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5s0j6c | Why do some siblings look similar or very alike but some look like they're not even related to each other? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When mom and dad made you, you are half mom and half dad. Since they are each half of their moms and dads, they mix all the moms and dads that they each had into you! So you may look like your grandpa or even your great-great-grandma, while your brother may look like another relative!",
"Vast oversimplification of what happens with genetics, but for any given trait will have one or more genes in your DNA that cause the trait to be a certain way... for example let's assume one gene decides trait of eye color. Now, it is important to note that DNA is actually made of two different sets of information... how the two sets interact varies. Sometimes one set dominates and ignores what the other says, sometimes each set contributes and you get a blend, some times unique combinations lead to very different results. Back to eye color, say a gene **B** is for brown eyes, and **b** is for blue eyes... again everyone has 2 sets of genes, so let's say B dominates b such that when together, Bb means brown eyes. So BB is brown, Bb is also brown and only bb is blue. When peeps have kids, DNA is split such that child gets one set of gene from each parent. And each time someone has a kid, thus process mixes the DNA differently. So let's say mom is Bb and dad is Bb, and they have 4 kids.... a BB, 2 Bb and a bb. This means the family will have brown eyes except for the one kid. Seems unusual, but it's just odds. Reality is much more complicated, and with a huge number of genes impacting how we look, but genetics makes sure there are similarities but also differences."
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5s0m58 | How did sexual production begin? There needed to be a male and female sexual organs! | I Googled this, I searched in this subreddit and others, but I ended up getting answers to different questions or not being able to understand the answer. A simple answer would be appreciated, thank you very much! | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"**Very simple answer**: Sex evolved first, then sexual organs. **Simple answer**: At first, organisms made more of themselves by simple splitting. This is good, because every generation, their population doubles. But it's also bad, because genetically, all the organisms are almost exactly the same. Then organisms evolved the ability to produce sex cells, or *gametes*. These cells contain *half* the genetic code of their parents, so one cell of each sex combines to make the full code. In the process, the genetic code from both parents are cut and mixed (i.e. *recombination*), producing a final code that is different from either parent. The simplest (and earliest) organisms lived in water and didn't have sexual organs. Gametes would simple meet outside in the water, join, and float away. Eventually, the gametes and the organs that produce them became more complex, allowing more protected gametes, internal fertilization (the gametes meeting inside the body of one of the parents), and the formation of other structures like eggshells."
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5s0scb | Why can we eat meat (like on bread(salami)) cold, but some meat only cooked? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It all centres around the concept of water activity. This is not the water content, but rather a measure of the water that is available to microbes. When meat is salted, the water is drawn to the salt and mostly becomes 'unavailable' to microbes. Then if the meat is dried much of the remaining water is lost, so that the water activity of the food drops far below the level needed to sustain microbial reproduction or toxin production. If sodium nitrate (saltpetre) has been added, the ability of bacteria to survive is further reduced. This is the environment of the original jerky and dried meats that have been prepared, processed, stored and eaten for hundreds of years. Fermented salami (e.g. Hungarian or German salami) incorporates a process that is similar in some ways to cheese making. A starter culture of lactobacillus is added and encouraged to grow to their pH limit. This is now an acidic environment that is not favorable to growth of more dangerous bacteria.",
"Salami is not raw meat. Nor is ham, Turkey, or chicken that you get from the deli counter. Just because it is served cold does *not* mean it is raw.",
"Salami is normally smoked and that is a cooking process. Other kinds are boiled, and only a few are raw cured. But even those that are raw cured are prepared in such a way as to inhibit the growth of bacteria. Raw meat is not dangerous, the bacteria that grows on it after the animal has died is dangerous. Because we do not eat our meat minutes after we kill the animal we have to cook it for it to be safe unless we take extreme measures like we do with raw fish sushi."
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5s0whp | Why is a terrorist organization like ISIS so difficult to defeat? With so many powerful nations actively fighting them, how do they still have a leg to stand on? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Radical ideology is really what we are fighting here and every time collateral damage occurs it undermines our ability to fight radical ideas further. It actually helps spread the ideas. It's like carpet bombing a forest fire. For some context, I was in Iraq in 2009. As you would imagine, most the destruction had already taken place by then. So I got to see the aftermath of our invasion. There was no open resistance when I was there. No one tried to fight us. They just watched us roll down the roads for the most part. Now imagine if you were say, 5 years old, and your home was destroyed by a bomb. Maybe someone from your family was killed. But it left you without anything to call your own. No one to call in case of an emergency. No one to call if your sibling falls ill. Not even a nation to call home. Not even shelter, except for what you can literally build from the rubble. Now imagine, little you sponging up all the info you can, all this has taken place around you, without you having any idea why. You see these foreigners who don't speak like you or look like you, you don't understand them, and you're told \"that's who did this to us\". Those *people*. No matter how bad someone tells you it was before, you can never feel like it could be any worse than it is now. **The enemy we are fighting now, is an enemy we created**. It's no longer an abstract idea. The kids that grew up amongst the rubble that we prepared for them are now fighting age. Radical ideology spreads through the oppressed like a plague and those people will forever fight. It's not that I sympathize with them. I just understand the anger. Isis is just one of the many names that this ideology has fallen under(Boko Haram, Mujahadeen, Janjaweed, Al Qaeda) and it's not the only kind of radical ideology. The difference is the amount of time, space, and motivation that's been necessary to breed. All of this is compounded by hostiles never being a uniformed enemy. They always wear civilian clothing. Here are some ~~pics~~ really incredible photos taken by a soldier in my platoon. These were taken during one of many humanitarian missions we ran while we were there. This shanty town was built in the protective area right outside our FOBs gates. This should help you understand what I mean. URL_1 Edit: for those of you who think this has an anti American agenda, you are dead wrong. I am a patriot and I love my country. [Here is my response to that.]( URL_0 )",
"**TL;DR: To almost every actor in the region, they are more useful alive than dead** To understand the answer, we must first understand some significant points: 1) Any answer that says \"x is the main problem\" is super simplistic. It may have part of a problem, but, like the rest of the grown up problems of the world, a complex issue like ISIS/terrorism cannot be reduced to a single point. 2) There are always more questions than clear answers. This is a significant problem when lives are at stake, but I do believe that, given the research over the last century or so, we have a fairly reasonable idea. The single sentence answer, which necessarily needs to be broken down into a thousand different pieces, is as follows: **The vast majority of terrorism in the last two centuries has been committed due to the political interaction of identity and the state** To understand this completely, we have to understand the concept of the nation. Most people around the world feel nationality in at least three levels: 1) Lowest level - The state as a function of nation 2) Mid level - the Ethnic group as a nation 3) Highest level - Religious group as a nation There are other \"nations\" as well, but these three are the most common. Now, the marriage of Westphalian peace that designated (theoretically) standard borders and the increased centralization and power of governments, the challenge became to somehow synthesize these three. The idea of a political \"people\" is born. The most cohesive state, then, was one where people shared all three national identities. The least cohesive state was one that had neither 2nd or 3rd, and thus even the function of the state as a nation fall into peril. Following the peace at Westphalia, Europe was consumed by violence which was primarily nationalistic violence. Between revolutions, revolts, genocides, and ethnic cleansing, Europe was a blood bath from 1648 to 1945. When one portion of Europe reached stability, another portion was lit ablaze by nationalist politics. The Arab world never had that moment. Even after the fall of colonial powers in the Arab world, the cold war politics of the US and Russia necessitated that the Middle East, a key region in the cold war, could not suffer the instability like that of Europe after Westphalia. So strong men were put in place who clamped down on the political negotiations which are required for the long term stability of a state which functions as a nation (A nation state). Now, fast forward to today. The strong men of the Arab world collapse (Saddam and Yemen forcefully, Mubarak, Qadhafi, and Assad by public pressure). This unleashes a huge tide of suppressed nationalist politics, which is always, always, always both disastrously bloody and excessively violent. Add in the Western exploitation of Pan-Islamism for combating the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, which leads to 9/11 (once the Soviets were defeated in Afghanistan, Al Qaeda and other mujahideen groups focused on two other Empires encroaching on \"Muslim sovereignty,\" the US (Iraq, Palestine, the Gulf) and Russia (Chechnya)). Now, how does this lead to terrorism against the West? 1. The West obviously has a terrible reputation in the Middle East, going back two centuries. But **America's** bad reputation starts in the 50s, with the opposition of the United States to Mossadeq, the United States propping up of Israel, the US opposition to Nasser (who was extremely popular in the Arab world), and the United States support of dictators. Now, add the Iraq sanctions and the Iraq War II, and you get just flaming hatred for the West. 2. That hatred is used by the Pan-Islamists in fighting the US wherever it has presence in the Muslim world. But, for nationalists like ISIS, it has a much more sinister use. 3. Attacking \"the West\" creates legitimacy for ISIS. Due to the involvement of the US during the cold war (and after) in the Middle East, hatred for the West is immense in the Arab world. Attacks against the \"oppressors,\" then, serves as a legitimizing tool in a fight where manpower is at a premium. 4. This leads us to ISIS of today. It is a nationalist movement which gains legitimacy for showing how it is fighting the historic oppressors by bringing the war to them. \"We are doing to them what they have been doing to us\" is the line they use consistently in their recruitment material. The goal, though, is to swell their ranks LOCALLY, not to actually harm the west in any way. No one seriously thinks ISIS is creating any real national security risk for Western nation -- not ISIS, and not Western nations. This is just a really great propaganda tool for them. Now, given all the above, why is ISIS so difficult to defeat: The reason why ISIS in particular has not been defeated, is, primarily power politics: **1) Power politics between nations always supersedes the threat of terrorist organizations** **2) ISIS is not the main concern of Middle Eastern nations. The power imbalance and vacuum between Iran, the Gulf allies, and Turkey is** **3) The Syrian civil war adds to those complications significantly** **4) Nations are more focused on fighting for power balance than against ISIS** **5) In managing the power politics in the Middle East, ISIS is actually useful for most if not all powers in the area** Let's give a couple examples: 1) Turkey: Turkey was fighting Assad in Syria, but the Kurds to the north were a serious threat to their territorial integrity. As such, they helped ISIS fight the kurds to the north as well. But to assuage Western powers, they made a show of fighting ISIS as well. 2) Saudi: Saudi is actively funding ISIS to push back Iranian allied Syria and Iraq and force Iran into a perpetual war with ISIS. This is because the Gulf allies are terrified of being surrounded by the Iranian led alliance of Iran, Syria, Iraq, and Yemen. It therefore needs to ally with groups like ISIS and Al Qaeda to force Iran into perpetual war and keep it from cementing that alliance. 3) Iran: Iran wants to fight ISIS. It really does. It's probably the most active in fighting ISIS. But it can't make a death blow to ISIS yet, because of Iraq and Russia. 4) Russia: ISIS is extremely useful to Russia. As long as ISIS remains a force, it provides Russia diplomatic cover for its activities in support of Assad as long as it can shove a few bombs towards ISIS and say that it's there for terrorism. Therefore, Russia NEEDS ISIS to assist its ally Assad. 5) Iraq: Iraq is a key ally to Iran, and ISIS is an existential threat to the Shia regime there. BUT airpower is extremely limited in efficacy, Iraq doesn't have a strong enough ground force to take ISIS on itself, the US won't allow the only other real enemy of ISIS (Iran) into Iraq en masse to defeat ISIS, and the other members of the anti-ISIS coalition see ISIS as to useful to destroy just yet 6) The US and the Western Allies: This is where things get really fun. The West wants to defeat ISIS. But to do so would effectively hand Syria to Russia\\ and Iraq to Iran, making a giant power block from Iran to Syria and Yemen to the south. So it wants to use Iraqi ground forces to force ISIS into Syria and let them fight it out in the Syrian civil war, while putting diplo pressure on Iraq to break its ties with Iran and try to isolate Iran diplomatically. The key to defeating ISIS: 1) End the Syrian civil war 2) Bring about political reproachment in Iraq and Yemen 3) The powers in the area will crush ISIS in a day Edit: All the above is an interpretation consistent with the theories of the school of realism in international relations. For more information about the realist school, read \"The Man, the State, and War\" by Kenneth Waltz, \"Theory of International Politics,\" by Waltz again. For my favorite sub school, offensive realism, read \"Tragedy of Great Power Politics\" by John Mearsheimer. Edit: Thank you for the gold kind stranger!",
"In addition to ISIS being a guerrilla army, there are a few other reasons... They are not only fighting to gain territory, but in order to control it they also need to act like a government for the people living there under their rule. When organizations like this succeed in providing electricity, food and water for their people, they gain some legitimacy and sympathy from people in the region. (Surely they're not doing a great job, given the circumstances, but I'm sure their followers are giving them some leeway.) This is how the Taliban is still in power in parts of Afghanistan, because they do make efforts to keep the people fed, employed and somewhat protected. ISIS has been well funded, and this is a major reason why they're still surviving. They have hijacked oil fields and sell that oil on the black market. They are also secretly funded through unknown supporters, likely to be Saudis who share their religious ideals and support the growth of Salafism/Wahhabism in the Middle East. The long term strategy of the Obama admin, from my understanding, was that they would eventually run out of funds, and once they did that they would begin to see fractures in the morale of their fighters, and a general diminishing of local support as they fail to keep their promises to the people in their \"caliphate\". So airstrikes have been targeting their shipments of oil and illicit funds, cutting off their supplies which has led to a [reduction in their recruitment efforts and an increase in defections.]( URL_0 )",
"ISIS is a country without its own country. When we fight Iraq, we know where they are. When we fight Afghanistan, we know where they are. When we fight ISIS, they exist in many countries, mixed in with people we don't want to kill.... So they are extremely difficult to bomb, and they are extremely difficult to fight hand to hand, because we can't tell good guys from bad guys... Until they start shooting. Then it's too late.",
"On top of the other comments, Id like to add: think of ISIS as not an army, but several, smaller militias or pods that don't communicate regularly. Some of these militias can be \"homegrown\" and just claim to be isis as well. Now how do we target these numerous, smaller militias? While information intercept can lead us to the larger threats, there are still hundreds of smaller groups that claim alliance to isis which you cannot track because they do not communicate. As well, once targeted, they will blend in with their neighboring civilians (sometimes in safe spots like mosques, hospitals, schools, etc) so the threat cannot be eliminated. The \"pro\" to all this is (as it IS a con within itself) that as multiple, smaller militias they are not organized/coordinated enough to be of major threat. Most of our domestic, terrorist attacks are people within the US claiming Isis alliance and not those from the Middle East entering the US to commit an attack. There are other reasons as well, but this is a major contributing factor. Edit: Source - took a political science course last semester and asked the same question.",
"At the end of the day, it comes down to forces on the ground. The three main forces fighting ISIS on the ground are the Syrian army, the Kurds, and the Iraqi army. Each one has it's own reasons for not defeating ISIS yet. The Syrians are exhausted and busy fighting several different groups. The Kurds may be the best but the Turks are interested in not letting them be too successful. And the Iraqi army was a joke and is still rebuilding from their defeats a couple years ago. It doesn't matter how much you bomb someone, eventually you need your grunts to take and hold ground from their grunts. America bombed the ever loving shit out of Vietnam and we all know how that turned out.",
"First and foremost, the impact of terrorist organizations is manipulated (overblown) by those who want to create a 'permanent enemy' in the minds of their citizens. This allows them to lead a generally fearful population who will then tend to support nationalistic, authoritarian, and militaristic activities. This also allows the leadership to deflect focus from domestic issues and/or cronyism and/or profiteering by smoke-bombing (like a magician) their citizens with \"TERRORISM!!1!!\" to distract from their sleight of hand. This doesn't mean that terrorists don't exist, however, what it means is that if we treated them as criminals and crazy people in a straightforward manner we'd take away virtually all of their incentive. The goal of terrorism is to frighten their undefeatable enemies into taking foolish actions in response to their activities. If we don't act like fools, they lose.",
"So many misguided statements here let me try to set the records straight I work with Oil in the middle east and you people in the West honestly have no idea how much of your equipment, money, and other resources ends up in ISIS hands. A massive iraqi military base was taken over by 40 isis members and they got $65 million + USD in equipment. First world nations have too many guns, explosives, and vehicles to sell and they inevitably end up in the hands of ISIS super cheap. For gods sake I HAVE SEEN european and american TOW missles in the hands of arms dealers sending them to rebel groups. Fighting ISIS is amazing for making money, that's why they have not been beat and we jump from afghan, to iraq, to ISIS, to Iran. As long as there is an enemy being supplied by half of the first world countries in the world they won't be beat because that isn't even part of the plan.",
"Because the US has spent the better part of two decades bombing people. This has taken people who would have likely just lived their lives, and radicalized them by killing members of their families, destroying their communities and leaving them with less options to live their lives. Enter ISIS a group organized around the idea of resisting this ongoing campaign of destruction and plunder of their lands and suddenly there is a glimmer of hope that the \"imperialists\" might be battled. This group shares the local religion, uses its funds to rebuild communities, and give the appearance of helping the people. And bam! You have a self sustaining recruiting method. The more the US bombs, the more people get pissed and lose hope and join the resistance. It is a cycle that was totally predicted when the US started to fuck around in the middle east.",
"In this case, the use, threat, and utility of force are not effective deterrents or solutions to psuedo-organizations like ISIS. These types of organizations are bound by a similar ideological belief, which makes waging traditional war against them incredibly difficult, if not impossible. While a lot of responses here are partially right, I have to say that the situations in the Middle East and North Africa are a lot more complicated than starving them of money, supporters, leaders, or having a strong military presence on the ground. If things were that simple, we would have solved the issues in the Bush years, or during Obama's troop surge and increased drone strikes. But, why is ISIS so hard to defeat? Because ISIS can be boiled down to a combination of fringe religious ideology, long-standing cultural identity that goes back hundreds to thousands of years that Western powers tend to choose not to fully understand, and the economic + governmental damage Western powers initially caused dating back to the raping and pillaging of the area back during the the era of global European colonialism (that this region still hasn't recovered from). Quick Edit: I see a lot of people throwing Vietnam in as a parallel. Truth is, there are very little parallels to Vietnam and ISIS outside of guerrilla warfare. The manner in which we waged war in Vietnam was wholly ineffective for a variety of different reasons.",
"It's mostly a matter of the countries who claim to be fighting ISIS, do not have a primary interest in fighting them. Biggest contributors, you could say, to the fight against them is Russia and USA. But the US actual interest is in pushing a major oil pipeline through Syria to the EU. As a matter of fact USA supports rebels who technically fight alongside ISIS. Also it's well known that Saudi Arabia, a major US ally, who receives weapons and money from the USA, most likely supports and funds ISIS. Russia is technically supporting groups who fight ISIS but only because they're supporting the opposite side of the war in Syria that the US does. This is likely because they want their own pipeline through Syria to the Baltic Sea so they can control oil exports. Both oil pipelines are pending projects and one can see the ally relationships in neighboring countries and understand both US and Russian plans for the pipeline. Neither wants to necessarily directly fight ISIS as they would be diverting attention from the oil plans.",
"It's not necessarily that ISIS are difficult to defeat, it's that anyone with the capability to wipe them out has no political interest in doing so. Taking out ISIS would require a sustained land invasion with tens, probably hundreds of thousands of troops occupying their territory for years on end. Politicians and military advisors around the World have made the decision that it's better for their country's interests to allow ISIS to continue to terrorize the people they occupy and suffer the occasional ISIS-inspired attack on home soil than having to deal with the headache of a multi-year full-scale war in the Middle East.",
"They leader hides underground. They mix with civilians. They are not a traditional army. Their attacks are guerilla. Militaries are generally not adapted for this type of combat. Vietnam was a great example of this. The VC was able to maximize casualties by using ambushes, mines, and untraditional techniques.",
"Because they have an unlimited supply of U.S. arms, vehicles and funding?",
"I went to University and studied applied intelligence methods(fbi/cia stuff) for a couple of years. For each of those years we had to analyze the stability of a particular country. My country was the small island country of Mauritius, that sits 1500 miles off the SE coast of Africa. One of the things we needed to keep up on was the possibility of terrorist attacks. Through my research I found that the possibility of a terrorist attack on Mauritius is close to zero. Reason being, 1) There's not a terrorist organization on earth that has nautical capability passed 1,500 miles. 2.)There's no natural resources for them to exploit. 3) Mauritius has more police officers on their island per 1000 residents than the United States does, and they also have a new naval ship donated to them by the Indian Military. To put it in a nutshell, Mauritius's doesn't have easily traversed borders, and they're too stable of a country for a terrorist attach. Meaning what? ISIS can't really do shit. If you take a look at all of the countries, or territory ISIS has \"control\" over, or has had control over, you'll that find these countries haven't had unstable governments for decades. They can only take over dystopian countries because militarily, its an insult to any military to even consider them one. What real military has to cut off 21 heads on social media to convince people they're powerful? None of them. ISIS are just a bunch of bandit murderers taking advantage of the medias need to sensationalize the minuscule into something story worthy. And a threat from the sky is pretty much impossible unless one person plans and commits the attack on their own. Reason being, governments put all their intelligence money into technical intelligence, and to pull of another 9/11 would require too much electronic communication to pull it off these days. ISIS just survives, they do not thrive. ISIS CAN'T DO SH*T.",
"I like to think it's because it's an ideology, and fighting an ideology is hell of a lot harder than fighting a standard army due to other people with similar beliefs adopting the same ideology in different countries... it's difficult to fight a worldwide army. Edit: grammar",
"Several reasons. 1) They get support from people who care more about money than morals. e.g. Guess who sells them oil? Weapons? Ammunition? Even medical supplies? Look it up, it's not hard to find out. 2) The methods used to fight them tend to create more of them. ie Rampant bombing of areas and indiscriminate killing of civilians. We may not like it, but that's how most of the fighting the West does in the Middle East goes down. And put yourself in their place, if your family were innocent and bombed to fuck by some American drone, and this crowd offered you a chance to strike back at their killers, you might well leap at the chance. 3) Religious fanatics tend not to make rational decisions.",
"This also goes beyond the scope of one militia group or another, and more into \"What is Wahhabism? When did it start? What did it do?\" - Some study will teach you how they, in WW1, were radicals funded by Britain in WW1 against the Ottoman Empire. They believed \"modern Islam\" had fallen corrupt and wanted to punish it. So they would kill teachers, blow up schools, kidnap students on the way to school, etc. The middle east was the most sophisticated region of the world and in a period of less than 20 years, the entire region was sent back to the stone age. They founded Saudi Arabia and The Taliban - many groups such as the Mujaheddin in Somalia and Yemen, the Al-Queada groups, Carlos the Jakal, all of them are Wahhabis. Imagine if Christianity had been hijacked by a stone age fundamentalist sect that many US Soldiers and police and judges suddenly converted to, and they began imposing their religious laws in spite of our national laws? Now, imagine if it became powerful enough, quickly enough, to become uber-powerful in Canada, Mexico and USA? That is kinda what happened with Wahhabism.",
"My friends who are in the US Army said part of it is that when you kill one, his son is automatically recruited.",
"The United States - namely the CIA and Pentagon fund them simply to use them as a tool for regime change in the Middle East. Can't destroy what the US clandestinely supports.",
"I'd liken it to fighting weeds in vegetable gardens. You want to kill the weeds, but not the vegetables. Weeds get picked because any chemicals could hurt the vegetables, but the weeds keep growing. You're constantly pulling weeds, there's just no end to it. The weeds might be from seeds long dormant in the soil or they might blow in from somewhere else. You could just pour heavy duty chemicals on everything, but then nothing would grow there for centuries. So, in a way, we could wipe out ISIS quickly, but the collateral damage would be insane. Granted the above is ignoring the psychological/sociological aspects of ideology and religion.",
"Grossly simplified: From a Military Standpoint ISIS is defeated. There are 3 Major Strongholds That have been essentially Surrounded by Strong Enemies. Airstrikes alone can only do so much. 1 is Raqqa Its the Capital City of the Evil ISIS People. Raqqa has been completely Cut off from the outside by the Kurds. The Kurds cannot advance yet because Turkey does not like the Kurds. ISIS has many supporters in turkey and if the kurds Advance towards Raqqa the Kurds might get bombed by Turkey and raqqa would not be Surrounded anymore and ISIS would be free. 2 Dioz El Zur Is a city south of Raqqa the Regular Syrian Army is fighting them there. But the Syrian army is stretched thin and Assad has strategic reasons to not expend resources and defeat ISIS there. ISIS is fighting everybody that Assad is fighting too. So assad waits until all parties have exhausted themselfs to swoop in later....at least that is the plan. And that is why in Dioz el Zur there wont be any decisive victory coming soon. 3 Mossul, by far the largest stronghold of ISIS, the Kurds and the Iraqi Army have surrounded the city. The kurds fearing Turkish intervention and the Iraqi army...oh boy...well they are not very good at fighting i am afraid. They want to not damage the city too badly so they can use it later. So advances if any are very slow. In Summary ISIS still exists but is defeated, even though a victory will still take a few months ISIS does not have the means to break any siege, their command structure is in shambles, either through targeted assassinations of leaders by the US or by filling their bags with (literal) gold and moving to nations that offer rich terrorists harbor. They cannot mount anymore offensives and after the atrocities they have committed can not expect clemency from the warring parties. So they have no reason to call it quits either. But even after a military victory the Idiology of ISIS has found many supporters in the middle east and among the muslim population in Europe. Terrorist attacks will continue until the people dont like ISIS anymore. Solution for this problem are not clear. Many hope that European freedom and liberty will make people not want to be terrorists and kill people. While others believe that if that is not happening that the muslims must leave. In any case ISIS is the worst thing that has happend to the middle east and to Islam since the crusades. Nobody can clearly predict what will happen, but everyone who studied the situation knows that the situation will not get better.",
"It comes down to getting the local population on your side. If you agitate them, don't work well with them etc. They turn on you and just see you as an outside threat. They recruit people easily becasue there are so many people who have been directly affected by a bombing. Put yourself in their position, you live in the middle of a desert, you believe in an afterlife and an all powerful creator. Then some guy comes along and kills your niece with a rocket. You are now incredibly mad. Then this other guy in your village says it's from the terrible west, (which it generally is), and says that if you help him you can get back at the people who did this. He says there are people in the community who are working with the people who killed your niece. And we need to find them and kill them before more people die. Then a big rebel force rolls into your village, parading around with flags, makeshift military armored trucks, etc. They are saying they are going to go fight back against the people who are bombing them. Now after all this your family has fallen apart, maybe you are watching day in day out as your city gets bombed, maybe it's just the radical interpretations of holy books that eventually gets to you. Either way you are hopped up on religious koolaid, you are incredibly pissed off, and someone just gave you the means to get back at the people who have more or less destroyed your life. And all you have to do is join us. That is how people get radicalized, war after war after war for decades. I'm going to say this as non politically as possible. The US is very heavily indirectly funding ISIS and other terrorist organizations. The US provides a massive amount of funding and weapons to Saudi Arabia. Source [1]( URL_0 ),[2]( URL_9 ),[3]( URL_13 ),[4]( URL_8 ) Then Saudi Arabia Turns around and funds terrorist groups all over the world. Source [1]( URL_7 ),[2]( URL_2 ),[3]( URL_10 ),[4]( URL_11 ) The reason that they don't stop funding is becasue the military industrial complex [makes hundreds of billions of dollars from these wars]( URL_6 ). [And when the military industrial complex has their hands in the pockets of the people in power]( URL_4 ), the people in power tend to not want to stop the wars. There are also many other reasons as to why it's hard to stop a group like ISIS. It's easy to retake the land, the US by itself could probably defeat ISIS in under 4 days if it committed to it. It's very very hard to do so without creating a power vacuum and making things worse in the process. Source: the current state of the middle east and the war in Iraq. Historically there have been two ways to deal with a problem like this. One you go in and kill literally everyone, civilians, military and take the rest as slaves, and destroy every memory and building made by the people you are against. [See the annihilation of Carthage, third Punic war.]( URL_5 ) The second is a far far better solution. You withdraw your military, set up a border make sure they can't invade you. Then wait for a while. From this point three things might happen. [One the people themselves with rise up and put an end to the current rule.]( URL_1 ) [Two the economy will collapse and a new government will form.]( URL_12 ) or three [the established government or your own government will try and make economic ties with the country to try and persuade them to change themselves through trade deals, or other kinds of deals]( URL_3 ). Keep in mind the second of the two options might well fail and you are back to the beginning. However it's the best option for reducing loss of life. That is just looking at how things have played out in history, it very well might be that none of those things happen and something else that no one has yet thought of will happen. Only time will tell.",
"You cant deploy conventional millitary tactics againt nonillitary targets. Civilian casualties are worse news than isis.",
"Because having your familly blown to bits at your neighbors wedding will piss anyone off enough to start shooting people.",
"Nobody mentioned that part of the reason ISIS is still around is because countries like the U.K. and US indirectly funded them heavily during the Obama administration through countries like Qatar and Saudi Arabia. The US essentially created ISIS. We've sold billions upon billions in weapons to Gulf states that fund terrorists. It's disgusting and nobody here mentioned it that I've seen. Hopefully that will change under Trump. Tulsi Gabbard just introduced the Stop Arming Terrorists today act that is aimed at fixing this problem.",
"We are secretly giving groups affiliated with them arms and money for one... URL_0",
"It is hard to defeat it, when you are fighting it with one hand while arming and training it with the other.",
"If governments really wanted ISIS gone, then they would be gone. Why do you only see documentaries of kurds or left over iraqi soldiers fighting? Because they are the only ones fighting. If the world powers really actually cared about defeating an organization that has committed terrorist attacks then they could defeat ISIS in a week if they wanted to.",
"I'd say for the most part it's just a cycle of vengeance for many,as these countries bomb and attack the organizations they kill off innocents or terrorist that are family members of these innocent people and could therefore give said innocent people a motive to hate these countries which leads to more recruits and the numbers fluctuate as the war moves forward.",
"Many of the forces opposing them are either working at cross purposes to each other, or only recently started seriously fighting them at all. For several years of the war the Syrian goverment, preferred to focus on more moderate opposition groups, leaving ISIS pretty much alone while pretending to fight them, knowing that the more extremist their opposition the more western states would prefer Assad over extremist jihadis with a habit of such gruesome executions etc. Turkey cares primarily about preventing the Kurds from taking de facto control of more land especially if Kurdish territory becomes all joined up. Russia cares primarily about keeping its naval base on the coast. Iran cares primarily about maintaining a corridor of Shia control so it can project influence into the mediterranean. Until recently when ISIS become one of the last anti-gov forces left standing it was only the western world that really saw them as the biggest problem, and their domestic climate is (post Iraq and Afghan conflicts) currently very risk and conflict averse. Until recently also ISIS had been winning the conflict with Al-Qaida and its affiliates for the status of the worlds pre-eminent radical non-state Sunni actor - in the process they won the support of some who had previously supported Al-Qaida.",
"Little late to the party, but I had a professor once say that trying to take down terrorist groups was a bit like fighting a fire with gasoline. It gives them ammunition, if you will, to recruit. At the same time, doing nothing isn't necessarily an option.",
"All it takes to defend ISIS and friends once and forever is a few million permanently stationed soldiers, a couple hundred thousand medical professionals, at least a million teachers, the biggest investment in infrastructure there ever was and an entire generation or two in north africa and the middle east that grows up in peace. oh, and an agreement between the US, Russia, Israel, Iran, all the Arab states and Turkey. As you can see, it's simple.",
"They aren't easy to kill. With someone like the Nazi's in Germany, you can storm the capital, take control, and you can end the war right there. But Isis and Al Qaeda are like tumors. If you don't take every last bit out, it will just grow back. Imagine if, after taking Berlin, you had to find and kill every single remaining German soldier. And none of them were wearing uniforms. And some of your own men were secretly German soldiers. And they will fight until, and after, they die, with no regard for personal safety.",
"USA is supporting them by arming and teaching \"moderate rebels\". Then they suddenly join ISIS. Turkey buys ISIS's oil.",
"The more aggressive we are against them, the more collateral damage we cause. The more collateral damage we cause, the easier it is for them to find recruits.",
"Let's not forget that the US is still lowkey supplying and financing ISIS, so they'll destabilize the Middle East. Don't have time to link any articles right now. Ut spend more than 5 seconds on Google and you'll fund plenty about it, from reputable sources.",
"Because the only ones fighting ISIS with boots on the ground are Iraqi soldiers and some tribes up north. One of the major rules in any war is, you can bomb, you can use drones, but without BOOTS on the GROUND you will not take anything. They are essentially the backbone. They claim territory. If in the future we are lucky enough to see a US and Russian coalition going there with boots on the ground, tanks, backed up by airstrikes, it would take a few months to eradicate them. That is if RU and US follow a strict no prisoner-shoot on sight policy which in case of ISIS they most definately should.",
"Partially because ISIS is a set of values that anyone can adhere to (a very very bad set, mind you) and it's incredibly difficult to kill an idea.",
"Can someone explain to me when ISIS started, and what their ideology is/why do they hate us? Are they leftover strands of the military that Saddam and Al-Quida (sp?) lead?",
"You can never win a war against a noun. The war on drugs will never work, nor will the war on terror. A uniformed and cohesive enemy you can defeat, not a noun.",
"Because the US is actively funding ISIS and using them as an excuse to justify our presence in the Middle East while we destabilize the living shit out of it and rob every country over there of every single natural resource they have.... Mainly oil.",
"It's politically convenient to have them around. Want to scare up some votes? Say ISIS is growing and your opponent is weak on ISIS. Already in power and want some more? Say ISIS is planning an imminent attack and you need more control to protect everyone. Have pesky protesters and want to jail them? Point to ISIS and say you're the more humane one since you're not beheading them like ISIS. Need a pump in your approval ratings? Kill an ISIS #2.",
"They aren't really fighting them. They just support (!) the active forces in the country! Some with ammo, medicine, knowledge or air support, which is helpful but If they'd send troops aswell, it would be way easier to win against the is. The ground units, who are good at fighting, are the Kurdish ones, which are really (!) small. Not many fighters with worse weapons. The gov just protects their area, Rebels are fighting but making no progress. Just after the Kurdish force joined there was some progress and other units followed like Iraqi troops and Rebels.",
"We're fighting ourselves, that's why. The middle East is the CIA, (ISIS, Al Qaeda), vs the Pentagon. That's why it's called \"theater\". It's a show put on by the 'military industrial complex' Eisenhower warned us about in order to milk us dry. It's a big drug dealing, gun running, pedo ring using our military bases to smuggle contraband and sex slaves around the world while avoiding customs. Heroin from Vietnam was smuggled in the coffins of dead soldiers for cryin' out loud. Of course these psychos don't wanna shut it down and it won't stop until we stop'em.",
"I'm really going to try to tackle this, *like I'm 5*. Inherently many of the nuanced points might not be conveyed well. **School Yard Example:** Everyone is out a recess and many of the kids are eating snacks, but Billy and his close friends don't have any snacks. Billy and his friends are playing in the sandpit grumbling about being hungry. Eventually, Billy gets so fed up about this that he decides to grab a toy, and throw it at a kid with a snack. Billy tells his friends that if you join me, I'll give you part of my snacks, whatever that may be. Some of them like the sound of that, some of them don't. Billy changes his tone, this time threatening, he says help me throw toys at the kids with snacks, or I'll throw toys at you. Now everyone in the sandpit is on board, or at least isn't going to oppose it. Billy takes his toy airplane, and he throws it at George. \"OUCH\", George yells. George and his friends are angry. They have more energy because they aren't hungry, and being frank, George has more friends. George rallies his friends together, they come over to the sand pit, and they take all of the toys away. They warn that if they act up again things will get worse. From Billy's point of view, his still starving, and now some \"meany head\" just came in and took something he really enjoyed and cared about. As you can imagine, Billy isn't going to sit there and take this, now he's more angry. He's now gossiping with all of his friends about how much George and everyone else sucks, and finally he starts cooking up a new plan to get back at them. Billy acts up again, he walks over, throws George's sandwich on the ground and stomps all over it whilst yelling about how this is justified and George is mean. Well, this doesn't go over so well, George winds up, and punches Billy square in the face. After a quick squabble George, having more friends to back him up, wins and Billy goes away. Billy and his friends are still hungry, now they don't have toys so their frustrated, and Billy has been punched in the face so they have something specific to use as proof that George and his friends are bad people; imagine how angry that gossip must be. **Afterwards** This example highlights that while Billy and George are fighting with increased vigor, no one is addressing the real issue: Billy is hungry. In fact George, in his frustration, just keeps making things worse when he shows up. This example highlighted a few things: * To end extremism you need to tackle the root grievances. If you don't, similar organizations and thoughts will just keep arising. If Billy is hungry, punching him won't fix that. * Many are coerced into fighting, or into not speaking out against it. There is usually a dogmatic inner group of dedicated radicals that must be dealt with by force, but as you get further from them people are less devoted. At the fringes many are only joining the fight because they're getting paid, and couldn't support their family otherwise. * Playing into the story of extremists usually helps them significantly with recruitment. When George punched Billy, now all of Billy's friends are all hyped up and ready to help out. A real life example of this was the [Abu Ghraib Prison]( URL_0 ). This example also fails to communicate a few things: * Extremism isn't solely comprised of Islamist extremism. * There are many more problems besides hunger, but poverty is a huge one. * Extremist tend to recruit young males most effectively, this provides them with an immediate outlet for adventure and excitement, a cause, a chance to have much more influence than they probably otherwise would have. Many counter violent extremism (in the development space at least) aim at young people to catch them at this key stage. This example doesn't set any historical context. **End** Ultimately this still leaves out a lot of what's at play here, but I still think it's useful to explain whats going on. Hopefully if anyone actually reads this, people will comment to help me fill in the situation more wholly. yet if there was one take away here, it's that we keep trying to fight the people instead of the actual problem. Even if we did magically \"defeat ISIS\" tomorrow, a new organization would rise with the same anger and concerns as the one before it. Sure it would have different features and iconic components, but it would more or less be very similar in what drives it and makes it function. That's where Developmental Assistance comes in, to address the root grievances and stop the situations perpetuating these organizations.",
"Not to beat a dead horse or sound corny, defeating an idea is impossible with any amount of military action.",
"Because, just like your SJWs these days, when things get tough they disappear into the crowd and cease their activities.",
"Now that you read all the contrived answers, here is the simple truth: Our Military Industrial Complex wants it that way.",
"Because the forces that are fighting them (the US) is also supporting and arming them. Isis gives the US a reason to be in the middle East to further their oil interests",
"1. Rich Saudi Arabians fund them. 2. ISIS recruits young people, knowing that many yearn for a purpose in life (what greater purpose is there than to serve God?) and really want to fight. 3. Guerrilla movements want to lose against establishment powers in order to ultimately win against them.",
"Lots of great information here/below but from a very fundamental perspective it boils down to fighting an ideology rather than an army is a war no one has ever won. Battles may have been won and time has favored one side or another but success is limited. Hence we still have Christianity vs Islam.",
"Well there are a plethora of answers but it boils down to war is just a loose term, ww1 and ww2 were total war, so everyone and every part of society was geared to war and defeating the enemy. Today's \"wars\" are limited air actions and even more limited boots on the ground. Literally gotta walk over every patch of ground killing everyone who's the enemy. Not leisurely dropping bombs with the odd air strike. Very simplistic answer yes.",
"ISIS is funded and controlled by the West as its destabilization army. ISIS IP addresses have been traced to British government addresses. The US has funded, trained and given weapons to them on record. Israel was caught saving two ISIS lives in Turkey, also on record. McCain has taken selfies with ISIS leaders and this is freely available to see on the web. The reason they are so hard to beat is because those fighting ISIS don't want to beat them.",
"Because good guys have to try their best to distinguish between actual enemy combatants and people who support the ideology but haven't done any terroristic acts. This ideology also glories martyrdom, which effectively makes every death of a terrorist a rallying cry for those on the edge. As long as the ideology lives on, there will be an ample supply of new recruits. So far the world powers have a lot of success militarily, but an effective strategy to combat the ideology hasn't been established.",
"\"ISIS\" as an existential threat to the West exists because a variety of Western interests need it to exist. The military industrial complex needs to sell weapons. Right wing politicians need a baddie to unite their base. Network news needs ratings. As soon as ISIS is no longer needed, they will be just another bunch of rebel groups fighting in various conflicts. Most likely the ISIS brand will be retired when it is past its shelf life. Kind of like fashion brands get disposed of every few years as consumers move on to the new hot thing. Remember al Qaeda? They're still around, but they're like, soooooo 2004.",
"Tl;dr: everyone is fighting over who gets to beat ISIS. Normally it would be the Iraqi army but it collapsed. A big part of the problem is that Iraq and Syria are a huge mess, so there's so many fights over who gets to fight ISIS, because whoever frees a place from ISIS controls it. The Iraqi army collapsed in 2014 when the soldiers literally decided to leave their weapons and run out of Mosul from the ISIS army that came. The Kurds want to fight but the Turks, Assad, and the Iraqi Arabs don't want them to. Assad's army is busy fighting for their own control on all fronts, and same with the counter-Assad forces like the FSA. Sunnis don't want the shia militias. The Turks want to get in on the action but the Iraqis don't want them to. And everyone is nervous about Americans getting involved again, especially the American public.",
"so many bad answers here. The primary reason is that all the big entities are not actually fighting them on the ground. The US, and to a lesser extent other western powers, will bomb them from time to time. But due to concerns about collateral damage, they just don't carpet bomb an ISIS town. It's just a small air strike here and a small air strike there. To actually defeat them you need ground forces. None of the major forces - including the Syrian army - are fighting ISIS on the ground. The biggest one doing so is the Iraqi army, which is in the process of pushing them out of Mosul. But again, they don't want to just turn their own city into rubble and don't want to kill their own civilians trapped there. So it is very slow and methodical fighting. ISIS has been losing ground for a long time. But this mix of no large armies fighting them + slow advances so as not to kill civilians = slow progress.",
"A lot of good answers. One fact that seems to be missing is the logistics of where the strongholds are. ISIS and others do not just sit in a camp in the middle of nowhere in the desert. They are smart enough to realize that the US won't go bombing recklessly heavily populated areas. (Yes, we have killed civilians even though it has not been admitted). Mosul was taken by ISIS and the only way to flush them out is one by one on the ground unless you want to carpet bomb the whole city and deal with the backlash of killing thousands of innocents. This approach would just breed more hate to us and we end up back at square one with a new leader emerging and starting another Islamic group and naming it something different. We will go through dozens of Islamic groups like ISIS in our lifetime. In ten years it could cycle back to Al Qaeda or the Taliban. Most likely, a current student of Al-Baghdadi will break off on his own and create an even more radical group in the foothills of Iraq.",
"Take a look at this video to have an idea of what fighting ISIS looks like. URL_0 ISIS doesn't really have an army. ISIS doesn't really even exist as solid entity. Any number of the people walking around on the street could have been ISIS fighters, and you would have been none the wiser. Think of it like if the TEA Party in the USA became militant. We know who the leaders of the TEA Party are, and we would know if someone stepped up or got promoted to a leadership position, but how do we really know who is a MEMBER of the TEA Party unless they self-identify as one? This is why people keep saying that ISIS cannot be defeated militarily, or even by us; they have to be beaten by those that live there. A conventional army can't fight car bombs, IED's, suicide bombers, and terrorists posing as civilians and taking shots at you from the back. Our military superiority has done its part. We've killed most ISIS leaders, and constant air strikes have wiped out their capacity to wage open warfare. That's only half the battle though.",
"Religion and ideological values set a foundation but ISIS is unique in how it has grown beyond just \"cult status.\" The reasons for this are vast and highly connected to their financial funding, social media presence, the global awareness of the group, and ability to recruit across borders. We could talk about the drive to create a caliphate - essentially an Islamic State as the name ISIS would suggest. This has grounding in the Koran though no doubt Islamic scholars always debate the details just like we see in other major religions. This is part of the reasons for having different denominations and sects. Religion is a fluid thing and never concrete, which is why they can persist for extended periods of time. All this said, I find the religious aspect to be to simple to explain the power of ISIS. I should add I work in Compliance (AML and terrorist financing are my focus). I think the financial and media driven elements paint a larger story of how ISIS continues to exist so well. Much of ISIS recruitment is done online and in places where people are at their lowest and most susceptible to promises of a better life - or promises of providing some better standing with a higher power. Jails throughout the EU are an example breeding ground. The uncomfortable thing about this is it is not a unique strategy - every religion or life changing ideological organization (like AA) provide similar services. We consider most religious visitors or organizations dedicated to, at least, social norming such as with AA when the goal is to convert alcoholics to non-alcohol driven lifestyles. Islam is not exempt from this and is generally accepted through much of the word - and heavily through policy in countries under Islamic law and EU countries as well (which some consider to be a contributing factor to ISIS attacks in Belgium and France for example). The recruitment is critical because it not only provides a \"body,\" but everything that body can provide. While some become fighters and even smaller numbers suicide bombers or executioners, most become just a part of the ISIS nation. The soldiers need food, places to stay, work and money to fund equipment, etc. Some of these people involved in the ISIS network may be by force - as may be the case with many business owners forced to pay money to ISIS just to exist. They also own and receive money from much of the oil flowing out of the Middle East, adding a serious amount of revenue into their coffers. In order for the caliphate to work, there needs to be a functional economy. While it's disputable to what extent ISIS really operates a standalone economy - I have seen examples of a possible currency created for ISIS members used to pay for goods and services. I have also heard of members being paid salaries - for fighters this is extra concerning as no doubt mercenary types may not care for the religious experience, but more for the financial opportunity. Recruitment of foreigners often begins with some coercion of having basic needs met with money, housing, a social group, etc. Situations like this help show how ISIS is not just a religious institution, as even the non-religious can benefit if they are valuable enough - and everyone is valuable, even if you are just a body a bomb can be strapped too. Pulling from my work experiences evaluation merchant relationships with generally large corporations of the world, I can tell you screening measures are often lax and to some extent arbitrary. It is made worse by organizations wanting to save money so they do the bare minimum required to remain \"compliant.\" This has meant half-assing documentation required to do business with new merchants, for example. Still, when the vetting system works correctly, it is still difficult. The key to defeating ISIS is to remove their money flows - but this is made difficult to do as they do not just use traditional banking systems but also Islamic banks, hawala exchanges, cryptocurrencies, etc. All of these things paired with organizational layering on an international level helps ISIS breed the money it needs and, importantly, keeping it available and accessible when needed with little concern for being discovered as associated with ISIS. When it comes to financing ISIS, it can be difficult to determine just when money is being used by or for ISIS. Most money is not being sent via PayPal to \"ISIS.\" Some send money to front business set up by the ISIS organization such as the Al-Aqsa Foundation which is found on many terrorist watch lists now. Other times a person pays for a regular service or good - like food at a grocery store - and the store owner ten cuts a check to an ISIS member who can deposit into an account used for purchasing guns and housing for soldiers. You can see how the rabbit hole can become very deep. The hardest part in all this from a Compliance industry perspective (or obviously my own take on the industry I am professionally involved in) is that things operate on hindsight and predictive analytics. It's easy to flag a terrorist after they kill someone and are captured from a battle ground, less easy to identify people who haven't done anything illegal. After all, like I said, some ISIS supporters don't go to war and just provide a home to live in or a personal check. Not illegal until you can connect the person receiving the funds with ISIS and depending on location the intention of the individual providing the service or money. The last stop in this overview is at the level of governments - and how they are motivated by money and self-preservation in most instances, above all. When financing of terrorism comes from the state level - true power is really provided to ISIS. An example outside of the world of terrorism is the development of the country of Israel not too long ago. It required a push from countries around the world for land to be granted to the Jewish people so they would have a permanent state. In the same way, the goal of the Islamic caliphate is to create a state (or world) for Muslims. Microcosms of this exist in countries like Saudi Arabia and Iran that having Islamic banks and Sharia law systems. ISIS is terrifying because they are emulating past state creations but now with a camera constantly affixed on them - but often controlled as well. ISIS has some top tier marketers and video/photo editors out there and this has allowed them to breed fear and submission on a global stage. Yes, politicians may speak out against them and people hold candlelight vigils outside of terror sites, but these things do not control ISIS. They manipulate every word to new propagandas - some of which you can readily keep up with in your language of choice through the ISIS magazine DABIQ. My end thoughts - you have to kill the money trail. It's not as simple as we would like it to be and is made worst by corruption at the state level where terrorism can easily be funded. Engaging in actual war is probably mostly useless, especially if war is fought by just killing a handful here and there in isolated situations. It's largely symbolic as it makes people feel like actions are being taken to remove the threat, but for some embedded in the theology of ISIS every death brings one closer to god. As a result, many with ISIS seem to lack a fear of death, a factor that makes them a different enemy than just \"going to war with the German Nazis.\" ISIS is truly terrifying for me as they can be an invisible enemy when they want to be, and few will stand in their way."
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"http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/5s0whp/eli5_why_is_a_terrorist_organization_like_isis_so/ddccx1b",
"http://imgur.com/a/PD3GO"
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"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_revolutions_and_rebellions",
"http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/hillary-clinton-wikileaks-email-isis-saudi-arabia-qatar-us-allies-funding-barack-obama-knew-all-a7362071.html",
"http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2016/11/22/obama-strengthens-iran-deal-over-gop-outcry/94286304/",
"https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/contrib.php?ind=D",
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"http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-security-idUSKCN11D2JQ",
"http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-saudi-defense-congress-idUSKCN11R2LU",
"http://dailycaller.com/2016/10/10/hillary-in-leaked-email-saudi-arabia-and-qatar-are-funding-isis/",
"http://thefreethoughtproject.com/clinton-us-govt-saudi-funding-isis/",
"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dissolution_of_the_Soviet_Union",
"http://www.independent.co.uk/us/saudi-arabia-us-arms-deal-weapons-sale-tanks-guns-barack-obama-a7182186.html"
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5s0xln | Why do car brands reuse their model names? No other branch does this. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"because they don't change that much from year to year. camry will always be a mid-sized satisfactory driving appliance."
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5s0zgh | Why does judge James Robart have the power to overrule the presidents orders regarding the muslim ban? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The president is only one part (The Executive) of a three-part system, along with the Judicial and the Legislative. The judge is (in this case) a watchdog and his bark deters others (including the POTUS) from going over the law.",
"I haven't read the order, but the short answer is judicial review. The court gets to decide what can and cannot be done under the Constitution.",
"Because he is a Federal Judge and the Judicial branch has checks against the Legislative and Executive branches."
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5s142d | Why does the suffix "ship" exist and where does it come from? | Words like sportsmanship, dealership, championship. Whats up with the "ship" at the end of words? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Middle English, Old English -scipe; akin to shape; cognate with dialectal Frisian, dialectal Dutch schip a native English suffix of nouns denoting condition, character, office, skill, etc.: clerkship; friendship; statesmanship. URL_0"
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5s15hi | Why are Captcha's getting more difficult? | Captcha's used to be typing in a word or number, now whenever I sign up to something I have to click on a few pictures. For instance, it will say 'Click on all the houses'. So you click on them, and them pictures are replaced with other pictures, some of them trees, some of them houses and some of them buildings that are similar looking to houses. Or ones that say 'Click on the street sign', but they're American street signs, and apparently only the green signs are streets? I don't know, help me understand! | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Because robots are getting smarter and smarter so every generation of capatcha becomes useless. The sign thing is just because capatchas developers are so lazy they can't be bothered making it regional",
"Usually you only have to actually do that \"select all the _____\" if the captcha thinks you're not human. The new ones look at your mouse movement on the page and then determine whether to give you the actual captcha or not. I've gotten into the habit of swirling my cursor around for a second or two before clicking the circle, and I barely get a captcha unless I type too fast or use the keyboard to navigate around."
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5s15xa | Why is it so hard to eject water from our ears? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Your ear canal isn't a nice, straight tube. It's bendy and very narrow. It isn't too hard to see why it would be difficult for tiny drops of water to work their way out of a bendy, narrow tube. Eventually water should roll out. If you start to experience pain, or it doesn't work its way out after 2-3 days, then you should consult a physician."
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5s189h | Why can't the person that snores like a bear hear how loud they are and wake themselves up? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They do. I've been kicked awake by my girlfriend for snoring, but then I stay awake as she falls back asleep, then she would begin to snore, startle herself, and then blame ME for snoring... when I'm still awake.",
"Actually, sometimes they can. I know from the experience of being startled by my own snores.",
"Backpacking buddy of mine went to a sleep clinic. He snores so bad no one will share a tent with him. They told him he wakes up every 30 seconds. No wonder he's a grouch."
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5s1ety | How come when you download something it starts slow then gets faster over a few seconds? | What makes it so that the download can't be fast instantly? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Neither you nor the computer you're downloading from know how fast the network between you is ahead of time. If the sending computer just guesses it can potentially flood the network with messages it has no way to deliver and cause network congestion.[ So it starts off sending slowly and ramps up until it finds the \"pain point\" where either network congestion starts or one of the two computers can't talk any faster.]( URL_0 )",
"The internet is built on IP (internet protocol). The internet is a packet-switched network, meaning data is sent as small packets (one packet contains up to 1500 bytes, including some control information called the *IP header*). IP is unreliable delivery, basically the network says it will make the best effort to deliver your packets, but makes no guarantee that the packets will arrive in the correct order, or at all. Another protocol called TCP (transmission control protocol), builds on IP by assigning a *sequence number* to a packet. TCP adds some additional control information to the packet in the *TCP header*. The TCP header includes the sequence number of the packet, and also information about which packets have been sent and received. To summarize, TCP includes enough information in the packets that each sender/receiver can figure out when packets have been dropped or out of order. Now you might be thinking that maybe a download should figure out how fast your network is, and operate at that speed. But the thing is, the speed of the network between two endpoints depends on the speed at all intermediate points, which generally depends on how much other traffic there is at those intermediate points. Moreso, IP doesn't even require different packets from the same data stream to travel the same path through the network! So TCP has a brilliant and simple solution, requiring no technology beyond its already built-in ability to detect dropped packets. All transmissions start slowly, with a small number of packets. Then, as soon as it is reported that all those packets were received, more packets are sent the next time. The sender keeps sending faster and faster, until packet loss occurs [1], then slows its sending speed until it's just under the threshold where packets are lost. But occasionally the sender will attempt to increase the speed again, and in this way continually use packet loss to discover if network conditions might have become favorable to using faster transmission. [1] Unless some other bottleneck occurs first. For example, TCP headers als include information on packets that have been received but not processed; the sender stops sending if the receiver has too many such packets. This can occur, for example, when saving a download to a disk which is slower than your network connection."
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5s1imu | Where do the superwealthy store their money if banks can only insure a small portion of it in a single account? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I manage investments for ultra-high-net-worth individuals, usually referred to as UHNWIs. This is a class of wealth distinct from HNW, and begins around 50 or 100mm USD, depending on which group is rating them. Generally, money works like this. There is a first generation of wealth, almost always created and led by a patriarch figure, who runs their own business. The business does very well and creates so much wealth, the patriarch (apologies for the gender bias, but it is just about always a male) thinks about passing that wealth onto the kids. The kids grow up a bit, and they have their own credit cards and expenses, and maybe even their own families. Patriarch (called \"generation one\" or G1) is still supreme leader, and kids (G2) follow what he says. Since expenses are ballooning, with kids having kids of their own, they decide to keep a family lawyer and accountant and advisor on full-time. This is what is called a family office. Family wealth is managed by the family office. Different families have different strategies for maintaining wealth. Most families seek a 5% annual return, and there are specific investment funds that generate strategies that give them this 5%. So, some of the money goes into these investment funds, some go to their own investment funds (an entity formed to manage money controlled by the family) so they can do their own deals, but usually most of the money is retained by the family business. The reason for this is simple: you own a business that has created enormous value for your family, so you re-invest profits from that business to grow, and that growth creates even more value for you. It's the perfect investment: you know the business perfectly, know how the books work perfectly, have supreme insider knowledge, and it costs you nothing to invest money into the highest areas of growth within the business. So the short answer to your question is that the extremely wealthy keep their money in the businesses that made them extremely wealthy, and take on a kind of allowance from the company that helps them pay for nice things. This is true most of the time, with some very specific exceptions, and there might be two variations which are worth mentioning. The first has to do with Asian and Middle Eastern family offices (which is relevant to western celebrities and athletes). They keep stacks of cash lying around. Gold bars. A lot of real estate investments and \"cash business\" investments (like restaurants and retail). The reason for this is mostly because they're not sophisticated enough to understand things like stocks and bonds, but they understand things they can see and touch. Like a restaurant that serves good beer and cheeseburgers, or a club that's \"just like that one in Las Vegas.\" The other part of it is that in certain parts of the world, the threat of being sued or robbed is so small, you can keep all your money in gold bars and cash, since you have so much influence in your community. Sometimes, your family is so powerful, little brother Kenny can kill an Australian tourist with his Ferrari and the police won't bother him because the court says it was the tourist's fault for walking on the sidewalk. But in America and Europe and Australia, and other places like these, you can be sued for looking at someone funny, so ownership of money is structured to reduce liability. The other exception that's worth talking about in-depth is new Asian money (mostly China, but my focus has been on Myanmar lately, and it applies there too). This is distinctly different from family office operations, mostly in one major way: I have seen entire bedrooms full of cash, packed in plastic bags, stacked floor to ceiling, wall to wall. It's a three-bedroom house, but you only use one bedroom for living. The rest is for storage. Why? Because you don't trust banks, and you don't trust the government to not take your money. So you do an all-cash strategy. Sometimes, you hire a truck to deliver cash for purchases, like when you want to buy a building for a new restaurant. You are known by reputation in the community, so you don't need to have more than $300 or $500 with you at any time; if you want to buy something big, they'll know you're good for it.",
"They don't. They'll have a small amount of cash on-hand for day to day expenses and the rest will be tied up in various investments (real estate, stocks, bonds, gold, etc.).",
"Are you talking about the super wealthy? They hide their money behind shell corporations and trusts and investments. They hold large amounts of stock in major corporations, hard assets like land, art, etc. Some banks give great interest rates for the money accounts. These huge banks like Goldman Sachs won't go under and giving them $500m will yield a very favorable interest rate. You don't just place it like a bank account because you don't need the money, always available. For daily living, they borrow against their accounts. Bill Gates' wealth is tied directly to Microsoft stock. He borrows against this stock to pay for his jet, his house, his cars etc.",
"The wealthy keep their money in various investments. Obviously there is a risk of losing the investment but generally investments increase in value. Once you become employed spend your first few paychecks on things you want to have. Once you have that go see an investment banker and ask for their recommendations. After that start putting every spare cent into those investments. You money will build quickly and you may even begin to think about retiring in 15-20 years."
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5s1nc0 | Why do obese people starve to death before they are super skinny? Why the body doesn't use that fat energy? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They donct thats a total myth. For example Begin quote In 1965, an extremely obese 27-year-old male, weighing in at 456 pounds fasted for 382 days (one year and 17 days) and lost 275.5 pounds. Doctors from the University of Dundee monitored his condition throughout his fast. During his fast, he obese man recorded low glucose levels for 100 days and defecated every 40 to 50 days. He was given potassium tablets to keep his heart healthy and multi-vitamins every day. According to URL_0 , the man was able to fast for over a year due to these factors:A year without food Extreme weightloss: treating obesity by total starvation can be dangerous Related Stories Audio: A year without food (Science Online Audio) Back in June of 1965, a Scotsman weighing 207 kilograms, described as \"grossly obese\" and hereafter known only as Mr A B, turned up at the Department of Medicine at the Royal Infirmary in Dundee. He was sick of being fat and wanted to lose weight by eating nothing and living off his body fat. He told the hospital staff he was going to fast flat out, whatever they said, so they may as well monitor him along the way. He ended up fasting for one year and 17 days — that's right, he ate no food at all for over a year. He lived entirely off his copious body fat, in the end losing about 125 kilograms of weight. Treating obesity by total starvation can be dangerous. There are many reports of total starvation leading to death. For example, some people have died of heart failure during the fast, while another died on the 13th day of his fast from small bowel obstruction. Some people have died during the re-feeding period after the fast — one from lactic acidosis. But to counter this, going hungry is natural. Humans like us (that's Homo sapiens) have been around for the last 200,000 years and for most of that time, food was not always at hand. We evolved to survive with not enough food. Some studies actually show that fasting (or at least, calorie restriction) can have health benefits under certain circumstances. Once you stop eating, your body gets its energy from the glucose in your bloodstream and liver, thanks to your last meal. You carry a semipermanent 0.5 to 1 kilogram of solids in your gut. The glucose from this runs out after about eight hours. Then you start burning up a chemical called glycogen. Glycogen is simply a whole bunch of glucose molecules loosely stuck together. It's stored in your liver and muscles. Glycogen is really easy to break down into the individual glucose molecules from which it was made. You can burn glycogen to get the glucose you need for about another 36 to 48 hours. After two or three days of fasting, you get your energy from two different sources simultaneously. A very small part of your energy comes from breaking down your muscles — but you can avoid this by doing some resistance training, otherwise known as pumping iron. The majority of your energy comes from breaking down fat. But very soon, you move into getting all your energy from the breakdown of fat. The fat molecules break down into two separate chemicals — glycerol (which can be converted into glucose) and free fatty acids (which can be converted into other chemicals called ketones). Your body, including your brain, can run on this glucose and ketones until you finally run out of fat. The average non-obese 70-kilogram male carries about 8,000 kilojoules of energy in glycogen, and about 400,000 kilojoules in his body fat. In the case of our big Scotsman, Mr A B, the staff in the medical school at the University of Dundee kept a close eye on him. He did not eat any food, but the staff gave him yeast for the first 10 months and multi-vitamins every day. Potassium is essential for the proper working of the heart, and when his potassium levels got a little low around the 100-day mark, he was given potassium tablets for about 70 days. He defaecated infrequently, roughly every 40 to 50 days. Blood samples were taken every fortnight, and his carbohydrate metabolism was checked on nine occasions during the 382 days of his fast. Surprisingly, for the last eight months of his fast, his blood glucose levels were consistently very low. They were around two millimoles, which is about half of the bottom end of the normal range. Even so, he did not suffer clinically from this abnormally low blood glucose level. His weight dropped from 207 kilograms to 82 kilograms. Some five years later, he had regained only 7 kilograms. In humans, fasting seems to have health benefits for high blood pressure, diabetes, asthma and epilepsy in children. In animals, fasting seems to reduce the cognitive decline that happens in conditions such as Parkinson's disease and Alzheimer's disease. One problem with fasting is that you can get cranky and irritable (and sometimes hungry). Another is the lack of companionship with your fellow humans. After all, the word 'companion' comes from the roots 'com' meaning 'with' and 'panis' meaning 'bread'. If you spend lots of time not sharing meals with your kith and kin, you run the risk of becoming an outsider. So to keep your friends, continue breaking bread — just don't eat it. End quote",
"They don't. There isn't a huge body of research on this, simply because it's not ethical to starve research subjects to death. If someone starves to death, they will be extremely skinny when they die. (See pictures of famine victims). Being in a state of starvation is high stress on the body though, and people that are in poor health (Obesity does not promote good health) are at a higher risk of dying for tertiary reasons. If you took 100 people at 10% body fat, 100 at 23%, and 100 at 35%, and put them all on water fasting, the average survival time before death is likely to be highest in those with more body fat, given the same relative health levels.",
"Fat deposits don't contain all of the things you need to survive. Even if your body is breaking them down in order to try and survive a starvation period you'll run low on certain nutrients and can become malnourished.",
"Your fat is nothing but an energy reserve. It's calories to sustain you for short periods of time, when you don't get enough calories to support your activity levels. How far will your car get, with a full tank of gas, but no battery, spark plus, or air in the tires? Your body needs more than just energy to survive.",
"I've never heard of an obese person starving to death, is this an actual thing?",
"[If the body receives it's necessary vitamins/nutrients in addition to enough water, it's possible to basically \"starve\" for prolonged periods of time.]( URL_0 ) Therefore, if an obese person dies while fasting before they are super skinny, it is not due to starvation.",
"The body also needs new nutrients that will pass through the body in the form of excretion like sweat, with Essentials like salt and water, and feces with others. These need regular replenishment and a person can not live long without them, certaintly not long enough to get a fat person skinny",
"Like any machine, the cells in the body will eventually stop working, unless repair work is done on them. This repair work needs raw materials (mainly protein and fat) as well as energy. If you do not eat any protein, your body will start cannibalising less important parts (such as muscle) to keep the more important organs (heart, lungs etc) going. This process can only go on so long before you run out of usable protein, and you will die of organ failure. If you are fat enough, but not particularly muscular, this can happen before your energy reserves are used up.",
"They have the energy reserves, by they are missing the other components to survive. Thus they starve their body of essential nutrients and die because of it.",
"Your body needs more than energy. You need water, vitamins, minerals, and protein. You have enough energy to survive from all the fat, but fat people still need other things to rebuild body tissue and for their body parts to function."
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5s1r40 | Why does cilantro taste like soap? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because you and I have a genetic difference than other people that makes it taste so awful. Been trying to like it for years, no such luck."
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5s1sfh | How can America spend $600 billion a year on their military, 54% of their federal spending, while other large countries spend a 10th of that? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"How?\" Because the US priorities military spending. Why can other spend less, this becomes a somewhat circular question. And it's because the US spends so much. The US vastly subsidizes its allies militaries. Basically the US military is super bad ass, so others don't need to spend as much and can do other things with their money instead. On the US's enemies, it's similarly true-- the US military is so powerful, you can't ever hope to compete, so why bother? Spend that money elsewhere. In the end, essentially the US having an insane military is subsidizing keeping everyone else peaceful and sane and not building giant expensive militaries, that's great for everyone. It's a system that works. Perfect? Oh probably not, but the world is quite damn peaceful for a long time.",
"It's not 54% of our spending; it's 54% of our *discretionary* spending. When you add in mandatory spending (i.e. medicare, medicaid, social security, paying interest on the debt, etc.) it's only around 16% of our total spending. We spend the money because someone needs to safeguard global trade. China and India can't do it because they're busy playing catchup technologically, and can't project power. Russia can't do it because most of their military (particularly their Navy) is in shambles following the collapse of the USSR. And Europe doesn't do it because they'd rather spend the money on health care and social programs, and ignore the fact that if the US abandoned them they'd have a rather large problem.",
"1. Your numbers are wrong. The Federal Government spends [$4.147 trillion trillion]( URL_0 ) a year. The Department of Defense spends [$582.7 billion]( URL_1 ). So 582.7/4147 billion = 14%, not 54%. 2. We spend much more than other countries because A) we pay for the defense of most western countries, including Canada, Western Europe, Japan, Australia, South Korea, etc. B) other large military powers are relatively poor (China, Russia) and pay their servicemen and women a fraction of what we pay ours. A huge amount of our military budget goes towards paying high salaries and benefits to our front-line troops and civil servants supporting them.",
"America only spend 3.3% of their gdp on military. Other countries such as Russia spend higher but since America's gdp is so high, even 3.3% of their gdp is 10 times higher than Russia's 5.4%.",
"They prioritize military spending. Other countries could spend a similar portion of their budgets but that money has to come from somewhere, meaning other programs lose out.",
"Part of the reason why the US is so wealthy and powerful is because its power and influence doesn't stop at its borders, it's part of a vast economic empire that spans the globe. Maintaining a global empire is very costly (the US has over a thousand overseas military bases. No other country on the planet has as much military power stationed outside its own borders) and tends to perpetuate the threats against it. The bigger your empire is, the bigger it must be to secure itself. This creates a vicious cycle of increasing military spending that's not economically sustainable.",
"First of all, economically speaking, there are no other large countries like the US. The US's GDP is about the size of the next three countries combined, making direct comparisons with absolute values misunderstands both math and economics. Most of the high on the GDP list are close US allies, who share a lot of interests with the US. Because the US had such a large military, they don't have to, and they often look to the US military to intervene on because of those shared interests. Canada knows the US isn't going to let anyone mess around in their neck of the woods, and can piggyback off of US military spending.",
"Yeah basically what everyone else is saying. The U.S. has a huge GDP and a reasonable portion of it is Government spending on defense. (Although I'm not sure half the people saying GDP know what it actually is, people treat it like it's the country's income but it is absolutely not) The U.S. Also spends more than other Western Nations because, like it or not, it has played the role of world police since the 50s, arguably even earlier. So people from other countries who spend less on defense gripe at America and American citizens about defense spending, but they would change their tune in a hot second if shit hit the fan and they needed help from their ally with the big guns. Also, the U.S. Is a big player with a big target on their head for a variety of reasons. If some unlikely scenario arises where it needs to defend itself, it probably doesn't want to depend on the military might of European allies located on an entirely different continent. One last thing to consider is the incredibly broken system of military contractors. The U.S. pays out the ass for pretty much everything defense related because the upfront costs of the infrastructure necessary to meet their demands is incredibly high. So they turn to the private sector where the infrastructure is already available, but these private contractors charge exorbitant prices, and half the time the projects get canceled anyway. Tl;dr: The U.S. Spends a reasonable amount given the size of its economy and its role in international politics."
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5s1wgr | why do jeans develop holes on the inside of the thighs just below the groin area | I'm guessing it's from friction when you walk but why has no jeans manufacturer done anything to fix it. And why does the first hole always seem to be on the right-hand side | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yeah, it's just chafing. Manufacturers will never fix this, if they make the jeans more sturdy then they'll last longer, which means you're holding onto one pair for longer instead of buying another. As for left to right, it would be different for everyone. Legs aren't exactly symmetrical."
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5s1zvx | What likely happened to the bodies that were trapped inside the Titanic? | Wondering if they were preserved for a long time? Maybe some remains still exist down there? Or are they all likely gone? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think they're asking about the ones trapped inside of rooms that could not possibly be opened by marine life or ocean currents. The ones in rooms with locked doors",
"The remains that stayed with the ship are long gone, all the aquatic life likely made quick work of an easy meal.",
"Most if not all of the organic material has long since been eaten away by bacteria and other aquatic life. Human remains were the first thing that bacteria, fish, and crustaceans feasted on. In 2012 pictures taken by Dr. Robert Ballards centenary expedition showed what could possibly be human skeletal remains still inside the ship. Within 50-100 years the majority, if not all, of the ships hull and fittings will have been consumed by the iron eating bacteria *Halomonas titanicae* and what is left of it will then disintegrate into the seabed. It's very likely that the remnants of the ship will not be there for the bicentenary."
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5s21oc | How supplements are not drugs and drugs are not supplements | Like how supplements effect the body and how drugs effect the body. What makes a drug, like HGH, and what makes a supplement? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It entirely depends upon whether that particular substance has been put through the rigorous multi-year testing required by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to prove that said substance does actually help or cure the condition the company claims it does (and won't kill anybody in the process). That process is Hella fucking expensive, and if a company can avoid it, it does, because prefer to make as much dough as possible, without being bothered by pesky things like prosecution for wrongful deaths. So if a company sells a substance (like Echinacea or St Johns Wort) as a supplement, they ain't gotta do any testing. This doesn't save them from prosecution if people die, though. And if enough people complain, the FDA will get 'em on false advertising anyway (As is currently happening with the weight loss product Garcinia Cambogia)"
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5s28qm | During, for example, the Crash of 1929, if everyone is selling their stocks, who buys them? | I'm probably mistaken, but usually when you sell stocks, someone else buys them up, and they pay a price to get it. So if everyone is selling their stocks, what happens when no one wants to buy? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"\"So if everyone is selling their stocks, what happens when no one wants to buy?\" thats exactly what happened. The value of a stock is determined by how much people are willing to pay for it and how many people are willing to sell at this price. since NO ONE wanted to buy the stocks, the value plumeted until people started to say \"okay, at THIS extremely low price I will buy them\"",
"A brokerage will buy them in hopes of selling them for more, or just providing a trading service. Or the issuing company can buy them back. Or just other people who think they see a bargain."
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5s29vr | Before super basic commodities like soap and toothpaste came about, how did people brush their teeth and get clothes clean? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddbw8m2",
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"text": [
"Depends on where you were. In parts of Asia, brushing your teeth with a loosely shredded tea tree stick would do a nice job in your teeth. Other places it was just a stick. Or more frequently, nothing. Teeth were gross and breath was worse. Clothes were actually easier, you just get them wet and scrub them against a rough rock. You've never seen this in a book or movie? And by 'easier' I really mean simpler, it was a huge pain in the ass. But soap isn't as new as you might think. Simple soaps made from ash and tallow have been in use for probably 5000 years. It could basically be made from waste (tallow has a lot of uses, but ash is just ash) so anyone with the knowledge and interest could make it.",
"Rudimentary soap has been around for centuries. We used to burn trees and extract \"lye\" from the ashes. Lye is contains sodium hydroxide. We used this to \"saponify\" animal fat; we broke it down to simply fatty acids. These fatty acids can be used to make soap, you can feel this yourself if you get a strong base (like sodium hydroxide) on your skin. It makes your skin feel soapy as it breaks down your cell membranes in your skin. With regards to toothpaste, I'm less certain. Before we knew about the lye/soap thing (which has been a long long time), the Romans used to ferment urine in order to increase the concentration of ammonia which could be used to also clean clothing."
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5s2ha7 | Why does food that's been heated in a conventional oven or stove pan almost always taste better than when it's heated in a microwave? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because it is less soggy. When you bake the moisture is baked out alittle...You get some nice crisping and browsing and other flavourful things happening. Microwaves just heat the water a little. It kinda spreads into everything making sog and mush.",
"Microwaving basically steams your food with it's own moisture. Ovens use dry heat to bake your food at higher temps that helps caramelize sugars and toast carbs.",
"Microwaving something is effectively identical to steaming or boiling it. If you make say, ramen noodles in a microwave, they're going to taste identical to if you'd cooked them on the stove, but if you're baking or pan frying something, you can get a Maillard reaction that you won't get in the microwave. Another part of this is moisture distribution in the food. Cooking something in the pan or oven might make the outside of it a bit drier than if you cook it in the microwave."
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5s2lc8 | What would you hear when you break the sound barrier? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You wouldn't really hear or feel anything in particular, other than air buffeting whatever fuselage you're in. The sound barrier isn't some magical wall that you only hear at the precise moment you exceed Mach 1; once you exceed that speed, you're breaking the sound barrier at every single moment. Think of it like a boat's wake; the sonic boom that people hear is the moment when the shock wave passes them, but the thing that is creating the wake is creating it *constantly* until it slows down."
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5s2nx3 | How can paying a poverty stricken town more than $1 per hour ruin their economy? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddc33qr"
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"text": [
"Money is basically a way we signal how valuable something is/how much effort. If you start paying certain people in a town, they suddenly have massive buying power. They can literally buy everything. Money is basically signalling \"these people deserve everything\". Think of it this way- if they make $1/day, if you show up in town with $100, you can basically buy out most of the town. Which doesn't do the town much good if you just bought all their food/supplies. It also creates a huge incentive to steal/murder the richer person (either you, or the town person you're paying). If they're barely surviving/eating, and you walk in with more than a years' worth of food, essentially, that's awfully damn tempting, even in the best of times. This is especially bad in a poor town that is pretty isolated. In modern economies, it's not all that different than billionaires- except they're spread over much more of a population, so they don't mess with say, the food supply (although many would argue, they still distort the economy; look at how many resources they end up controlling). Imagine having a billionaire living in a small town, and only spends his money in the town. it's going to mess with things. edit: And while they can change their prices, it often doesn't happen over night- and even if they do, if the richer town people can afford it, it's going to be more of a struggle for the townspeople you didn't pay."
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5s2u8l | Why are their different types of pain, for example, dull, sharp etc? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Whilst my biochemistry is too out of date to explain the different kinds of pain (for example, heat based pain is certainly different in sensation to a cut or similar), I can give a basic answer. Two large factors: how badly it hurts and where it hurts. To explain how badly, imagine throughout your body you had lots of tiny little bubbles of water throughout your tissues. Whenever one of these bubbles is popped, it triggers the closest nerve and sends a signal to your brain that is registered as 'pain'. So if you get a splinter in your little finger, a few bubbles immediately around will pop causing a sharp feeling of pain. If you stub your little toe, a lot of bubbles throughout your toe will register (more!) pain. Now imagine that as soon as a bubble pops, it seals itself and slowly refills. If whatever is causing the pain is still there (e.g. splinter!) it will pop again and continue the pain signal. But if all in that area have been popped, it will take time for them to refill and popping repeatedly will make a much weaker sensation than when you first got the splinter. This is numbness. Certain areas of your body have far fewer bubbles to feel pain, such as bone or muscle. Hence a bruise is a dull pain rather than a sharp one."
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5s2v01 | The strategy of NASCAR racing | What are the specific strategies that go into NASCAR racing? After casually observing it looks like the strategy is: get someone to push you; block people that aren't on your team; stay behind a car and then pull out in front of it on a turn. Is there anything more to it? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So I'm going to talk from a perspective of mainly watching Formula 1, Formula E, the odd MotoGP and Indycar, and maybe some WEC here and there, but a lot of the racing strategy can work for all disciplines. The first thing to understand is that the strategy isn't just \"What the driver is doing right now\", but also how the team manages the race. The first thing that goes into race strategy is Pit stops. Depending on the discipline, pit stops can involve changing all or some of the tires, adding fuel, and in some disciplines, changing the entire vehicle or driver. First let's talk about tires. Tires degrade, sometimes just because of hard racing, sometimes because they're designed to(Formula 1 has tires specifically designed to last a certain amount of laps). As they wear, they start to lose traction. As they lose traction, they start to lose speed. Fresh tires will always be faster than old tires. However, going down the pit lane(which almost always have speed limits for safety purposes), taking off the old tires, and putting on new tires takes a chunk of time. So the first level of strategy is \"When is it worth getting another lap out of the tires vs. when are we losing enough speed to make it worth coming in now\". Also, doing things like braking hard into turns, taking turns quickly, following closely behind the car in front, trying to overtake, etc will wear the tires even more, but are a little faster. So the driver can drive in ways to sometimes preserve the tires, and sometimes just get speed out of them. There's more on top of that decision too. There's a technique called \"The undercut\", which basically refers to when, say, the 5th place car pits before the 4th place car. The 5th place car then comes out on new tires which are faster, and drives as hard and as fast as they can, wearing out the new tires, but going much faster than the car that was in front of them. When the 4th place car then pits, they'll have lost the time to the 5th place. If it works out, this means that the 5th place car can essentially pass the 4th place car without needing to actually pass them on the track. So teams always have to be aware of how old the tires on the other cars are as well. I'm not sure if NASCAR has different tire compounds, but in many disciplines there's also the fact that there can be different compounds of tires. So there might be tires which are faster, but degrade faster as well, or tires which are slower, but last longer. NASCAR also has an additional facet to this where because on oval tracks the driver is only turning one direction, one side of the tires wears faster than the other. This means that teams can execute a pit stop much faster if one side of the tires is fine, but the other side still needs to be changed. Now, the next thing is fuel. Refuelling takes a lot of time, and for that matter is pretty dangerous. Fuel is also heavy, and weight increases lap time. So in a perfect world, you'd want to add exactly enough fuel where it runs out as the car stops in its pit box, and then put exactly enough fuel to make it to the next pit stop(Or the end of the race, if they won't need to pit for tires). Since there are so many things to think about in terms of tires though, it's hard to get that exactly right. Again with this, the driver can somewhat mediate how much fuel they're using. Sometimes they have controls on how much fuel the engine uses, and sometimes they can just drive in ways that reduces the fuel consumption. Last year's Indy 500 was won by a driver who didn't take on fuel when everyone else did, thus passing the other cars as they took their pit stops. He then ran out of fuel on his victory lap, because even saving fuel, he took it exactly to the limit of how much he had remaining. Deciding on tire wear and fuel is why sometimes you see drivers pass, and sometimes you see them happily parade behind each other... it's easier on the tires and takes less fuel to draft behind someone than it does to try to overtake them. Similarly, sometimes if there's a car that's on fresh tires, and you still want to go several more laps before pitting, then maybe you don't block them. Or if (in disciplines where there are different compounds), let's say that the car behind is on new softer tires, and you're on older harder tires, you might really try to block them so that they have to tear the shit out of their tires to get past, while your tires are on their last legs anyways. The ELI5 version is that basically passing other cars is hard, even with the draft-out break-pass way of passing. It's hard on the car too, and fixing that all up takes time. So the \"strategy\" is managing when it's best to fix everything up, when it's best to push, and when it's best to conserve.",
"> Is there anything more to it? Turn left.",
"ultimate goal for a single nascar race is be the 1st past the line after however many laps the race is. problem is..your fuel tank won't last 200 laps. your tires won't last 200 laps. the harder your driver pushes the car around the track, the quicker your tires and fuel runs out. the track doesn't stay static. cars also have to run in a pack of other cars. due to aerodynamics, a single car going around the track by itself is dramatically slower than 2 cars working together bumper to bumper going around the track. this leads to a continuously fluid set of short term cooperations and competitions going on during the entire race. the driver is in communications with the crew chief as well as the spotters to find and visually negotiate these short partnerships against other opponents. suppose you and a fellow team member are in a 3 pack of cars. opponent in lead, you and team in 2nd and 3rd position. as all 3 of you pull out of the turn, #2 car and #3 both pull to the inside or outside, suddenly removing the lead car's slipstream. he loses speed and both of you pass him while being bumper to bumper. he has to hope to catch your #3's tail wind to keep pace. otherwise if he gets too far, he'll be a single car on the track at a much slower pace than everyone else. or alternatively, you're in the lead with opponent in #2 and your team member in #3. you're approaching a corner and you coordinate with your team member. you purposely take a little suboptimal race line hoping the #2 car follows your lead just so he can remain in the slipstream. meanwhile your teammate in #3 takes the optimal race line and passes both of you while your opponent is cursing."
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5s2w83 | Why can the human iris be of bright colors (i.e. green, blue, ...) when the rest of the body is a variation of red/pink/brown flesh? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The human eye only has one pigment of color which is brown. The brown pigment comes from melanin. Blue eyes have very little melanin, green and hazel eyes have have more and brown have the most. The blue color comes from the scattering effect of light it's a similar processes as the light scattering to make the sky blue. Most people will say that blue eyes lack pigment altogether, but people who lack pigment, are albino and their eyes red or pink which is a reflection from the blood vessels behind the iris."
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5s31wc | Why can't any of my electronics use multiple channels/sources (e.g. wifi & 4g) to download data at the same time? | I get that if I connect my laptop to an ethernet cable, I will still have to deal with a bottleneck at my modem/router/subscription, but what limits (my) computer/phone to only one channel/source? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddc1m8j",
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"text": [
"Nothing (well, other than your data plan). My Galaxy S5 has a \"download booster\" option which uses 4G and wifi at the same time.",
"There is a way, but it's pretty recent (the specification was written in 2013- it's [here]( URL_0 ) if you want to take a look). The problem is that the Internet was built without taking multiple connections into account. It assumes that each device has one address, and that it should find the one best way to get to that address and keep sending more data that way. So it needed some changes in the way your device communicates with the server in order to know that your device has multiple addresses and it should split the data it sends between them."
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5s32zz | How do people actually survive falls from incredible distances? IE - say your 'chute doesn't open? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddc1ksr",
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"text": [
"On the rare occasion that they do, it tends to be due to something relatively gentle (not that many things are, at terminal velocity) breaks their fall before the ground does. Examples might include extreme amounts of snow or dense tree branches. So your deceleration is spread out over a great many feet, instead of all at one sharp liquid-y splatter. That being said, I stress 'relatively' gentle. It's still going to beat the crap out of you unless you are astoundingly fortunate.",
"By doing the drop-roll thing they teach paratroopers. Lengthening the impact time can dramatically reduce chance of death, so if the impact is over 1 full second rather then 0.1 of a second, the impact energy is spread out. Maybe someone better at maths then me can do that part."
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5s3i9v | What keeps countries from demanding debts being paid in full, suddenly? | Example, China currently holds a trillion in U.S. Debt to them . I can kind of wrap my head around how a global economy works but what is keeping countries that own other countries debt from demanding it be paid off? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What stops the bank from demanding you pay off your mortgage today or they'll take your house? They can't just call in the debt because that's not what was agreed to when the money was loaned. Most government debt comes from Government bonds - which have a set amount, set interest rate and a **set date they become payable** It (obviously) is a lot more complicated then that - but the ELI5 answer is they can't do it because they have a legal contract which says they can't",
"First China only holds a little over $1 trillion is U.S. Debt not trillions. Second, what stops any bank from demanding immediate repayment of loans? Well it runs counter to the purpose of the loan in the first place; gaining interest. Third, even if they did; the U.S. Would just say no and the price China would have to pay in any attempt to recover the funds falls far short of the benefit of having those funds Fourth, if it didn't turn into a war the world economy would most definitely suffer heavily which is something no country could afford; especially china which is a massive exporter in the world market.",
"The terms of the debt. Just the bank that holds your mortgage can't just up and decide \"pay us the $100K you owe us tomorrow\", entities that loan money to governments have follow the terms of the loan. This usually comes in the form of a bond maturing, which can take years, even decades.",
"Because in global scale, debt works more like an investment, so demanding its payment in full would be counter productive. If you owe me $1000 dollars, and have been paying me just the interest on it (say 10% a year) for 15 years, you've already paid me my $1000, plus $500 on top. So, at this point, we basically have an arangment where you just hand me $100 a year for the rest of your life....so demanding that you suddenly pay me back the initial loan would net me some cash in the short term, but I'd essentially be killing the golden goose."
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5s3ohb | On the movie Arrival, what was the whole purpose of the aliens coming to Earth, and why did she have a daughter if she knew that in the future she would eventually die from cancer? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not as simple as \"she had a daughter despite knowing the outcome\". She has kind of moved outside linear time at that point and causality doesn't work like that. She knows her future the way you know your past."
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5s3ula | How a song you used to know, but after 10 years are unable to say a single phrase from it, once the music starts you suddenly can sing the whole thing without even thinking? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddc9774"
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"text": [
"All your memories are stored in your brain, you DO - as everyone - have autobiographical memory (short of any physical or genetic brain damage) l. It's just that you can't access those memories. But when you encounter a trigger or anchor your brain then attributes more instantaneous significance to those memories and you can recall them. PS: Deep brain stimulation offers evidence of memories being permanent. Hypnosis as well. There are simpler methods but that's beyond the scope of this question."
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5s3xte | How do you prevent/fix gerrymandering? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The simple way to do it is to have a completely independent, arms-length electoral commission. In Australia, our electoral commissions (there are separate ones for federal and each state/territory) are responsible for drawing boundaries. Political parties and any interested individual can submit suggestions, comments, etc, but they have no control over what the final boundaries are. If the party in power gets a poor partisan outcome from the new boundaries, that's tough luck....they can't cancel or overturn the new boundaries on a whim. Apparently some US states do have \"independent\" redistricting now? So there's at least a template for other states to follow.",
"CGP grey has the best answer that heard so far. He explains it in this video URL_0",
"I believe the simplest way to solve gerrymandering is to **increase** representation. \"The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand, but each State shall have at Least one Representative;\" -Article I, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the US Constitution\" So taken to its limit, Congress could have 10,630 members of the House of Representatives. The ability to gerrymander with districts of this size would be significantly diminished. Plus an organization of over 10,000 people becomes more difficult/expensive to bribe. Not too mention getting your individual representatives attention gets much easier.",
"We can use an objective, consistent algorithm to define district boundaries using the [split-line method]( URL_0 ). CPGrey has a good [explanation video]( URL_1 ) of this method. A downside of sorts for this method is that it ignores natural boundaries like rivers and highways, which *do* have significance in distinguishing among groups of people. That said, having a **truly objective** means of drawing districts is the real value here."
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5s3ymd | I have a portable air conditioner. Is it more effective to direct the vents towards the floor or ceiling to cool a room? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Since cooler air sinks, aiming the vents up will result in more even cooling. If you're sitting on the floor, aiming the vents horizontal or down may be more comfortable.",
"Hot air floats, cool air sinks.. thats why many heaters in a room are at the bottom. So facing it up would probably more effective."
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5s40n8 | Why do we feel nauseated when we try to read in a moving vehicle? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Your brain uses two main inputs to determine your balance: your eyes and your inner ear. Inside your ear there are small circular tubes (your semicircular canals) with fluid. As your head turns, the fluid is pulled by gravity, which is detected by hairs attached to nerves. Your brain also pays attention to the position of the horizon whenever possible, and does some calculations based on your movement and what your inner ear is saying to guess how the horizon should look. Your inner ear is your main source of balance, but you may notice that it's still a little more difficult to balance with your eyes closed. Your brain can also pay attention to the position of your limbs relative to the rest of you, but mostly it's your eyes and ears. Nausea happens whenever those two main sources of information disagree on your position. When you're reading, your inner ear is sensing motion as the car turns or goes up or down, accelerates or slows. All of those things change how the fluid in your ears move. Normally, your brain compensates for that with input from your eyes. Basically, tilting your head back and accelerating forward quickly make the fluid do the exact same thing, but if the horizon drops in your vision it means your head is going back. When you're staring at a book, you're not getting any visual indicators that match your motion or balance. In fact, you're getting conflicting information - your book is, more or less, very still, especially if you're concentrating on keeping your eyes focused on the lines of words. That conflict causes the nausea as your brain struggles to make sense of why your ears say one thing is happening, but your eyes say something different. Specifically, your brain thinks you're being poisoned. Many poisons affect your balance very quickly - consider the affect alcohol has on your [ability to balance and walk]( URL_0 ). When your ears and your eyes disagree, that is often a sign of poisoning. If you have ingested something poisonous, you should get rid of it very quickly so more doesn't get into your blood stream. Best way to do that? Vomiting. So you get nauseous to stop you from eating any more of the thing you apparently ate and to make you throw up what you've already eaten. Evolution hasn't really caught up to the existence of cars, though. So your brain can't really figure out that you're not poisoned, you're just in a moving vehicle. So it still thinks you're poisoned. Seasickness is the same thing. When you're in your cabin, you'll probably stay fairly steady as your balance is handled by the signal coming from your ears. However, your eyes are going to see the cabin rock and sway, which disagrees with your ears holding you steady. Likewise, even videogames can make you feel ill if you focus too much on the screen, because your eyes will say you're moving around a lot, but your ears will know you're just sitting in a chair (and virtual reality gets *really* sickening because you're so immersed visually)."
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5s42zk | Why do we have the Statute of Limitations? Why do we let people go, just because they committed crimes in the past? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Statutes of limitations exist for various forms of law in various common law countries. They do not exist solely for criminal offences, and even where they do, they are not necessarily uniformly applicable to all criminal offences. SOLs are necessary to prevent abuse of the court systems. Once a litigant has identified that he or she been wronged, he or she has a finite amount of time in which to *begin* to seek redress for that alleged wrong. Without a finite window in which to begin proceedings, potential litigants would be free to lurk in the shadows until an opportune time arises without the other party having any notice that they may be the target of litigation. Consider the following scenario: John and Jack are neighbours in the City of Ableton. John pays Bob's Plowing to plow his driveway, shovel his sidewalk, and salt them during the winter season. The City of Ableton's bylaws require property owners to render their property safe within 24 hours of a snowfall. In order to comply with his legal obligations, Bob keeps a record of the time at which each property he services is completed and provides his clients with a copy. After a particularly fierce ice storm, Jack slips and falls on a sidewalk that is on John's property (or is his legal responsibility). Jack is seriously injured with a broken hip and misses several months of work. However, despite notifying John of the injury, Jack does not pursue legal action. Several years later, John moves out of state and disposes of a lot of old paperwork including his paperwork from Bob showing when his property was cleared of ice and snow. Shortly after John moves out of state, Jack files a claim in the state courts seeking compensation for the injuries that he sustained due to his fall. At this point, not only does John live out of state and would have to travel to attend court, he no longer has the documentation proving that his property was consistently cleared of ice and snow within the 24 hours required by the city, and in advance of Jack's injury. Jack was in a proper legal position to pursue his claim immediately after he was injured and should have done so. By waiting several years he was able to diminish John's ability to dispute the claim because John had disposed of paperwork that he had no reason to believe was relevant. Similar logic applies to criminal matters. The state should not be permitted to wait for potentially inconvenient evidence to disappear, nor should it be permitted to pursue minor offences many years after they are alleged to have occurred. More serious offences such as murder and armed robbery are generally not subject to statutes of limitations and may be pursued after many decades.",
"Statutes of limitations are designed because the courts recognize their limitations. They know that after a certain amount of time it's hard for people to accurately remember things, that evidence degrades, witnesses move or die, etc.... They also know that people will take advantage of that, and bring suits (or charges) after delays in order to take advantage of people. This is why most things have a statute of limitations. It's notable, though, that not all things do. Murder, so far as I know, can always be prosecuted no matter how long after the event. And most serious crimes have very long statutes of limitations."
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5s48th | Why do we feel extreme chronic pain? Wouldn't a little pain feel good but it seems like a chronic pain would lower our survival skills | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Pain is the body's way of telling you something is wrong. Just because something is wrong for a long time doesn't necessarily mean the body should quit warning you about it."
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5s490t | What determines whether a person sleeps on their back, side, or stomach? Is it just habit? Can we change the position we sleep in over time? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm relatively sure it's related to the firmness of your bed, and not what you prefer. I.e. if the bed is too hard or soft, your body will either cross your legs (while lying on your back) or flip on to your side/stomach. Kelly Starret is the guy you're looking for. He's a Physio that focuses on mobility. URL_0 I had back tension that made me flip on to my side every night. I use a tennis ball to self message my back...I sleep like Count Dracula now."
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5s4s61 | What is the difference between an oligarchy and an aristocracy? | I understand that an oligarchy is a powerful group who control government/legislature and rule in self-interest. But this is extremely similar to an aristocracy - the highest social class which, again, rule in self-interest. Where does the difference lie? The origin of the word aristocracy is related to rule by the 'best' - is it then in how they justify their rule, with oligarchies simply relying on their power to oppress difference? Or are the lines just so blurred that they are different words for different circumstances (e.g. oligarchs post-Soviet Union and aristocrats in feudal Europe)? Thanks in advance. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Oligarchy is the general umbrella term for all \"rule of the few\" systems. \"Oligos\" means \"few\". A monarchy is an oligarchy in which the few are kings, queens, counts, earls, dukes, and so on. \"Mono\" means \"one\". A theocracy is an oligarchy in which the few are priests, bishops and religious institutions. \"Theo\" means \"relating to god\". An aristocracy is an oligarchy in which the few are the privileged upper class associated with nobility after the fall of monarchies. \"Aristos\" means \"best\". A plutocracy is an oligarchy in which the few are the rich corporate elite. \"Plutos\" means \"wealth\".",
"Aristocracy tends to be hierarchical. The knight answers to his lord who answers to the king. An oligarchy is where a select group (who are more or less equal in their status) run the state. Aristocracy carries with it the notion that the rights of the governing group have obligations towards their betters and usually that their rights are inheritable. An oligarchy is when a group of powerful people agree to support each other's power position to override or countermand the will of the population as a whole. You can almost view aristocracy as a heritable oligarchy, but not quite. Aristocracy has historically often been a check on absolute power and aristocracy implies a hierarchy which is of not always typical of an oligarchy. An oligarchy operates to remove any checks and balances on the power of the ruling group whereas an aristocracy usually functions as an inheritable check on the power of the most powerful. The line is pretty grey and various aristocracies were basically oligarchies and you can probably view all aristocracies as some form of oligarchy, but the difference does exist."
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5s4tl0 | What prevents clouds with water freezing up into an ice ball and falling onto our heads? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Clouds aren't a solid mass, they're countless billions of droplets floating in the same area along with water vapor. When they start getting cold, the water condenses into rain or snow or hail and falls. The whole thing can't freeze fast enough to become a giant ice block."
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5s4uvq | Why do cellphone manufacturers/communication companies recommend that you let a new phone die before recharging it? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It should be noted that with Lithium-ion batteries, which is in most smartphones and laptops today, fully discharging them lowers the average lifespan. Small discharges and recharging more often between uses is encouraged in order to increase average lifespan. Fully discharging a lithium-ion battery could be if the electronic device was able to estimate how much time you had left (in time, not percentage) as a fully discharge would allow the device to recalibrate its estimates, but this should be done occasionally (e.g. on a monthly basis). **Sources:** [ URL_1 ]( URL_1 ) [ URL_0 ]( URL_0 )"
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5s4wwo | Why are all tv's on sale all of a sudden | I have been somewhat researching televisions and cant help to notice that most tv brands such as samsung and sony have dropped the prices of 4k tvs. Huge price drops too such as 400-500$ off. Isnt 4k suppose to be the new standard of televisions? Is this not the right time to buy a tv? I have not seen anything about 5k or newer tvs. But like macbooks and iphones I know there is new technology yearly, but what goes for tvs? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Also, tomorrow is the Super Bowl. That makes it a time where people would want to upgrade what they have. 4K has been around for awhile but hasn't caught on for cable, it's mostly for internet/Netflix stuff. They are wanting to push the OLED technology now as the premium priced TV's, so LED TVs are going to dive in price.",
"It's the day before the super bowl, a last chance to push TV sales before everyone loses interest in TVs",
"We are coming up on spring. Spring is the time when the newer TVs come out. So, dropping prices to make room for the new. I used to work as a TV salesman."
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5s4zsj | What's the connection between entropy and the end of the universe ? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine the universe is a box, a really big box. The box is full of water, with a bunch of packing peanuts suspended in the water. The peanuts dissolve in the water over time. It's slow process, but sooner or later all of the peanuts will be completely dissolved in the water. It's like they were never there at all. This is entropy, and the end of the universe. All the stuff in the universe is slowly dissolving away - through processes ranging from gigantic explosions that scatter star-stuff through the void to physical matter literally vaporizing back into energy over a long, long time. Once everything is scattered/dissolved, the universe will be \"dead\", because there won't be enough energy left for anything interesting to happen ever again. In the analogy, you can't get the packing peanuts back out of the water without cracking open the box and adding energy (in the form of a filter or something). So the packing peanut leftovers will just float in the water forever, not doing anything."
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5s5248 | How does shooting lasers (i.e. LASIK) into someone's eyes dramatically improve their vision? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Same way stabbing someone can save their life if the surgeon does it in just the right place. Those lasers make tiny cuts in your eye's lenses, changing their shape so they focus more sharply.",
"I currently work at an opthalmologists office, there are many types of lasers that we use to help people see better, let's start with LASIK. LASIK fires tiny laser into the cornea to reshape the cornea and allow for a different reflection of light to hit the retina. Our eyes are like cameras so it all depends on the amount of light coming in and how focused it is when it hits the retina so a person with 20/20 vision has a great shaped cornea that allows for great light reflection and LASIK allows the cornea to change shape to better refract that light. Alright, let's move to iris lasers. I don't know much on this one but I know enough. People with closed angle glaucoma have no way for the fluid behind the cornea but in front of the lens, anterior chamber, to drain. What surgeons do is the fire lasers into the iris, the colored part, to allow for a new drain to open and the pressure to drop. When patients with glaucoma have high pressures in their eyes it pushes on the optic nerve and causes vision loss and thus the laser brings the vision back. Alright now onto the retina, there are many types of diseases that affect the retina. Retinal detachments and retinal tears both cause major blind spots in the vision and retina surgeons fire lasers to tack the retina back down much like spot welders do with metal. Now, people with uncontrolled diabetes have a lot of blood leaking in the retina and if untreated can cause permanent vision loss. Most retina surgeons start treatment with a series of injections into the eye to stop the inflammation but if that doesn't work the shoot lasers to cauterize the area affected by the blood leaks. Source: work for opthalmologists office in AZ and have been studying to become a retina surgeon.",
"They aren't \"shooting lasers into people's eyes.\" Usually the cornea is misshapen, and the laser is used to reshape it so that they can see better. It's only surface level modification.",
"Vision impairment correctable by LASIK is due to incoming light being focused either in front or behind the retina and not spot on. LASIK reshapes the cornea, which is the transparent front part of eye that covers the pupil and is a large contributor in focusing incoming light, so it gets the right form and thickness so incoming light now is focused directly on the retina resulting in improved vision."
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5s536p | Why do people gasp when they see something shocking or surprising? | Is there a mechanism that causes people to gasp or is a conditioned response? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We are not 100% sure, but the most likely answer is that it is part of the fight or flight response. (mechanism) Your eyes see something shocking. The signal goes to a part of the brain known as the \"reticular activating system\". This system also coordinates other shit like breathing. It also \"wakes up\" other parts of the brain. In this case, it's all, \"wake up, something shocking happened!\" You take an extra gasp of air and prepare to run away!"
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5s54e1 | What do EPA opponents mean when they say they take issue with EPA overreach? What do they mean by EPA overreach? | I've tried to google it, but can only seem to find ultra-conservative explanations. Looking for a less radical, neutral clarification. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A less radical explanation doesn't really exist. \"Conservatives\" believe that the Federal Government should be as small as possible. They argue that The Invisible Hand of the Market will provide Economic Incentives to companies to be safe, because unsafe companies will be abandoned by customers in favour of safer companies. To this, they argue that complying with EPA regulations is an un-necessary financial burden that punishes those who comply and rewards those who cheat the system. Yes, that's right — they're arguing that because criminals break laws and regulations, it punishes the law abiding. They argue that the EPA should be trusting companies to voluntarily follow regulations, and bring enforcement against ones shown to violate them. The problem with this argument is that it depends on the public having perfect knowledge of the behaviours of all companies, *and* the spare time to gather and interpret that knowledge, *and* the expertise to interpret that knowledge, *and* the existence of apples-to-apples competitors for the product or service, *and* ignores the fact that middlemen in a supply chain often only care about their immediate cost of doing business and will cover up violations, *and* ignores the fact that most of the time, once the environmental damage is done, it cannot be reversed — for example, with lead poisoning. I chose lead poisoning for a reason — because their argument is exemplified in the Kehoe Paradigm : \"Show us the data\". Robert Kehoe was a scientist employed by the manufacturer of tetraethyl lead gasoline additive, who worked constantly to deny that there was sufficient evidence that tetraethyl lead was a chronic and acute toxin, and that it was causing an epidemic of lead poisoning, as was demonstrated by Clair Patterson, a researcher who identified lead residues *pretty much everywhere* as a result of gasoline exhaust settling out into the environment, containing aerosolised lead. Kehoe's paradigm, \"Show us the data\", where the burden of proof was placed on those who claimed harm was happening, was also used by tobacco and asbestos manufacturers, and also by *every other* manufacturer that has knowingly put out a product that causes harm. They deny that there is sufficient data to show harm, and then deny that there is sufficient data to show that they knew of the harm, and then deny that there is sufficient data to show that they could have reasonably foreseen the harm. The opposing paradigm is to *default to caution*. Prevent illnesses and death before they occur. But that would involve companies ceasing selling a product when they have merely *statistically significant* evidence that *reasonably predicts* harm, rather than *having legally proven to a legal finder of fact* that harm *had actually occurred* and that it was more than merely correlative, but actually *caused* by their actions. That is what they mean by \"EPA Overreach\": when the EPA demands that they not undertake actions that a reasonable person would reasonably believe would be likely to lead to harm, rather than let them do whatever — and then negotiate financial settlements for fines and lawsuits. I have to make this disclaimer: I'm not personally neutral on this. I'm a retired scientist, and this is one of my pet causes. I believe that this explanation *is* neutral, however, because it is backed up by history.",
"Occasionally poorly written environmental regs get enforced in weird edge cases that end up with ridiculous or outrageous decisions like mud puddles being deemed \"wetlands.\" Similar situations happen with most regulatory agencies."
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5s563t | How can a ruling in a Washington state court overrule executive action? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It was not a Washington State court. It was a Federal Judge who lives in Washington State. There is a very big difference. As to how the Federal Judge can overrule an executive order? That is one of the purposes of Federal Judges and the Judicial Branch's check and balance against the Executive.",
"URL_1 The judge is a (Republican) federal judge (apointed by George W. Bush). Since he is a **federal** judge it is my understanding that he can rule on **federal** matters. The thing with **executive orders** is that \"executive orders are subject to judicial review and may be struck down if deemed by the courts to be unsupported by statute or the Constitution\" ( URL_0 ) So basically this judge was just doing his job.",
"They can not. You are mistaking a ruling from the United States District Court for the Western District of Washington, as being from a court run by the Government of Washington. The United States Federal Government's Judiciary has 3 levels; Supreme Court, Appelate Courts, and District Courts. There are 94 district courts, with each State and incorporated territory having at least one. Washington State, where this ruling took place has two, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Washington, and United States District Court for the Western District of Washington. The ruling came from the Western one. The Judge would have been appointed by a President of the United States, and confirmed by the United States Senate.",
"The US government is split into three branches, and are arranged to have a system of checks and balances between them. The Legislative branch (congress) makes laws. The Executive branch (the president) enforces the laws. And the Judicial branch (the courts) makes ruling on whether or not people have violated the law, as well as making sure that the law consistent with itself and with the constitution. If the executive branch tries to enforce a law in a way that violates some other law, the judicial branch can strike down that action. The way to override that would be for the legislative branch to create/alter the law so that the thing that the executive branch wants to do becomes legal. And if any law that the legislative branch makes violates the constitution, then the judicial branch can strike down *that* law, which can then only be enforced if the legislative branch amends the constitution (which is **really** hard to do, and requires 75% of the states to agree to it).",
"Can we have a mini ELI5 inside this ELI5? Is that okay? How come I have been hearing people on reddit say the previous rulings on this matter were super important, that the marshals should have taken CBP officers into custody last week, but it's not until this \"so called judge\" speaks that people listen? What makes his ruling the real one?",
"not sure if this is allowed, but if I may piggyback on this question. what is the difference between the ruling of the federal judge in boston, and the ruling from the federal judge in seattle? why does one take precedence over the other?"
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5s56hs | Why do water bottles have expiration dates on them? | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's the expiration date, generally, for the container the water's in, not the water itself. Leaching and whatnot."
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5s57fa | Why are snow storms with lightning so rare? What prevents them from occurring? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Thunderstorms require a lot of warm, moist air moving up while a lot of cold, dry air is moving down. The warm air gets high enough that water droplets condense and make big clouds. The more air moving around, the bigger the cloud. The lightning comes from a build up of static electricity from the different air currents moving against each other. If it's snowing, chances are there isn't enough warm air to form the right conditions. Snow requires cold, moist air. Dry air is much better at forming static electricity, and there generally aren't masses of air moving against each other when all the air is cold, like there would be if some was warm and some was cold. Hail can often coincide with thunderstorms, however, because it's formed differently. When all that air is moving upwards, it can create some extremely powerful updrafts. Sometimes they're strong enough to push water high enough for it to freeze into hail before falling down again, even if it's much warmer down near the surface.",
"Thunderstorms are typically caused by a warm lower layer in the atmosphere pushing up against a colder upper layer. Usually this is caused by extreme temperature drops, say humid and 90's during the day then still humid and 50's at night. That 40 degree temperature difference creates havoc in the atmosphere. Typically with snow conditions you aren't having temperature swings that drastic.",
"> The short answer? \"In the summer there's a lot more moisture in the air\" > > \"Any thunderstorm requires moisture, instability, and some mechanism for lifting, such as a front. It is harder to get all of these to come together in the winter,\" > says Yvette Richardson, assistant professor of meteorology at Penn State. Source: URL_0 and my Googling Skills.",
"I just looked it up because I was curious, so maybe you will get a better answer. But from what I can tell it has to do with air currents being more stable during the winter as everything is cold so there isn't the displacement between hot and cold air which is typical of a thunderstorm. There is what is called [thundersnow]( URL_0 ) which is what you are asking about, so it does happen."
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5s5bx6 | Why does holding your breath / straining seem to help when performing an action, such as benchpressing, of lifting something heavy? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Formers Competitive Powerlifter here- As far as performing a \"big lift\" goes, i.e. benchpress, deadlift, squat, etc: These movements, more when they are performed with heavy weight for either one or a few reps, require body stability, or \"tightness\". When you breathe during a lift, your body shifts, however slightly. This is bad for the end goal of moving the weight. So for example, the benchpress. A tense body, especially including the core, legs and shoulders, is extremely helpful in moving the weight. A breath will cause these muscles to temporarily loosen, which can be detrimental to the performer being stable. The slightest shift can cause leverages and the lifter's \"base\" to be much less strong. I myself was taught to take a big gulp of air and hold my breath until the lift was completed. It should be known, however, that while this method is effective for moving a weight, it is not healthy in the long-run.",
"Using the valsalva maneuver increases intra-abdominal pressure, stabilizing your core and protecting your spine. This is another major benefit of this technique, especially as you advance in weight.",
"I believe what you are looking for is the [Valsalva maneuver]( URL_0 ).",
"Yep- a valsava will close the vocal folds, therefore giving you your pelvic floor, diaphragm, and vocal folds for a closed system to increase pressure and therefore build postural stability."
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5s5epw | why do online cable streaming services only show a select 4 or 5 commercials? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Is the ad rate so different than broadcast? I watch a local San Francisco station on-line and they have 4 ads. If I pay for broadcast ad rates why don'tI also get to have my ad showing on-line at the same time?"
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5s5gfd | Why is automaton suddenly a big deal? Hasn't it already been happening for a long time? What's different now? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"What I think other explanations are neglecting to mention is the change in machine learning. Automation has been a thing for a very long time, but computers have not been powerful enough, and we haven't yet had the methods to *teach* computers to do tasks. *That* is what is so different about automation today. Before machine learning techniques were implemented, automation was very limited. You tell a robot arm to go to *this* location, execute *this* command (like close the grabbing arm), then go to *this* location and do *this* command. If the part the machine is supposed to be grabbing is out of position, the robot doesn't know or care. It executes its command regardless, which means it might fail to grab the part, or grab it the wrong way and crush it, or drop it in a position on the other end that jams the entire assembly line. For that reason, every step of the process had to be very precise. Human workers are usually employed to check the parts and align them correctly for the robots to function properly. It's not a very glamorous job, but it's still a job. Then, we started making robots smart enough to recognize simple changes in position with cameras and settings so that a robot could take the place of a human fixing the alignment of parts. That takes a lot of computing, because it takes recognizing that the part is out of place, then computing the changes made to put it into place, how to execute that, and then doing it. That's not easy for a simple robot, but our technology has advanced. Suddenly, even just standing at the assembly line realigning parts isn't a guaranteed job. Then we figured out true machine learning, where we can teach robots to do complex tasks. This requires more intricate, complicated computer networks because it isn't very efficient. The robot has to \"think\" about all of the inputs and all of the past inputs to make a decision, which requires a lot of computing power and a lot of memory to store the data of past actions. It also takes a lot of complicated coding to tell the computer how to do all that. Those things are all relatively new. Our computers haven't been sophisticated enough to handle that until recently, and computer memory is getting much faster and bigger to store the data required to do it. Think about automated driving. You can't just tell a car to turn left *here* and turn right *here*. It has to react to pedestrians and cyclists in the road, it has to react to drivers doing the wrong thing, changing traffic lights, changing traffic patters, detours, all the actions of all the cars around it. That's a *lot* of data to process, and there's no simple formula to tell the car what to do. Every situation is different, every situation needs a decision instead of a command. The ability to do that didn't exist a decade ago, or at the very least, it wasn't commercially available. Now it is. Now you really don't need *any* humans on the assembly line, except one technician to service the robot. Humans don't fix the mistakes made by the robots, they fix the robots so they don't make the same mistakes. Those jobs are gone. And with machine learning, we can teach computers not only to act in complex ways, but also *to create new things*. Computers are now composing music, and it's not even bad. It's not Mozart, but it's not bad. We have computers that can take big sets of data and output the next step in manufacturing. Need a new car design? Used to be you needed a guy to think up a concept car, some more guys to check the aerodynamic efficiency, some guys to consider the market and what people are interested in buying, some guys to custom build a concept model for review, then custom build a full scale concept... Now you can have one guy feed a computer an Excel spreadsheet with sales on every car for the last ten years, and you don't even need 3D models of those cars, you *don't even need to Google image search them*, you just tell the computer to do it and it does, and builds its own 3D models. Then the computer automatically compares trends and looks at numbers and sales and what was popular and spits out a design for you, which you can then feed into a 3D printer that builds the scale model, then feed some instructions into an assembly line that doesn't need to be told how to custom make this car, it just figures it out and makes it. *That* is what's different about automation these days. Tasks that were once considered far too complicated or delicate for computers to figure out are routinely done by computers these days, or getting very close to it. We once believed that humans with our infinite, *living* creativity would always be solely capable of coming up with new, innovative ideas, but computers can do that now, too. It certainly hasn't been a fast process, we've been automating for generations now, but there's always been other things to fall back on that computers and automation couldn't handle, like driving a truck or flying a plane for the military. Turns out, computers are taking over those jobs. The only jobs left are menial labor, and those jobs either don't really exist because mining coal is terrible for the environment, so we stopped, or no one is willing to take the job because it's too physically demanding. And service jobs (retail, waiting tables, etc.) but those don't pay enough. The only real jobs left are super technical jobs that require years of formal education and probably more years of experience in the field (like, ironically, designing better robots). The aging population doesn't have time, money, or inclination to get those skills, which has made unemployment so much of a contentious issue. Edit: \"But we've had this technology for decades!\" But it hasn't been commercially available. We haven't been using it to automate jobs like we are now. \"This is a hyperbolic vision of the future of automation!\" On the one hand, yes. I did that deliberately to emphasize how changing technology is affecting the economy. On the other hand, Trump was elected on promises of employment. The problem is real. And even a few years ago self driving cars were still thought to be pipe dreams and no one was considering their impact on the economy. Now they're not even widespread and we're already talking about how they'll devastate trucking jobs. Automation isn't evil, it's inevitable. I don't think it's bad, but you can't deny that it's happening. Edit^2 : I'm not saying machine learning advances are the sole reason. Other people have brought up the aging factories taking the opportunity to replace old equipment with better technology that has already existed, and I think that contributes as well. At time of writing I had not seen any answers adequately delving into machine learning, though.",
"Controls engineer here (the guy programming this stuff). * It got more flexible, so now it's cheaper to change a machine from making product A to making product B. If you were making small batches, changing products annually, or just juggling orders for different parts and you spent most of your time converting your production line, you would automate less. Now your machine automatically adjusts to handle a range of products with inexpensive change parts and actuators. Also, touch screen controls can be reconfigured way easier than buttons and dials. Think fun size candy bars vs regular or king size and Snickers vs Payday; you don't want a dozen different machines that only handle one thing, you want an easily adjusted machine that does all of them. * It got faster. High end automation is working in single digit microsecond reaction times and tens of microseconds for full program/network cycles completely deterministically. Back to candy, if you need 10 lines to fill the world supply of Snickers, that's a bit pricy compared to two that can fill the world supply of Snickers and Payday and have time to cover 100 Grand too. * Motion is way better. CNC is fine and all for hard coding a path for a tool, but multiple levels of electronic camming with profiles calculated on the fly is normal now. Robotics is easy now and when you add machine vision, it replaces anyone that ever picked stuff up on a production line. The tools and program functions to do this stuff exist and are easy and flexible to use (on some automation platforms). * Machine vision exists now. Cameras are better and the software you use to program them is better and more versatile. We aren't checking if the print is good enough for OCR or finding where a pancake is on a conveyor anymore. We're making complex visual analysis. Self driving is whole other level with mixed vision and fucking L~~A~~*I*DAR. * It costs less now. To the point there are clear ROI for all but the most complex, low-skill work. I see people doing things they think are just too hard or expensive to automate (driving is a good analogy here) all the time... While I install and test their replacement that will pay for itself in 6 months. Basically, the limit to automating everything is time to figure out and write the program; mechanically, humans are pretty easy to replace and processor speeds are no object. EDIT: *LIDAR, I'm in machine/process automation, not self driving or defense. I just assumed they replaced \"radio\" with \"laser\", but apparently it's \"light\", resulting in LIDAR instead of LADAR.",
"There are three major divisions of work: **Primary** (food production, raw resource extraction) **Secondary** (processing and manufacturing) **Tertiary** (services and transport) The primary sector went from 99% of people's jobs to being less than one percent now because of *mechanization*. A man on a tractor can feed hundreds. That was ok because people could move from farming to the secondary sector to process this new wealth of resources. The secondary sector then became almost completely done in by advances in *industrialization*. One plant conveyor belt with ten workers can produce more tools in an hour than a craft shop could make in a month. That was ok because when these manufacturing jobs dried up we moved up to the tertiary focused economy: serving all these goods and delivering expertise to others. Now, *automation* will take away the last of the secondary sector, and many of these service and transport jobs. Machine intelligence will take away the jobs that require expertise but not a lot of creativity (already developed techniques like surgery, routine taxes, filing claims against parking tickets, etc). There's no real \"fourth level\" to go into. The only fourth level is research, development, and novel engineering. Obviously most people aren't suited for these jobs, even if we let everyone have free education to the phd level most would not pass.",
"You are right that there has been a general push toward automation particularly since the industrial revolution. In general this has improved quality of life. It is also true that since them there have been people worried about what automation was going to do to jobs, and jobs adapted. There does seem to be a difference in what is happening now in both quality and quantity. In terms of quantity, the speed with which individual technology is threatening to wipe out huge swaths of the labor market is basically unprecedented. The breadth the kinds of automation that is quickly becoming available is as exciting as it is frightening (computers are already writing short journalism pieces, driving cars, trading stocks, assisting surgery, etc.) The idea that \"computers will help us do the lifting but humans are always goimg to need to do the thinking\" is looking more and more naive. Perhaps most importantly, the gap in skills necessary to take the \"next job\" is growing. It is easier to teah a former sewer to now operate a bobin on a loom than it is to teach a former lomghaul trucker how to be a coder programming that truck. This is causing fear of a thinning out between the highly skilled and the low wage worker. Or 50 years from now we could be looking back on this moment as the turning point toward a golden age in humanity. Telling the future is hard. Edit: this got a lot bigger than expected. So to respond to a few comments. 1) this isn't prescriptive, just descriptive. I don't advocate \"holding back progress to save jobs.\" This is just a description of why people are concerned. It is easy to wave ones hands and say \"well, yeah, some people will be hurt and they'll just have to get with the program,\" but that ignores the social and political influence that that hurt and fear have. 2) i did not mean to minimize the huge disruption that was the industrial revolution. As a commenter pointed out, you had about 25% of the country change jobs (using the responders figure) and living location in about 3 decades. It is hard to tell if automation will have that big an effect. But if you are looking at 2050, it is very possible that we will have automation solutions for every current job that involves driving, fast food, the supermarket floor, manufacturing, increasingly detailed physical manipulations, and cooking as well as increasingly brain-intensive processes like banking, surgery, writing, accounting, etc. It is really hard to tell what will catch on and what won't. It will also be interesting to see if remote work will do anything to change the past century's flight to the city or not. 3.) As pointed out, this tech also has an enabling effect. Cafe press let everyome be a tshirt manufacturer, square space lets people gett simple websites up. 3d printing could drastically lower the bar in small scale prototyping and botique manufacturing. 4) Basic Income is one solution people go to, greater socialistic tendancies is another (and related to the first). That's possible. It's also possible that the next wave of jobs we haven't dreamed about is coming. Schools in 10 years could be teaching aduino programming in middle school and graduating students who have to take 1 foriegn language and 1 computer language as a basic requirement. Girl scouts of 2050 might be able to take a flavor profile and custom build your personal cookie delivered by drones (though if there is one thing we've learned, its that the flying car is never gonna happen).",
"I work for a medium sized, family owned company. The same family has owned it for over 50 years, the founder still comes into work almost every day, that sort of thing. Really good people who really know their industry. Our product has always been made with *machines*, and while the industry has been slowly moving towards automation as technology has advanced, it didn't change the fact that these machines are huge, heavy, and expensive (millions of dollars with little to no automation). Not the kind of thing you could just replace. You get good crews, you make improvements where you can, but you still have to have five or six guys running each machine, and since everyone in the industry is doing the same, you can compete just fine. Now the last 10-15 years or so, that has started to change. These big, expensive machines are getting older, and they are breaking. When they break, an arms race of sorts starts to emerge. One company will buy a new incredibly fast machine that is extremely automated. One or two guys run the whole thing that six used to, and they still output twice as much as the old machines. A couple companies do that, and their labor rates drop like a rock. They charge less. Now the next time something gets to be even slightly screwy, EVERYONE just wants to replace it with one of these fast, super efficient machines. It becomes a cycle. Your competitors are getting faster and more automated, so you have to as well. Now back to the company I work for. We are very much behind the times. Being the family owned, good natured people that that the owners are, they have hesitated to modernize and put people out of work. Sure, we have a few new machines for additions and new product lines, but we are also still using machines they bought 50 years ago and along the way. However, it is getting to expensive for them to run those anymore. Our competitors, and even other product lines in our own company can run the product for half the price! So while they have been squeezing every ounce of life out of those old machines, there just isn't anything that can be done. When we sell product made on those machines, we effectively break even. It keeps the crews employed, but we don't make any money. We make money off of the automated operations. As time continues, and people retire or quit, or the machines just beak, we will shut them down for good. If that doesn't happen in the next five years, we will probably be losing money on those machines, so we will be forced to shut them down and find other work for those employees. The point of my little anecdote is that we are at a tipping point. It's not just big automotive companies or high-tech manufacturers that have begun automating, it's the companies that make commodity products, like boxes (which is what we do). There is probably a box plant in every city and town in this country. Thousands of them. They all will either be extremely automated, or they will close their doors in the coming years. The pressure from the larger companies has made the midsized companies automate (my company), and in turn, we will make the small companies go the same route to compete and keep up. Any that can't afford to simply won't make a profit and will go under or get bought out for pennies on the dollar of what they were worth in their prime.",
"**ELI5 answer:** Think of careers as a ladder where you start at the bottom and climb up steadily. If a robot removes the steps at the bottom and steadily moves up the ladder removing steps, eventually only the tallest people can reach the lowest remaining step to start climbing. **Non-ELI5 answer:** As jobs are automated, the average minimum skill level for a decent job can go up. Consider self-driving cars for example...what career can a mid-40's truck driver switch to when he's automated away that pays as well as driving the truck did? Imagine that cashiers, bank tellers, etc. are replaced by AI. These are low-skill jobs that many people work, and there's not much for them to switch to when these go away. Even if humanity as a whole can adapt, individuals are often greatly impacted and left with no way to adapt. Making it worse...it's unclear if humanity as a whole can adapt. Middle class wages have been relatively stagnant while productivity has increased and other income levels have seen increases since the 1970's. Automation is likely partly to blame for this (there are a lot of other reasons also). Finally...jobs that previously seemed safe from automation no longer seem that way. Much of what many accountants do can be automated and is currently (my wife does this for a living). Automation is steadily chipping away at clerical and legal research jobs. I personally automated away entire positions at my previous job in photometry research. Source: read stuff and my wife and I both automate people out of jobs for a living",
"I've commented on this before. I work for a large industrial forged steel products manufacturer located up in New England. I'm stationed in the O & G capital myself. Over the past few years I've been with the company the main factory has gone from three shifts of ~100 people to 2 shifts of maybe a dozen. The error rate has decreased, production has gone up, and their favorite part they wont admit? Robotics aren't part of the union. Although robotics may have had a lengthy transition into the market (mostly due to cost I imagine), the 'late adopters\" are now investing and it's killing jobs. Realize, economics has a trickle down effect; the factory workers get laid off from the small town factory that *was* the #1 employer in the city. Those factory workers aren't buying cars from the local dealerships, they aren't going out to eat supporting the food industries, and they are cutting back grocery bills struggling to survive. In response to that, the car salesman, waiters/waitresses, and grocery store owners are doing the same thing caught in the cycle. It's killing U.S jobs like shipping jobs to China did back in the 70s and 80s. The worst part of it all? The rich get richer, the poor get poorer, and there's nothing you can do about it.",
"The number of things you can automate is drastically growing, since we are no longer limited to automate the \"muscle\", we are now starting to automate the \"brain\". In the past we had machines and robots already, but those were limited to precisely repeating tasks. All their movement was either pre-programmed or hardwired into the mechanics. If something unexpected happened, they couldn't react, they had no sensors or cameras that could tell them what is going on or ways to react to it. So you always needed humans around to monitor them and do the tasks that the machines couldn't do. If you look at those \"How stuff is made\" videos from the 80s you always see humans around the machine, as there are always steps in the production that the machine can't do. This is changing now. Better cameras, sensors and AI means that we can now automate those last steps that still required humans. The robots can now [react dynamically and are no longer required to follow a hardcoded track]( URL_2 ). That kind of use is however still limited to the factory and not quite that revolutionary. Where it is starting to become really interesting is outside the factories. Most obvious this is with self-driving cars. If you wanted to automate transportation in the past, you could, but you had to lay train tracks and have big control centers regulating it all. Today you can just take a car and have it drive itself. You do not need to change the environment to suit the machine, you can put the machine into a human environment and it can work it's way around. This open up a lot of areas to automation that historically didn't allow it, since there were no robots flexible and safe enough to handle those environments. It also doesn't just stop with robots, a lot of jobs are already digital in nature, humans entering data into the computer and such, all of those jobs are open for grabs by AI, which has made rapid progress in the last few years and started to match human level performance in a lot of tasks. AI might still be a few decades away from passing the Turing test, but for a lot of jobs you don't need something indistinguishable from a human, but something that is good enough for the specific tasks and AI starts to be getting there. All that said, it's worth keeping in mind that such revolutions in the job market don't happen overnight. A technology that has been demonstrated in the lab or on a trade show might still take decades until it is common place in every factory and often it might require to build a new factory from scratch to take full advantage of the automation that is already possible. When you look at newly build factory lines, such as [Steam Controller]( URL_0 ) or what [Tesla is doing]( URL_1 ) you will see a lot more automation than in factories that have been around for decades. **TL;DR:** We are approaching a point where the machine can do almost all tasks just as good or better than a human. Thus making the human unneeded on the job market.",
"Automation Engineer here. Actually more of a robotic engineer as of late. From my experience, the companies that have a lot of robots and automation are doing really well. So well, that they are hiring more drivers, accountants, engineers, logistics, etc. I think it is creating more jobs here in the US. Instead of shipping the business overseas for cheap, we can manufacture it here for cheap with robots. There is a shortage of engineers in all disciplines in my field. We also need more electricians, plumbers, machinist, etc. I also think that it is political. The super rich do not want minimum wage raised. It is a fear tactic to keep the Walmart and McDonald's workers from asking for healthcare or raising the minimum wage. If they keep people thinking that a robot can do their job, then they won't complain about getting paid so poorly. I personally know of a major pizza chain that tried to use a kiosk system that made pizza's on the spot; without humans. It failed miserably. I believe companies are starting to realize how much they actually need the poorly paid humans.",
"Worries are like fads, people obsess about them for awhile and you see them everywhere, then people find something new to talk about. The worry people have about automation isn't anything new as you suspected and it's been going on in one form or another since the industrial revolution. You've probably heard the derogatory term \"Luddite\" before. Luddites were actually an association of tradesmen during the huge sweeping changes that occurred as factories and farming began mechanizing. They had worries that machines were going to replace people and take jobs away; sound familiar? Instead mechanized farming and large scale manufacturing made many previously unobtainable items affordable for the average person and helped to usher in the middle class. The manual labor jobs went away but were replaced with better jobs that paid more and didn't require people to work themselves to death. Technology is scary because it has the ability to enable sweeping changes in every aspect of our society and change our daily lives, our jobs, and even our health. While automation will remove many jobs, the jobs were not the best ones to begin with. It also creates new jobs. Large businesses used to have mailrooms that handled all communication within the company and staffed with hundreds of people all sorting and binning internal memos. They used to have phone operators connecting the calls from office to office and outside lines to desk phones. There used to be elevator operators taking people to different floors. Automated phone switching, email, and automatic elevators removed all of those jobs. But they created telephone engineer, line operator, exchange administrator, LAN and wiring tech, Network Engineer, Elevator control repair, and tons of other jobs that pay better and are more fulfilling for the people doing them. Flipping burgers, sweeping floors, driving people around in a taxii, these are all jobs that suck just like being an elevator operator sucked and while those jobs go away, many new jobs will replace them. Automated car infrastructure engineer. Automated custodial maintenance techs that service and program the cleaning equipment. etc etc.",
"Work produces value. Luxury time also has inherent value. As automation takes over more and more essential jobs, the marginal value of adding another hour of labor to the economy decreases (farmers produce more value than Walmart greeters). But the value of luxury time stays the same. For generations, that was fine - even as automation increased, there was still enough labor available that produced more value than an equivalent amount of free time, for most people to be employed. But automation is now becoming so ubiquitous that the marginal value of adding another hour of labor to the economy is dipping below the value of adding another hour of luxury time. At this point, it becomes almost impossible to make it 'worth it' to hire more people. Theoretically this is great - if we're producing so many goods and services that it's not worth it for people to work more hours, then we should be able to all work less hours and enjoy the same standard of living. Unfortunately, our economy isn't set up like that - if you don't work 40 hours you don't get a living wage, and there's no mechanism for everyone to simultaneously lower their labor output so that everyone can stay employed. So basically, one of the foundational assumptions of our economic system - there's infinite valuable work to be one - is going away, and the system we have now doesn't function correctly when that happens.",
"I can say that I work in automation and it's been pretty crazy lately. I see shit and think \"wow, this is really ancient. How did they get by with this for so long?\" And then I realize that stuff was from 10 or 15 years ago. Automation from the mid to late 90s is scary to me. The amount of technology in the last few years is amazing. The efficiency that is possible now is mind blowing. No real legitimate business can afford to not have automation now, and if they do, they are missing a massive opportunity. Our work pays for itself, and we give empirical proof of that.",
"I think the best idea to get a grasp on the situation is to look at automated vehicles. Taxi drivers, semi drivers, delivery drivers, industrial truck operators, mailmen to name a few. You also have to consider that car accidents will be a thing of the past so a huge slash in the need for traffic officers and first responders on the roads. Even the ambulances might be driverless allowing for more space for medical equipment with out a need for a cab. Then look at the average persons relationship with a car. The time for family's needing two+ cars is a thing of the past. The car takes Mom to work then returns home by itself to take the kids to school. Car picks mom up from work at designated time. Now imagine even further in this scenario. Whose to say that a family will even own the car. They very well might opt to lease / rent it. Because there wont be a need for the car to sit at Mom's workplace parking area. There is no labor cost as if you were paying a taxi to pick you up. Renting very well might be the cheaper cost compared to owning. Then you get to avoid all of the maintenance aspects of the car. If it breaks down the company sends another to pick you up. You wont have to pay insurance either. Your not driving so your not liable for the actions of the car. The manufacturer will be responsible for that most likley. You dont own it so you wont need to insure a 30k+ item sitting in your driveway just waiting for a tree to fall on it. Think about how much the normal person actually uses a car on a daily basis. If this is how things go their wont be a need for auto part stores / service stations seeing that the company you have a contract with will be responsible for all of that jazz. No more gas stations. If my roomba can auto dock to a charger once its battery is low no reason the cars of the future cant do it. No need to pay some one to plug a car in. Because lets face it electric is the future. Heck they are even making tiny robots that can tow cars out of parking garages. You wont even need a tow truck but for very unique situations. URL_0 Driving will be reduced to a recreational activity on designated roads / tracks. My 4 year old son might never have a licenses in a traditional sense. Think of all the jobs that will just vanish completely.",
"Automation was expensive and limited. It used to be very repetitive tasks that may require precision but can be placed blindly. For example: \"put this piece at location XY\" \"Move arm to XY and twist\". Then some computer vision started to appear: simple laser locator, that can find the edge of the thing being made, which can then calculate the exact orientation of the thing, allowing some level of misalignment to be corrected. Later on, they added some camera, now it can detect some fault, allow for more precision while assembling (as now the stuff can be slightly mis-manufactured and still be machinally assembled). Until now, it wasn't much of an issue: those machines were very expensive, and the labor rate was quite low. A single machine could easilly be 300000$ or more, and last maybe 10 years before they are too obsolete by the new technology. They were relativelly slow compared to today's ones. Now, those machines are available sometime for less than 50000$. Are way faster than before. The more expensives one now can have crasy computer vision and extreme precision, and are very fast. They may be 500000$, but replace maybe 20 workers. Let's say 10$/hour, 40h/week, 50 weeks... That is 20000$/employe = 400000$ replaced. Notice how close you are from the labor? But hey! It also cost the employer lots of money to have employes, so you get even closer to the price. Want to add more metrics? It do not get sick, do not make mistakes, don't screw up, no lunch break, can work double and triple shifts. And guess what! More precise than an human! So, what changed? Cost of the machine vs human and also the flexibility of those machines.",
"It has never been as efficient as it is now. Before job replacement ratios were very low. Technology replaced a few jobs, but a few new jobs were created. Roughly a balance. The problem now, is that technology is so advanced, it is replacing jobs far faster than new ones can be created. It isn't a group of horse care takers being replaced by a car mechanic, it is a software engineer replacing hundreds, sometimes thousand of people in a given field. Our current economic model isn't designed to sustain changes like this. Changes like this, with our current economic model will lead to massive unemployment and a huge wealth disparity. Major revolution needs to occur, but our current society is easily placated through a variety of methods which most are unable to recognize.",
"As an engineer in that field, I might be able to shed some light on the subject. Automated machinery in the 80s got rid of a lot of \"dumb\" labor. While it's true that things like PLCs and robots have been around for decades, they had the limitation of only being able to do one thing day in and day out. A robot could only pick up one object from one place and set it in another, or weld a specific pattern. If any of that changed, it was a big pain in the ass and was really expensive. Automation was high production, but low adaptability. If you were a factory pumping out 5,000,000 of the same widget a year, you automated almost everything you could, because it was worth it. But if you put out limited production runs of a bunch of different products, automation offered less of an advantage to you. The modern trend of lean manufacturing pushes more towards limited production runs of a wide array of products (supply being determined by demand) which is in opposition of the mindset of the 1950s and 60s which was \"push\" (supply not being determined by demand, produce as much as you can now, build up inventory, and worry about demand later). Humans are low production output, but high adaptability. So at first, it seemed like human labor was a better fit for the Lean Manufacturing philosophy that made companies like Toyota world leaders in manufacturing. There is one facet of automation that has seen huge advances in the last decade: machine vision. Machine vision is automated machinery using cameras to make decisions on-the-fly. With machine vision, automated machinery can be high output, *and* high adaptability. Take for example, a job where someone picks parts off a conveyor belt, inspects them, and the packs them in a box if they're good and puts them in a reject chute if they're bad. Without machine vision, you *have* to use a human being to do this. But with machine vision? You can completely automate this process. Mount a camera on the robot and now the robot can recognize the parts, count how many there are, what orientation they're in, and adapt it's positioning program *in real time* to compensate. It can now pick up those parts no matter where they are on the belt and no matter what orientation they're in, put it in front of another camera, spin the part while the camera checks for defects, and then make the appropriate choice, all automatically and without the need for a human. Best yet, the robot can't get tired or bored and start making mistakes. It will do it's job the same no matter what time of day or day of the week it is. It doesn't worry if it's wife is sleeping around on him, or if it's kids are being bullied at school, or if it's going to have to ship it's oldest kid to military school, or think about how great the fishing trip this weekend is going to be. It doesn't get sick, doesn't need breaks, doesn't need to sleep, doesn't worry about life, doesn't have distractions, etc. Another example. Let's look at a factory where people assemble components manually. They have a station set up with fixtures and the components to assemble a part. Before cameras, you had to hire very good people who wouldn't make very many mistakes. Those people were very hard to find, and so you had to pay them a lot of money. Supply and demand. Now, add machine vision to those stations. Now, the vision system does all the inspection and makes *sure* the operator assembles the part correctly. If the operator misses a gasket or a screw, or forgets to plug in a component, the camera will check, see that those components are missing, and refuse to release the part until all the required pieces are present. Now, *anybody* could do that job after a few minutes of training. You don't have to get really good operators that don't make a lot of mistakes because now the machine catches the mistakes and doesn't *let* the operator assemble it incorrectly. The qualifications to do that job went down, and so you have more people to choose from, and thus the wages for that job can be lowered, because there are more people willing and able to do it. Supply and demand. Machine vision systems have been around for decades, but until very recently they were extremely expensive. The cheaper systems were pretty low resolution and were dodgy. You needed a really good programmer to get something useable about of a cheap camera in the past. But now, affordable, smaller vision systems are becoming more commonplace. Wherever they're not replacing operators, they're lowering the skill required from the operators and thus lowering the wages for that job. If you can put a $2,000 camera on a machine and pay someone $1,000 to program it, all you need to do is lower the annual salary for that operator job by $3,000 to have a one-year ROI. So, in short, to answer your question of why people are starting to freak out about automation now: smart vision systems getting cheaper and more accessible.",
"Because up until now, robots have been mostly replacing factory workers, a poor and voiceless demographic. But self-driving cars are coming. In some US states, truck driver is in the top 5 most common jobs. Almost 3 percent of all working Americans are drivers of some sort — more than 2 percent are truck drivers, 0.4 percent are bus drivers and 0.3 percent are cabbies and other types of drivers, according to Census Bureau occupational data. Self driving cars will cost 1.7 million people their jobs. Suddenly, the impending job shortage is very real and personal and coming very soon.",
"For what it's worth, I have an answer that's mostly contrary to most of the other posters, even if it's super late (4:30EST atm). It isn't. It's the same as it's been for years. It's not different except in media coverage. I will give you examples as an automation engineer in the Midwest Auto industry. For several decades, automation has been taking over production. For 15 years or so, it's been a major effect on economy out here. For the the past 5 years, it's been the *most contributing factor to new jobs* in the industry. Note the language there, though. As far as jobs go, automation is a bigger deal now than it ever has been, although it's increasing at about the same rate as it has been for 30 years. In the 80s, some QA guys lost their jobs to a camera and a computer. Then a team of eight welders was lost to a team of two machine operators. Then a materials department of 50 people was reduced to 30, thanks to improved logistics handling in warehouse software. This has been increasing at a pretty steady rate for many decades, but only a few jobs at a time... most often even as slow as manufacturing production, which means instead of hiring 150 people you hire 90, which is much more difficult to notice as opposed to firing 5000 people and taking in 200 robots. Please note this is just the experience of an automation EE in the auto industry of the Midwest area, and may not apply to your manufacturing area.",
"AI is making the difference. We are one technology leap away from AGI, Artificial General Intelligence. When applied to robotics the ramifications are simply staggering. A robot that can make a jacket, from base materials placed on a table, can make anything. At that point 80% of the world is out of a job. Not over the course of 30 years, but 10. All non-creative labor will be performed by robots, and that includes the service industry. But it doesn't stop there. Full Automation will eventually lead to the point where you no longer need human labor to make more robots. And I don't mean making them better, I mean every step in just making them. Prospecting for minerals, mining, smelting, crafting, transportation, assembly, etc etc. That means that in terms of human labor there is 0 difference in making one factory and making 10 thousand factories. As long as you have the resources. Which in turn makes space industry inevitable, as we will quickly run out of resources on Earth, but those kinds of rare minerals are found a plenty in the asteroid belt. So that means one of two possible futures. 1. The corporations maintain strict control on robot technology, under the guise of copyright ownership. And the rest of us live in shanty towns while our corporate overlords live happily in district 1. 2. We maintain an open and free internet and either manage our own open source robotics that keeps up with modern technology. Or straight up steal the technology and put out for all to have on pirate sites. This allows all of humanity to benefit and it fundamentally changes human society to something like the Zeitgeist project. In short, keep the internet free, it really matters.",
"You're right, automation isn't exactly new technology. *New* technology is expensive. *New* technology doesn't change our lives. What changes our lives is yesterday's cutting-edge technology becoming cheap and easily accessible. Cheap enough that it's cost-effective to start using it more often. This is where we're at now with many forms of automation. For example, the technology to produce a touch-screen kiosk where people enter in their orders at McDonald's has been around for easily two decades, it was just too expensive - paying a person $9/hour to do this was far cheaper. Today, such a device costs one-tenth the cost it did 15-20 years ago, people are looking hard at these devices to cut costs.",
"Read title and was like... Automatons are a big deal?",
"because its the first new jamiroquai album in 7 years, how is that not a big deal?",
"Because innovation is never about the newest thing, it's about the thing that was new 10-20 years ago that is now cheap enough for real use. Automation in factories was just the beginning, it was clunky, and single purpose. Now we are getting to general purpose automation, where you can buy a robot that can learn to do more than one job, and teach itself to do it better. CGP Grey, a youtuber, has a great video about it called Humans Need Not Apply.",
"Automation is suddenly a big deal because you frequent a site where the avg demographic is young, poor, idealistic and bends anti capitalist/Anti-wealth. [Source]( URL_1 ) Note that not one of the top comments cites anything other than anecdotal evidence and opinion. Automation has been going on since the dawn of time and it has been a net benefit for society. AI and Machine Learning are just the latest flavor/buzzwords used to instill fear and sow confusion. To understand the impact of automation, one only has to look to history. * Why did slavery increase after the cotton gin 'automated' their job? [Source]( URL_0 ) * Why did jobs and real wages grow in the wake of the Industrial Revolution? [Source]( URL_2 ) * Were there breadlines when Henry Ford rolled out the Model T and made buggy drivers and public transportation \"obsolete\"? * I am still waiting for the death of all retail jobs and economic collapse that the internet was supposed to bring. Automation, in the modern sense, has been happening for almost 200 years. While entire industries have been wiped out, our economy and real wages have increased significantly, as has our standard of living. In-fact, I would challenge all of the Nay-sayers to find me one historical example where a technology innovation led to a prolonged and widespread economic collapse. > But, But - this time is different AI will automate everything - The machine will rule, we will become serfs to capitilist overlords. Every top comment has some flavor of this response; good in the sense that it is a red herring as to the bias of the 'analysis'. AI is just the latest step in a line of many. Jobs will never go away.. In 1790 you had 3.9m people in the US. In roughly 200 years we added 300m people to our population and likely automated every single job that would have existed at that time and done so on a scale un-imaginable (see agriculture). Why then is the sky not falling with 30 or 50% un-employment rates?",
"What has changed is the internet, which lets wrongheaded ideas like \"machines will take our jobs\" spread more quickly, and lets the people who believe in these ideas congregate and create echo chambers, where they become even more adament in their beliefs, more easily. No evidence at all exists that technological advancement will reduce job opportunities. Remember, this is not a new theory.. URL_1 > Predictions that automation will make humans redundant have been made before, however, going back to the Industrial Revolution, when textile workers, most famously the Luddites, protested that machines and steam engines would destroy their livelihoods. “Never until now did human invention devise such expedients for dispensing with the labour of the poor,” said a pamphlet at the time. Subsequent outbreaks of concern occurred in the 1920s (“March of the machine makes idle hands”, declared a New York Times headline in 1928), the 1930s (when John Maynard Keynes coined the term “technological unemployment”) and 1940s, when the New York Times referred to the revival of such worries as the renewal of an “old argument”. > As computers began to appear in offices and robots on factory floors, **President John F. Kennedy declared that the major domestic challenge of the 1960s was to “maintain full employment at a time when automation…is replacing men”.** In 1964 a group of Nobel prizewinners, known as the Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, sent President Lyndon Johnson a memo alerting him to the danger of a revolution triggered by “the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine”. **This, they said, was leading to a new era of production “which requires progressively less human labour”** and threatened to divide society into a skilled elite and an unskilled underclass. The advent of personal computers in the 1980s provoked further hand-wringing over potential job losses. And every time, the predictions ring hollow. We've had more automation - and particularly cognitive automation - over the last 20 years, than any other period in history, and this is era that has seen the fastest wage growth in human history: URL_0 > **Progress in the global war on poverty** > *Almost unnoticed, the world has reduced poverty, increased incomes, and improved health more than at any time in history.* And means of automation are not concentrating into the hands of a small elite. They are becoming increasingly widely distributed. For example, we've gone from 122 million people owning smartphones in 2007, to 2.5 billion people owning them at the start of 2017. All of this power and technology is now in the pockets of nearly half of the world's population. Contrary to the fear-mongering about automation being concentrated in the hands of a small minority and impoverishing the masses, it is becoming ubiquitous and raising the standard of living of the vast majority of the population.",
"What is different now is that it is happening in more fields, and it is happening faster than it has ever before. Clerical and Service industry jobs are becoming automated.",
"I am going to try not to have an overly long treatise on why. **There is a point where computers can not only do what a human can do but do it faster and better. We crossed this point for a lot of things and are approaching doing this for most things** In the past we were making automated **tools** to help at task",
"Some of this may have to do with the fact that we are quickly approaching a point where we can automate away a few industries with self driving cars. Once self driving cars can be proven to be more reliable than humans you will see massive lay offs in ground shipping and transportation. This isn't like other fields that may slowly bleed jobs as machines become more efficient there will be less jobs for people. There seems to be a real line that once machines can be shown to be better drivers than people it is just a matter of automating away all the workers. Professional drivers who are laid off in mass will not be able to just get new jobs since their automated cars will already be made in increasingly automated factories and driving in many places is one of the highest paying jobs a person without an advanced degree can have, so the quality of life for those people will drop off. Not to get political but the changing economy is what fueled the rust belt to be the hot bed for a Trump. People who are pinched out by the changing economy felt like people didn't care about their plight and people who will lose their job to automation will be in a similar plight.",
"It's the personal connection one has to an automaton, a cyborg or another machine that looks like us. Sure, machines contribute to just about every product we have these days and have helped move modern civilization more quickly to next level technology, but these machines are largely behind the scenes in factories. We only see the end product. If automatons began to be more used in society, there are two schools of thought. One, the human-nature of the beings (think of cyborgs or something like the T-800 from Terminator) would help us accept them working in very human-conditions and trust them in certain situations (like baby delivery, e.g.). On the other side, the uncanny valley says that having a machine look like us would cause an unsettled feeling and it would be better to have something look like Number 5 from Short Circuit in our daily lives. Either way, the use of these machines is going to be a big deal because automatons are more useful in service industry (like Taco Bell) versus the Amazon Warehouse, because one of their big benefits is the human-likeness. In the warehouse, you would just have Number 5 roll around, but at the McDonald's counter, you might have something that looked like the love dolls from Japan. So, no, automatons have actually not really been used to their full potential because their main potential is client-facing interaction like the service industry. If you are referring to automatons in factories, they'd be there largely as proofs of concept. Things are different now because automatons have finally become advanced enough to be useful where they are needed most.",
"Humans need not apply is probably the best video explaining this issue URL_0",
"It's exponential. Think of it like an infection -- once technology opens up automation of a new task or type of work it rapidly expands to fill that space, displacing human workers who used to to that task/work. It goes in \"waves,\" as new technology develops and reaches the point where it can take over a work space. It may seem like it's *suddenly* a big deal because now computers are getting advanced enough that tasks/work that were thought to be complex enough that they could only be done by humans are now being done more and more effectively by computers, and so we are likely nearing a next \"wave\" of whole categories of jobs being delegated to computers.",
"Contrary to popular belief, machines have been creating jobs for awhile now, but that trend is ending. Automation is suddenly a big deal, because we have passed the tipping point, and the machines are now consuming jobs. The only reason they haven't consumed more is because the corporations are using people in 3rd world countries like slaves, and it's cheaper to \"pay\" the slaves than automate the work they do. There is an article on the front page right now that shows factories in China are now replacing workers with machines, and getting huge increases in productivity and less defects. Self driving cars alone is looking to threaten MILLIONS of jobs just in the USA. Wattson, the computer that defeated the best jeopardy players, is now being used in diagnosing medicine. It will only be a few more decades before machines are doing many, if not most, of the jobs we do today. Then what? How does that economy function? If almost no one has a job, then they don't have money to buy things, and the economy collapses. Of course, in reality, this will be a slow trend of job destruction, and the economy would decline with it.",
"It's all media hype. Countless innovations throughout human history have put people, and sometimes entire industries, out of work. The cotton gin. The sowing machine. The car. The computer. The internet. The smart phone. Advanced electronics. New software. And guess what? When jobs are destroyed because one industry successfully outcompete's or makes obsolete another industry, those new industries create more jobs. Lots of times those jobs pay better. The two big ones even the younger generation should be familiar with are the internet and smart phone. Stores with physical locations sometimes have trouble competing against online retailers like Amazon. And how many people do you see get GPS's now a days? They just use their smart phones. Heck, there were lots of the reasons the Cival War in the United States was started. The big one was the the southern states were very invested in slavery and they felt there way of life was being threatened. But that threat wasn't just legal. It was economic too. The northern states had much more automation than the southern states, which relied on manual slave labor to get work done. The plantation owners with salves were afraid of automation too. People are better off when we innovate and create new cool shit for people to use.",
"When the Luddites first appeared they where put down and into there places by the upper classes. The folks in the middle didn't care and where happy To accept that all the poor where just stupid and ignorant, because their jobs where safe. All was good except for the poor at the bottom who got told to deal with it. Now those people in the middle have started to have their jobs threaten and have come to realise automation threatens the majority of jobs. Folks at the top making the big money will still be fine so don't care. The middle class people who work in IT don't care, they think they will have jobs fixing and programming the new machines. In my opinion the IT folks are deluded but making big money now so are not going to stop. Even selfdrive vehicles threaten huge numbers of peoples jobs and life styles. Who needs bus drivers taxi drivers, lorry drivers, ships captains, delivery drivers and all the jobs they support like insurance sales, car sales men. But folks are happy to support self driving cars because they can watch TV on their commute. Those commuters need to wake up and realise they won't be commuting soon when their jobs are gone. Down votes inevitable for knocking self drive cars, but it does not change the logic.",
"A few reasons, but here's the biggies: * Job loss has become a very real issue for many people. Even as various governments publish employment statistics that distort the picture, many young and vocal people can see that jobs and job security are in increasing peril almost everywhere. * You correctly point out that automation is at least 100 years old and has been widely embraced already. But some more dramatic concepts such as autonomous vehicles and IBM watson-style problem solving have become more well known, causing imaginations to run with ideas of what the future might hold. * Citizens used to be more concerned about jobs and their fellow citizens, but many societies and individuals have turned cold to that. Unions and working people have been demonized. Once-honest work is now mocked, and a false goal has been planted that everyone should be a CEO or startup millionaire. * Consumers are more accepting of low quality automated goods and services. Today's consumers even believe and spread a narrative that actual human service and craftsmanship isn't economically viable. They expect their service need to be handled with an error-prone bot, touchtone phone maze, or outdated web site FAQ. And because their expectations are so low, they don't demand better.",
"There is a genuine possibility that human brain labour as well as human muscle labour will become obsolete. This will create a huge problem for the way capitalism works....for you to sell you have to have someone to buy. What happens when a very large part of the world is unemployable through no fault of their own? General doctors, legal adsorbents, lorry drivers, baristas, accountants, journalists, anyone who writes word documents all ripe for automation....",
"I'm too late so no-one will see this but it's like this: In the past power had to be completely centralised and rigid because pre-printing press ideas were incredibly expensive to transmit to large numbers of people. With the printing press and greater literacy, ideas could have much more significance to the point of actually being dangerous to those in power, leading to democratic systems to keep the peace as you could not subjugate an entire populace. They could go on strike and then you would be fucked, because if the work stops and people start getting hungry then the government gets overthrown violently. If we reach a point that the most important work is automated then why should those with power care if the workers strike? Will there even be any workers? If powerful people don't *need* workers to keep everyone fed or to make things/fight, then the existence of those people is just a risk of revolt without anything in return. So why not just have a mega-genocide? what's to stop you? reduce operating costs of feeding \"useless\" people. why not? why won't this happen?",
"An automation engineer from another thread explained the economics of it nicely: [Automation engineer here. Automation is difficult and expensive but labor savings more than justify it. Last year I installed a few machines that automated part dimensional inspection. The inspection process became much more accurate and the plant manager thanked us and bought us dinner for saving him from hiring an additional 800+ people to do a worse job. The capital ROI was just a few weeks. I do this dozens of times a year. It's here to stay]( URL_0 ) (credit u/lostmessage256). So it's really just a matter of whenever a technology advances to the point where it can do a category of jobs more efficiently than a human, it takes over all those jobs very quickly.",
"A lot of folks have covered the reality that machines are getting smaller, cheaper, and smarter. I would also submit that they are also become *lighter* and *heavier*. Companies are exploring how they can deliver items with drones. Other companies are exploring how self-driving cards and trucks can deliver people and products without the need to sleep and on a moment's notice. As we continue to improve electronics, it will be possible for these devices to safely recharge themselves. In the IT industry, software and hardware has become more robust, with self-deploying servers, consolidation of hardware resources, and the outsourcing of support jobs. Retail is going online because it's more convenient to shop at home, which consolidates workers into warehouses. Even cutting edge content delivery companies, like Netflix, are destined to roll back their mail-order DVD rentals. I remember growing up in the 90s, reading books that discussed how technology would lead to shorter work days and a higher quality of life. That's all speculative fiction for another timeline; people are now asked to work harder, to do more, while wages never kept pace. We're witnessing the tipping point of a technological revolution. It's fair to ask that prepare to embrace it in a way that helps realize the dreams that we've had for decades.",
"Automation is infiltrating the work place in ways no one even considers. Sure we know a computer could take our fast-food order, and now automated vehicles are catching up to the mainstream expectations of robots taking over. But apps and chips have been taking jobs right before our eyes for a while now. I lost my job to automation...11 years ago. Movie theaters used to use film. Film used to require a small army of specially trained projectionists to keep a movie theater running, especially the 10 - 20 screen buildings. But in 2006 my theater replaced all the projectors with fancy new digital ones. No more building the film reel from the small reels they shipped to us. No more unpredictable, yet always identifiable amd fixable issues with film. Now it's always the same handful of glitches. And when these glitches happen we call a single technician who may not even live in the area. Tech-support. Basically all the control was taken from us via computer chip. Around the same time Fandango became a thing, and then the tills were all digital, so one didn't even need to count change and people could akip the box offoice. In the time span of one year the classic theater turned into one big computer and suddenly there was about a dozen employees where there only needed to be one. The building ran itself. It's not like any of us were paid living wages to begin with, but yeah most of us were gone within the year. No more hours. Too much idleness leading to gossip and general boredom. The boss had been around for a while and he never really adapted but did what he could for us, while losing the only gig he'd ever really known. And at the time, did anyone see what was happening? No. We were extatic about the new technology, and so were the customers. We felt privileged to reign in the future. So that's how we'll lose our jobs. Not with debate and cataclysm, but with smiles and cheers.",
"[Humans Need Not Apply - CGP Grey]( URL_0 ) Probably the best explanation there is.",
"Before we replaced muscles with machines. Now we are starting to replace minds with machines.",
"Automation is now software based, not hardware based. Meaning 1 computer can now control thousands of automated functions......",
"Automation has swept through various industries and eliminated whole classes of jobs over and over. These waves come and go with jumps in technological capability or cost efficiency. Right now, the imminent reality of self-driving vehicles is threatening truck drivers, taxi drivers, delivery drivers, many shipping or postal workers, transit operators... the list goes on. A fuckton of people drive for a living and won't pretty soon.",
"The biggest difference is that before the IT revolution we were automating away unskilled repetitive labor. Now we are automating away skilled jobs. It doesn't seem like much but sites like webmd, avvo, paypal, and zillow reduce the demand for what are historically some of the highest paying professions: doctors, lawyers, bankers, and realtors. Anybody not in IT or creative industries should be nervous....it's only a matter of time.",
"LOL, first i was thinking, WoW, Jamiroquai is bigger (automaton is their new album, announced a week ago, im a huge fan!) then we thought on Reddit, dam , 900 comments, must be a record, and then i read it and its not about them, but about industry. got me! When you subscribe to a new community, it populates your front page sporadically, TIL the world isnt all jamiroquai fans!",
"What's different is that we came out of an 8 year recession AND we haven't raised wages as a whole in nearly that amount of time. So many many people have seen economic stagnation. That PLUS reduced demand for labor from outsourcing AND from automation has led to permanent systematic reduction in employment in the USA. And it as an election year so every problem that could be talked about and blamed on a candidate was. I think these all contributed to why all of a sudden automation is a bad thing.",
"Simply put: the transistor. We had machines and electronics for in days before the transistor was invented, but the transistor revolutionized computing and it has been evolving since. Now we can put a computer in about anything, and its not brand new technology so robots that build things in a factory isnt too expensive an idea and a lot more manageable as someone trying to purchase the technology. I watched a video about automated robots that shares intelligence and could learn how to do different tasks and problem solve then share the solution with other machines",
"* machine learning has come a long way, and can now do more complex jobs * almost all technology has gotten cheaper, 20 years ago it would be insanely expensive to have touch screens for every super-market station, now its dirt cheap which puts a lot more jobs at risk. Automated farming meant that more people get food and allowed people to seek out less back breaking forms of labor. Taking away a fast food job, a tax analyzer's job, a marketing job, or any other \"more complex, more cushy\" jobs and replacing it with an algorithm can save businesses a lot, but come at a cost of putting more people out of the \"better\" jobs",
"because originally automation was portrayed as being used to do the jobs too boring or too dangerous for people to do. So people would still be employed to help do a thing, and robots would do the stuff people cant/shouldnt do. Accidents still happened, but public opinion was for its good intentions. Furthermore, when businesses wanted to cut down on labor costs, they wouldnt 'automate more' but would instead deploy vast social engineering schemes and lobby governments to import more third world refugue unskilled laborers to drive the value of labor down. Poor people would get better jobs, middle class people would feel good about helping the poor, and the displaced workers would simply go to another factory/country or even start their own businesses with the money they had earned thus far. But now there's a push to get robots to do ALL the things, which leaves a lot of humans unable to find viable work to support themselves, unemployed people are unhappy people, and unhappy workers inevitably start to do bad things that make more people unhappy. These unhappy people no longer have the ability to start their own businesses because only the already established organizations can afford the BILLIONS OF DOLLARS it takes to fully mechanize, leaving everyone not already rich totally fucked. Furthermore, its a lot harder to win public opinion with removing people and replacing them with robot especially for really simple shit. The company can no longer pretend they are helping others, they are blatantly helping just themselves and people call them out on their bullshit.",
"There are two thresholds automation needs to overcome in order to replace human labor. Cost: it must be cheaper to produce and implement than human employees or there is no economic incentive to replace them. Capability: it must perform required tasks equal to or better than human labor, or there is a quality incentive to retain human labor. Automation technology in the early part of the industrial revolution and throughout most of the twentieth century was only capable of replacing routine, manual labor tasks. Examples include: skilled artisans, most agricultural jobs, factory jobs, etc. Pretty much any kind of rote, manual task could be performed better and cheaper through automation. As a result, employment in the agricultural industry went from a pre-twentieth century majority of the labor market to less than two percent today. Research the Luddites for an example of early resistance to automation. Most household and personal items (like clothing) are no longer fabricated by individuals, but by largely automated factories. In other words, the labor market transformed dramatically; but, on balance, automation technology had created more jobs than it replaced. This is the key point that is being argued today: That the nature of automation has changed in such a way that it is no longer creating additional employment opportunities for every job it replaces. While the early implementation of automation was only capable of and cost effective at replacing routine, manual tasks, the automation that is being developed today will be capable of replacing non-routine, cognitive tasks. Examples include: driving, writing (look up machine written articles), research and, perhaps most important, learning. That is all a preface. To answer your question, why is automation such a big deal? There is a funny statistic that I've heard from multiple sources, but could never track down the origin: every major revolution in modern history was preceded by a surplus of unemployed lawyers. While, on its surface, this serves mostly to poke fun at the trouble making wrought by idle lawyers, there is a deeper conclusion that can be drawn here. Regardless of your personal opinion about them, lawyers tend to represent the right of the intellectual bell curve in every society. Taken more broadly, this statistic could be restated as: every major revolution in modern society was preceded by a surplus of unemployed smart people. That implication is one of the major reasons why the automation of today is so much different than the automation of the last century. The old automation was only capable of displacing unskilled and uneducated members of the labor force. The new automation has and will continue to displace skilled and educated workers from the labor force. Some, perhaps many, will find alternative employment. However, there is a reality that really needs to be discussed more openly, which is: automation has enabled an economic model in which many (and possibly most) people are simply economically unnecessary. This brings up a number of existentially important questions, like: what responsibility does an economy have towards its useless, if not parasitic, members? Particularly when this segment comprises the majority of the population? What about when automation progresses to the point that no human labor inputs are required to run the economy? To what extent do our lives have purpose outside of economic production? Unfortunately, I feel that most of these questions will be left to the politicians to interpret. In the early twentieth century, Keynes wrote a great article titled \"Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren\". It is very interesting to read this article from the perspective of one of those notional grandchildren, and think about how much our society has gotten wrong over the past 100 years. Anyway, I hope at least some of this was interesting to you. The main concern about the automation of the future is that it will be displacing from the labor force the kind of people who can seriously disrupt society when left without gainful employment. But maybe that wouldn't be the worst thing."
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5s5hpd | Why do Comcast and the big companies fight against net Neutrality? Like wouldn't they make more money in the long run with more consumers and cheaper ads instead of fewer users who are paying more for certain websites? | Like for instance Costco is successful even though they charge less due to a huge consumer base (i know they also charge for membership but you are paying for Comcast so those can be canceled out of the equation). In my mind, having 350 million US citizens on the internet would rake in more money through small ads than having only an elite top 10% who can afford the high prices to pay for faster data plans. Am I wrong? If so please explain. Thanks! PS. I do know what Net Neutrality is but could you also explain that for anyone else who doesn't | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"User numbers are not changing in the scenario. People need the internet. They are fighting against laws that limit how much they can overcharge their customers.",
"You can make money off customers. You can make more money of customers who pay more for better packages. You can also make a *lot* more money charging web services like Netflix, or Amazon, or Facebook tons of money to let people access their sites faster. You can also make it so it's a lot faster to access *your* sites than competitor sites."
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5s5nkx | Why do snakes stick out their tongues so much? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They are capturing scent particles from the air; once their tongue is back inside, they insert it into a smelling organ on the top of their mouth, the Jacobson's Organ.",
"The inside of your nose is lined with special tissues that can detect the particles that make up smells in the air. When you inhale, the particles from the scent travel through your nose and hit these tissues, letting you smell them. Snakes breathe through a tube that opens in their mouth in the soft part of the lower jaw, not through their nose like humans do. So instead of having those special tissues up their nostrils, they have a couple of special openings in the roof of their mouth, called a Jacobson's organ. But since they don't breathe up into the top of their mouth, they need to get those particles in there somehow to be able to smell them. Their flicking tongue captures these particles from the air and then slides into the holes in the top of their mouth, letting those tissues \"smell\" the particles. They do not have these special sensory tissues on the tongue itself, though. As for why they don't, that's more than I'm capable of ELI5ing, since the explanation of evolution is a bit beyond what I can ELI5.. Enjoy!",
"They pick up scent particles from the air with their tongue and rub it against a scent organ called the Jacobson's Organ in the top of their mouth. The Jacobson's Organ has a left and a right side, and the forks on the tongue correspond to these. This gives snakes \"stereoscopic\" scent which lets them tell how far to the left/right what they are smelling is."
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5s5p3v | Why can we study something for 3 hours and remember nothing, but watch a movie for 3 hours and remember everything? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You are not making the connections and the links. Studying does not engage the emotions. Start using color in your notes. There are a lot of techniques for learning. Make note cards you can quiz yourself with. Make a stack. Go through them. If you can answer one discard it. Then go through the rest again. Keep a stack you did not get correct until you can get it right. Then shuffle the cards so you do not memorize in order and go through them again. Discard the ones you know the answer to.",
"Your brain has different kinds of memory. Semantic memory is the memory for things like facts. You put things into this memory by repeating them (a thing called rehearsal). When your brain stores it, and you bring it back up, it has to search through all the words and stuff in there. Episodic memory is the memory of things have happened to you. This memory gets recorded naturally. When your brain stores it, it stores it with visual info and sound and tries to replay it kind of like it was when you stored it. When you watch a movie, even though it's not actually happening to you, your brain treats it like it is. Your brain evolved before movies were a thing, so it doesn't know any better. It records the movie into your episodic memory as if it happened to you, so you remember it effortlessly--the same way you can remember what you ate for breakfast or what the weather was like outside today. While studying, you can actually try visualizing the information and playing an imaginary movie in your head. This generally will stick much better than just repeating the words!"
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5s5qjl | Is it possible to reverse nerve damage caused by Neuropathy | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Which kind of neuropathy does this relative have? Neuropathy is a description of a condition (deteriorating nerves), not an ailment in its own right. Among peripheral neuropathies, there are some caused by vitamin deficiencies, some caused by genetic flaws, and some caused by other conditions. If the neuropathy is caused by a vitamin deficiency, a change in diet can reverse the neuropathy to a degree. If the neuropathy is genetic, the trick is to live as healthy a life as possible, keeping blood circulation and general cardiovascular health up, but this will only slow the onset of the neuropathy, not reverse it. That said, there have been some recent scientific breakthroughs in nerve regrowth that are showing promise in clinical studies; in 15-20 years, there may be treatments to regrow the damaged nerves for some types of peripheral neuropathy. Wikipedia actually has a decent article that goes into more depth."
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5s5ts6 | Why do you need to shave your head when undergoing chemotherapy? What are the common side effects and how come we haven't discovered a better treatment for cancer? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hair loss occurs because chemotherapy targets all rapidly dividing cells—healthy cells as well as cancer cells. Hair follicles, the structures in the skin filled with tiny blood vessels that make hair, are some of the fastest-growing cells in the body.",
"Because it falls out if you dont. In random patches. You dont have to but if you dont want to look like you got into a fight with a buzzer then its a good idea.",
"You don't NEED to shave your head, all or your hair just FALLS out! The only way that we know how to kill cancer is to kill everything around it. This has bad effects on things like hair. And life.",
"you dont shave your head, the chemotherapy is basicly a poison that happens to be more toxic to cancer than the rest of the body, and hopefully kills the cancer before it kills the patient. On the way though, it kills hair follicles in a hurry, so their hair will fall out. they might shave it because the fuzz that is left is not ideal. \"Why havent we discovered a better treatment for cancer\"? because its hard."
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5s5uwl | Why do the contents in tap water in different countries make non-natives sick? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The baseline reason is that water in different areas of the world contain different microbes. The tap water you drink has virii, but you've built up an immunity to it over your lifetime. Not so for the virii in other regions, so you're liable to get sick drinking their water. As I'm not any sort of virus expert, I don't know which ones in particular are problematic in this regard, and hopefully someone more knowledgeable will come along and add to this."
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5s64tr | Why is seawater so hard to convert into drinkable water? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's just hard to do it cheaply. A lot of people think that membranes are the way to go because membranes can let water pass but stop other stuff. But you got to push the water through the membrane and that takes pressure which takes energy. But who knows, maybe someone will think of a cheaper way of doing it."
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5s674d | Rosalind Franklin's contribution to the discovery of the structure of DNA | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Franklin was a DNA researcher at the same time as Watson and Crick. Their research on DNA heavily relied on using Franklin's data from her own, separate, research. But they didn't have her permission to use it, and didn't ask. Her research was crucial to Watson and Crick's understanding of DNA, but never got nearly as much public credit for a lot of reasons. URL_0",
"For the first several decades after the discovery of the DNA structure, the only people anyone ever talked about as discoverers were Watson and Crick, who were the authors on [the paper]( URL_0 ) that first described the DNA structure. However, working alongside Watson and Crick on the problem of DNA structure in the same laboratory were Rosalind Franklin and Maurice Wilkins. What has come to be recognized in more recent years is that some of Franklin's data was very important for Watson and Crick's discovery, and that Watson and Crick did not give Franklin the credit she was due. In fact, since the data was shown to W+C by Wilkins, it is not even clear whether Franklin knew how much she had contributed to the discovery. That said, the pendulum seems to have swung the other way a bit, and you now often hear that W+C stole the idea from Franklin and took credit for it. This is definitely not true. The situation is basically that W+C were doing pretty conceptual work, thinking about the structure and what would fit the considerable data already available. They had a few ideas floating around but weren't sure which was the most likely. Franklin, on the other hand, was doing very empirical work by x-raying crystallized DNA molecules to try to get an idea of their structure. The crucial piece of data that she generated was an x-ray indicating that the DNA had a helical structure. The limitations of x-ray crytallography means that this image in no way presented a full picture of the structure of DNA, and Franklin certainly didn't fully appreciate its significance. For W+C, however, the x-ray immediately confirmed and elaborated one of the models they had been tossing around and ruled out the others. So while Franklin's data was central to the discovery, and this fact was not properly reported by W+C, W+C made an at least equal contribution - it's not as if the discovery was \"stolen\". An added wrinkle is that, as members of the same team working on the same problem in the same lab, there should have been more open communication between W+C and Franklin all along. W+C should not have needed Wilkins to show them Franklin's x-ray, and W+C should have kept Franklin up to date with their hypothesizing, which would have helped her interpret her results. But there was no love lost between Franklin and W+C, and their personal antipathy led to a breakdown in scientific communication that ultimately led to Franklin's contributions being undervalued for some time."
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5s68o5 | To what extent are other smart animals self conscious? | For example, do dolphins recognize their own thoughts, and if so do they know other animals don't but that humans do? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is an example of what's called a philosophically unapproachable question, a larger part of a more famous one. I do not know for a fact that you recognize your own thoughts, and you don't know that I do. We rely on the fact that we are both human and both the same to answer that question, but it would be possible, at least in the short term, to create a facsimile of a person that was not self aware but demonstrated all of the behaviors of self awareness. When it comes to dolphins, we can recognize social behaviors and pleasure activities. We know that each makes a specific sound to introduce itself that's unique (relatively, at least) to each dolphin. We know that they grieve, and that they teach each one another. Some tests even indicate that dolphins can recognize video of themselves or their own reflections. If that's the question you meant to ask, that's the answer. But do they recognize their thoughts? Are they aware that they are playing, or do they merely play? 'Meta-cognitive reasoning', or the ability to think about thinking, is one of our big tests of self awareness. This is stunningly hard to test for, if not completely impossible. Philosophy would hold that we'll never really know. Perhaps dolphins are merely sophisticated biological machines who's behaviors and quirks are the byproducts of evolution and learned responses, rather than deep introspection and self-reflection. But then, perhaps, so are we."
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5s6hgi | Why are our bodies so susceptible to tiny amounts of medicine? | Every pill we take, be it anti depressants, anti histamines, vitamins, painkillers, etc, is tiny, and the amount of active ingredient even less (usually in mg) Why are our bodies, which are so much bigger than the medication, so susceptible to tiny doses? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"ELI5: Because particles are really really really tiny so they can spread out over your body, like how a really small amount of food colouring can make a large glass of water a completely different colour. ELI13: Let's use aspirin for example. A 75mg pill of aspirin contains about 250,000,000,000,000,000,000 molecules of aspirin. And then think that there's only about 37,000,000,000,000 cells in the body. This leaves approximately 70,000,000 (70 million) molecules of aspirin for each cell in your body. And aspirin doesn't even work on every single cell, only in cells that can produce other chemicals for it to react with."
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5s6ixx | Why didn't the Black Death spread to MOST of Poland? | I looked on Wikipedia and there was this gif showing how much countries it infected, so I wondered. | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"URL_0 TL;DR The polish king quarantined Poland from the rest of Europe, limiting the spread of the disease through its borders."
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5s6t9p | Why do we still "see" light even if our eyes are closed? | i just noticed that there is a difference in what we "see" when i closed my eyes with bright light in front me vs when i cover my closed eyes with my hands. why does that happen even if the eyes are somehow not receiving external signals? thank you. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because our eyelids are thin. Pull your t-shirt over your head and stare at a light bulb. Now drop a phone book on your face and look at the same light bulb. Phone book thicker than t-shirt, hand thicker than eyelid. If my 5 year old ever asks me this I'll send him back.",
"Your eyelids don't block out all the light, so some light still reaches your retina when the eyelids are closed. It's a subtle, yet crucial observation you've made. There are patients who are practically blind, i.e. they have light perception, but they cannot identify objects visually. Interestingly, when those patients progress to completely lose light perception, i.e. going completely \"dark\", the subjective experience is huge, though objectively speaking, not much has changed. The progression from *practically blind* to *fully light deprived* has a huge emotional impact, which is largely neglected."
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5s734p | What was r/thebutton | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It was a Reddit experiment that lead to the antifa movement. Everyone wanted to be the last to press it, but only one could be. You waited and timed it cause you were only given one single chance, but if someone pressed it within the minute - that was it and you had to accept it wasn't ever going to be you. Some of us were more accepting than others."
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5s765c | Why didn't any other species make as many advancements as humans? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's this book called *Sapiens* that argues that it is the human ability to communally believe in the imaginary which largely allowed us to develop to this point. Other social animals have to spend a significant amount of time developing their social structures and relationships. They have to spend time with others to learn to trust them and work together. There is a limit to how many other individuals you can keep track of socially. For homo sapiens this limit is claimed to be ~150. Because of this we have (almost) no evidence of primates or other human species such as the Neanderthal living or cooperating in groups that exceed some limit. Humans are different because we make up and tell stories about imaginary things such as a national or religious identity that large groups of people can subscribe to. This gives them something in common and a basis for mutual trust between strangers. By imaginary I don't mean that something is a lie or fake, just that it is not a real world object. Since humans who have never met can identify with each other due to this shared imaginary thing they are more willing to trust and work in a group with large amounts of strangers. Scientific and social progress is often the result of such collaborations. It also allows for increasingly large groups to concentrate their resources/capital. This is also why homo sapiens were able to easily outcompete, or perhaps directly eliminate, the other species of humans. Hundreds of homo sapiens can easily defeat a few dozen Neanderthals despite being inferior in strength and brain size. I don't know how extensive the evidence is for this theory. But on its surface it seams reasonable.",
"A key factor in human development has been *language*. Once one human comes up with a cool idea, they can share it with another human, who in turn can turn it into a cooler language. Without language, we would literally have to reinvent the wheel every generation. So it isn't so much that humans are a whole lot smarter than other animals. It is that we were the first to get smart enough to invent language, and language allows us to transmit and save (with writing) our knowledge to each generation can know a little bit more than the one before.",
"A couple things really. First of all, when pre-man descended from the trees they relied more heavily on the use of their hands to manipulate the environment through foraging techniques. It is theorized that this is what led to the increased frontal lobe size on humans, which in turn leads to better cognitive ability.",
"It's because we have incredible curiosity and a high ability to adapt to new environments and situations."
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5s77f9 | The supposed 'Island of Stability' in chemistry/physics. | Chemistry | explainlikeimfive | {
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"An atomic nucleus is essentially a balancing act between two different forces - the electrostatic force between positively charged protons, which pushes them away from each other; and the residual strong force between nucleons (the collective name for protons and neutrons), which (up to a point) pulls these particles together. The nature of these two forces are different, as well: the strong force, as its name may suggest is the stronger of the two, but it diminishes to pretty much nothing over the distance of about one nucleon. Meanwhile, the electrostatic force is weaker but its strength remains much more consistent with distance, dropping by a factor of one over the distance squared. This means that any nucleon will only feel the strong force from its nearest neighbours, whilst any proton will feel the electrostatic force from all the other protons in the nucleus. Consequently, as nuclei get larger, you must pack more neutrons than protons in to the nucleus to allow the strong force to keep them held together. However, at some point when your nucleus has a massive blob of neutrons inside it, it just becomes more energetically favourable for the nucleus to split up into smaller components, and you get things like spontaneous fission, alpha and beta decay. This is why nuclei at high mass numbers tend to be unstable. But what about these *islands of stability*? Well, perhaps you might remember that electrons in atoms sit in shells, and that atoms with closed shells are extremely stable - the noble gases all have closed shells, and are extremely inert, undergoing chemical reactions with great difficulty. Nucleons in atomic nuclei sit in their own shells in a very similar way! And just like atoms, nuclei which have closed or near-closed shells (called magic number nuclei) are more stable than those which sit further from closed shells. The islands of stability are predicted to sit at these magic numbers, where the next set of shell closures are supposed to lie. Nuclear physicists think that there may be a set of superheavy elements at these magic numbers which have much longer lifetimes than those around them, due to their closed or near-closed shells. Hope this helps!"
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5s7k3t | How can Helium be a liquid at absolute zero, if atoms stop moving? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Liquid helium is not at absolute zero. Absolute zero is −273,15 °C while liquid helium is -269 °C. The closest we have been is one-half-billionth of a degree above absolute zero using a unique combination of gravitational forces and magnetic fields to cool sodium gas. [Source]( URL_0 )",
"The notion that all movement stops at absolute zero is based on classical physics. There is thing in quantum mechanics called the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. It says that a particle's momentum and position cannot be simultaneously completely determined. This leads to something called zero-point motion. Even at absolute zero, a particle cannot be completely still, since that would mean that its momentum and position would be simultaneously determined. Instead the particles \"jitter\" a little bit. This is zero-point motion. For both stable isotopes of helium, helium-3 and helium-4, it just works out that due to the low mass of the atoms and the weak forces that would bind them together into a solid, the zero-point motion of the atoms is enough to prevent liquid helium from solidifying, even at absolute zero at normal pressure. If the pressure is increased enough, even helium will solidify. Source: I'm a theoretical physics PhD student and I study liquid helium-3.",
"Everyone saying it isn't a liquid at 0K is wrong, and needs to check the literature. [Here]( URL_1 ) is a phase diagram of helium. To answer OP's question, helium is a quantum liquid, its bulk properties are a manifestation of the underlying dynamics of the quantum particles that make it up, whereas other elements are either too massive or have too many confounding effects from interactions between their components for this to show up. The relevant effect here is [Zero Point Energy]( URL_0 ), which describes how even with 0 temperature, and no mechanical energy, some quantum systems have a nonzero energy, because of the constraints imposed by the Schrodinger equation. In the case of helium, this energy is enough to overcome this very inert element's extremely weak interatomic attraction and keep it liquid, unless you put it under enough pressure to force the atoms to stick. ELI5: Helium atoms keep moving a little bit, even with no energy."
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5s7ksf | Why do we use an tiered income tax system, instead of something more precise (like an integral-based tax)? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's way easier for the average person to do the math if the tax rates are stepwise rather than continuous. The average person isn't very comfortable with formulas, but can deal with subtraction and multiplication.",
"I have a feeling that using a formula to calculate income tax is more complicated and harder to understand amongst the un-educated, which make up a significant portion of a country's population. I know a couple of relatives who cannot grasp the concept of \"x-squared\" but have no problem with the current tax code. Hell, there are even people who don't understand the brackets system and think that accepting a raise will make you poorer. Another main reason is that it is hard to find a polynomial curve that fits into what the government wants. Try plotting US's tax system with a parabola, I'm sure you'll end up with very strange coefficients.",
"H & R Block, Intuit (who owns TurboTax), etc. actively lobby (i.e. bribe) lawmakers to keep the tax code as confusing as possible because their industry depends on individuals not being able to prepare or file taxes on their own. Imagine if we had a flat tax that was simple and automatic, and based on the income statements that the government already has access to. Why would anyone pay to have their taxes done? The system isn't broken, it works exactly as designed. It was just designed to serve them, not us. That's not the sole reason, but it's certainly a contributor.",
"That would be more complicated. And whether or not it would be theoretically more efficient, that can end up being less efficient in practice due to the complexity of implementing it. If every single additional dollar you make changes the tax rate you pay, the accounting calculations become a bit more complicated than if you can simply apply a single arithmetic calculation for everything you make under a threshold you may be nowhere near. A business can handle that, but just some random person might find it frustrating, easy to screw up, and untrustworthy if they don't understand how a number is arrived at.",
"A very common misconception is that your tax burden immediately jumps up to a higher percentage if your income (AGI) crests into a higher bracket. What actually (currently) happens is that your first $x of income is taxed at the first bracket's percentage, the next $y of income at the next percentage, and so on. For example, if the next bracket is 20% at $86,000 and your AGI was $86,091, only $91 would be taxed at 20%, and the remaining $86,000 is separated into lower rates (e.g. 10% of your first $30,000, plus 15% of $56,000). If you were to graph taxes paid against AGI, it would have a slight curve. Against gross income, there would be a \"landing area\" corresponding to the standard exemption. Graphing percentage paid as tax against income might actually look somewhat like a parabola, depending on the number of brackets and the rates in between. [add] [Actual tax brackets for 2016]( URL_0 )"
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5s7owl | When surgeons remove a part of the brain, how do they fill the hole left behind? | So I was watching a documentary about a girl who had half her brain removed and I realised they can't just leave the gaping hole there. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The brain is suspended in a layer of fluid, called cerebrospinal fluid (or CSF). If parts of the brain are removed, the \"gaps\" get filled with CSF.",
"Usually when removing tissue from anywhere in the body they are doing it to relieve excess pressure. Filling the hole with anything would be counter productive, and provide a vector for infection to take place."
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5s7vcg | Functional programming vs other types of programming | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Normal\" (imperative) programming is based on an idea that you tell the computer what to do as a sequence of steps like: read a number add 1 to that number print the number on screen ... Functional programming is based on the idea that a program is an evaluation of a mathematical function. Mathematical function is a \"box\" into which you put a value (for example a number) and it spits out another value. It does nothing else than that and it has to spit out the same value every time you give it the same input value. These are the restrictions a mathematical function has to have. Now in \"normal\" programming you have functions too, but they are not mathematical functions, they are more like subprograms that can do other things than just take and return values. In functional programming, everything is a strictly mathematical function that is only allowed to take a value and output a value. The program then looks something like this: output = convert_number_to_text(add_numbers(input,1)) So functional programming is basically restricted from \"normal\" programming. But why would we restrict programmers? Turns out it is very good to be restricted like this, because: - The programs are very bug-proof because every time a programmer uses a function, he knows it will only return some value and do NOTHING ELSE. In a normal programming language you never know if a function changes some data in the background or something, which causes many bugs, which may also be very hard to find and fix. Basically with restrictions come guarantees. - The computer knows that the functions aren't allowed to do certain things and so it can optimize the program to run faster. For example if you call a function with two parameters a(b,c), the evaluation of b and c can always be done in parallel on different CPU cores, because they are completely independent! - The program has interesting mathematical properties, it may be analysed in certain ways, mathematical proofs of its correctness can be made etc."
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5s84qy | what happens when someone rich dies with nobody to pass it on to? Where does the money go? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A person who dies intestate, or without a will or beneficiary, will have their assets distributed \"by law\". There are laws everywhere to govern this sort of thing and vary by location. For example, the laws in England are different than those in the United States. In fact, in the US, the laws are by state. For the most part, the assets are placed into an account, an administrator is hired and assigned to locate the nearest living relative/s. Failing that, the assets will eventually go to the State Treasury. Generally speaking."
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5s87pn | Why does inhaling steam seem to clear up clogged sinuses? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think of your mucous as a kind of hydrophilic (strongly attracted to water) slime. If you're sick, suffering from allergies, exposed to irritants, etc... then it can be valuable to move that mucous along faster than it would normally. By inhaling water vapor, you increase the water content of the mucous, and it becomes looser, less sticky and more subject to being cleared. Another reality of the situation is that often what we perceive to be clogged sinuses due to mucous are actually just inflamed. Steam and warmth can be soothing, especially since dryness or the presence of an irritant is often a cause of that initial inflammation."
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5s8805 | Why do even the best suction cups eventually fall off of the surface to which they are affixed? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The answer is not going to be as interesting as I suspect you might hope. In short, the seal formed by the suction cup is never perfect. The cup itself and the surface to which its attached are not perfectly smooth or clean, so even if it's a very good seal, over time air is going to infiltrate the low-pressure region within the seal. Keeping a vacuum is notoriously hard, and historically requires some kind of mechanism to continuously evacuate a region. That is to say, if you had a suction cup that would constantly remove stray air molecules that got into the sealed region, then there would be no set limit to how long it could hold."
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5s89w0 | Why is it so hard to create emulators? Emulators like Citrus are coming along, but the ones for the Wii and PS consoles are still in heavy development. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Operating systems like Windows and Linux are designed to work on a wide variety of hardware, so moving from one CPU or ram set to another is not big deal. Operating systems for static hardware systems like gaming consoles are entirely different; the OS is designed from day one to work with exactly one set of hardware and often includes checks and calls that expect extremely specific bits and pieces to be present, and fail if they are not. Emulation is essentially tricking an operating system into thinking it has one set of hardware when it is actually using another, and getting that trick to hold up is hard, ESPECIALLY when the hardware the emulator will be running on is changing too. The Wii and PS consoles are tricky examples because they run on proprietary hardware for the most part, often involving intricate and unique designs, ie. the ram setup in the PS3. Nintendo consoles use older styles of CPU that have been overclocked into oblivion, with both of these presenting challenges to emulation. It's a tricky issue, and getting the OS to continue working on varying hardware is very hard."
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5s8d0l | How exactly do banks make money? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Traditionally... 1. Let people put their savings in your vault and pay them 5% interest. 2. Loan that money to people for houses and businesses, charge them 10% interest. Of course, things have gotten much more complicated nowadays.",
"I'm on my phone so please excuse the terrible formatting. Your question could have two meanings, How do banks profit, or how do banks create money. I'll answer the second one first; the 'creation' of money. Banks employ a system known as 'fractional reserve banking' whereby banks are able to create debt (notice the distinction) to borrows to a higher percentage than total deposits. For example, say i deposit $100 in the bank. The bank is now able to make $1500 worth of loans. This new debt is filtered into the economy now increasing the amount of money in the economy. The first type, how do the make profit? Interest on these loans.",
"They also make money when you use your credit cards and Visa debit card. Its called Interchange Income and it comes from the fees that every merchant and retailer pay to Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express for the ability to let their customers pay using their cards. The fees vary and will affect which retailers will accept which card. For example, Discover charges slightly higher fees, which is why not every place will take Discover. American Express actually delays paying the fees until after the Amex cardholder has paid their bill at the end of the month. This means that even fewer retailers will accept Amex. Each individual fee is small, but when you multiply that by billions of card swipes every day, the income is significant. Financial Institutions will get a higher percentage of the Interchange when you press Credit at the store and less when you press Debit.",
"The interest people pay on loans. Fees people pay on their accounts and investments. While they have your money, they also put it into low risk investments and make money off those as well."
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5s8ecs | if the average person sees a horizon about 3 miles away, how would that change if the earth really was flat? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If the Earth were a perfectly flat plane with an edge, then the \"horizon\" would be theoretically visible at any distance from the surface. Literally any non-zero distance. In practice, the limit would become our visual acuity--the limits of our eye's ability to resolve details at a distance--and I suppose photons would act weird running virtually parallel to the surface of an actual physical plane, depending on what the plane is made of, it's gravitational influence, etc."
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5s8eia | Why do we have a dominant hand, and how can we improve dexterity in your non-dominant one? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The easiest way to gain dexterity in your non dominant hand is to start brushing your teeth with it Obviously this won't magically make you ambidextrous but it worked for me to make my left hand more dextrous than before so I'd call it a success.",
"Re the first point google is your friend and the following Wikipedia page will help. URL_0 Re the second point you can do by simply attempting tasks with the non dominant hand. For example a person that break their dominant arm will be unable to fully use it until the break has healed, and there for need to use the non dominant arm to pick up items, write etc. At first the task is difficult but over time with no option to use the dominant arm the tasks become easier. Once the break is fixed the user will naturally return to using their dominant hand but retain the ambidextrous abilities they have gained.",
"As Rextherabbit's link shows it has a lot of factors. One that I didn't see mentioned is that people naturally have one side of the body slightly larger than the other. This is partly due to use: you will see professional tennis players with one large arm and one smaller one. But the difference is also visible in parts of the body that should have equal usage: one side of the face is larger than the other; the male member has some curvature because one side is larger. When a baby begins to grab things it will find that it is easier to grasp with its larger arm. Look at which side of a person's face is larger, and see if that is their dominant side.",
"I started jerking off with my left hand instead of my right, now my left hand is almost as easy to control and actually easier to do precise movements with. ._.",
"As a juggler I suggest learning how to juggle. It will wildly increase your proficiency of your non dominate hand because juggling forces you to do both gross and fine motor functions with both hands. Also the juggling skill has massive cross over benefits in regards to ambidextrous skills."
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5s8i03 | How will autonomous cars handle not being able to see the road, ie snow | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It certainly will be harder for an autonomous car to do this than normal driving. Early autonomous cars will likely have a failsafe mode, where if they can't handle the road conditions, they will pull over and return control to the driver. Also remember that these cars will have a lot of advantages, like 360^o vision, radar, IR, and future enhancements might allow them to talk to the road and to each other. What might appear as a white out to us would be no different than a sunny day to them.",
"Right now it's not advised to use autopilot in snow. With that said there are plans to where it will be ok in the future and there are different ways to do it. One is to create detailed surroundings which include data sent from the cars themselves when conditions were not snowy. This allows the car to look for multiple different markers (curbs, telephone poles, signs, and other landmarks) to determine its location and drive in the same way as previous cars did in good conditions. This of course has issues with rather rural areas with little historical data and in those instances the car will advise not using autopilot.",
"All these cars have LIDAR and radar to sense other cars and things around them. They use cameras to see road signs and lane lines. So you are right that the lines on the road disappear as far as the cars sensors are concerned but like us the car can see things like curbs and sign posts. Basically as the tech becomes more prevalent cars will map out road sign posts and curbs using LIDAR and radar. When the camera cant see the road it will match terrain contours, road posts, curbs and anything else it can detect with radar and LIDAR to previous information or maps of the given GPS coordinates. The programming has been used in other areas for years so its not super difficult just tweaking it for autonomous vehicles and creating usable databases of all the roads is kind of a big task.",
"The same way that you do when you can't see the road - you do your best to get by with other visual cues other than the road itself, and information you have access to. Vision is just one aspect, there are many cameras of many types as well as recieving other kinds of data i.e GPS, lidar, physical sensors. The software controlling these things are getting better also. You don't just track the road itself, you track all objects and their spacing and their motion and parallax, their shape, how they're lit etc etc. Just like in your brain there are areas that track edges in your vision, and within there there's bits that deal with angles of those edges and so on, in addition to areas that track colour, brightness, occlusion etc. all of this information is put together into a model that you use to make decisions. We're improving it's models of the world beyond simply tracking the floor.",
"Unless road standards are followed perfectly and the roads mapped exactly, the extreme conditions will still defer control to the driver. The typical rules the car has to follow will not be applicable in extreme conditions. You could see it the same as a car driving across the desert. Where are the lanes? Snow could additionally interfere with sensor functionality depending on the type."
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5s8t7h | Why do we still load fonts locally for websites, when bandwidth can support entire video ads? | I don't understand why i can visit a website in this day in age and still have un-displayable characters be a thing, especially considering the bandwidth madness that advertisements go through to track and load on your page. | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The HTML language is designed to save bandwidth as much as possible from the ages when it might be a scarce resources. Fonts are a local resource which are not designed to be updated and removed on the fly by web browsers. The designers of the website should use web-safe fonts or make the characters into images."
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5s8u62 | How to calculate the Domain and Range of a Function? | Mathematics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"For a function f(x)=y : The Domain is all the values x is allowed to be. The Range is all the values y can be, considering all allowed x. For example: f(x)=1/(x^(2)) has a Domain of \"x is not equal to 0\" (since it would be undefined due to division by zero) and a Range of y > 0 since no value of x gives a negative or zero value from the function, but you can get any positive real number result you want."
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5s95en | Do our brains work faster if we live everyday life faster? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"No, your brain works best when it isn't always bombarded with stressors. If you are taking in a lot of constant new information you don't really digest it always, and the very incentive to acquire \"new\" information and constant stimulation is surrounded by stressors. What is the motivation to live \"fast-paced\" to begin with? Which is why there are so many psychological defects in our modern rat-race age... the human brain evolved in an environment where life was very hard but not necessarily \"fast-paced\". Many hunter-gatherer tribes don't wake up early and the majority of them take naps throughout the day, now these people may be \"pre-logical\" but they are walking encyclopedias who know everything there is to know about surviving in their world without reading about it. Furthermore, the human brain has actually shrunk as well. A constant barrage of internal and external stimulation will flood your brain with dopamine and other neurotransmitters but it will also increase your cortisol levels... by racing through life to acquire some invisible goal one realizes that we forget to actually enjoy that life."
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5s9gsj | Why does the depolarisation of a cell potential continue past 0 mV? | In the case of a neuron, there is a gradient providing a voltage of -70 mV, meaning positive ions will want to enter through the barrier to make this voltage 0 mV. However, if you look at the [curve]( URL_0 ), the cell becomes polarised again, just with opposite charges; positive ions will now want to escape out of the cell. Is this because the sodium (Na+) channels only allow flow in one direction (into the cell), or is it because sodium will flow in despite the voltage, due to the lack of sodium ions inside the cell, to make an equilibrium in terms of ions, defying the opposing charges? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You have to remember that an electrochemical gradient consists of both the concentration gradient of an ion and the polarity of the membrane. So even once the membrane is depolarised beyond 0mV and the electrical gradient wants to push Na^+ out of the cell, there is still way more Na^+ outside the cell so it keeps rushing in until it reaches a point where the concentration and electrical gradients are balanced. I know that wasn't really ELI5 but I figured you already had a basic understanding of membrane potential. If you want to do some further reading, have a look at the [Nernst Equation]( URL_0 ). This is a way of calculating whether an ion will flow into or out of a cell if you know the membrane potential and the relative concentrations of the ion inside and outside the cell. I found that once I understood the concept of equilibrium potential mathematically, this made understanding everything to do with membrane potentials and ion flow so much easier."
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5s9l9p | how does my phone know how much percent of battery I have? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Almost all smart phones use two different methods together. The most simple is voltage. Voltage is not a very good indicator of charge in li-ion batteries used in phones because the voltage does not fall at an even rate when you use them. Voltage measurement is used as a fail safe. It's very bad for a battery's voltage to get too low. This is why sometimes when you get your phone cold in the winter it drops dramatically in charge percentage instantly. What has happened is the battery's voltage dropped when the phone got cold. Now the phone has started reporting an estimate based on voltage. The second and much more accurate is coulomb counting. This is like counting the individual electrons as they go in and out of the battery. It counts them as they go in (charging) and as they go out ( using it not plugged in). This allows the phone to know exactly how much energy it put in and can accurately guess how much is left. Just like putting gas In your car. The electronics that do this are actually called 'gas gauge' chips. The phone will have programming in it that will use both methods together to track and report charge state to you. Source : electronics engineer that designs things w li-ion batteries."
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5s9mqp | why does a one-way ticket cost almost as much as a round trip ticket? | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"What flights are you looking at? Usually, you get like a 10%-25%. For instance, my airport to JFK is ~$25 cheaper round trip than two 1-way tickets for the same airline. As for why, simple, guaranteed business. Let's say there is a 15% markup, that means two 1-ways nets 2x15%, but whose to say you take the same airline back? So, they give you a round trip price that is 10% cheaper, so they lose some profit in return for a guaranteed 5% of that return flight."
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5s9o0f | How come many people have lots of mental disabilities, not only one. | How come many people have lots of mental disabilities together. I often hear about people with dyslexia, with adhd, and maybe ocd. But i find its less common to find someone with just dyslexia or just ocd. | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are a lot of gray areas in psychology. Mental order diagnoses are an attempt to catalog a wide variety of behaviors into neat little boxes, but no two brains are the same. So you might be a dead ringer for bpd, but you only have mild symptoms of schizophrenia and ocd. Since there's no specific term for that exact list of symptoms, you get all three diagnoses. The field of mental health science is more art than science, to put it in Rick and Morty terms. A lot of people don't realize that.",
"I'm bipolar, clinical depression, anxiety, and ADHD. I think it's just my brain is wired wrong lol"
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5sa0i7 | What causes songs to get stuck in your head? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"I've read that it is because we sing in our heads a part of the song, which is not finished. But our brain likes to finish stuff so you just keep singing it."
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5sa64s | How would a particle collision at CERN be experienced by our senses; would it have feeling, smell, sounds, looks, etc, or would you die from the explosion, or is it so small you'd not notice anything? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You mean if you were in the path of a collision? We have a rough idea because something similar happened to someone in the past. In 1978, a Russian scientist named Anatoli Bugorski was accidentally hit in the head with a proton beam moving at close to the speed of light from a particle accelerator. He saw a flash \"brighter than a thousand suns\" but didn't feel any pain. Afterwards, his face swelled up and began to peel along the path the particles took. His intellectual capacity is intact but he as a result he has deafness in his left ear, paralysis of left half of his face, occasional seizures, and he gets tired easily. Despite this, he was able to complete his PhD and continued to work. He's still alive today. He received more than enough radiation to kill him, but because the beam was so tiny, it simply passed right through him. The catch is that the LHC at CERN is 200 times more powerful than the accelerator he was working on. Also, he was lucky enough that the beam passed through non-vital areas of his brain. If it had passed through a vital area or some other part of his body, he might have been killed."
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5sa8ps | whats the difference beween a politician accepting a donation and a politician accepting a bribe? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's bribery when there's a direct quid-pro-quo (exchange of one thing for another thing) and where the causation is such that the payment triggered the official action. That's what makes regulation difficult, conceptually and practically. If the Koch Brothers donate millions of dollars to the Tea Party, is that bribery because the politicians will, if elected, enact pro-coal and pro-business laws, or did the Koch Brothers simply donate to those politicians who, as a \"pure,\" unadulterated policy matter favor pro-coal and pro-business law independent of the donations? How do we know that the donations cause the action and the donaters aren't just choosing to donate only to those who agree with them? It's a lot easier to prove bribery when you're talking about non-policy, ministerial actions, like approving building permits and granting contracts, than it is when you're talking about broad political actions that favor any one group. If Bernie Sanders were elected through the donations of $20 he received from tens of thousands of people, would those people have been \"bribing\" him when he lowered their relative tax burden by more heavily taxing the 1%?",
"Bribes are illegal, and campaign contributions are legal. No, seriously, that's it. In most countries what US calls \"campaign contributions\" would be called bribes and be illegal. The only distinction is an arbitrary line. In the US, that arbitrary line is that you can give someone money, you just can't tell them what it is you want them to do directly. That's it. If Exxon hands a Congressman a pile of cash and says, \"open up offshore drilling and we will give you more\", that is bribery and illegal in the US. If Exxon hands a Congressman a pile of cash and then 5 minutes an Exxon lobbyist walks in and says \"open up offshore drilling and we will be grateful\", that is legal. The simple fact of the matter is that in the US, bribery is legal. There are limits on how you can bribe. You have to be coy and not pretend like it is an exchange. We have a bunch of dumb rituals you need to follow, and sometimes you need to document the bribe. At the end of the day though, it's a bribe, and it's just how business is conducted in the US. If you want your congress critter to do something for you, ~~bribe them~~ give them legal campaign contributions and then tell them what you want. Seriously, there is no difference. We just don't call campaign contributions bribery by custom. Lots of other nations just call it bribery. We could change the law and also call it bribery too.",
"Donations are made to the candidates campaign or a supporting institution (their party, or a PAC or some other independent expenditure). A donation will never legally see a candidates bank account. Donations are regulated heavily and usually publicly disclosed (super PACs don't need to make disclosures). Most donations are made because the donor agrees with the candidate politically or has a personal relationship with them. Rarely they are made in the hopes of influencing the candidate, but there's no quid pro quo so politicians can ignore or return the donation. A bribe is given to a candidate or incumbent politician directly in return for some service or action they take while in office. They're illegal, so usually not disclosed. Edit to further clarify: most states have restrictions on lobbyists making donations to candidates. In my state, they can't make donations to candidates who don't appear on their ballot on Election Day. I assume there are similar provisions made by the FEC for national and congressional candidates but I am not 100 percent sure.",
"A campaign donation has limitations on how it can be used. You can't take a vacation to Maui with your campaign donations for example. A bribe has no limitations on how it can be used. It goes straight to your personal bank account.",
"Semantics. I can't give a politician $1000 to pass a law, but I can take him out to lunch, eat the finest food known to man kind and pay for his $1000 portion, with an implication of what I want in return. Very difficult, if not impossible, to regulate. What's to distinguish an honest favor or nice act for a politician from a bribe?",
"It's bribery when you wire the money into the politician's personal bank account and he passes the law you want. It's a donation when you wire the money into his campaign's bank account and he passes the law you want. Edit: This isn't a joke! And it's not \"bribery,\" either, not in modern-day American political parlance; it's called \"corporate free speech.\" Bribery was a problem, so we defined it out of existence.",
"A donation becomes a bribe when the person donating gets special favors from the person getting money.",
"Whilst there are the intended differences, if we're talking real meaning behind them, there's none.",
"TL;DR: A surprisingly wide variety of things done for a politician could count as a \"bribe,\" but *only* if done with the intention for the politician to perform a surprisingly narrow set of acts. According to recent Supreme Court precedent, to be a \"bribe\", there *must* be what's called a \"quid pro quo\", i.e., something done for a politician (doesn't have to be a payment directly to him!) to induce him to take some kind of *official* act. Let's unpack that a bit, starting with the \"something done for a politician\" bit. The stereotypical bribe involves handing a politician an envelope full of cash. While that still [definitely happens]( URL_1 ), particularly on the state and local level, it's so obvious as to be kind of, well. . . tacky, I guess. In the US anyway, a lot of what goes down in terms of bribery isn't direct payments to the politician as such, but nonetheless involves some kind of favor done for or on behalf of the politician. Possible examples: donations to a favored charity, pulling strings for the politician's kid, getting his wife a seat on some local non-profit board, etc. What makes the above a *bribe*, instead of just a friendly favor (\"elite\" social circles involve *tons* of mutual back-scratching), is when it's done to induce the politician to take some specific \"official act,\" i.e., exercise some power specific to their office that only they can exercise. Could be almost anything, depending on the office in question, e.g., voting a certain way on a particular issue, approving an application, awarding a government contract, etc. But it does have to be an *official* act. Just because something is a manifest conflict of interest, in an ethical sense, does not make it a \"bribe\". There's a whole lot of what could fairly be described as \"influence peddling,\" corrupt as the day is long, which is still not technically \"bribery,\" pr even necessarily illegal, as it doesn't involve the official actually doing anything *as a function of their office*. Making introductions and endorsements? Making \"friendly\" phone calls to other officials over whom the subject official has no actual authority? Probably doesn't count. Certainly didn't for [Bob McDonnell]( URL_0 ), anyway.",
"Nothing. There is absolutely no difference. If anyone else did the same thing, they would be in jail.",
"Politician: I would like to ban Muslims! Donor: that's a great idea, here's $100 to get you elected! That's a donation. Donor: here's $100, could you please ban Muslims? Politician: you have a deal! That's a bribe.",
"It's a huge gray area. The obvious answer is \"It's a bribe when it's understood by both parties that a specific favor is expected in return.\" However, historically (in the US at least) favors are expected in return for donations, as well. It can be hard to distinguish between a favor and a bribe, and it's almost a guarantee that any monetary exchange will be described as both by different parties - and it can be difficult if not impossible to tell which term is more accurate. This is a big part of why some people are in favor of campaign finance reform.",
"Donations are a glorified legal way of bribing, no more to it. Time for it to be seen for what it is.",
"Donations go to an organization supporting the politician, e.g. the political party, for the purpose of supporting the politician's campaign for election. They are supposed to be recorded and subject to audits. Bribes are given with the intent of receiving some sort of material benefit in return, e.g. get the politician to support a development or legislation that would benefit the person offering the bribe. Since bribery is supposed to be illegal, records are seen as little more than blackmail material so such transactions are hidden with or as legitimate funding.",
"The former is legal and the latter is not - other than that I don't think there's that much of a difference. If you want a lesson in how it works check out the money Devos has been handing out recently.",
"The only difference is the spelling and pronunciation. If a company gives money to a politician you can bet they are looking for something in return. A politician calls them donations and suddenly they aren't breaking the law. Donations are just bribes that have to be laundered first."
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5sa9p1 | What is the difference between "fake news" and regular old propaganda? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Propaganda is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide variety of state media usage for nationalist or political. Although propaganda is typically biased in favour of a particular policy or political position, it is not inherently misleading or fraudulent. For example, propaganda has been used extensively during wartime to dehumanize enemy combatants, drive military recruitment, improve domestic productivity, influence popular opinion, and improve morale. Even then, even the most blatant propagandists stopped far short of outright fabrication. \"fake news\" is a rather new term which is highly synonymous with \"making shit up\". To be perfectly clear, \"fake news\" itself is not new, merely the term is new. The Daily Mail has been known to outright make up events on slow news days in order to hit their article quotas. For example, back in 2012 an article broke about a dentist in Poland who pulled out all of her ex-boyfriend's teeth, resulting in a criminal investigation. This article was picked up by multiple news outlets worldwide and all of them sourced back to the Daily Mail, which of course sourced no-one at all. When someone finally called the police station in the city in question, no record of such an event or investigation existed. This is not the first nor the last news item that the Daily Fail has outright made up in order to fill a page but these items never raise any issues of importance or significance. More recently, the inability of millions of readers to distinguish between some idiot with a blog and a highly respected news reporting agency has been exploited as a means of influencing popular opinion towards a political end. Were I inclined to do so, I could easily create a website that looks \"newsish\" and has a \"newsish\" name such as URL_0 and post an article claiming that Hillary Clinton was seen laughing at and kicking a disabled black baby. If 100 people read my \"article\" and 10 are dumb enough to believe it without questioning the complete lack of a source then that's 10 people who will have that in their minds come election time. Repeat hundreds of times and enough dumb people will have been swayed in order to influence the outcome of the election.",
"propaganda always follows a certain political agenda, whereas the distribution of fake news can have political and/or financial reasons.",
"Depends on what definition of fake news you use- some people are starting to overuse the term a bit too broadly. Propaganda is more focused (usually state/political party funded) on driving a certain message. Fake news is people making up a story- either because it'll drive traffic($$) or a person wants to make the other side look bad(but it's not really directed/ organized, it's more \"lone wolf\"). They do blend together a bit, and it's not always possible to know which is which- it's not like state sponsors come out and tell you they funded something all that often.",
"One is a statement of purpose. One is a statement of truth. Propoganda is information presented in a way specifically to support a certain viewpoint. That information can be true or false. An example of true news as propoganda would be articles touting \"FBI reopens investigstion into Clinton emails\" without providing context about the lack of information in them. Or, on the flip side \"CIA briefs obama on reports of Trump russian bribes\" without giving the context that they were telling him about the existance of an unsubstantiated report, not briefing him on actual bribe evidence.\" False propoganda would be a north korean news paper running an article to say \"Kim Un voted person of the year in US poll.\" Fake news, as originally used, refered to the truth behind the story, not the intent. Things like \"pope surprisingly endorses Trump.\" It could also be things like \"mars rover finds civilization on mars.\" But it became a big deal this wlection because actually factually innacurate headlines were being intentionally created to drive ad revenue, but people were having their political opinions influenced by it. Tldr: Propoganda is defined as being intended to sway political opinion, whether true or not. Fake news is defined as being intentionally created to be false (as opposed to a source lying or a journalistic mistake), whether for.political gain or not."
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5sacqb | When holding a seemingly heavy small object, why does it seem to weigh less if it's in a large box? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's won't always but your points of leverage are much better if you can keep your shoulders square and keep the load as close to your torso as possible. A small object will force you to carry it at at a hunch and pull your shoulders inward which puts more stress on your spine and takes away good lifting form.",
"I believe that there's some psychological phenomenon at work, which subconsciously makes us stronger when the box looks like it's going to be harder to lift so the body expects to need more power. Not sure though, sorry.",
"The weight is being distributed along a large plane instead of one point, reducing the pressure you feel."
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5saeoz | Why aren't we coughing or sneezing while we sleep? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"*basically* it's because the part of your brain that causes the reflex of sneezing isn't very active. It also doesn't respond to stimulation of dust etc",
"Your brain puts your body into a state of semi - paralysis while you sleep to make sure you stay at rest. People who sleep walk have a chemical dysfunction in this area"
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5safiw | Why WiFi and Smart Utility Meters do not cause cancer. (Need to explain to neighbors in a simple manner) | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Our nerves conduct electric signals. If radio waves were strong enough to even *affect* them - not *damage* them, just *affect* them at all - we would have seizures every time we answered the phone or walked past a wifi router. This doesn't happen. If electromagnetic waves in general were harmful, the electric outlet on the wall near a bed would have done a lifetime of damage to the person sleeping nearby. This doesn't happen either. Holding a magnet could be fatal, if electromagnetism was harmful. It isn't. The reason these things don't happen is because they operate at energy levels that are *way* too low to *affect*, let alone *harm*, anything in our bodies. Electromagnetic waves are stronger the closer you get to the source, following inverse-square rules (strength goes up by a factor of 4 every time you cut the distance in half)... so having a phone next to your head or a laptop on your lap is basically full exposure, but there hasn't been a rise in number of cancer cases to match the astoundingly high rise in strength and number of radio waves in our environment. The reason that these sources of electromagnetic waves can't hurt us is because their energy levels are too low. *Energy* isn't the same thing as *power*: if you cut the distance between you and a router in half, the *power* you are exposed to will go up by a factor of four but the *energy* level is the same because energy is proportional to frequency. High-energy photons, such as X-rays, hit us like little bullets; low-energy photons, like anything in the radio frequency range, hit us like little marshmallows. No number of marshmallows is going to be as harmful as a bullet; no number of EM photons is going to be as harmful as an X-ray. (In the following I'm going to assume that the 5-year-old in question is mathematically precocious, and not getting most of their scientific knowledge from the Insane Clown Posse.) (The energy of photons is measured in 'eV', 'electron volts', the energy of one electron raised one volt... you can ignore the units, all that matters here is how big the numbers are in comparison to each other.) Medical x-rays have a wavelength ~0.1nm, which corresponds to single photons with an energy level of ~12400eV. These can go through almost everything in your body, damaging cells and DNA on the way, but some of them get stopped when they run into metals - like the calcium in our bones and teeth - making them useful for medical imaging. The damage they do *can* cause cancer, but it usually doesn't unless you are exposed to a lot of it. (Patients getting exposed to a large number of x-rays at once are at a lower risk than the techs who work around the x-ray equipment every day.) The weakest wavelength that can damage cells is UV light, which can cause skin cancer but can't penetrate deeper into the body. A single UV photon has an energy of ~4.1eV, or ~3000 times less than the energy of an x-ray. (Again, energy does not equal power. 3000 UV photons don't equal the destructive power of one x-ray, the same way 3000 marshmallows can't hurt you as much as one bullet.) UV photons can cause skin cancer, but compared to how many of them hit us this is very rare; usually the result of a lifetime of working in the sun or tanning on the beach. WiFi signals, including those emitted by the new 'smart' meters, are streams of photons having wavelengths ~12.5cm and energy levels ~0.0000024eV. This is ~1.7 *million* times weaker than a UV photon, and ~5.1 **billion** times weaker than an x-ray. (Again, this doesn't mean that 5.1 billion WiFi photons are equal to one x-ray. WiFi photons don't have enough energy to damage cells, regardless of how many of them there are.) This is *way* off the bottom end of the Marshmallow Damage Index. Compared to an x-ray, wifi photons have the destructive power of the *thought* of a marshmallow. So is it *possible* that smart meters can harm us? Sure, anything is possible, even vanishingly *improbable* things are *possible*. But there is a massive selective-perception effect at work; people use cellphones and laptops all the time, spend their lives sleeping with their head a foot away from an electric outlet, get exposed to electromagnetic waves *all the time* without considering them to be a risk. There is zero evidence that low-energy EM poses any risk at all. Even if we ignore the fact that we are bathed in radio waves all day, there aren't even theories about *how* such things could harm us, let alone reasons why some specific source of them would affect us differently than all of the sources we don't worry about. But there are people who distrust science - they seem to be rather selective about what they consider to be science-y, and to believe that things that are considered science-y can be more harmful than basically identical technologies that they don't fear - so if you are a company who hopes to avoid lawsuits you put the weasel-words in the warnings. But this says a lot more about the state of science education than it does about any putative risk of physical harm. tl;dr: photons are only as dangerous as their energy level. High energy photons like x-rays *can* cause cancer; most of them don't, but limiting exposure is wise. Middling energy photons like UV light *can* cause skin cancer; most of them don't, but if you spend enough time in the sun it can happen. Low energy photons like WiFi/radio/TV/smart-meter signals are not known to cause cancer *at all* - there isn't even a known mechanism by which they *could* cause cancer - but in a litigious and scientifically-illiterate world it is safer to say that there might be some risk than it is to risk a lawsuit. (dammit... sorry, wrote another essay-length comment.)",
"Radio waves do not have the power nor the wavelength required to damage DNA. They are less powerful than light. Do they think radios cause cancer? Because it is the same basis for the technology.",
"Radio waves and microwaves (the part of the electromagnetic spectrum used by cell phones, wifi, and things like that) simply don't have enough energy to cause any cellular or DNA damage. Furthermore, they transmit with extremely low power, on the order of milliwatts, which is thousands of times weaker than a 60 watt light bulb. If your neighbors listen to the radio, have satellite tv, or use cellphones, this is the same thing. One thing I find is helpful to explain to older people is that if they ever owned and watched a CRT television, they got far more radiation exposure from that (which is to say none) than they ever will from wifi or smart meters. Radiation can be scary to people who don't understand it, but radiation is just transmitted energy. Visible light is radiation. Radio waves are radiation. If you're not scared of radios, you have no reason to be scared of this.",
"WiFi and cellphone signals are mostly radio waves, which are non-ionizing, meaning they don't have enough energy to ionize particles (such as part of your DNA) and cause cancer."
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5sagc4 | Why is it often so hard to taste things when your nose is congested? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most of what we consider our sense of taste is a combination of our taste buds, our sense of smell, and to some extent, our sight. (Try tasting food blindfolded).",
"Not an expert, but I believe ~90% of taste comes from smell. This is also why you can \"almost taste something\" when you smell it.",
"Your taste buds are actually quite limited in detecting taste. If you've ever tried putting lemon juice on your tongue when it's sticking out, you likely can't taste it. The roof of your mouth pressing the food down onto the chemoreceptors on your tongue does more of the work, but the olfactory receptors are unique and can give a more \"3D\" experience.",
"You actually only have 5 tastes, sweet, salty, sour, bitter and umami. Everything else is a flavor like strawberry or vanilla these are \"tasted\" through smell although sight and even how you think about the food plays a large part in the flavor as well. (Source: mom is a chef who specializes in food and wine pairing amongst other things and has studied the science of taste extensively) if you have any questions feel free to ask alot of this was hammered into my head from a pretty young age although I'm a little rusty now.",
"As others said - a great part of what we perceive as taste is made up from multiple senses, mostly of smell. I have no sense of smell and I can enjoy tasting different food just as anyone else. I think it's because I use all of my senses to taste - taste, touch (food texture), sight (you can truly \"eat with your eyes\") and even sound (hearing the crunches etc.). I once tried eating a chicken and then bread with closed eyes, and when I chewed them for long enough to have the same mushy structure, if I focused only on the taste, they tasted basically the same.",
"In addition to everyone's answer about smell being 90% of \"taste\", try watching coffee/wine tasters. Everytime they take a gulp, they look like they are **rinsing the sample** through their teeth, before spitting it out and rinsing a \"reset\" cup of water/solution. The fact is they are swishing and aerating the sample by bobbing the back of their tongue up and down, *at the same time*, the action **forces some air from the throat into the back of their nose** to taste-smell the sample. (They aren't gargling/rinsing through their teeth like how you would after brushing your teeth. That rinsing action requires you to block off your throat, which wouldn't help very much in trying to test aroma of beverages. Imagine trying to rinse, but you tense your cheeks and also allow the air to move in and out of your throat instead of blocking it off. That is kind of what they do.) When your nose is congested, the fragrant air from the throat(which came from the mouth) **cannot reach the smelling parts of the nose**, so much of the aroma and fragrance from your food is lost."
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5sajtv | Why can Cymbals played with a stick deform like in this slow motion video, but if i deformed them the same way with my hands, they would be broken? | [Video]( URL_0 ) Bonus question: Do my bones bend the same way when i fall? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It has to do with some material properties called stress and strain. Stress is a measure of force applied to deform an object and is related to how quickly this force is applied. And strain is basically just how well a material reacts to a stress. Hitting something quickly, such as your cymbal example, falls into what's called the \"elastic region\" of a material's stress/strain curve (elastic meaning that the is no permanent deformation), while bending something slowly falls into the \"plastic region\" of the stress/strain curve (plastic meaning that there is permanent deformation).",
"When you bend it with your hand you are putting a different kind of force on the cymbal then when it is struck with a drum stick or mallet. If you get the cymbal vibrating at its resonant frequency it can actually break. Have you heard of or seen people breaking glass with their voice? That is using vibration (resonant frequency).",
"I think this was stated above, but it has to do with the stress-strain curve of the material. This curve is dictated by a property known as the Youngs Modulus. For steel (and most metals) the stress-strain curve is elastic up to a certain stress. Basically you can bend something a small amount with a small force, and it will bend back. After a certain degree of force, i.e. a higher stress, the material will remain bent. These are known as the elastic and plastic regions respectively. For a good example, look at a metal ruler. You can bend it up to a certain point and it will bend back. After a certain degree of bending (due to a larger stress) the stress-strain curve will enter the plastic region and it will remain bent! Also, how brittle a material is tends to have a dramatic impact on this. Source: am structural engineer."
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5sajw6 | What's the story behind the American banks failing in 2008 and what was done to repair the situation? | So my friend and I got into a discussion about economic policy. One topic I'm not too familiar with is why the banks failed/needed bailed out in 2008 and/or why the housing market crashed. If you could provide links to supplement this explanation that would be a huge help. I'm just trying to understand what exactly happened and why. I realize this has been answered in the past, but I'm also looking for supplmental information (articles or studies) if possible. | Economics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I do recommend the movie \"The Big Short\" that goes though the complicated financial jargon and the problems that caused the financial crisis in a very funny and entertaining way. I general banks work by taking deposits from customers and giving them out to other customers as loans. The interest on loans is bigger then the savings accounts and the difference goes to the bank. However there is a risk of people not paying back their loans and when this happens the banks have to cover the losses. What happened was that the banks developed a system to spread their risks to reduce them. Now as one loan fails the risk gets spread over all the banks so nobody would feel it. So you could get a lot of shitty loans together with high interest rates and just spread the risk and still make a profit. The problem was that if you start to give loans to everyone people start buying houses and the house prices skyrockets. But then a bit later when the loans have to be paid back and people can not do so the houses gets foreclosed and the housing prices drop. Suddenly you have a lot of loans backed by worthless houses. So even the loans that were considered safe ended up being terrible.",
"Better yet, watch \"The Big Short\", good film and it reveals that the same banks that were handing out those bad loans, were betting on the fact that their self created bubble would burst."
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5sal2j | Why do objects with a higher thermal conductivity feel colder to the touch? | Physics | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They only feel cold to the touch if they're colder than our skin. If they're hotter than our skin, they'll feel hotter than something with lower thermal conductivity at the same temperature. This is because our body can't detect temperature. All we can detect is rate of heat transfer. The faster the heat transfer (in either direction) the more extreme it feels to us.",
"Because heat gets conducted faster. A cold object will \"take the warmth\" from your hand, while a warm object makes your hand hotter. It works the same way for any object, but since metal has a higher thermal conductivity than wood and it transfers your heat faster, your hands will get colder in a shorter period of time, and that's what you're feeling."
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5saodd | Why is self checkout technology so terrible? | Technology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The creator is still frustrated. Planet money made a podcast about it was informative and relatively funny. Here's a link out of pocket cast to the episode if you wanna check it out. URL_0 You can also go to the npr podcast website for planet money and look for the episode called self checkout",
"Place the item in the bagging area. Unexpected item in bagging area. An attendant has been notified to assist you. Place the item in the bagging area. Unexpected item in bagging area.",
"Checkout machines don't have 'POS' as their acronym for nothing. I wish corporate would pay attention to what its actually like to work with them. :( Source: I work in a pharmacy. Lol",
"all of your issues hinge on the fact that they weigh the output. but that is the only way for them to track that its been scanned. Of course you could leave items in the cart and never scan or bag it, but thats far more easy to identify to loss prevention than to mimic the motion of scanning and drop it into a bag."
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5saol6 | Why exactly are countries like Japan who explicitly say no to refugees not receiving the same criticism as their western counterparts? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From my understanding this happens because Japan doesn't feel as responsible as other western countries like Europe and the US since it has had historically less influence, contact, physical proximity and economic interest in the area. This does not mean that Japan and similar countries don't get criticized by this, but they generally stray away from international politics too far from home (i.e. they did not send troops to the Middle East like the US).",
"Because; * Western involvement, directly or indirectly is a result of these refugees. * Japanese have a very different culture to adjust to and also the language might be harder to learn than English, so immigrants don't exactly think to move there in the first place. So nobody cares if they say no to immigrants. *Japan's involvement in middle east is non existent.",
"The United States in particular is a nation that was built and founded upon the very principle of immigration. We are a nation of immigrants, it goes against our values to prevent other people from coming here."
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5sapya | Given incredible luck, is it at least possible for radioactive matter to cause enough, and the right, mutations to make a turtle look like a teenage mutant ninja turtle? | Stay with me, I'm serious. With incredible luck, could something cause just the right mutations to DNA to change a turtle into a bi-pedal human/turtle hybrid looking thing? Or would something in the turtle DNA (# of chromosomes, length, etc.) make it impossible? Are turtle homeobox genes incapable of such segmentation and direction? | Biology | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, since incredible luck is a given, the answer is (theoretically) yes. All living beings are composed of the same elements, the 4 bases of the DNA. Since the concept of DNA mutation generally englobe duplication/translocation of chromosomes, there's no theoretical limit to what may happen (although the transformation you propose will include *countless* mutation steps)."
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5sawal | How / When did SCOTUS judges become so partisan to predict a decision on the basis of party appointment rather than on the merits of each case? | Other | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're really not as partisan as people make it seem. However, they are human. The constitution and laws have a lot of ambiguity to them. People are going to interpret certain things differently- > If Supreme Court Judges are as partisan as everyone else they shouldn't be given lifetime appointments. The founders thought the opposite. The idea is that if you have a lifetime appointment, you don't need to make partisan votes in order to get re-elected. You can tell your party to fuck off, if you disagree. If you have the ability to be replaced, you don't have that freedom. And what's to stop Congress from just replacing a conservative judge with a new conservative judge? Not much. That's basically how Congress gets elected now, and they are far more partisan. > When non-SCOTUS judges are elected, how possibly can they remain impartial? The short answer is they aren't. Ideally, they do the best they can, and you try to make sure you vet them heavily before allowing them onto the court. There's no magic way to find someone who isn't political. The job is inherently political. The check/balance on this is that if it gets bad enough, judges can be impeached. Also, both parties in congress has a lot of power in screening(or making new laws), so that tends to moderate judges quite a bit (and worst case scenario, if congress screws up, voters can vote them out). If voters don't vote them out, the founders figured that means it doesn't bother them that much. But just to emphasize, for the most part, even though they tend to vote on \"party lines\" (and keep in mind, the big cases in the news tend to be ones where there is a split- there are many that are unanimous), generally speaking, they do have a coherent ideology , even if you don't agree with it. edit: In addition, precedent matters a lot. If Scotus decides \"x is legal\", it's incredibly hard to over turn that-they almost never reverse themselves. They're very very away that if you say \"x is legal\" and it benefits one party today, it might be the other way in the future, and they've put themselves in a box. That is a huge check on their power. To give a recent example, a big part of the recent ruling by Judge Robart putting a stay on the immigration ban- relied on the decision to prevent Obama's immigration changes a few years ago. It really can come back to bite you in the ass, and the Judges are not so partisan as to not be blatantly inconsistent (for the most part)",
"They really aren't that partisan. The majority of cases are decided between 9-0 and 7-2. You hear about the 5-4 decisions because they are the most controversial, or it's an incredibly gray area of law, where the court has to set a precedent where none existed prior. All Federal Judges are lifetime appointments, not just the Supreme Court. Some States have elections for Judges. That's an issue for their State to decide.",
"A few things: they aren't judges they are justices. Now you may think that doesn't matter but it does. They are mainly charged with interpreting the constitution or matters between states. Most of these cases are decided by 7-8-9 justices and not along ideological lines. Most judges aren't partisan, politicians just make it seem that way on decisions they disagree with to fire up their voters. At the Supreme Court level for instance the deciding vote for the ACA was a conservative minded justice who ruled that congress had the power to pass the law. As for lifetime appointments, it is necessary to keep judges from becoming politicized. They don't need to worry about pleasing anyone, getting elected or finding his or hers next job. Any overtly political judges will be overruled at the next level. As for the Supreme Court, the vetting process of years of being a judge and then getting confirmed means most people are the leading legal minds in the country and have a vested interest in upholding the law and not a personal agenda. That is also why there are 9 of them. As for elected state judges, it's a sovereign state decision to make judges accountable to voters but the next levels (appellate and supreme) courts for the state are appointed to prevent the implementation of the law from becoming overly politIcized.",
"Usually people determine if someone is partisan or not by whether they agree with them. If you agree with them, then they are voting based on sound reasoning and rational interpretation. If you disagree with them, they are a partisan hack. As someone else mentioned, the law is often very grey when it gets to the SCOTUS. The word \"abortion\" appears no where in the Constitution, and there are multiple ways to interpret it. The second amendment is incredibly poorly written, and there are multiple ways to interpret that as well for two obvious examples.",
"All justices are people and people are fallible. There is no 'objective view' in many of these things, only different interpretations. What different interpretations potentially do is a) change the decision b) how to get to the decision. There are several ways to interpret the constitution. I'll cover the two broad ways currently in use. There is the originalist, that interprets the law how the judge believes it was originally meant. This is related to textualism- this is basing it purely on what is written and excluding things like intent of the law and what it is supposed to fix. This is summed up as the Constitution is dead and fixed for all time view. The 'opposite' view is the contextualist. This view considers not just the words and the text, but also the context in which is was written. Things like, what the intent was, what the issue it's trying to resolve is, what will the consequence of the ruling be. The originalist/textualism interpretation roughly aligns with the current Republican/conservative view. They like strong congress and executive branches, and a narrow interpretation of the law. Conversely the contextualist view is associated with the left block of the SCOTUS (at this time). Note that it does not mean they will vote the way the political alignment suggests. The ACA was passed by a conservative justice because they interpreted the constitution to say congress has the power to make that law. In other words, one can come to a left wing or right wing decision regardless of interpretation. Right now, the left block and right block tend to use these contrasting ways of reaching their respective decisions, but it's not always the case. What the parties do when electing one toe the SCOTUS is two things. Look at their history to see how congruent it is with their parties beliefs. See how they reached those decisions. They want a way of reaching the decisions that the ruling party views as more likely to favour them. Judges tend to be very consistent with *how* they make their decisions, even though they may not be consistent with whether that decision is viewed as a win for the left or right.",
"The Justices are predictable not because of their politics, but because they have a long track record of written decisions of law literally called \"opinions\" in their wake. Some judges come around on certain theories or ways of thinking, and sometimes the world moves under them making them seem more or less left or right, but you know who a judge is at the end of the day. It's beyond politics, it's deeper. It's just how they view the world, read and interpret words, and logic through problems.",
"They aren't partisan. Supreme Court judges rule by *constitutional* ideology, not *political* ideology. If you read any Supreme Court decision, this becomes very clear. One of the reasons Antonin Scalia was so noteworthy was because he was pivotal in bringing \"originalism,\" or interpreting the Constitution as it was \"intended\" by the framers, back into popularity (where it was heavily criticized and rejected in the decades prior to his appointment). For comparison, other interpretations of the Constitution include the \"living document\" reading, which interprets the Constitution as it should apply in the modern day, and the \"strict constructionist\" reading, which interprets it strictly by the exact wording. All of the schools of thought have their own merits, which is why they are all used or have been used by Supreme Court Justices now and in the past. As others have pointed out, the vast majority of SCOTUS cases are decided unanimously or close to it. Only the controversial ones (often landmark cases) end up as 5-4 or 6-3 decisions, which are the ones you hear about.",
"Justices are primarily influenced by their judicial philosophy rather than their political philosophy. Categorizing justices based on their party membership (if applicable) and attempting to use that as a basis to predict how they will vote on a case is wildly unreliable. For example, Antonin Scalia was a notorious textualist because he believed that properly worded statutes (and other legal documents) left little room for misinterpretation; if the drafters of a certain legal provision intended that provision to be interpreted in a certain fashion, it should be written as such or amended through the democratic process. He was also a strong believer in the separation of powers and vigorously opposed judicial overreach or legislating from the bench. Clarence Thomas is a textualist akin to Scalia and often voted alongside him even if their reasoning was different. However, Thomas is known for being willing to override previous decisions if he viewed them to be defective; in Scalia's own words \"Thomas doesn't believe in Stare Decisis, period\". Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the other hand is much more willing to adopt and apply social expectations and modern concerns into her decisions even where they do not fit neatly within the text or spirit of the law. Every justice is unique, and party membership doesn't really play a big part in what they bring to the nation.",
"The job of a Supreme Court justice is to interpret the Constitution and decide whether a particular law is constitutional, based on that interpretation. There is more than one way to interpret the Constitution, otherwise we wouldn't need a Supreme Court in the first place. When people talk about a *conservative justice* or *liberal justice*, what they really mean is *a justice that interprets the Constitution in a way that conservatives agree with* or *a justice that interprets the Constitution in a way that liberals agree with*. As you can see, that's a bit of a mouthful, so we shorten it to \"conservative justice\" or \"liberal justice\"."
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