Ian Banks and other sci-fi writers, there is a concept called the post-scarcity economy.
In our current economy, there is a limited quantity of resources, so there is a competition between people/communities/societies/countries for those limited resources. That competition includes, but is not limited to, jobs, loans/credit, an economy based on money, theft, wars, fraud, and all sorts of things.
In the concept of the post-scarcity economy, the availability f resources is theoretically unlimited because of automation, off-planet material extraction, and free energy. Availability of manufactured goods would likewise be almost unlimited, due to additive manufacturing (aka 3D printing), artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.
My feeling is that, should we reach the point where the availability of resources is basically independent of the need to COMPETE for them (buy them), the society would basically look very much like the Communist ideal spouted by Marx. There would be differences (the proletariat would not have to kill the bourgeoisie, communal property may or may not exist, people would not need to be indoctrinated, etc), but without the NEED for jobs to survive, the world would be a communist ideal.
Thoughts? | 16 | I would argue that our *need* for jobs is, and will be more so in the future, more due to boredom and the desire to be valued by others, than it is to provide basic necessities for survival.
Do you think humans will, at some point in the future, stop having the desire to be seen as “high status,” or the desire to stop “competing with the Joneses”? | 11 |
ELI5: If World War II era guns were so good, why did we replace them? What advancements have modern firearms made that warrants replacing standard issue weapons? | 147 | After WWII there was a pretty strong effort to look at how small unit engagements had happened and to figure out better weapons and so on from that information. Two big things that became apparent was that it was very rare for small arms to matter much beyond around 300 yards, and that the big factor in small unit success was the ability to throw a lot of lead at the enemy quickly.
With these lessons in mind the decision was made to go from "full power" rifle rounds like the 30.06 to "intermediate" rounds like 5.56. The 5.56 round that the M16 fires is not nearly as powerful as the 30.06 that the WWII era Garand fired, but the M16 had 30 rounds of ammo in a mag vs. the M1's 8. Less power also means less recoil and so the soldier with the M16 can fire faster without the recoil dicking up his shots. The M16's bullets also fly faster and flatter, so the modern soldier is much more likely to make an effective "snap shot" than his WWII era counterpart.
You also have various ergonomic improvements, a chrome lined bore, easier manufacturing, all NATO rifles were set up to use the same ammo and magazines so if you were next to a German unit you could borrow their shit if you needed it. | 175 |
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[Flintstones] If the Flintstones characters power vehicles with their feet why don't they just walk at that point? | Additionally, how do they turn? Fred Flintstone's front tire [looks like it's stuck in place](https://i.imgur.com/k8CODRP.jpg) | 17 | A number of reasons. Wheels will keep turning while you rest your feet, the roof keeps the sun and rain off your head, more space to carry stuff, you don't have to listen to your wife complain about sore feet.
As far as turning goes, just grab the sides of the car, stand up, and rotate to whatever direction you want to go in. | 30 |
[Marvel Universe 616] What could stop Galactus? | At a certain point, it would seem as though the various civilizations would say "Enough of this bullshit!" and try to kill or contain Galactus. So, what would work? | 21 | Beta Ray Bill almost killed Galactus by finding out where he was going to feed and destroying the planet before he got there. So that's one way.
Reed Richards developed an anti-Galactus mecha suit that costs a billion dollars a second to run. That may work.
Doctor Doom stole his powers.
Aegis and Tenebrous beat the snot out of him.
Thanos once blasted Galactus so hard he went flying and his helmet shattered. It didn't come close to killing him, but he was not a happy camper afterwards. | 22 |
ELI5: Why does the night sky appear to move slowly even though the earth is rotating at 1,000mph? | 439 | Because mph is the wrong unit. The earth is rotating at 0.0007 rpm, so the stars appear to rotate at the same rate. The minute hand of a clock has an angular velocity 24 times faster than the stars (0.017 rpm), but it still isn't fast enough to be able to see the movement. | 566 |
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ELI5: How the power source of Voyager 1 and 2 function, which made them kept going for almost 40 years (and still going) ? | According to Google it have something called "Radioisotope thermoelectric generators", but couldn't understand how are they able to produce limitless energy to keep going. | 21 | The power source is just 4.5kg of plutonium-238. This radioactive substance breaks down at a predictable rate, half of it decays in every 87.7 years, into Uranium 234, which has a very long half life and so can be considered stable.
The decay produces alpha radiation, fast moving helium nuclei, which will run into other atoms, bouncing off them, shaking them up - which is another way of saying, heating them up.
This heat is used to create electricity using thermoelectric couples - similar thing to peltier devices - a kind of diode that produces a voltage as heat moves across them.
As the satellites are now 42 years old, this means that they now provide 72% of the heat they did at launch, and they produce less electric power than that, as the space radiation degrades the thermocouples. Because of this, many instruments on them have been shut down; they will continue to shut things down as time passes. They hope to keep at least something running at least to to 2025. | 36 |
ELI5: This Bitcoin mining thing again. | Every post I saw explained Bitcoin mining simply by saying "computers do math (hurr durr)".
Can someone please give me a concrete example of such a mathematical problem?
If this has been answered somewhere else and I didn't find it (and I tried hard!), please feel free to just post a link to that comment.
Thank you :) | 922 | It looks like there's still a bit of misinformation here, so I'll try to clear it up.
**The Big Picture**
Mining increases the bitcoin network's security and fights fraud by calculating what's effectively a checksum for transactions. By contributing their computing power to the bitcoin network for mining, individuals are rewarded with newly minted bitcoins by the community. This also provides a way to distribute new bitcoins in a fair manner.
**The Details**
Hash functions are at the heart of mining. A hash function is basically a complicated math formula that takes in some arbitrary input and gives a reproducible output. However, changing the input even slightly will completely alter the output. For example, using the SHA-256 hash function:
SHA-256 of "Test" always outputs a hash of "532eaabd9574880dbf76b9b8cc00832c20a6ec113d682299550d7a6e0f345e25"
SHA-256 of "test" (lowercase t) is "9f86d081884c7d659a2feaa0c55ad015a3bf4f1b2b0b822cd15d6c15b0f00a08"
Now, let's say Alice decides to pay Bob 10BTC. The bitcoin network basically records that in the public ledger of transactions as "Alice -> 10 -> Bob". However, right now someone could change that 10 to a 20 without consequence. The network has to have some way of checking if the recorded transaction is valid or fraudulent. That's where mining comes in.
When Alice pays Bob those 10BTC, miners in the bitcoin network will try to hash the transaction "Alice -> 10 -> Bob", resulting in "aa314e08a642f5be3857276ecb4a4085a33b916f84aebef32a077df9c29949b3". However, mining has a requirement that the resulting hash must start with a certain number of 0's (depending on the network's hash speed). Thus, miners will slightly alter the transaction by adding a random number to the end like so: "Alice -> 10 -> Bob 12345". The miners will then hash it again and see if it has the required number of 0's. If not, it'll change the random number and hash it again. This is repeated until an acceptable hash is found.
Once the correct hash is found, the transaction and the hash are permanently stored in the public ledger of transactions, and if anyone tries to change the transaction (i.e. changing the 10 to a 20), the hash will naturally mismatch and the network will know that that transaction is fake and will reject it. The miner who calculated the correct hash is rewarded a certain number of newly minted bitcoins and transaction fees for his contributions to the security of the network.
Thus, "bitcoin mining" is actually a slight misnomer. Its other equally important purpose is "bitcoin transaction securing."
Hope that answered some questions!
Edit: Thanks for the Gold! \^_^
Edit: mappum clarifies a few intricate details below. | 403 |
I [30/F] have been volunteering with a peak psychology professional body for five years. Suddenly removed from their website. What should I do? | Hi everyone,
I have been volunteering with the national peak body for health psychology in my country for five years as the Chair of the Student Subcommittee. For the past year, along with another student, I been responsible for curating content for the newsletter.
I am a PhD student, and my degree has taken longer than expected for health reasons. Nonetheless, I enjoy volunteering, because I am very passionate about health psychology. I have received little recognition for the work I have done, which has often been very extensive and involved hours of work, but again, I am passionate about health psychology, and I believe in loyalty to an organisation. I also attend monthly teleconferences, which are each two hours. I have rarely missed a meeting.
In a recent email listing all committee members, I was not listed. I replied and asked why my name was not included. I was told it was a record keeping error, which I accepted. I have now noticed that I have been removed from the website as 'chair of the student subcommittee', 'student representative', and 'newsletter editor'.
I do wonder if they are suspicious that I am still a student, but I am, there have just been extensive delays because of my own health issues, and COVID. I actually mentioned to the Chair in a recent email that I have finished my coursework and placements, but I am still continuing my research, because I was wondering if I would be eligible to be considered an early career representative instead. She said I am still considered a student representative.
What are your thoughts? How should I address this? I'm a little annoyed... | 122 | Seems like something another simple email to the organization’s point person would solve. Just reach out again and ask for clarification about why you’ve been removed from the website. It might be another error or more involved. But you’re not going to know if you don’t ask. | 122 |
I have a Chernobyl question and I'm not sure how stupid it is. | I have been reading a lot lately about nuclear reactors and the accident at Chernobyl. When the plant failed they sent in Liquidators to do the cleaning. These Liquidators have been labeled "biorobots" as a substitute for the robots the scientists sent in as an attempt to clean up the mess. The robots failed as a result of radiation. What caused the robots to fail? How does radiation affect electric circuitry, and why then can operations in space occur safely without the technology failing as a result of the radiation?
Thanks | 60 | Radiation striking a computer can cause bits to flip (1's to turn into 0's and vice versa). This is a common and very expensive problem in space, and is solved with a combination of hardware (such as shielding and using less vulnerable materials to make the chips) and software (such as computing everything thrice). The Space Shuttle, for example, has five computers, because all of them might be incorrect many times throughout the Shuttle's week-long mission. The Mars rover's computer devotes about 25% of its available processing power to detecting and correcting errors.
In the end, radiation hardening makes computers radiation-resistant, but not radiation-proof. With enough radiation, there is no modern computer that will work reliably. The human brain is much more resiliant to radiation.
EDITED for factual accuracy. | 57 |
What is a good, challenging topic for a Bachelor Thesis? | So I'm in my fourth and last year of undergrad at a University in Europe. In order to graduate, weare required to write and present a senior/bachelor/undergrad research thesis/paper. We have to get a professor to advise and lead us, do our own research, be thorough... Key requirement is obviously some form of econometrics in it, be it a simple model or a thorough application. Obviously, the better and closer it is to an actual paper, the better grade we will get.
I want to finish things off the right way, so I want to challenge myself to write a good thesis. The top papers get a small recognition and besides, I want it for myself. I'm gonna pursue a PhD and so I would like it to be a first good step in economic research.
The only problem is, I can't come up with a good topic that isn't repetitive (each year a lot of theses cover very common stuff like effects of minimum wage on economy X, TPF differences, effects of education...). I'm not trying to shoot for the moon here, I just want to be a bit more original. A lot of older guys told me look for something easy and that I can get data for quickly, but I don't want it to be easy. If I can impress the committee and create something good, I'll be satisfied.
I've taken many econ courses, done a study abroad, explored different areas and I have specially taken a lot of econometrics, math and stats courses (Stats I and II, Calculus I and II, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Econometrics I, Time Series, Advanced Econometrics, Microeconometrics, Applied econometrics) (yes my school has a good metrics program). I have also taken other econ and applied econ courses (Game Theory, Dynamic Macro, Behavioral, IO, Advanced IO, natural resources and environmental econ, labor market discrimination econ, development econ, intl trade, regional and urban...). I've also taken finance and data mining courses.
If I had to choose a few of these that I "love" (although there's no such thing as an econ course I disliked), I would say anything math-intensive, like anything econometrics, Game Theory and Behavioral. As for model-based courses or applied econ, I loved nonmarket valuation (environmental and natural resources) and Labor (although I don't want to turn to cuteonomics).
I know I have to come up with the topic myself and not ask around, but I would love some insight from other people who had to do the same thing or that can just chip in with thoughts. | 60 | I had a chance to talk with one of Harvard’s head policy professors (I don’t want to give too much info out for ID purposes but can talk to a mod to confirm) about a similar topic, and he suggested the footnotes and last few pages of current research papers. He said that often, these are where researchers write their curiosities or unresolved questions. You won’t find a new topic in a research paper because you’re reading a paper after it’s answered the question. | 12 |
ELI5:Why do Americans treat people in the Military with high regard but don't give the same respect to police officers? | They both have dangerous jobs and their jobs are for the service of American people. Military men get discounts and get thanked for their service, but cops don't?
People in the military have committed immoral acts, just like cops. Cops are directly protecting you whereas people in the military do so indirectly. | 16 | There's a lot more opportunities for people to have negative day-to-day interactions with law enforcement.
There's quite a few places that will give discounts to several types of public servants, though, police and firefighters included. It is important to remember that most such discounts are not out of pure generosity, but rather in order to draw the business of that demographic.
Edit: Police also get to bear the brunt of enforcing laws that individuals don't agree with. | 22 |
CMV: The Kim Kardashian game proves why we need universal healthcare | Opponents of universal healthcare usually argue that individuals are rational economic actors, who make spending decisions which are better, more suited to their individual needs and more efficient than those which the government would make for them.
"Kim Kardashian: Hollywood" is a new smartphone game where people pretend to become celebrities. The game is very successful. [It is projected to earn $200 million dollars this year.](http://entertainthis.usatoday.com/2014/07/16/kim-kardashians-video-game-on-track-to-earn-200-million/). But the game is free. All this revenue is generated by in-game purchases, where players have to spend real money on pretend assets, which further their journey towards pretend fame. There is no limit on the amount someone can spend on this. [One woman says she spent $500.](http://jezebel.com/oh-god-i-spent-494-04-playing-the-kim-kardashian-holl-1597154346).
The success of Kim Kardashian: Hollywood pretty much proves that a lot of people are irrational morons when it comes to their money. If this is how people spend money, we can't trust them to choose proper health insurance. Left to their own devices, people will just spend their money on becoming an imaginary celebrity, only on their cell phone. When their appendix bursts, they won't be able to afford it and the system will have to pay.
Unless we are willing to let people die because they spent all their money on nonsense instead of budgeting for healthcare needs, the only solution is to force them to pay for it through mandatory taxes.
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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!* | 17 | Everyone's hobby is stupid to someone else. Model rockets are stupid, going to a football game is stupid, and fixing an old car is stupid (depending on your preferences)
Disagreeing with how someone spends their leisure income isn't an indictment of rational actors. | 45 |
Why are people with down syndrome almost always obese? | Why do we never see any jacked Down syndrome people? Do they have a genetic condition where they put on weight easier than others? If it is a genetic condition couldn't something be done to counteract the weight gain?
Hypothetically could someone with down syndrome, following an intense workout program and strict diet, ever become a bodybuilder?
| 22 | Down syndrome comes with a number of less obvious physical limitations beisdes mental retardation and the characteristic facial features. In general, they have very poor muscle tone (hypotonia), as babies they are typically floppy, and this continues to adulthood. This doesn't necessarily preclude them becoming a body builder, but they do not start out on the same level as an unaffected person.
Heart problems are very common, as are underactive thyroids and predisposition towards certain leukemias. Heart problems can limit their ability to work out at a high intensity, and thyroid issues can lower their metabolic rate. Again, these are things that can be managed, but they still act as roadblocks.
It is not as much of an issue now, but in the past - encouraging children with Down Syndrome to exercise would not have been considered. There were many physicians and caregivers who didn't give much consideration to their overall quality of life. This is an attitude which is thankfully changing. | 11 |
In an interview with Dick Cavett, Richard Burton described a coal seam called "the Great Atlantic fault," that goes from Spain through Wales under the Atlantic to Pennsylvania. Was he full of it? | [Here](https://youtu.be/708q7LjMGso?t=154) is the interview.
He says
>There’s a great seam, a famous seam-a world famous one-- which I believe is called the Great Atlantic Fault. And it starts in northern Spain in the Basque Country, and it goes under the Bay of Biscay and comes up in south Wales. Then it goes under the Atlantic and comes up in Pennsylvania. So that if you took a Basque miner, or a Welsh miner or Pennsylvanian miner, and you could blindfold them and transport them, and they will recognise the coalface the moment they see it. I believe it's four feet, six inches.
It's a beautiful interview and it seems believable enough. But I can't find any references to the "Great Atlantic Fault," outside of quotes of the interview or from the 2014 movie "Pride" where Bill Nighy's character closely paraphrase's Burton's speech. Granted Burton says, "I believe it's called the Great Atlantic Fault" so maybe he just got the name wrong. But is this a real geological feature? | 203 | Slightly. We know that there are a number of geological features that span the Atlantic. But the Atlantic has split them in half, they dont run under the Atlantic in a contigous feature. The mid-atlantic ridge is a place where magma pushing up from the mantle pushes apart the NA and European continents. The coal seam was seperated about 150million years ago. | 169 |
[Ready Player One] where the fuck is the government in all of this? | A corporation keeps slaves in metal boxes with electrical control and torture devices so they can carry out menial labor in a video game, it is even confirmed that people have died doing this. The same corporation then murders several people with drone placed bombs for financial reasons and gets away with it in a world that is filled with cameras and tech that could easily incriminate them. They also seem to have hit-squads of armed troops that can invade homes and attack people with impunity. Then the police conveniently show up to arrest mr. Evil CEO as he is pointing a gun at some kid in a trailer park while seemingly ignoring the years of flagrant human rights abuse and corporate inquest. Is there some explanation about this in the book? Am I missing something? | 60 | In the book:
- Indentured servitude is explicitly made legal. You get a job at IOI based on your skill set to be able to work off your debt. Then they take off living expenses and anything else they can think of and people have to work there forever. Also, the jobs are actual jobs like customer service rep.
- They planted meth making equipment on the building so it looked like another meth explosion (which is not uncommon in what amounts to a gigantic trailer park).
- They have armored dudes to collect people in debt and bring them in. They don't have an official hit squad like that IOI chick in the movie makes it out to be, but the collection of people is perfectly legal so they don't have to hide that they're going in for someone.
- He doesn't point a gun at a kid in a trailer park. | 58 |
[The Force Awakens][Spoilers] Financial question about the First Order | TFA was good. Obviously a very strong homage to the original trilogy, a huge planet-destroying superweapon included.
My only issue with the Starkiller is how expensive and time consuming would it be to build it. The Empire ruled the galaxy, taxing hundreds of system to fund their military expenses. How a fringe political group managed to hollow out a planet and install a superweapon in it in a span of less than 30 years, while keeping things completely under wraps? That would be ridiculously expensive and that's when my suspension of disbelief failed me.
Imagine Confederates losing a Civil War, their sympathizers moving to Canada and building a nuclear arsenal aimed at the whole East Coast. That's how it feels to me. | 122 | The power and authority of the First Order is never really detailed in the movie. It's sufficiently powerful that the New Republic would rather back a insurrectionist force against it than engage in outright warfare, which would imply that it controls a significant amount of the Galaxy. They also have the ability to commender children to train as Storm Troopers, and seem to have access to the ability to clone their own army if they so choose.
I wouldn't call them a fringe political group. More like the Third Reich in space. | 158 |
ELI5: Why are people allergic to things? | 15 | The human body is a very delicate thing that hates things from the outside. Therefore, all the things inside your body have antibodies (like a ticket that shows that they're allowed to be there). Sometimes, the immune system (security guards) don't recognize a ticket and over react. This causes allergies. | 10 |
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[Futurama] Who built Hedonism-bot, and why? | *Let us cavort like the Greeks of old! You know the ones I mean.* --Hedonism-bot
Was he designed to be a Hedonism-bot, or does he have some practical application? How does he support his lifestyle? He usually has humans waiting on him, but he doesn't seem to produce anything... just consume everything.
Who the heck built this robot, and to what end? | 52 | Obviously some rich hedonist who needed a sidekick, and now that he is long dead his robot still spends his money.
Though he does provide an interesting economic boon, he supports the arts and spends his wealth like it was on fire thus getting previously locked up money into the economy. It is possible that he is some kind of government program to siphon off wealth back into the economy. | 43 |
ELI5: What is the meaning behind Nietzsche's statement "God is dead"? | 140 | The psychological need for "god" is no longer there, as civilization has evolved.
The implication is that there was never a "god", just something that Man created to fill a perceived hole in his psyche. | 222 |
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ELI5:What's wrong with Mental Health Care in the U.S.? What are some potential ways to fix it? | Whenever there is some kind of mass shooting the topic of mental health reform always seems to come up. However, I never really seem to see any concrete ideas for reform, or explanations of what is wrong with the current system from politicians. It's seems like a lot of people just use it as a vague buzzword after every shooting. So, is it a legitimate issue? What can we do to fix it? | 49 | I work in a jail where approximately half of the inmates have diagnosed psychological issues. Many of which get sent of to state hospitals for mental treatment. Most of the time we (as jail staff) wait for beds to become available, while jail medical staff treat said inmates.
Many of these inmates need drugs that are not allowed to be administered in a custody setting. Once a bed does become available for an inmate, they get shipped off. Some time later the inmates no longer display the serious psychological impairments they did while at the county level. That inmate is sent back to jail to stand trial or be evaluated by the courts. Time passes, the inmate is back off the very medications which solved many of the psychological problems. The inmate spirals back into the original psych issues which led to them being incarcerated. The inmate is unfit for trial. Sent back to state hospital. Repeat.
More institutions and staff. More funding for said institutions and staff. More crisis intervention training for cops.
Today it's the jails that are the psych hospitals.
| 24 |
ELI5:Are electric motors nowadays vastly more efficient than an electric motor from 100 years ago? | I've disassembled electric motors from about the 1950's, and they seem identical to the ones we have today. So have there been any advances in electric motor technology in the past 100 years?
I realize that things have become smaller and more streamlined, and permanent magnets have become more powerful, but these seem like simply incremental changes.
The only thing I can think of is brushless motors, but beyond that has anything else substantial changed? | 15 | Electric motors pretty much maxed out on efficiency when they were first created, we have motors today that can hit 99% efficiency, but that doesn't give you the right picture
A motor that you just want spun up to a constant speed can be made very efficient and you just connect it straight to power and you've got yourself a highly efficient motor.
But what if you want to control the speed? Well now you need a motor controller and this is where most of the efficiency gains have been had. Advances in switching electronics allow us to feed the motor exactly what we need to and only draw what is needed from the batteries, earlier systems would generally have to throw a lot of the unneeded power away as heat which isn't efficient and drains your battery.
So while motors have remained around the same efficiency as components, the systems involving motors have increased in efficiency as we could build motor controllers with fewer losses. | 25 |
ELI5: What does it take to make it snow? How come there are countries that never seen snow before? | Im asking because where I’m from ( Baghdad) it snowed for the first time since 1914! Why was this year different? Why hasn’t it snowed before? | 16 | In reality, it is always snowing, everywhere except right on the equator.
People think that clouds in the sky form rain. In reality, those clouds are so high up that it is always below freezing, so every single rain, except right on the equator, is actually snow that melts as it is falling.
Therefore only one thing is required for it to snow--that the snow doesn't melt on the way down (or melt and re-freeze, which makes it sleet instead) Basically as long as the air is cold enough it will always snow instead of rain. So all that is needed is for it to be cold outside.
Checking the average temperatures in Bagdad, it simply rarely gets cold enough. It has to get pretty close to 32F or 0C to have any chance of snowing. In addition, it looks like Bagdad doesn't get a lot of rain. So in order for it to snow it both has to be one of the few days where it rains AND at the same time it has to be one of the even rarer days where it gets close to freezing in temperature.
The chances of both of these things happening at once as just very, very small. Possible, but small. | 20 |
CMV: Capitalism is cannibalistic | Edit: Thank you everyone who replied! I just learned about the delta thing. I'll dish those out when I'm on my PC in the morning (pro tip: don't do one of these things on a phone). I'm going to get off my phone for the rest of the night. Feel free to keep the conversation going, but you won't hear from me until morning. Thanks again!
My hypothesis: Capitalism is cannibalistic.
Due to a number of factors, economic actors on the bottom-end of the economy (the poor) eventually drop off the economic map and become non-actors. This leads to a concentration of currency in the remaining population of actors. With more money floating around, prices rise due to supply and demand principles (inflation). This decreases the purchasing power of the remaining actors, pushing more into the bottom end and eventually off the map, thus perpetuating the cycle.
Economic actors drop off the map for a number of reasons, some of which are:
1) Death, or poor health
2) It's expensive to be poor, i.e. low-end actors don't have the purchasing power to take advantage of bulk supplies and other cost-saving measures. Just the same, it's cheaper to hand craft supplies. This overall leads to a reduction of purchasing from the low-end actors.
3) Low-end actors are needed to fulfill manufacturing and production jobs so the cost of manufacturing remains low. But as costs rise, pay must stay the same or fall to make up losses in the profit margin. This encourages companies to move jobs into labor forces that can afford the low pay, like China. Further, automation in manufacturing reduces the number of people who have to be employed to create a product, reducing it's manufacturing cost. But, the product price isn't reduced accordingly, so the profit margin can remain high. This also contributes to creating non-actors.
4) As people struggle as low-end actors or become non-actors, they tend to become alienated by the very economic system that is supposed to support them. With faith lost in the system, they look to take advantage of what they can for survival. An alienation of the economic system then becomes an alienation of society in general. A rejection and alienation of law follows closely as these non-actors turn to stealing or selling illegal goods for survival.
5) At it's core, the exchange of currency is really the exchange of energy; the exchange of one type of work for another type of work. But, the rules of supply and demand arbitrarily change the value of that currency, not so that it best matches the energy invested into a product, but so the most currency gets exchanged for a certain amount of work as possible. The value is then set by psychological factors, not any true scientific or mathematical principles. That exchange of work for the most currency possible directly creates inflation and ultimately undermines the initial goal to attain wealth.
Again, when people drop off the map, the remaining money in the system gathers into the hands of the remaining actors, raising the concentration of currency among them. This increased concentration of currency increases the prices of goods for those actors, simultaneously making it harder for non-actors or slow actors to participate in the economy. That increase in price also counteracts any advantage gained from the concentration of currency. Therefore wealth doesn't actually increase.
The net result is an increase in inflation and a shrinking of the active participants in the economy. Actual average practical wealth per person doesn't increase. The economy literally cannibalizes itself.
Note: I realize regulations can and do change the variables in this equation, along with central banks playing around with interest rates, etc. But, the inherent equation is still there.
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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!* | 196 | Economic history basically disproves your whole argument without getting into all of the technical economic details. Look at America in the 1800's, the most capitalistic, free market economy ever. During that time unemployment was extremely low while America accepted the greatest influx of immigrants probably ever. Further, the wealth of the nation by basically every measure was had the highest growth in the countries history.
Look at other countries that turn to capitalism for further proof: Singapore, Hong Kong, etc. Every time you see explosions of wealth production and massive increases in standard of living. | 73 |
ELI5: How has the suit become such an international standard of formalwear/men's fashion, to the point where in his official portrait Kim Jong Un can be seen wearing one? | 193 | The influence of European nations. It became popular through the 20th century in Europe. It became popular as formal wear as official policy in Europe's former colonies (US, South America, and Latin America) imported the design, while their colonies in Asia and Africa adopted/had European fashion preferences forced upon them.
Korea never was an European colony. However, it was a a colony of Japan (from 1910 to 1945) after Japan had rapidly industrialized and "westernized" (which included colonial ambitions) after Commodore Matthew Perry had forced Japan open to trade with the threat of Battleships in 1852. So, Japan adopted Western Fashion, and the Koreas adopted it as well. | 87 |
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How exactly has the Large Hadron Collider been improved for 2015? | From what I understand the LHC could already accelerate hydrogen particles to 0.9999999c. How much faster do they really need to go? | 77 | It is not about speed it is about energy. The LHC always was intended t run at 14 TeV, but in order to see if it really works they decided to run a few years at lower energy and luminosity. Now after more than a year of shutdown and several improvements they are finally confident to run at the desired energy.
Even though the energ has only increased by almost a factor of two this is actually a big deal. A lost more models can be tested (if we still not find any superpartners it looks really grim for low-energy supersymmetry). | 19 |
If the solar system travels thru a nebula or a big dense cloud of matter, can our solar system grow? Can Jupiter or the sun grow in size? | 111 | No. The solar wind creates a "bubble" of plasma that prevents gas and dust in the interstellar medium from touching planets or the sun. And that plasma doesn't touch most planets since it is deflected by their magnetic field. In the few cases when it does, like Mars, it actually takes away more atmospheric matter than it deposits.
Actually the sun is traversing through a region of interstellar gas and dust (though not dense enough to call it a nebula). Even though density is very low, molecules actually collide with each other over very long times (at a much larger scale than a human lifetime). It is possible to define sound and speed of sound, even though it's not human hearable. The sun is travelling supersonic in that medium, so it creates a shockwave. Voyager 2 felt it with its magnetometer when it crossed the shockwave and entered interstellar medium, confirming scientific predictions.
EDIT: corrected the "nebula" term. Thanks for the corrections. | 29 |
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ELI5: Why are dodgy websites rigged to redirect you to arbitrary webpages depending on where you click? Are they just ads? Do the number of clicks benefit the website or its revenue somehow? | 33 | So it depends. For legitimate ads then yes the website can be paid per click, so the more people it gets to click on the ads the more revenue it potentially makes.
For non legitimate sites or dodgy sites they could be sending you even more dodgy websites where malware or other malicious code can be injected, for example key loggers, activity trackers etc.
How does clicking on a link to a website give you a virus? Well there are several methods but one of the simplest is that each time you open a webpage it downloads some data to help it run. If it's a dodgy website then it can embeds malicious code in the portion that is downloaded. This is a simple answer to a complicated topic but hope it gives an overview. | 23 |
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Eli5: How much of a species' sequenced genome is stable enough to represent a species, as opposed to finer stuff that will keep changing really fast as they breed? | I know this would vary a lot between species, so for example, what's this like in the human genome? | 44 | Honestly, a species isn't really a single genome, but a gene pool. The idea of a species is fluid and changes over time. You can't define a species as its pool is transforming either, all you can do is look back into the past and go "Ok well at some point it definitely diverged from its relatives". Gene pool drift is a continuous process, and we can only define species at all by where a gene pool differs from another gene pool in arbitrarily defined ways. Essentially, the idea of a species is just a colloquial thing we use to easily communicate a concept where it's obvious what we mean but impossible to entirely define it.
The stable parts of a genome, ie, the ones where all the different alternatives in the gene pool are very similar, tend to be the parts where mutation almost always causes a reproduction disadvantage. This mostly means the fundamental pieces that operate cells, like genes that code for ribosomes. Some genes that are really important to the species fitting its niche can also be "protected" like this. These genes are referred to as highly conserved, which essentially means that mutations to these genes almost always get removed from the pool before they can spread, and only stick around if the niche the species needs to occupy changes (and if that happens enough, the species becomes a new species).
There's not a great deal that's truly stable about a genome. Most of it can and will change over long enough time spans. However, each individual member of the species inherits normal genes from the gene pool with at most just a tiny handful of mutations. The low mutation rate means that the "average" gene pool remains pretty stable as a whole even though individuals may be changing quite a lot. | 12 |
Eli5: Why does splitting an atom cause such a giant explosion? | Where does all the energy come from? | 21 | Splitting a *lot* of atoms releases a lot of energy.
Just like burning one molecule of gasoline does nothing, splitting one atom of uranium does nothing.
Burning a gallon of gasoline releases a lot of energy. Splitting thirty pounds of uranium will destroy a town.
The energy comes from forces within the nucleus. One force holds it together, while another tried to push it apart. By splitting it, we allow that repulsive force to violently fling the nucleus apart, and release a ton of energy. | 21 |
ELI5 the proper usage of further/farther and lay/lie please? | I'm an American and these things baffle me, I've been asked to explain it to some family members that aren't native speakers and I always feel like an idiot.
Thanks in advance.
**Edit** Thank you for the concise explaining I appreciate it. Marked as answered. | 20 | **Far***ther* is about distance.
*Lie* is something you do to yourself, you lie (yourself) down.
*Lay* is something you do to something else. you lay it down.
**Difficulty:** The past tense of verb *lie* is **LAY**, while the past tense of the verb *lay* is **Lain**. Amateur word nazis do not know this and wrongly attack anyone that correctly uses **Lay** as in past tense. | 13 |
Brain tumors are known to directly cause depression, but could the opposite happen for someone that is already depressed? | To my knowledge, various different brain tumors can have negative emotional impacts such as depression or anxiety, but if an individual already suffers from these illnesses, could a tumor have a reversing like effect? | 2,153 | The problem with answering this question is that we don't have a good understanding of the mechanisms of depression, biologically speaking. Theoretically, the disruption a tumour causes could well lead to changes which improve emotional wellbeing, seeing as we couldn't say for certain what disruption causes the opposite. However it's also worth remembering that depression and other emotional impacts of brain cancer could also be more directly related to the patient's situation (i.e. their poor prognosis and the stress of having the illness) | 393 |
ELI5: When i feel a half-sneeze creeping through my sinuses and my eyes start to tear up, what is actually happening? | You all know the feeling when a sneeze just won't fucking happen. The abstract burning, the watery eyes - what is actually going on in my sinuses when this happens? | 42 | A sneeze is a semi-autonomous reflex that requires many muscles activating together to perform. Normally, your body isn't capable of launching so much air at once to clear your nasal passages. Many muscles have to contract at once to force that large amount of air and to also protect the body from the high pressure generated by the sneeze.
Imagine a sneeze as a space rocket launch. Mission control has to make sure that every part of the launch is working properly before starting the launch. Even during the launch sequence, there are many steps that have to be performed in order to make sure that the rocket is completely unobstructed, the fuel ignites properly, the rocket is shooting in the correct direction, etc.
However, when something goes wrong in the sequence, the launch is aborted. However, some parts of the launch sequence have activated and your body will feel only a half-sneeze as certain muscles have contracted but the rest have not. | 28 |
Why aren't pixels made up of 'RYB' LEDs instead of RGB ones? | Was wondering that since the 3 primary colours are red, yellow and blue would it not make more sense in some applications for yellow LEDs to be used instead of green LEDs for pixel based displays. | 77 | Additive versus subtractive color. RYB (actually Magenta, Yellow, Cyan) are primary subtractive colors. Red paint isn't red light, and yellow paint isn't yellow light. Magenta ink/paint is actually anti-green (it absorbs green), yellow is actually anti-blue, and cyan is actually anti-red. If you combine magenta and yellow paints you are really combining anti-green and anti-blue, so those colors are absorbed whereas red is reflected, so you get red.
However, the rules are opposite for additive colors where you are generating light that is mixed. Red is red, green is green, and blue is blue. Combing red and green light you get red-green light which is just yellow.
Hopefully that makes sense.
Edit: you can play around with this a bit on your own. For example, try mixing together different paint colors to see what the result is (hint: it's generally always darker). And try painting cards that you use to try to reflect light onto the same spot, or use ink to color a transparent filter over a flashlight and see what happens when you combine different light colors. Compare that to what you get when you mix the paints/inks together instead. | 121 |
[MCU/Agents of Shield] Does Red Skull and contemporary Hydra agents REALLY know why Hydra was founded? If he does why has it never come up? | So after season 3 of Agents of Shield we learn that Hydra was initially started as a sort of cult heralding the return of the first Inhuman to help them take control of the planet. This cult is complete with ritual sacrifices and a lot of borderline superstitious reverence for a single individual. The Red Skull is considered the modern "founder" of Hydra. Did he know of the organization's true origins? If he did why has he not mentioned it or pursued the goal of bringing Hive back to earth? What about other members of the modern Hydra organization: the one computer nazi thing, that one secretary dude in the winter soldier, the one nazi dude from season 2, and all other assorted leaders of Hydra that never mention the organization's founding mythology. | 23 | There was a split in Hydra between the heads whose primary concern was seizing power on earth (Red Skull, Dr Whitehall, Alexander Pierce) and the heads whose primary concern was the religious origins (headed by Malick mostly). Red Skull is the modern founder of this branch.
The more practical members thought of Malick as an eccentric at best, and a dangerous kook at worst. Whitehall specifically is contemptuous of the cult on screen in a flashback, trying to convince Gideon Malick to abandon it.
Armin Zola, the computer Nazi, is a bit of a special case. He was never ideologically committed to Hydra in the way Red Skull or Gideon Malick were. He was a brilliant scientist with no ethics who used Hydra to gain the resources to pursue his scienteric curiosity, and in turn he was used by Hydra bending that curiosity towards ends that would benefit the organization. | 27 |
[Dragon Age: Origins] Why can't elven mages get the Dalish Elf origin? | So, from what I understand, the Dalish elves live in the wilds away from human civilization and preserve the old elven culture. By contrast, city elves have integrated into human society, live in human cities, and are treated as second-class citizens.
If your player character is an elven warrior or rogue, they can have the City Elf or Dalish Elf origins. But if your character is an elven mage, they are forced to take the Mage origin. I don't understand this.
If the player character was a city elf, I can see this happening. The Templars would know about their existence and would put them into the Circle of Magi like they would with human mages. But if the Dalish don't live under human authority, why would an elven mage among them end up in the Circle?
Did the Templars threaten to attack the Dalish if they didn't give them up? Do the Dalish fear/hate mages as much as humans do? Do Dalish elves not have mages?
I would appreciate any insight into this, and I'm sorry if I'm getting any details wrong. | 51 | It's important to note that the potential wardens are not just generic examples of their kind- they're specific people, with specific families, backstories and lives up until this point. More specifically, these are all situations where Duncan finds a person both worthy of and had completely lost their previous lives such that Duncan felt it justified to recruit them . it's mentioned in a few things that the other origins did happen, but Duncan was unable to save the proto-warden.
As such, while there absolutely *are* Dalish Mages, there simply wasn't a situation leading up to the blight where Duncan found himself around a Dalish Mage who showed they were worthy of joining the grey wardens and had lost enough that he could justify recruiting them- just like he never met a templar or tevinten magister or surface dwarf or tal-vashoth or bandit in that context. All those people exist, and no doubt many of them could have become potent grey wardens. But their paths simply didn't align in a way that allowed them to.
TL;DR To become the Warden, you need to be recruited by Duncan. As Duncan didn't find a Dalish Mage worthy of recruiting on his way to Ostegar, one couldn't be come The Warden. | 49 |
+'s and -'s used in tables/charts | I wondered what the +'s, ++'s and -'s mean in scientific papers when relating to the growth of microorganisms.
I understand that + would mean growth and - would mean no growth, but would ++ mean increased growth then?
I have added a [picture](http://imgur.com/F0fyeyT) as reference.
In this example would this mean profuse growth of both Strep and Pneumococcus?
Thanks for your help. | 167 | From the title of the table i presume it would mean if the bacteria in question are present or not:
"-" would be a negative result (bacteria not present or in very low number)
"+" would be positive
"++" would be a high population | 35 |
ELI5: Why were taxes so high for the rich during the 50's when it was such a conservative era? | 26 | While the *nominal* tax rates on the rich were high in the 50s, the *effective* rates and actual *taxes* were not.
Virtually everything was deductible until the 1970s -- for example, credit card interest was deductible. Corporate and estate taxes were much higher as well, meaning that such deductions could be afforded due to revenues coming from other sources. This allowed for the highly progressive tax rate structure (top rates reached over 90%) but again, due to the accounting with deductibles, the effective rates in the 1950s really weren't substantially different from today, and very few taxpayers ever actually experienced the top rates (unlike today, where many more do as a percentage of all taxpayers.)
Due to the ability to deduct practically everything, the push-back from the wealthy was quite low, since few of them would actually pay the published rate. Most of their focus was on maintaining and expanding the deductibility accounting, since that's where the tax savings came from. | 19 |
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ELI5: Why does a sudden shift from warm to cold lead to a runny nose? | 39 | When warm, moist air hits something cold, you get water droplets appear on the cold surface. (Think about the windows steaming up in your kitchen when you cook)
The same thing is happening inside of you. You have warm, moist air inside of you, and when your nose gets cold then water droplets are formed that makes your nose runny | 22 |
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What word/phrase best describes Tom Nook’s loan program? | This is a goofy question, but...
For those of you who don’t know, Tom Nook is a character in the Animal Crossing video game series. In addition to serving as the primary shopkeep in most of the games, he sees to it that you, the player, have a roof over your head. Your first house (tent) purchase from him is non-optional, and in older versions of the game, house upgrades are *also* non-optional (leading to fan jokes about extortion), but the most recent game changes the latter limitation, allowing you to pay off your first house and keep your loan balance at zero indefinitely.
However, one thing that has never changed across the games is the nature of these loans...namely, that you don’t actually have to pay them back. Tom Nook will ask you to do so repeatedly, but he makes no effort to reclaim the house or anything, and you can go the entire game living out of a tent and fishing for sport if you want. The only downside is that you *will* be stuck in that tent; Nook doesn’t do any upgrades until the old debt is gone. It kinda reminds me of the “casual loans” exchanged between friends and family, where one person gives another some cash with the expectation of repayment, but doesn’t really go after the other person if they don’t pay it back...they just remind the recipient about it over and over again, and won’t lend to them a second time if the reminders are ignored (ex: “No I’m not giving you a couple hundred; you still haven’t paid me back the money I gave you last month, you jerk!”).
Problem is, “casual loan” is just a phrase I made up; I have no idea what that’s actually called, and I have no idea what Nook’s hilariously generous method of debt management is called either. Is there an official term that describes this kind of arrangement? Because I know it’s not a gift, since ignoring the debt does have *some* negative effect (can’t upgrade your house). In other words, what do you call it when a person doesn’t necessarily have to repay a loan, but their lack of repayment still affects their future lending potential? | 91 | I think it be considered as non-profit fully subsidized loan. When you buy a house in ANCH, there's no interest rate but the incentive to why you want to pay is due to that you might wanna built a better house. And it's not time lapsed as well as you can pay whenever you want. Not paying or paying won't hurt anything you do in your island life. Also when you pay, Tom Nook will donate the bells to the charity which is considered to be non-profit by institution standards.
This reminds me a lot of Subsidized student loans. The government pays for any accruing interest in your loan so you have no interest rate while in school. Not paying or paying won't hurt anything within time frame while still in college but sometimes you wanna pay because it lessens loans later on when you graduate which is a good thing. The difference is that Tom Nook's loan program has no time frame at all while Subsidized student loans only have unlimited non-accruing situation within college time. | 34 |
[Fist of The North Star] Why do bandits and raiders attempt to fight Kenshiro even after witnessing the brutality and skill with which he deals with their leaders? | The world seems pretty miserable. Is it a form of assisted suicide for them? | 15 | It's just the sort of instinct you go to in times of desperation. Prison Logic, call it. The world becomes separated quite clearly into masters and slaves, and newcomers to your world need to either be made slaves or be destroyed, lest they upset that delicate hierarchy. | 14 |
[Marvel] Why are the x-men hated and the avengers and other mutants are loved? | Whats up with that? | 22 | I believe it is because the x-men acquired their powers through random, natural mutations, whereas other mutants acquired their powers through experimental or accidental means. This threatens some people as the x-men can be viewed as the evolutionary next step for humans. Basically, they fear being replaced. | 52 |
[DC] If Clark Kent decided to quit being Superman and instead dedicate the same amount of time and effort into science and technology, how accomplished could he come? Could he compete with Luthor? And would Lex hate 'scientist Superman!' more or less than classic Supes? | Just realized that 'Clarke Tech' would actually be a pretty great name for a tech company headed by a super-genius (Clarke's Third Law and all that), so had to ask this. | 119 | Pretty damn accomplished.
Precisely how smart superman is varies a lot, but even at his dumbest he's very smart and has a solid grounding in the sciences. At his smartest, he's a literal supergenius. Combined with his advanced kryptonian scientific knowledge, ability to rapidly research topics and supersenses able to see atoms- plus various superscientist allies should he ask for the help- he does indeed have the ability for Clarke Tech to rapidly become a rival to Lex Corp.
Lex would rapidly hate him as a rival. But if he learnt he was superman, or if he didn't bother to hide it? Lex would be beyond furious at him trying to beat him at his own game. He'd hate him even more. | 79 |
ELI5: What actually decides when I'm born if I'm a boy or a girl? | Sperm, egg or other? | 26 | Your dad's sperm.
Your DNA (the blueprints to build a complete human), is broken up into like little chapers, called chromosomes. Everyone has two copies of all 23 chapters. Or you have 23 chromosomes from mom (the egg) and 23 from dad (the sperm) for a total of 46 (you need all 46 for everything to work but thats another ELI5).
Now of those 23 (remember you have a copy of each) only one determines sex, #23, the sex chromosome.
All fetuses are defaultly female, the only thing that makes them into a male is two certain hormones at very specific times. The codes to make these hormones are found on a chromosome called Y.
So lets do some deductions. If Y is the chapter than makes the "turn this baby chick into a baby dude" signal; and your mom isn't a dude, then she doesn't have Y. She has the Y's female copy, called X. Actually remember she has two X's (every chromosome has a copy). She got one X from her mom and one from her dad. No Y, so no signal to make a dude, so when she was an fetus it defaulted to a female, the natural sex.
So when her eggs are formed and she gets to give one of her copes, she can only give an X, thats all she has. But you dad, he's a dude, so he as an Y, and since he's from a man and woman, the other #23 he has is an X. So when his sperm form there is a 50/50 chance it gets an X copy or a Y copy.
So its the sperms, with its X or Y than when it fertilizes the egg, which can only have an X, that makes the sexual determination. | 25 |
Why do some people have good singing voices and some people don't? | Is there an evolutionary reason behind this or just something that happens at random? | 99 | It's more training than anything else. Just as a bodybuilder learns proper technique the singer learns how to control their airflow and the stretch of their vocal chords better. Being "tone-deaf" is detrimental because you can't figure out what's wrong in the technique.
Also, to add on to this a "good" singing voice is subjective, in arabic/Indian countries this tends to be more nasal, more guttural in Africa etc.
I don't know of what evolutionary advantage good singing could give unless it is also tied into fitness somehow, i.e. peacocks with larger plumes are more fit individuals(fitness is primary and "beauty" secondary) or sexual selection.
EDIT: please read malkin71's comment below to take into account this is helped by natural structure. | 28 |
ELI5: Why do sounds outside of the human range of hearing not damage our ears? When a speaker plays an 18 kHz tone at a loud volume level it hurts to listen to, however, if you change the pitch to say 30 KHz it’s as if nothing was being played. Why is this? | I know the air is still vibrating with the same power as before, but for some reason the pressure on the ear goes away. | 18 | AFAIK this only is the case with ultrasound frequencies. High power, low frequency waves (eg shock waves from an explosion) can still damage your ears, even rupturing your eardrums.
As to why ultrasound doesn’t cause harm: the frequency is too high for our eardrums to react to: they won’t move together with the wave, and because they don’t move nothing in the ear is affected. | 12 |
ELI5: Why is having money in tax havens like Swiss Bank accounts considered bad if it is not actually illegal? If it is illegal why is there a Swiss Bank? | 28 | Depositing income into Swiss Bank accounts for the purpose of avoiding taxes is illegal, but there may be other reasons for wanting to keep money overseas and secret/secure. Also, Swiss banks are governed by laws of Switzerland, so U.S. laws have no bearing on whether and why they exist... their laws could be completely different than ours. | 22 |
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ELI5: At what point does a game become “solvable”? | I know that “solving” games is a pretty rigorous mathematical topic, but I just want to understand a general concept: where is the line between a solvable and unsolvable game?
Take chess, for instance. Nobody has “solved” chess yet, but of course under certain setups the game is solvable (e.g. those puzzles that are “White/Black to move and win,” “Mate in 7,” etc.). Is it the case that all games are solvable, but computational limits don’t allow us to solve a game as complex as chess from the starting position?
Or, to put it in other words, consider some game that one could prove was absolutely unsolvable. Can such a game exist? Assume that there exists some computer that has infinite memory and can make computations in effectively zero time. Can a game exist that is not solvable for that computer?
| 28 | > Is it the case that all games are solvable, but computational limits don’t allow us to solve a game as complex as chess from the starting position?
This is the important detail. Games like chess and go have enough possible decisions that the ability for a computer to count through them all becomes impossible. There are more possible 40-move chess games than there are atoms in the known universe; the scale of that sort of number is difficult to imagine. Once you pare down the parameters by reducing the number of possible pieces moving or possible turns taken, things start to become "solvable." As a side note, the number of possible Go games is many orders of magnitude higher than chess games, because the very simple ruleset opens up even more possible moves.
As a note, that's also how chess computers work. They only check the most likely moves and only check a few turns into the future for consequences of each choice. The stronger the chess computer, the greater the "depth" to which it will predict the consequences of a move.
But in theory, if you had infinite time with an infinitely powerful computer, even games like that *could* be solved, even if that solution was "under perfect play, the game is a tie." Tic-tac-toe and checkers, for example, are always a tie given perfect play by both sides. | 17 |
Why are we adding all the present values? | In the economics lecture, the instructor explained this formula
**F = P (1+i)\^t**
F - Future Value (return)
P - Present Value
i - interest rate
t - time period for which the money is lent
The above formula is very clear to me, it has a very straightforward meaning.
But then he said a little transposition of the above formula makes it useful in another case:
**P = F/\[(1+i)\^t\]**
He explained, assume that a company or government promises you to have $3 per year for 5 years. At the end of 5th year it will pay you $100 (along with that $3). The discounting rate (I don't know why he didn't use the word interest rate) is 5%. So,
​
|Time|Final Amount F|Interest (1+i)\^t|Present Value (F/\[(1+i)\^t\]|
|:-|:-|:-|:-|
|1|$3|1.05|$2.857|
|2|$3|1.1025|$2.7210|
|3|$3|1.1576|$2.59156|
|4|$3|1.2154|$2.4683|
|5|$3, $100|1.27617|$2.3507, $78.3594|
||||Total = $91.34|
he said, the company will ask you to pay it at once those $91.34 and that is called bonds. I really didn't get what he did. Why did he add all those present values? If someone promises me to pay $100 after 5 years, and the interest rate in market is 5%, I would simply lent him, by the equation
**P = 100/\[(1.05)\^5\] = 78.3594**
Can somebody please explain what he tried to explain? | 25 | Your calculation is for a zero coupon bond - this bond pays a $3 coupon per year on top of the $100 at maturity. The difference between your figure and his figure is the value of the coupon payments.
The value of the principle is $78.35, as you calculated. The value of the coupons is $12.99
$78.35 + $12.99 = $91.34
Essentially, the bond pays 3% interest, but market interest rate is 5%, so you’d only be willing to pay $91.34 for the bond to compensate for the low coupon. If the bond paid a $5 coupon, you’d be willing to buy it for $100. | 16 |
[1984] due to shifting allegiances, sometimes Oceania is and always has been allied with either Eastasia or Eurasia. What happens propaganda wise when both nations unite against Oceania? | 32 | Bold of you to assume there's actually a war. Or any alliances. Or an Eastasia or Eurasia. Or an Oceania outside Airstrip One.
The Party are actively opposed to truth as an ideological position, and have total control of all information in Oceania. If something's not directly established on screen (and given the Party's power, maybe even if it is), it's best to assume it's a Party lie. We have no idea how much of the worldbuilding we're shown is true, but we can safely assume a huge chunk at least of it is not.
Given that, figuring out the details of what is happening is near impossible. If you can't even objectively establish what 2+2 is, how are you going to figure out complex geopolitical relationships? Oceania is allied to whoever it's convenient to tell the public it's allied to. What relation, if any, that has to *actual* Oceanic alliances is an exercise to the reader. | 72 |
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ELI5: What physical changes occur in a hard drive or USB stick to store information? | If I save a Word document to a USB stick, what's actually happening inside the stick? Thanks! | 30 | On a USB stick, gates are actually getting fused or opened to represent the binary data. The same thing happens when writing to a SSD. That's why both of them have a limited number of writes before they go bad.
Traditional hard drives store everything magnetically. The head on the hard drive induces a magnetic field of different polarities which can then get read back later. | 18 |
ELI5: What is the difference between something being "decriminalized" vs. legal? | 26 | "Decriminalized" is still illegal, it just doesn't carry criminal penalties, e.g. prison time.
Traffic violations, for instance, are illegal but not criminal. Still punishable by law, but typically only with fines or demerit points. | 57 |
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ELI5: If your body is dehydrated why do you have to pee so quickly after drinking water? | You would think if your body is dehydrated that it would keep as much water as possible instead of eliminating some of it. | 126 | Part of being dehydrated is that your body refrains from processing too much waste from your blood in to our bladder because it needs to expend water to do so. When you finally start hydrating again your kidneys start going back to work. | 97 |
ELI5 What is Doughnut economics and how does it work? | 119 | It’s an economic model that takes 12 social necessities and 9 ecological ceilings into a single model. Basically we want to fulfill the necessities without damaging the ecosystem. If a society manages to do so it’s considered economically prosperous.
Simplier put it’s a model that measures economical prosperity by aiming to fulfill social needs (water, housing, education, justice etc.) without damaging the eco-system. If a society could provide enough water for everyone but the water will run out in a few hundred years than it is not considered economically prosperous. | 98 |
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How are trigonometric functions programmed into calculators? | I have had this thought for a while but how do calculators calculate trigonometric functions such as sin(θ) accurately? Do they use look-up tables, spigot algorithms or something else ? | 172 | This could be done in different ways by different calculators, but the easiest way is probably to use an approximation based on a series. For example, sin(x) is equal to x - x^(3)/3! + x^(5)/5! - x^(7)/7! + ...
Since the terms get smaller and smaller the further you go in the series, an algorithm could simply continue evaluating the series until an appropriate level of precision is reached.
For example, to approximate sin(1):
sin(1) ≈ 1
- 1^(3)/3! = 0.83333
+ 1^(5)/5! = 0.84167
- 1^(7)/7! = 0.84146
+ 1^(9)/9! = 0.84147
- 1^(11)/11! = 0.84147
At the 6th term, we see no difference at our chosen precision any more, so this is the final answer. Any subsequent terms would be too small to change the answer at this precision. | 138 |
ELI5: how do you "reverse engineer" something? | 63 | You carefully take something apart, study how the components are put together, and how they interact with each other.
For example, if you don't know how to fold a paper plane, you can carefully unfold one to learn what folds to do. | 213 |
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How do we acquire traffic data? | 20 | In Tokyo, there are often guys sitting by busy intersections with clipboards full of clickers (They have a bunch of those round hand-held counter things bolted to a clipboard). They just sit there all day watching cars, clicking counters and making notes. It's not very sophisticated, but it's certainly a method to get some idea of traffic flow through an intersection. | 11 |
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CMV: Princeton University (and other ivy league colleges) does not deserve respect because it primarily serves the interests of the rich elite and its student body does not give back to the average American | **Edit: Columbia University is an exception among the ivy league: it is quite diverse socieconomically, with 30% of its undergrads having Pell Grants. However, the rest of the ivy league isn't very economically diverse**
Robert Reich, former Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton, and progressive commentator, posted this on his facebook page:
>"**For the second year in a row, Princeton University has emerged on top in the U.S. News & World Report rankings of American universities. Which shows how utterly bankrupt those rankings are.** I have nothing against Princeton, but it has the least economic diversity of any elite university and its graduates flood Wall Street and corporate consulting more than any other. Before the financial crisis of 2008, close to half Princeton’s graduates went into finance. Add in management consulting, and it was close to 60 percent. Even today, these two professions are the choice of a majority. Meanwhile, Princeton has among the lowest percent of Pell Grant eligible students, a proxy for students from poor families – only 12 percent. (Berkeley, where I teach, has more Pell-eligible students than the entire Ivy League put together.)
>If you want to look at a ranking that’s meaningful, take a look at the one just put out by the Washington Monthly (where Princeton is ranked 27th). Why does anyone still pay attention to the U.S. News?"
I believe that his commentary is very on point. Should Princeton University really be revered when its student body primarily consists of those who have socioeconomic privilege and want to gain employment in lucrative occupations in the corporate world (management consulting, investment banking, etc) that do not have much social value?
investment banking, management consulting, corporate law, and hedge-fund management are among the highest-paid of all professions (the Times reports hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen made about $2.3 billion last year, and is still doing extraordinarily well even after his hedge fund entered a guilty plea to insider trading charges). Yet the benefits to society are negligible. You might even say they’re negative, because most of what these professions do is take money out of one set of pockets and put the money into another, in zero-sum contests that cost a bundle.
Unlike other high-paying professions, such as medical services, STEM jobs, electrical engineers, computer programmers, people in management consulting and corporate finance currently primarily do not make money off of helping others or creating products that improve people's lives, but off of screwing others for personal profit.
In the past, investment banks used to make primarily off of investing their clients' money, and helping firms with IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, etc. But since the late 1990s and the 2000s (running up to the financial crisis of 2008), financial institutions were basically hedge funds masquerading as investment banks. Banks tricked their clients into purchasing toxic assets that were given artificially high credit ratings, and the banks then proceeded to bet against the assets they recently sold for huge profits, screwing investors even more. Moreover, on the commercial banking side, banks actively targeted vulnerable low-income individuals (who were often racial minorities) for subprime mortgages that the banks knew people would default on (and they engaged in predatory lending by making the contracts and terms extremely complicated).
Even after the banking bailout, investment banks and commercial banks have been doing a lot of shady stuff, trying to foreclose on people, refusing to refinance loans for victims of predatory lending, buying off politicians so that they can weaken Dodd-Frank financial regulations (via lobbying and massive contributions to SuperPACs), giving their executives exorbitant pay even though these same institutions were responsible for crashing the global economy and inflicting misery onto so many people (via unemployment, inequality, etc). Investment banking (and now commercial banking) is very unethical, and is one of the most unethical fields of finance to go into. Yet many from Princeton and other ivy league schools pursue this because they want to get rich on a personal level, and don't seem to have much empathy or social consciousness. Investment banks are helping turn our society and political system into an oligarchy.
Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations famously distinguishes between Productive and Unproductive Labor. Investment Banking essentially epitomizes the latter.
The British Empire, as well as he United States in the middle part of the 20th century because super powers because they *manufactured* products that increasingly helped build capital stock, which allowed for long-term growth. Similarly, today, engineers, computer programs, and the like are justifiably given lucrative salaries because they actually create products of value that people benefit from.
An investment banker, in contrast, and indeed almost all of the financial services industry, derives money from shuffling money around, rather than creating stuff of value, or providing services of value.
Is it fair to say that banks don't provide any service? No. But I certainly think it is the case that for some reason, market mechanisms aren't working effectively here and bankers get paid **way** too much for what it is that they do. When an MIT Aerospace engineer PhD is making $80k, and a 24 year old kid out of college is making $150k, - well, I guess that shows you how awesome the market's priorities are, and how messed up our wage setting mechanism is.
Moreover, many investment bankers leave the profession after 2 years and go into private equity or work at hedge funds, and make a shitton of money of there, and are able to take advantage of the carried interest tax loophole since Wall Street has an enormous influence in the political system. In the U.S., we tax work, not wealth, thanks to the influence of Wall Street lobbyists in Washington D.C.
Here's a good article about the corporate culture at Goldman Sachs for more information: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/14/opinion/why-i-am-leaving-goldman-sachs.html?pagewanted=all
Similarly, management consulting, esp the big three firms (McKinsey & Company, The Boston Consulting Group, and Bain & Company), have also been involved in lots of unethical stuff. While boutique management consultant firms have been more ethical, and more genuinely interested in serving clients, these big three consulting firms have been engaged in unethical, zero-sum behavior. And to the extent that clients benefit, it is the employers who gain the disproportionate benefits, since these consultant firms will often encourage businesses to lay off workers to "cut costs and become more competitive," often regardless of whether workers are truly burdensome on a financial level to maintain. Consultant firms also encourage firms to engage in job-killing mergers and acquisitions, claiming that it will increase the company's efficiency, even when this isn't the case (there should be x-inefficiency of diseconomies of scale if we're doing microeconomic analysis)
These consultant firms have also encouraged employers to raid employee's pension plans and shop for the cheapest healthcare plans to give employees, regardless of whether the plan adequately covers employees' healthcare needs. This is very different from the "stakeholder" society the U.S. had in the 50s and 60s (and even 70s) when employers were more willing to look out for the interests of their employees.
When Princeton's student body primarily consists of those with socioeconomic privilege (**many of whom are legacy admits** and did not have the same credentials as non-legacy admits), and then fosters a culture in which people are encouraged to be very self-interested and pursue lucrative careers in industries that make money off of screwing others, then Princeton does not deserve the respect that it gets since its student body is not giving back much to our society.
I'm not saying that it's necessarily "wrong" for people to go into finance or management consulting, but when the majority wants to go into these two fields, then there's something wrong with the university's culture.
Instead, we should respect schools like UC Berkeley, UCLA, and others whose student body is economically diverse, schools that actually have a meaningful impact on facilitating upward mobility, and giving the underprivileged the opportunity to move ahead in life. And we should respect schools that encourage people to go into social work, like teaching, nursing, caring for the elderly: the pay for these occupations may be low (the myth is you get paid what you’re worth. Yet for many occupations it’s just the reverse: Pay is inversely related to the real benefits to society). But the benefits to society from these professions is considerable compared to investment banking and/or management consulting. We desperately need these people, not more people on Wall Street.
It's a shame that by endowment per student, Princeton is the wealthiest school in the United States, while UC Berkeley and UCLA, UCSD, and other excellent state colleges are being underfunded.
**Edit: (here's a link looking at the economic diversity among the top 25 ranked schools)
Economic Diversity Among the Top 25 Ranked Schools http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/rankings/national-universities/economic-diversity-among-top-ranked-schools**
**Edit: here are some links provided by /u/simsproblem for more information on the topic:**
http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2010/04/why_do_harvard_kids_head_to_wa.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/column-how-wall-street-takes-advantage-of-the-ivy-leagues-failures/2011/08/25/gIQA7FTnJR_blog.html
http://www.forbes.com/sites/michaelgibson/2014/02/07/the-ivy-league-has-perfected-the-investment-banker-and-management-consultant-replicator/
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2014-01-02/ivy-leagues-new-dream-job-not-wall-street-waiting-tables
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2012-02-16/harvard-liberal-arts-failure-is-wall-street-gain-commentary-by-ezra-klein | 131 | I think you are misunderstanding the reason that Ivy League schools get a lot of attention and respect. It is not about which institutions are best for American society. It's about which institutions accrue the largest personal benefits to the students who enroll there.
Going to Princeton or Harvard or wherever is massively beneficial on a personal level to the kids who go there. Whether it's moral or not, hobnobbing with a bunch of really rich kids is *great* for your personal career and status prospects. In fact, the more elite the students they pick from, the more their value to each student goes up.
It's highly unfair. But people want unfair advantages. And getting your kid into Princeton gives your kid huge unfair advantages. So people want their kids into Princeton. And thus Princeton tops the rankings. | 79 |
[DC] Is Captain Cold better than Mr. Freeze at freezing? | 101 | Yes. In *Forever Evil*, Captain Cold directly compares his "cold gun"'s abilities (which he had, at the time, absorbed into himself; shortly after the event, he lost that power and had to rely on the cold gun again) to those who just shoot ice. People like Victor Fries use a coolant (e.g. liquid nitrogen) to turn moisture in the air into ice. Leonard Snart's cold gun directly affects the movement of atoms and molecules, to the point that he can bring an object or person's temperature straight to *absolute zero* if he really wanted to; the ice is just a side effect. | 122 |
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eli5 Why cant our body repair eyesight? | when we get a bruise or break a bone the body will naturally repair the damage. so why wont our body just naturaly repair eyesight when it gets worse? | 82 | Bad eyesight most often comes because the eye is not in perfect geometrical shape - even if all the cells are healthy and happy you still can see badly - because your eyeballs are in "squished" shape.
and body cant really correct the shape of it. for example when you break a bone, you need something external to keep the broken parts aligned to heal properly | 62 |
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