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5t0rvd | What is the uproar over "Dear White People" about? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Think about it from the other perspective. If the show was called \"Dear Black People\" and it was about white people stating all of the things that black people do that makes them angry, how would it be perceived?",
"The TV series is based on a movie (2014 according to IMDB) of the same name. The movie was quite controversial to some in the Breitbart / Trump universe because it mocked white people and was pretty funny while doing it.",
"Most likely it's a small group of people that the media is blowing out of proportions in the same way it blew the zika virus, swine flu, \"berniebros\", and all the other political mumbo jumbo going on in the last few years."
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5t10kt | Why do most people have very specific traits (age,race,height,appearance) for relationships as opposed to friendships? | I think this might occur more in the Western world than it does in other cultures but I would say in general that it's an obvious trend. When it comes to friendships, most people will be close friends with everyone. With the exception of gender, traits like age and race are not factors and are only barriers due to differences who individuals of different ages and races socialize with naturally. But basically, looks don't really matter. For relationships however, it's a whole different kettle of fish. Some people have so many preferences that it becomes impossible to keep up with them. Things like age, gender, and race seem obvious but others seem a bit silly. Could you explain why this is? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because it matters more in a relationship. You want someone you are sexually attracted to and compatible with. Many women want a guy who is taller than them, so if you are 5' 10\" and like to wear heels, that will narrow your options. A 45-year-old man might still be looking to have children so that rules out 45-year-old women. Some people are attracted to certain races, others want someone who shares their cultural identity, and others don't want the hassle of dealing with the prejudiced family. As they say, the heart wants what the heart wants, isn't just about rational decisions. Many your dad wore a certain kind of cologne, smelling it on a potential mate might be a big turn off...or a big turn on. Many of these things are simply out of our control."
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5t11l8 | If women make up around 50% of the United States, then why do men make up around 80% of the United States Congress? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Running for Congress usually requires you to have education, wealth, and connections. Those things were hard for women to obtain equally to men until recently (and many would argue it's still not equal). Keep in mind it was legal to deny a woman a credit card just for being a woman until the '70s, and that's just one example of the legal and social hurdles women faced. Even though things have gotten better, it takes time to utilize your education to gain wealth and connections, so older people are typically in a better position to run for Congress (the average age is 57-61). Most of those people were going to college in the 70s and the gender inequality that was present then is showing up today in your choice of candidates. As time goes on and things become more equal, we should expect to see the numbers become more even. I'm also sure there are other social factors at play, such as people being used to seeing men in positions of power, but I think the biggest issue is past disparity.",
"Because there's no rule that says the gender ratio of elected officials needs to reflect that of the American people. That goes for literally any job; there is no 50/50 gender requirement. There's also no 50/50 ethnicity requirement, or hair color requirement, or any other genetic trait, because jobs are supposed to be based on merit, or in the case of the elected officials, the votes of the people. Also, [the lack of female candidates]( URL_0 ) might have something to do with it. > Two years ago, the Pew Research Center conducted a survey of 3,341 adults who had at some point run for office. This wasn’t just about Congress; Pew looked at those who had pursued anything from school board slots to county government positions to national office. > Only a quarter of this group was female. > The lack of female candidates is a serious and substantial problem — but one that doesn’t always get taken seriously.",
"Same reason men make up 90+% of garbage collectors. Different genders are driven into different occupations. Women are less likely to be in the profession.",
"More men run, and women vote for them, so perhaps gender doesn't make a very important contribution to how well a politician does their job. If you'd like to argue that gender should be more important in selecting politicians, /r/ChangeMyView would be a better sub than this one."
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5t1i41 | Why are the 9th & 10th amendments of the U.S. Constitution so rarely invoked? | Side note: If there is a better sub for this question please let me know. I've heard the 14th amendment overrides the 10th, but things like prohibition seem to fall under the 10th. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The 9th and 10th amendments are invoked quite a bit. The 3rd amendment is actually invoked the least as only a handful of supreme court cases deal with that issue. Your question is also vague as to what you mean by invoked. Do you mean use by the media, citations by courts, or general knowledge?",
"The Tenth Amendment is invoked constantly. It's so common that it has a name: *states' rights.* This is considered in nearly every Federal law, each of which must avoid overreach into something that the states claim is their right. Example: the Federal government cannot require states to set a particular speed limit. It can only grant or deny funding for *interstate* highways, and may choose to deny this funding if it doesn't like how the states are running them.",
"The 9^th and 10^th are catch-all amendments to make it clear that if something isn't mentioned, then the federal government can't do it. While this seemed like a good thing to say, some of the other language is so broad that almost nothing is outside the possible influence of the central government. The 14^th specifically overrode the 10^th with respect to citizenship. Before the 14^th , each state could decide who was a citizen of their state and therefore a citizen of the US. State-by-state rules didn't work so well in the citizenship space, so that was revised."
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5t1lf7 | Why do poorer people tend to have more children? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's a number of factors. 1) Below a certain threshold, even small amounts of money matter. If I have plenty of money, having a stash of condoms (or if female, taking birth control just in case) is relatively easy to do. If putting that money towards birth control means I may have to skip a meal, then I may be more likely to risk pregnancy. 2) There tends to be educational gaps, and I've actually known people who honestly didn't understand what causes pregnancy, so them not taking steps to prevent pregnancy makes more sense. 3) Anecdotal, but possibly related. I've been broke before, and it tends to go hand-in-hand with a \"meh, fuck it\" attitude, at least for me and a lot of the people I know. At some point you just expect life to hand you shit, and there's only so much shit-ade you can make, so you stop taking basic measures to prevent bad things 4) Abortions cost money, which ties back into #1. 5) As someone else pointed out \"when you're poor, there's not much else to do.\" There's probably a lot more contributing factors, but I suspect the above will account for the majority of the cases.",
"1) Poor people are unlikely to be able to afford more effective forms of birth control, especially if they are un- or underinsured. I'm fortunate to have a good-paying job with health insurance that covers HBC and my IUD, which cost $1200. Someone who works a job that pays poorly is unlikely to have these benefits, and is *definitely* not likely to be able to pay out of pocket. 2) Many poorer communities do not have proper sex education - hell, many schools regardless of socioeconomic status don't. It's difficult to prevent pregnancy if you don't understand how the body works to begin with. That, and many poor communities tend towards more religious/conservative values, which don't often encourage birth control and sex education. It's unlikely that a person who grew up knowing nothing is going to be able offer this crucial knowledge to their offspring. I can only imagine what it'd be like to hear the same bullshit I heard in high school, but with parents who they themselves do not know enough about the subject to correct me. 3) Abortions are not only hella expensive, but very difficult to get in most states - and, you guessed it, even more so in poor communities. I can put in for time off work for a doctor's appointment and use sick time without worrying about being fired. I can call off work if I'm sick without fearing that I'll lose my job. Many poor people, however, may work jobs that do not provide sick time, and there's a very real fear that it would ultimately boil down to wondering if they could truly afford to lose their job over this. An abortion isn't just an in and out visit, in many places. 4) Conservative/religious values that dictate gender roles; for some people, women are inherently meant to be mothers, and bearing children is the greatest, single most important thing a woman can do.",
"My experience is purely anecdotal, so take it at face value: I worked for HUD during the late 80s-90s in one of the poorest areas of the nation. 13-year old pregnant girls were brought in by the mothers to apply for housing. Consider their circumstances, though: as young, black, under-educated females without transportation or any job opportunities, who already lived in public housing with mothers who survived on welfare and cash gifts from \"friends\", a pregnancy/child meant a relative fortune in benefits: housing rights, Aid to Dependent Children payments, medical care, food stamps (of a sort), etc. Imagine going from being a poor black teen girl in a depressed rural area, with absolutely NO HOPE of anything better, and then the question is not WHY have children, but WHY NOT? As a normal human being with normal desires for intimacy, love, and family, this situation, no matter how abhorrent to someone in different circumstances, becomes the norm. Edit: should add that the area this took place in also had the highest per capita number of churches, and ZERO sex ed, and limited contraceptive availability, even if the girls had been educated about how to prevent pregnancy.",
"In college we had this sociology class where the professor talked about this. One of the answers that made sense was \"Poor people tend to have more children because they think that having more children will mean more people will be supporting them or their whole family in times of need. Whether it be during their old age or during times of illness and etc\" This is an opinion and I believe it is relevant to this topic so I brought it up.",
"I just want to chime in with a personal observation here. In my own experience, it seemed like a lot of poorer women - even as young as high school age - would seek romantic and sexual relationships as a means of escape from troubled home and family lives. In contrast, better-off young women would only seek relationships when they felt they added to an otherwise emotionally positive life. I definitely wouldn't go as far as to accuse poor women as a category of seeing pregnancy as a means of securing a relationship; it just seemed - again, in my observation - that they were more likely to have sex earlier and feel they really needed to constantly be in relationships. tl;dr seems like poor women have more sex due to lack of positive family relationships - > more babies",
"This may be controversial but some people are just not great at making decisions for one reason or another. If you are not someone that made great choices like studying hard and working hard you are probably poor. You probably are not super responsible with your birth control or general life planning. Another factor is that if you are super focused on your career then you will tend to be richer. You will also probably have to wait to have kids until you are older which means you will have less of them. Again, these are all broad generalizations but more often than not the traits that make you rich correlate to the traits that make you more responsible when planning your family.",
"Really simple answer - more children costs in the short run but in poorer countries without labor laws they provide income over a longer time horizon. Especially in agricultural societies where more children = more farmhands. People on here seem to think it has a lot to do with birth control availability.. That may be true in the first world. But even before the advent of birth control, poorer people had more children. Correlation doesn't always equal causality.",
"All of these reasons listed here are surely contributing factors but I haven't seen anyone get to what I'd consider the root of the answer. I'd say it's all about \"Instant Gratification\" vs. \"Delayed Gratification\" (aka the Marshmallow Test). The same type of people who would habitually spend every dime they earn before the week is out so they can never dig their way out of the hole are going to be the same type of people who are thinking short term during sex and go unprotected.",
"A lot of it comes down to women's rights. Poorer communities tend to place women in more traditional roles, where much of their value is determined by having children. When women have more control over their lives, they tend to choose when and whether they have children. Such societies often give women perverse incentives to have more children. Discouraged from pursuing careers, they need a man to take care of them and having a child with that man means they are more likely to stick around. Finally, some it comes down to money and education. Birth control isn't always cheap, can require medical assistance, and discipline and knowledge to use effectively. If you don't have health insurance, never got more than a high school education, and live in a society where \"good girls\" don't talk about sex to their doctors or pharmacists, you might not be good at birth control.",
"The points mentioned in this thread pretty much encompass all the reasons for poor people having more children. However, I would further like to add two more points from a South Asian perspective- 1. Poor folk tend to have more children as it guarantees that there will be more hands available for work, hence contributing towards the financial stability of the family. 2. Since poor people don't get access to proper education, orthodox beliefs are rampant. This causes them to yearn for a male child (males provide for the family, whereas a females marry into another family), hence keeping on having kids until they have one.",
"Wealthy people save for their retirement. Poor people plan to have at least one of their kids take care of them, financially and also as an alternative to a retirement home.",
"As mentioned by many others, there are multiple reasons, such as a low standard of education due to the incapability to go to school, little knowledge of contraceptives due to, well, the incapability to go to school too, too poor to use contraceptives and abortion etc... However, the first reason I thought of was actually J.C. Cadwell's Theory of Intergenerational Wealth Flow. Indeed, children cost money to raise. The more children one has, the more money one needs, thus poor people have more children; seems paradoxical as you observed. However, you are not taking into account where that 'money' comes from. Is it from the parents' pockets or the children themselves? In other words, if the children are able to contribute to the family, then having many children isn't a very big problem at all. Sure, toddlers wouldn't be able to contribute much, but when they reach an age capable of doing manual labour, they can start paying off their 'debt' by helping the family. But there is another part to this theory. What kind of society are we talking about? Less-developed countries, or developed countries? In less-developed countries, children are valuable assets who can help their parents with housework, such as tending to the livestock. Wealth flows from the children to the parents (hence 'Theory of Intergenerational Wealth Flow). However, in developed countries where the cost of living is high, a child may not be able to pay of one's 'debt' no matter how long he works for. Wealth ultimately flows from the parents to the children. Your question title doesn't state which society you are talking about, but since you mentioned America (which I assume is largely a developed society, maybe less-developed for some rural areas; I don't live in America) in your description, the reasons why poorer people have more children are probably the other reasons mentioned (e.g. lack of education). Most of us live in developed societies, so we tend to assume that 'having children = expensive', which is mostly correct ONLY in developed societies. In less-developed societies, which tend to be poor, having children can be an asset. *(I'm not sure if this answer is ELI5 standard :c)* **tl;dr Children in poor families tend to be from less-developed societies where there is a low cost of living, thus instead of being a burden on the family, they can be an asset to the family by contributing back to the family and offsetting their burden when they are of a capable age.**"
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5t1mil | why do "a-list" actors seem to shy away from the horror genre? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You've got it backwards. The Horror genre shies away from A list actors because they're so expensive. Horror movies are made on the cheap. We're talking 20-40 million or less. There's no room in that budget for A list celebrities.",
"Probably because horror movies are typically low-budget and thus couldn't afford to attract a-list talent. High-budget horror movies like *Shutter Island* can afford more expensive actors (e.g. Leonardo DiCaprio)."
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5t2knh | Why is IQ still used as a measure of intelligence when it is known to be outdated? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"IQ is purely a scale by which intelligence is measured, much like the SAT is on a scale from 400-1600. Is the scale outdated? what does that even mean? it's just a scale used to relate different scores. IQ Tests on the other hand it can be argued are outdated. The reason we still use them is, simply put, measuring someone's intelligence is hard. This means we have to use what we've got, but take results with a healthy dose of skepticism."
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5t2y6k | Why do certain words that sound like they should have "a" in front of them get "an" preceding them. (like historical or universal) | Most commonly "an historical", but I've seen other cases. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It has to do with the sound that is being made, not necessarily the letter. When they're saying \"an historical,\" they're probably swallowing the H, and making it similar to \"an honor.\" It probably sounds like \"anistorical\" in order to flow better than \"A Historical.\" Universal uses A instead of AN because it's making a Y sound. So you'd use AN to precede Uplifting, but A to precede University, because they're making different phonetic sounds. It's similar to how the British add the R sound to words that don't have them when the end of a word and the beginning of the next word have vowel sounds (like Vodker and Tonic. the A at the end of Vodka and the A at the beginning of and are getting changed to differentiate the words)."
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5t3j6i | Why in interviews do they put [words like this] followed by the rest of the sentence? | Are the he people being interviewed actually saying this or is it an addition made by the interviewer to make the sentence make sense to the reader? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Words that are included in brackets are those which have been substituted by the author for the sake of clarity. For instance, let's imagine that an interviewer is talking to someone about the hazards of carbon monoxide poisoning, but the person they're interviewing keeps referring to carbon monoxide as \"it\", rather than carbon monoxide. Because \"it\" is sort of vague, and could refer to a lot of different things, an interviewer might, when writing the article, replace \"It\" with \"Carbon Monoxide.\" So instead of: > \"It is responsible for hundreds of deaths a year.\" A journalist might instead write: > \"[Carbon Monoxide] is responsible for hundreds of deaths a year.\" The person they were interviewing didn't *say* carbon monoxide, but it's what they meant, so it's accurate to put in there, as long as you clearly indicate that these are the journalist's words, not the speakers.",
"It means those words were never actually said by the person. The author is adding them to give context, or what they think the person meant. It could also be a word substitution, like if the interviewee said \"him\" and the author added [Edwards] to be specific as to who the \"him\" was."
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5t5yt3 | Why does congress frequently meet between 1 and 5 am(or so early in the morning?) | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's rather that they stay awake until 1:45 am, not that they all get out of bed and get to the hill at 1:45 am. The thing is that Congress actually does a lot of time-wasting things, such as day-long hearings on nominees. While they surely are important, that's a full day you can't have a vote because a few handfulls of senators are preoccupied. And this happens all the time. It's necessary, because you can't have a meaningful debate on the Senate floor with a 100 people. Add to that that Senators are expected to do a lot of fundraising and have meetings with constituents and lobbyists. so if you really want something to be discussed, sometimes you need to work into the night, sometimes, when some time-consuming Senate moves are happening all at the same time. If you're interested in what a typical Senator's day looks like, here is a good answer: URL_0",
"They don't *start* that early, they *finish* late. No one is getting up at midnight to go to work, they're starting at a normal hour but not finishing until some crazy hour at night."
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5t66dg | How is Japanese taught in schools (in Japan)? | To elaborate: I watched this video [about Kanji]( URL_0 ) (it's part 2 of 3). So I wonder how context-sensitive language is taught in schools (especially Kanji)? Does one learn all pronounciations and meanings when the character is introduced? Do they sort of chain/combine it with other characters so they have a like a "batch" to use at once? For how many years is Japanese taught in schools? How much extra work does it require at home (if any)? More simply put: how does Japan teach its language? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm fluent in Japanese but not a Japanese person. I don't know for sure, but I think kanji are divided in to grades, and depending on the kids age, they will aim to learn those and then take a standardised test on that kanji grade. They start by learning the ones related to simple vocab and work up towards the ones with more strokes/more difficult vocab. Some seemingly simple kanji are learned later tho because they are used by adults in daily conversation and wouldn't be relevant for a kid. I teach a 9 year old Japanese boy and we often look up words together if I don't know the English translation and he often says 'i can't read that kanji' so we listen to the voice pronunciation of it and then he's like \"ohhh I know that word\" so it seems that he knows the vocabulary/ meaning already he just doesn't know the kanji itself. He has just taken grade 2 kanji test, grade 1 is the highest. His little brother who is about 5 has just taken the lowest grade which I think is grade 5. For non natives it is harder to learn kanji because we are simply not exposed to them enough, seeing them here and there in daily life you will recognise the meanings of them without actually \"studying\" it because you've seen it often enough. Being able to draw them by hand on demand is a different skill to reading them so I think that requires people to draw it multiple times. Interesting topic, I'd like to know more myself!"
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5t6dnk | Why are Americans so obsessed with terrorists? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fear is a powerful motivator. If you can convince people to be afraid of something, real or fictional, you can get them to do almost anything. 9/11 was the deadliest terrorist attack in history, and even though it was only 1 event, it's still fresh in the minds of many people. It's fairly simple for a politician to exploit that fear for any number of purposes, like getting support for banning immigration from certain countries.",
"Fear is a hell of a drug. Propaganda fuels fear. Also, you're talking about a country that voted a rich reality tv start to be its president.",
"The obsession drives the populace. Fear drives the obsession. Propaganda drives the fear. Money drives the propaganda. Billion dollars of business provide the money. Politicians are the business' tool (through lobbyists and donations) who use propaganda, legislation and demagoguery to drive the populace's obsession. This is a self-feeding cycle."
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5t79lw | Why did women never take to gaming like, or even more than, men did? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is a myth. Pacman was so popular amongst woman that pacman 2 was about Mrs Pacman. There was a crash in the early 80's somewere where companies flooded the market with really stupid games like E.T (really the worst game ever). So when NES came along, Nintendo had a choice to make to deal with this crash. Market it in the toys aisle (as opposed to the electronics aisle). By this time, however, the toy aisle was split up into \"boys\" and \"girls\" (this was nonsensical imo) and nintendo picked boys. And so begins the massive and aggressive market strategy that games are for boys. But let's be clear: It is false to state that women don't play games. The entertainment software association released a study in 2015 that disproved that idea. 44% of American gamers (3 or more hours per week) were women. Women aged 18 and over represent 33% of the game-playing population vs boys of 18 or younger at 15% [Source]( URL_0 ) [Bonus link to Adam Ruins Everything]( URL_1 ) *EDIT: To clarify that last point: That stat stuck out for me because I always thought the majority of gamers were teenage boys.",
"Your premise is faulty. Just as many women play video games as men. A little over a year ago, [the Pew Research Center published a report on gaming]( URL_0 ) that showed 50% of male adults and 48% of female adults play video games. Where men and women differ is in _identifying_ themselves as gamers (more likely among men) and the _type_ of games that they play (women are more likely to play mobile games than men). Also, the biggest money-making console and PC games tend to be violent & overtly masculine shooters that frequently sexualize female characters. And that's just campaign mode. Once you get into multi-player, a woman has to deal with the enormous amount of actual, live douchebags that populate multi-player games. It's not a surprise that women don't play those sorts of games in mass numbers. (Kudos to those that do put up with the bullshit to play, though.)",
"I'm not entirely sure this is correct, and I'm far too young to give an opinion based on experience, but I'd say that maybe early games were just surrounded by violence and cars, things even today that seem more masculine than feminine."
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5t7xi8 | If death in battle sends people to Valhalla and extension, Asgard, and other forms to Hel, does that mean that the Norse gods could never die in battle as they would just return to Asgard? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think that only applies to mortals. There are Norse prophesies that involve gods like Thor dying during a battle with the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr, which implies that they can die. This leads me to believe that death for the gods either involves going somewhere else entirely, or just straight up death with no afterlife.",
"No, the gods could die. They were expecting it. In the [Edda’s]( URL_0 ) visions of Ragnarök, the twilight of the gods, were recoded. In fact the worry over these visions & the preparations for the final battle drove many of the actions & decisions of the gods. They built walls to keep out the frost & fire giants; they bound Loki & his sons to keep them from interfering; they made powerful weapons to defeat their foes. But in the end, they knew their fates were sealed. It was seen. Three winters would come with no summer. The world tree Yggdrasil would shake, all bonds & barriers would be broken. The walls keeping the giants of Jotunnheim & Muspelheim at bay would fall. Loki would be freed from is prison & pilot Naglfar, the ship of nails, filled with an army of the dishonorable dead. Fenrir the wolf would be freed, his great maw swallowing the sun. The great serpent Jörmungandr would thrash, sending tidal waves across the land. Surt, the Fire Giant would bathe the world in fire. Thor, Odin, Tyr, Heimdall, Freyr, all would fall in battle. Then the earth would sink beneath the waves. Beyond that, the gods could die in other ways. Baldr, also known as the shining or beloved, was loved by pretty much everyone; especially his mother Frigg. But there was a prophecy that he would be killed. So Frigg went around to every object in the world and extracted a promise from them that they would do no harm to Baldr. So, since nothing could hurt him, he was basically invulnerable. Word soon got out that Baldr couldn’t be hurt and the other gods had great fun when they found they could throw axes & spears at him & just watch them bounce off harmlessly. All this attention payed to Baldr irritated Loki, & he plotted to destroy him. He found that while Frigg was out getting her promises, she forgot about mistletoe, thinking it to small & weak to be of threat. So Loki made a spear (or maybe an arrow) out of mistletoe. Then one night as the gods were playing their game of throw weapons at Baldr. Loki approached Hodr, Baldr’s blind brother, and said, “no reason to hang back, let me help you join in on the fun”, and he put the mistletoe weapon in his hand, and helped him aim. Hodr threw (or shot) the mistletoe at Baldr, killing him instantly. Even though Hodr was blind & didn’t know the mistletoe was dangerous, he was still killed by the other gods as punishment. Loki didn’t get away either, he was hunted down and captured. Then two of his sons were brought before him. One was tuned into a crazed wolf and tore his brother apart in front of his father. Then Loki was bound to a great stone, using the intestines of his own son.",
"I think the Norse gods couldn't die more because they were immortal rather than that they would return to their realm. Also the collection of such dead souls seemed to be manually performed by beings such as Valkyries so I'm not sure it is considered just an automatic transition.",
"After Ragnarok all except a few gods would perish, and the remaining would repopulate the worlds; The two remaining humans Lif en Lifthrasir would repopulate Midgard. Only Baldr and Hodr would return to the Valhalla. So i'm fairly certain the gods *could* die permanently, with no afterlife, seeing as there isn't being said what happens after Ragnarok with the previous gods, only the ones who return."
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5t812m | Why/how are there many more girls then boys in fine arts schools? | I'm at a fine arts high school, and its nearly 80% girls. Im in creative writing, there are 2 other boys out of 30 girls in my whole class. Almost exact same with my fine arts middle school too, i always wondered why is this? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Different genders have different preferences. Men tend to go into more math dominated fields and women tend to go into more emotive fields such as arts, social work, education, etc. There's a lot of sociology and biology behind it, but people gravitate to what they feel they are good at. Also, the arts doesn't typically pay very well. Men are conditioned, as well as being part of their biology, to be providers which is hindered by the pay. Even if interested, men are less likely to go into fields that pay less because society expects them to have money and to be able to provide in order to find a good mate and maintain a high social standing. I guess you could frame the question in another way. Why do so many girls feel they can drop a ton of money on an education for low paying fields and poor job opportunities? Why do they have the belief that they don't necessarily need to be self sufficient with their degree?",
"I've seen too many fathers (and even some mothers) who are afraid that boys who express any sort of creativity are going to \"become gay\" and so anything to do with color, design or expression is forbidden. I really feel for these boys, because the appreciation of beauty brings so much joy.",
"Society has pre-conceived roles that each gender should fill. We are programmed from a young age to what we are supposed to be when we grow up. Men typically go to school for engineering, business, and computer related roles, while women typically go for liberal arts, teaching, or social sciences. Nothing is actually stopping women from going to school for STEM degrees."
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5t9dit | How and why did the arbitrary masculine and feminine designations in languages like French and German develop? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From user Gilles at URL_0 French is Latin mispronounced by proto-Germans. Both Latin and German have three grammatical genders: masculine, feminine and neutral. Both languages are part of the Indo-European family and derive their gender system from the same root. Given this history, it isn't surprising that proto-French started out with these three genders. Over time, like most Romance language, French largely lost the neuter gender (now present only in a few pronouns, e.g. ceci or ça). The origin of grammatical gender is not fully known. The current theory on Indo-European is that there were originally two genders, animate (for people and personifications) and inanimate (for objects and abstract concepts), and the animate gender split into feminine and masculine. Many Indo-European languages, in particular most modern Romance languages, saw a merger of masculine and neuter. Although the feminine/masculine distinction in grammatical gender is likely to have arisen from biological gender (feminine to talk about women, masculine to talk about men), the language has evolved considerably since then. Nowadays, in French (like in most other languages with feminine and masculine genders), masculine and feminine usually match biological gender when applied to people or animals, but carries no implication when applied to other nouns: it's just an arbitrary grammatical feature."
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5t9o4d | The Saudi Arabia / Yemen conflict? | I keep seeing a war of sorts between Suadi Arabia and Yemen on the news. I can't understand the topic at all and it seems very complicated. Could someone please offer an ELI5 version? Thanks | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Religion in Yemen is split roughly 60-40 between Sunni Muslims (~56%) and a branch of Shia Muslims called Zaidis (~42%). The Constitution of Yemen makes no provision for freedom of religion, and as result the Zaidis have felt oppressed and targeted by the Sunni majority government for a while. Tensions between a Zaidi rebel group called the Houthis (officially *Ansar Allah*) and the government have been growing since the 1990s until an off-an-on war broke out in 2004. The war has since escalated, and the Houthis took control of the Yemeni capital Sana'a in 2015, forcing the president, Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi, to flee the country. Yemen is now divided into roughly three parts: the west, controlled by the Houthi rebels, the south and east, controlled by the government still loyal to president Hadi, and the center, controlled by various militant groups including Ansar al-Sharia, al-Qaeda, and ISIS. Kind of like the Korean War was first and foremost a war between North Korea and South Korea, but secondarily a proxy war between the capitalist USA and the communist USSR, the Yemeni Civil War is first and foremost a war between Houthis and Hadi loyalists, but secondarily a proxy war between the mostly-Shia Iran and the 100% Sunni Saudi Arabia. These two states have been bitter rivals pretty much since the current Islamic Republic of Iran came into existence. There a number of reasons why they're hostile to each other, like stance towards the USA (Saudi Arabia is our friend, Iran hates us), oil export competition, and especially a difference in religious majority, which is exacerbated by an extremist approach on both sides. Diplomatic relations between Iran and Saudi Arabia have been getting worse and worse and worse, and this is just one more arena where they can try to assert their dominance over the other. Where the sides are drawn is very clear: Iran, being mostly Shia, supports the Zaidi Shia rebels. Saudi Arabia, being Sunni, supports the Sunni Hadi-lead government.",
"Well there isn't a war between Saudi Arabia and Yemen. There is a civil war in Yemen between the Government and the Houthis rebels. The basic reason is that the Government represent the Sunni majority of the country and the Houthis the Shia minority of the country. You also have Al-Qaeda and to a limited extand ISIS fighting for control of the country. The two main adversary there are the Houthis and the Government and they are both backed by States. The Houthis is a Shia Minority and Iran backed them up. On the other side you have Saudi Arabia that is a Sunni majority country and they back the Yemen government because they don't want a Shia country next to them, especially if they become ally to Iran. That would be like Canada would be fighting a civil war and one side would be pro-russian. The US would intervene to make sure that doesn't happen. People view the civil war in Yemen as a Proxy-War between Iran and Saudi Arabia. Both are the extremely religious, are part of the two main section of Islam, there are two big oil exporter of the region and they both try to influence civil war in Yemen, Syria and Iraq."
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5t9qtn | Why do television ads for medicine and drugs always say to look at their magazine ads? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The fine print. You can only say so much on television, and the screens are only so big to display text. there are a TON of legal disclaimers in the fine print as well as side effects and the like, all of which is information you'd (hopefully) want to know before putting a random drug in your body. Usually the text will take up the bottom half, or sometimes even the entire back of a full-page ad in a magazine"
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5tajy9 | Why is the optimal length of a song 3-4 minutes? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It isn't. TV and radio in the 80's had a lot to do in influencing the length of songs. If they're 3 minutes on average, you can stick the top 10 songs in a 30 minute TV/radio slot. Billy Joel talked about it at one point, because he kept being told that his songs needed to be trimmed to fit time slots."
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5taqkk | Why do ellipsis come in threes? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The various groups of . are all related. One . is a period, thus meaning stop. Two .. indicates a finite range. Eg. 1..5 Three ... (ie an ellipsis) indicates an undefined range.",
"There's a distinction between the punctuation (ellipsis) and its typographic representation (... or three baseline dots). It's purely a matter of convention to represent ellipsis as three baseline dots. Altogether they form ONE ellipsis, not three. You can also represent it with an em dash. You mostly see that in speech representation, when someone is speaking and breaks off in the middle of a sentence. For example, *Now where did I leave that--oh here it is!* When you see the em dash in that context, it's also an ellipsis."
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5tay2t | Why are races run counter-clockwise? | Whether it's a foot race, horse race, NASCAR, or even a baseball diamond. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Romans did it that way. Every time some weird thing doesn't make sense, it's because the Romans did it that way. Why do we have two twelve hour segments in our day (AM/PM), instead of one 24 hour duration? The Romans did it that way. Our months? Roman. Go watch Ben Hur if you don't believe me. The chariot race: counterclockwise.",
"There are lots of different myths as to how it started. Some say that a horse breeder during the revolutionary war started it because in Britain races were run clockwise, and screw the redcoats. Some say it's because we read from left to right, making it more natural for judges to track runners. I think a lot of the reasons found when googling it are pure bullshit, fyi.",
"One thing I always found weird was that oval races for cars tend to be run counter-clockwise, but road races are run clockwise. This holds true in NASCAR and IndyCar, plus F1 races are clockwise.",
"Not sure if it's related or not, but interestingly in physics counter clockwise is considered \"positive\" rotation. Ex: if current is flowing towards you on a wire, the resulting magnetic field flows counterclockwise around the wire from your perspective. If current flows away from you, it would be negative and the magnetic field would go clockwise. So we say the rotation itself is positive or negative, corresponding to which direction the current would go in this electrical example. (This is called the right hand rule) Could be these are entirely unrelated standards, or maybe they both come from the same classical source. Either way, if a physicist got to design modern sports, they would do it exactly as it's currently done."
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5tcdgk | Why are languages like Mandarin so complicated?? Isn't in the language speaking people's best interest to make their language as simple as possible to communicate with other peoples? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's complicated to you. To them it must be rather simple. I mean a non English speaker might find it crazy that there, their and they're all sound the same but look different? or worse, words that look the same and can even sound the same but don't mean the same thing? Really, I can address you at your address, put arms in your arms and entrance you at your entrance, that's all VERY confusing to a foreigner. Perhaps it's not complicated at all to have one different word for everything.",
"Do you mean our written language or our spoken language? Oral communication in East Asia (including what eventually became what we today call Mandarin) developed in much the same way it did in most other countries, long before writing and out of whatever common need for communication there was (usually once trade starts being necessary). In that sense, it's no more or less complicated than English or any of the other languages. I don't know too much about that particular part so I'll leave it to the other comments. The part that people usually find difficult is the writing system. Our written language has a lot of fun theories. There's actually a cultural legend that it was first invented by 倉頡 (who's basically the mythical historian serving a deity emperor; our mythological figures are sometimes weird like that, a lot of them are literally bureaucrats, god-bureaucrats I guess) while he was studying the world. Back to non-fiction, the language currently is a lot more complicated, but at least part of Mandarin is pictograms. This means they started as pictures, literally. For example, if you look at the character for mountain, 山, it looks kind of like a mountain (two small peaks, one large one). But drawing a mountain every single time you need to represent a mountain is tedious, so these sort of things naturally simplify over time. The pictograms include a lot of natural objects, like the sun, moon, grain, etc. Especially food and animals since these are often the sort of things that are the first to need recording to keep track of when trade or bartering or surplus (and thus storage) becomes a big thing. There's a lot of other theories for the non-pictogram characters which now compose most of the language. Wikipedia actually has a pretty good compilation of them under their Chinese characters page. But that's mostly debates about categories. I personally prefer the simpler explanation for most languages that as civilization advances, you begin to need to record things other than natural objects, abstract notions such as emotions or descriptions or philosophy or what have you. And so the written language naturally expands (almost always starting first with the oral language, mind you). Another fun fact, the written language has actually been significantly simplified in its modern form (unless you're in Taiwan). That's the origin of simplified vs traditional Chinese. Most of mainland China uses simplified now. Another, another fun fact is the whole communicate with other people thing. I saw a comment about isolationism but that's actually only really applicable to more recent Chinese history, definitely not thousands of years. Maybe in the last hundred or so depending on your interpretation, but ancient China was a very active trade force (it's where the Silk Road got it's name, a lot of silk was traded, most of it from China). And if you really want to see a heck of voyage, take a look at at Zheng He and his crazy adventures around everywhere from India to Africa to the Mediterranean collecting- essentially- princes and lords who wanted to appeal to the emperor for trade with China (though the whole having to kowtow part probably wasn't as neat). They mostly definitely needed to communicate with a lot of other cultures, and obviously they successfully did otherwise history would be pretty different. Back on topic though, spoken Mandarin is actually simpler than English, from a purely grammatical standpoint. Actually, most languages are more structured than English- mainly because English was largely an oral mixing pot of lots of different languages way back when before the whole written English was a thing. In fact, written English actually showed up much later. Rather than saying written Mandarin is odd for being derived from pictures, I'd argue that it's more like English (and many languages of Latin descent) got to skip the whole picture part by building off of existing written structure. I don't know nearly as much about Greek and Latin where a large portion of the European languages derive from so I can't speak about that. But, if you look back at ancient Sumer, what's usually agreed as the earliest example of writing, it developed in the same way, from pictures. And I'm gonna stop there before this becomes a post on written language in general rather than just Mandarin.",
"By the implied inflection and cadence of your vernacular correspondence I can form an epistemological groundwork for a cognitive coalescence of your desired impartment. Or.... \"I get it\". Language is hard. It sucks. Nearly universally. And English sucks. HARD. i before e [except half the time]( URL_1 ). Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. It can be understood through thorough thought though. [Really]( URL_6 ). And while time flies like an arrow, [Fruit Flies like a banana.]( URL_7 ) And this sort of thing is in [ALL languages.]( URL_5 ) Even the [most holy of C]( URL_4 ). Why do we still use a language that's so terrible? Because switching to [something better]( URL_2 ) would be a really big pain in the ass. Mandarin is older and even more [crufty]( URL_3 ) than English. We can't even switch to the metric system. And that's OBVIOUSLY better, less complicated, straight forward, and would barely impact daily lives. You know except for [a probe here and there]( URL_0 )."
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5tcfmd | Can churches in the United States of America offer sanctuary? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No, churches in the US do not have the legal authority to prevent the police from entering to make an arrest.",
"They don't have any special protections from search warrants. They are somewhat reluctant to storm a church given the optics, but when push comes to shove they'll do it anyway, ala Waco, TX."
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5tcjr9 | Why do adults play with babies by pretending they're going to eat them or "get them"? | Have a brand new baby niece and it just occured to me that an awful lot of people will do things like touch a baby's cheeks or their chubby thighs and talk about how chubby they are and how they wanna eat them up. Or like how many games of tickling or peek a boo; and when the child is old enough to run games of tag, seem to be centered around pretending to "get" the child like we would harm them or eat them if we caught them. Now obviously we don't mean it literally when we do it, it's a game meant to entertain the child but I wonder why we ever collectively thought to do it to begin with. I mean you would think it was something that would scare a baby rather than amuse them. sorry if this has already been answered somewhere else I looked and couldnt find anything | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's survival training. Just like puppies fighting or kittens hunting, human children have to be taught to survive the world. It's better to teach them with games and laughter than terrifying reality.",
"Human cultural socialization. The game is was to prepare for real life possibility, run and hide from the monsters who will eat you (wolves and other people (not so much the eating on the last one)). Children learn well by play, not so well by lecture. Today being ate is no longer as much of an issue, but the cultural traditions are still with us. We act out behavior we learned from one generation to the next. A game you played as a kid you play as a parent. Human have likely been playing this game a long long time, which I find really cool.",
"it's a critical survival skill to know when someone is going to actually get you, or eat you, in the wild. Also babies are endlessly laughing and entertained by this, and an element of surprise thrown in, and adults who are happy with children are happy making babies laugh. It's not enough to just say there's a tickle-bomb or tickle-gun, it's an extra-twist for the baby to believe they're following a path with their eyes or hands to some treat only to THEN find out it's actually a tickle-bomb or tickle-claw. THEN they laugh a lot more. While it may sound super-crazy I got the best response out of babies by not only making it obvious the now-discovered tickle-claw was a threat to the baby - immense tickling will start immediately - but that I also may be victim to the tickle-claw even though any sane adult can see, clearly, it's my own hand. Babies laugh endlessly at that shtick."
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5tclzj | Why are public defenders so understaffed in relation to prosecutors? Shouldn't they both be equally underfunded? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Public defenders are employed by the state. They're paid by taxes. That's the \"public\" part. Most people pay a private defender, and it's really expensive. There are also government prosecutors, otherwise knows as the attorney general. When the cops charge you with something and it goes to court, it's the attorney general, or someone working under him, who prosecutes you. The fundamental difference is that if the attorney general's staff is feeling overwhelmed, they simply refuse cases. \"eh, I could prosecute the weed case, but this murder case is more important... Let the pot head walk\". Defenders on the other hand don't have the option of simply choosing to not be charged. Also, politics. Funding public defenders is essentially seen as paying money to help out criminals while funding public prosecutors is seen as fighting the bad guys. Despite their professional ideals. EDIT, grammar for the grammar gods."
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5td7se | British TV show's short "series" vs American TV shows long "seasons" | Just some examples to throw out there Peep Show having only 6 episodes per "series" as well as The Inbetweeners Also The Office (UK) having only 3 "series" with 6 episodes each where as The Office (US) has 9 "seasons" with 20+ episodes per season I also noticed most British TV shows tend to end before they debatably go to shit unlike some US TV shows | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"British shows have fewer scriptwriters and often fewer characters; also, there's an expectation for writers to go for quality rather than quantity: one thing the British often notice about long-running American sitcoms is that they quickly become formulaic. With fewer writers, there's more consistency, but it means they can't write as many episodes. With fewer actors, you can't so easily film two episodes simultaneously: with a larger ensemble cast, this is much easier. Also, British actors are expected to be involved with other projects as well, so they're not available all the time. (The last-minute casting of Michael J Fox in *Back to the Future* caused a lot of headaches for the makers of the sitcom he was starring in at the time, *Family Ties*.) Shorter and fewer series also have the advantage that the show is less likely to run out of ideas or \"jump the shark\". In fact, it's widely expected of British writers that they wrap up the show before this happens. There have been some exceptions, though: the world's longest-running sitcom was the British *Last of the Summer Wine*, which ran for 295 episodes in 31 series, with only one cast member appearing for the entire run. Although it continued to be popular, it was often criticized in its later years for a decline in quality as it struggled to attract new audiences.",
"U.K. TV shows usually have a smaller writing staff. Ricky & Steve wrote the entirety of the original \"the office\", whereas the US version has a much larger writing (and directing) staff. The I.T. Crowd was written entirely by Graham Linehan too. I'm sure there's many more factors but that springs immediately to mind."
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5tdewh | When did blue became the standard color for ball pens? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It really isn't the standard, but there's many reasons why it could be preferred by companies that manufacture pens. Here are some explanations. For one, blue ink is distinguishable. If you're printing out a paper in greyscale, blue ink will stick out on the paper. This is especially important for official documentation such as what you get in the doctor's office. The color on the paper makes the person who's looking at it know exactly what you wrote without having to scan through the paper. Also, blue ink makes an original document visible from copies. Since most copy machines use black and white printouts, the blue color of the pen makes the original document (the one scanned) easy to identify. Another explanation is that blue ink writes better. The composition of the ink allows the pen to flow better on the paper. And finally, there might not be a reason. It's likely that when different colors of ink were developed that people naturally developed a preference for blue. Like black ink, it's legible but unlike red ink, still easy to read. This is probably the more likely explanation."
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5tevkz | Where did languages such as Mandarin, Korean, Cantonese, and Japanese originate? | I'm curious as to whether they share a base root language? For example, the romantic European languages stem from latin, I didn't know if there was a language that the aforementioned languages share? Edit: I've been told they share no root language, where do each of these languages come from? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Finally something I'm knowledgeable in! Firstly, its not just Latin that the romance languages stem from - in the end all of the languages in Europe, with a few exceptions (Hungarian and Finnish are the main ones) are all descended from each other. Basically, as far as we know, there was a language spoken a couple thousand years somewhere around the Black Sea, which we call proto-Indo-European (PIE). As speakers of the language spread out from their original homeland, they started speaking differently from each other, kind of like how there are differences between American and British English. Over time, they spoke so differently from each other that they couldn't understand each other - this is the definition of a separate language. Now, the reason the language is called Indo-European is because PIE first split into two main dialects, one in India/Pakistan, and one in Europe. Over time these languages developed their own dialects and split into even more languages - Latin descended from one of the dialects of PIE spoken in Italy. Once the Romans conquered Europe and northern Africa, they made Latin the main language of the people. Because the area was so large and communication wasn't very quick or reliable back then, Latin ended up developing different dialects somewhere between the 4th and 8th century AD, which over time developed into Spanish, French, Italian, etc. Because all of these languages originally came from a single language, they share a lot of features in common. This is how we can trace back their history and tell where they came from - for example, in English, the PIE 'p' sound changed to an 'f' sound - this is why we have the word 'father' instead of 'pater' like in Latin. We call these words cognates, because they come from the same original language (in this case PIE), and can be mapped on to each other with certain sound changes. When two languages are related, they ALWAYS have cognates. However, linguistics isn't that easy! Sometimes, two words can sound alike either by coincidence, or by being borrowed. This is actually more common than you think - for example, the English \"gung ho\" is borrowed directly from Cantonese. Generally the more cognates you can find between two languages, the more closely related they are. For example, if you found that 80% of the words in a language are cognates with another language, you could very safely say they are closely related. If that percent changed to only 5%, likely its just coincidence, or they're very distantly related - you would have to look at other aspects of the language to determine which was the case. Now, onto the actual question - Mandarin and Cantonese are indeed related! A lot of their vocabulary is very similar, for example the following words (I don't actually speak Cantonese, so sorry if I mess up the romanization): Mandarin | Cantonese | English ---|---|---- | --- ni | nei | you wo | ngo | I bang |bang | help dian hua| din wa| phone If you systematically compared their vocabularies, you would find so much in common, you could recreate the language they both came from - middle Chinese. From your reconstruction, by applying different sets of sound changes, you could arrive at either Mandarin, or Cantonese. Thus we say the closest common ancestor of both Mandarin and Cantonese is something we call Middle Chinese, that was probably spoken roughly around the same time as Latin. Looking further, you see that the grammar of them is also similar - both languages have lots of little words, and generally put them in the same order when making sentences. Now, lets assume Mandarin and Korean are related. We would expect to find similarities - lets see if we do! I'll use the same words as above for simplicity (Also, I don't speak Korean either so apologies if I mess this up, Korean is really context-dependent so its hard to pick the right translation from the dictionary) Mandarin | Korean ---|---| ni | neohui wo | jeoneun bang |dowajuda dian hua | jeonhwa Yikes! Not much in common, only the last one. Maybe they're just really distantly? Well, Korean likes to make really really long words (we call this agglutination because its like gluing smaller words together). Chinese, on the other hand, likes to have really short words. Korean also inflects, meanings the words change depending on what they do in the sentence (this is the same thing as English I vs me). Chinese has no inflections - they use the same word in all situations. If they were related, we would expect them to both have similar grammar and words - we dont really find this, so that means that the last one must have been borrowed. In fact, what happened was the Korean people stole Chinese words because Chinese was the language of education and prestige in that area, similar to Latin and French during the Middle Ages. We see the same thing occur with Japanese (same thing where I dont speak it): Mandarin | Japanese ---|---| ni | anata wo | watashi bang | tasukeru dian hua | denwa Like Korean, Japanese likes to inflect words. However, it doesn't really like to put words together to make super long words as much, so once again we conclude that Japanese isn't related to either Korean or Chinese. As to where these languages actually originated from, we know Chinese came from somewhere in the Himalayan mountains (its related to Tibetan, albeit distantly). Korean and Japanese, we have basically no idea, and they aren't related to any other living languages (there used to be a few languages similar to them, but they basically all died out when the modern version became the primary language), so we call them language isolates. Without any other languages to compare them to, its basically impossible to find out where they came from :/ **TL;DR** Cantonese and Mandarin are related, and both originally came from somewhere in Tibet. Korean and Japanese aren't related to any other languages (or each other), and we have no idea where they come from.",
"> Most European languages stem from Latin That's not quite right. Only the Romance languages (Spanish, French, Italian, etc.) descend from Latin. However, the vast majority of European languages *are* part of the Indo-European language family. > Mandarin, Japanese, Korean All three of them belong to different language families. Genetically, they're as different as English is from Arabic.",
"To your edit: no one knows where languages came from beyond the reach of our current methods for finding language families. It's possible that all three groups are distantly related, but have been separate for so long that no trace of the common origin remains. It's not even known if all languages ultimately go back to a single human language spoken in Africa or if language was developed independently several times.",
"On mobile so the thoughts won't be completely organized but prior to the creation of Hangul, they wrote with Chinese characters. I've been to museums with old Korean artifacts and was surprised that I could read scrolls that were written with Chinese characters. I believe Japan started out that way but they have other writing systems in addition to Chinese characters now meaning today the written forms are not the same. Cantonese and Mandarin are similar when written but in my experience Cantonese speakers in Hong Kong/Macau use some written slang not considered \"standard,\" although they know how to write \"standard Chinese.\" There are several dialects of Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Wu/Shanghainese, Hakka, Hokkien/Minnanhua) which I believe to some extent share their roots in ancient Chinese in the same way Romance languages are from Latin, though today it's very difficult to communicate between the two without a lot of exposure to them. In China you can go 50 miles in between villages and the local dialects are mutually unintelligible (though most younger generations are fluent in mandarin now so it doesn't cause communication problems). During WW2 Chinese used the Wenzhou dialect to send communications - it is so radically different from other dialects that it couldn't be deciphered; there's a Chinese saying \"don't be afraid of heaven or hell, just fear someone from Wenzhou speaking Wenzhounese.\" So the languages you mention shared a common written language (Chinese characters) which if I remember from my schooling they have found \"oracle bones\" showing the first written characters. I could be mistaken by Vietnamese also used Chinese characters and likely other nearby civilizations. The oral languages all evolved separately (Japanese, Korean, and Chinese). I remember way back from school even learning about a language called Dungan in Central Asia that is still spoken today and is basically a toneless version of mandarin."
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5tfcy0 | Why are vinyl records making a resurgence, but not other retro recording technologies like casette tapes or 8-tracks? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Cassette tapes are making a comeback, particularly for artists in subgenres like [vaporwave]( URL_1 ) and lo-fi hip hop, which both embrace the sounds of [tape warble]( URL_0 ) and vintage recording anomalies, as well as the revival of the lost art of making mixtapes. The problem with any large scale production is that cassette decks aren't being made as often anymore (if at all), so when you spend $8 on a cassette it's likely that some old cassette deck will ruin it. But people still have cassette decks in older cars and home stereos, so it's worth the risk to immerse oneself in nostalgia. (The same cannot be said for 8-tracks, where working 8 track decks are harder to come by and the playback of music leaves little to be desired.) Record players are still readily available, as well as pretty affordable... and they look great in a home stereo setup. They're also more easily repairable, unlike a cassette deck which has many internal moving parts that can destroy your cassette ribbon. Vinyl is much more marketable. Artists these days don't make much on digital music sales, therefore by pairing a physical copy of their music that the listener can actually touch and feel with some nice artwork, they are more likely to make that sale (and will often times give a digital copy for free). Listeners get to own the album that sounds far better than a compressed Mp3, they're supporting the artist, they're supporting local record shops; manufacturers are happy, record label is happy... it's a win/win/win/win on all sides. *TL:DR - Vinyl is more aesthetically pleasing than 8 tracks or cassettes, a better investment for audiophiles and a better monetary return for artists and labels, and record players are a more reliable instrument for playback than cassette players or 8 track players.* I love this quote by [Brian Eno]( URL_2 ): “Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them.” edit- links, punctuation",
"8 tracks were a horrible format: lots of tape hiss, they jammed often, the tracking was hard to coordinate so that they often had to change 'tracks' in the middle of song with a delay and mechanical clunk.",
"To put simply, it's because they don't display well. You can frame a vinyl, you hang the cover slips on walls, you can have a classy looking collection. Which is why most people like them, it's not like they actually listen to them most of the time (hence why most vinyls come with digital download codes) But cassettes and 8 tracks are clunky and ugly. They don't look good, or at least not by collective pop culture standards right now. You don't really see any body collecting Betamax or VHS do you?",
"FWIW, I use records for a few reasons. Analog audio has an uncompressed, broad, warm sound to it that I like, and vinyl captures that best. I can also find old original mixes/masters of albums, and hear them as they were when released. Thrift store vinyl prices are awesome, and family always sends old records my way, so it's a cheap way to get high quality audio. I also have a soft spot for the familiar \"chshk\" of a needle drop. I don't care for tape media as much because it doesnt have the broad dynamic range. Also, tape is physically troublesome. It unravels, tangles, and breaks. < /my 2 cents >",
"CDs/High bit rate digital audio sounds better than vinyl. Many people believe that vinyl sounds better or it sounds \"warmer,\" but the \"warm\" sound they prefer is actually the impurities being introduced via the analog format. A CD has more than 10 times the dynamic range of vinyl. Vinyl also suffers from surface noise, mechanical noise and longevity. Also vinyl channel separation is pretty weak meaning the stereo sound stage is not up to par. In nearly every aspect a high quality digital audio file is superior to vinyl. They also purposely cut out the bass because of the analog read format. The vibrations from the bass interrupts the playback of the music so the sound engineers have to cut it out. All the professional sound mastering engineers prefer digital to vinyl. Vinyl has a lot of complications. The reason vinyl is making a comeback is largely because of hipsters and the misconception that it sounds better. Nobody believes cassette or 8 track sounds better so they haven't made as much of a comeback."
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5tft0n | Why are younger children from tribes that get photographed not considered illegal photos when they are naked? | I saw a post of some pictures from some of the last native tribes around the world and with some tribes they wear little to no clothes. Why is having pictures of underage children okay when it's of them? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Why is having pictures of underage children okay when it's of them? Nudity is not equivalent to pornography. A naked child pictured running through the house escaping from a bath is not sexualized so it isn't illegal. Similarly naked tribal children are not illegal to photograph.",
"Phonography in most jurisdictions has always relied on context. While some more repressed societies consider almost any form of nudity to be sexual many others have a more relaxed attitude towards this idea and acknowledge than not all nudity is necessarily sexual. This is why in most sane places parents having baby-pictures are not automatically considered as child-pornographers and why there are many family orientated nudist clubs/locations/colonies that do not have any sort of age limit. Nudity is not always something sexual. Of course this always is a bit in the eye of the beholder and in some places even publications like national geographics will get you in trouble. It all depends on where you are more on what you are looking at.",
"The same reason it is not illegal to photograph your infant child in just a diaper or bathing. They are not intrinsically of a sexual nature.",
"When you've already stolen their very soul by taking their photo, everything else pales in comparison...",
"I just bought the coffee table book of this actually (link in the thread comments bellow). Here is what OP is referring to: URL_0"
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5tghql | Why do schools depicted in movies have student hall monitors? Is this a real thing and how do they make up all the work they miss? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In my experience it is not a real thing. I attended three different public schools as a child. Only one of them had hall monitors and that function was performed by staff. I have never heard of any school having students take on that job, likely because of the reason you mentioned, but also because there would be a conflict of interest in terms of being expected to supervise and discipline their peers, especially friends. I doubt many people that age would be as unbiased as required. As for why schools in movies sometimes have student hall monitors, movies about school are often focused more on the students and their interactions with each other than on the teachers. Placing a student in the role of the hall monitor, rather than a teacher, allows for the inclusion of a different type of student character and different types of interactions.",
"It's not that big of a deal - we still have similar role in Eastern Europe ( called \"student on duty\" ), where classes take shifts over the year, each providing two representatives everyday ( for primary school it's usually only 5th and 6th graders, depending on how many classes are in particular school), which gives no more than one \"day off\" for each student in school year. Now, at first glance, it might seem like terrible idea to miss entire day of courses, but it offers different kind of lessons - students for that day are expected to dress \"professionally\" (white shirt, suit trousers etc.) since they become kind of school representatives, greeting visitors and directing them to for example principal's office, it teaches responsibility, as it's them who are delivering gradebooks between classrooms ( if for example one of teachers needs to borrow it to put in latest test marks, or if class is split between two classrooms (like PE or different foreign languages), problem solving (teacher ran out of boardchalk and jaintor is off to fix some door lock - should I look for him, try to find chalk in storeroom myself or ask for help?) and so on... There's also quite a lot of downtime, outside of break-times, so students can self-study while nothing is going on.",
"My school had them with students, only it wasn't during actual class. It was before/after school. The student monitors made sure other students weren't messing around and got to their bus on time and what not."
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5thk4d | Why are old "religions"(norse, pagan etc.) are not considered religions today, when Christianity, Islam etc. is and they have pretty much the same proofs for their beliefs? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A religion isn't just the things people believe, it's the institution to act in accordance with that belief. That is, Christianity isn't *just* the belief that Jesus lived and taught in Galilee, was crucified by the Romans, and was resurrected, liberating some or all people from some or all of the consequences of sin. It's the whole apparatus of believers and churches and Mass and revival meetings and Bible study groups. Norse or Greco-Roman paganism doesn't have that in the modern world (except for a few revivalist movements, which most people would agree are religions, even if they think they're silly). The Elusinian Mysteries aren't performed. No one goes to Delphi or Cumae or Dodona to consult with an oracle. There are no Vestal Virgins. The last vestiges of the actual practice of Roman paganism died off in the five or six hundreds.",
"Depends who conquered who, and who won the wars 😁 IMO, they're all equally valid. That is to say, they're all bs.",
"They are not considered religions because they do not have modern worshipers. The religion died as the people who practiced it were killed or converted to other religions.",
"They are actually considered religions in many countries today. You can look to the Ásatrú in Iceland who have been in the news for building a pagan temple to Odin in Öskjuhlíð hill, Reykjavík. You can look how service people in the American military can choose to have a pentagram engraved on their tombstone should the die in the line of duty. Before their economy tanked, the Greeks were reconstructing the Parthenon in Athens, with a goal of putting up a new statue of Zeus within (although this may not be a good example of pagan religiosity so much as one of historical reverence).",
"Marketing, mainly. What *you* believe is true. What *someone else* believes is just silly nonsense. So a new King comes into town, and wants everyone to follow their religion - Christianity say. They can't put the existing beliefs on the same level as *their* beliefs - that would be absurd! - so they suppress the existing beliefs, and call them 'myths', and get all the priests and academics to call them 'myths', and in a few generations you've discredited everything else as a valid belief system. Of course in these more modern times, you're just going to piss people off if you dismiss the beliefs of billions of people as being pure rubbish - it's rude, and probably won't achieve what you want it to - but back in the day, you could get away with it.",
"I'd think it's also because of the fact that most gods in mythology are disproved scientifically. For example, in Shinto, iirc, they believed that earthquakes were caused by a fish(-god?) trying to squirm and escape its bondage, deep under the earth. We know that tectonic plates collide, create large amounts of pressure and eventually release, causing earthquakes. Also, I don't really know how to say this well, but the Gods in major, at least monotheistic religions today don't really control... Physical things. For example, in many mythologies, there are gods of wind, love, clouds, thunder, etc., which we more or less know how it's actually done today (ex: lightning results from clouds colliding causing large amounts of static electricity, not Zeus getting pissed off). Please forgive me if I am missing something. I am not exactly well-versed in this topic but I've done my share of mythological school units and wiki browsing."
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5thwk3 | How was anime able to distinguish itself from animation in other countries? | I've been into anime for awhile now, but something that I've always been curious about is why Japanese animation was able to separate itself to be considered its own medium, unlike animation from, say, Russia or France? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's actually really straight-forward and simple: In Japan, cartoons are all called \"anime\", short for \"animation\". When they export animation to other countries, they still call it \"anime\" instead of using each country's colloquial terms. That's ... pretty much it."
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5thxpk | with children often indoctrinated from birth into the beliefs and politics of their parents, how do so many individuals end up with the ooposite views of those who raised them? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Indoctrination isn't some lifelong lock. It sets you up heading a particular direction. Early in life, the most influential people on our beliefs are our family. As early as middle school and high school the most influential people on our beliefs become our peer group. Mixed into that is a natural growth of feelings of individualism and a desire to actually reject the beliefs of the family."
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5tisij | What is Race-Baiting? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Saying something purposefully inflamatory or offensive to a specific race in order to incite argument. Specifically, an argument designed to expose assumed flaws in the target demographic. Its typically used by ignorant folks to incite an emotional response and then point a finger at whatever racial group they deem worthy of ridicule. For example: Baiter: \"Why are people from Narnia always so aggressive?\" Narnian: \"Thats bullshit! Youve never even been to Narnia!\" Baiter: \"Why look another triggered aggressive Narnian!\"",
"Race baiting, also known as dog whistle politics, is when you subtilely and discreetly appeal to racist views/racists, even if the end objective has nothing to do with race. For example, when Reagan was running for office, he made a comment along the lines of stopping the \"unconstitutional regulatory agenda of the IRS against independent schools.\" There seems to be nothing racist at all about that statement, right? Well, when you dig beneath the surface, you realize that this comment had deep racial tensions. See, when Brown v Board of Education was decided, many southerns decided their solution was to create private schools that didn't allow black students so their kids wouldn't go to school with black kids. A black family sued (Green v Kennedy), saying that these discriminatory schools weren't \"charitable\" organizations and therefore wouldn't qualify for tax exempt status. The court agreed, and Nixon ordered the IRS to deny tax exempt status to these discriminatory schools. People were pissed, and naturally wanted their WASPy schools to be tax exempt again. Reagan's comments were in attempt to appeal to racists to gain there votes but never explicitly said anything race related, and anyway not familiar with the matter (and maybe even those who are) would be totally unaware of anything racial. Other examples could include using phrases like \"inner city youth,\" but the point is it's an attempt to appeal to racists being discreetly. The end objective doesn't need to be racist in order for something to be race baiting. If you didn't want welfare, you could potentially get people behind it by implying that lazy black people are using the system to leach off your hard earned tax dollars (another Reagan quote, \"a **Chicago** woman...:\"). Nothing inherently racist about being against welfare, but making a claim like that to make it politically popular is a different story."
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5tj50j | Why did Britain have a vote to leave the European Union in the first place? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because a bunch of people wanted to leave and the current PM was having trouble getting support for the stuff he thought necessary to cope with staying in. So he set up a dare: He would call for a vote on staying in or leaving. If people voted to stay he wanted cooperation from those opposing him and if they voted to leave he would resign. They voted to leave and he resigned, something he didn't expect.",
"being in the EU is sort of like being a state in america. there are some laws of the union which you are bound to, and must get the whole union to vote for a change. So if the UK wanted to change its immigration or monetary policies in conflict of what the rest of the EU supported, they couldnt. and they did, so they did, and now they can do whatever they want."
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5tkn3d | What is the time processing of newspaper printing and delivering? | So I work nights and BBC news is on all night. When I went to the shop on my way home today at 7:30am the newspapers are there displaying news I saw only a few hours ago. How do they get everything written, printed and delivered so quickly? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I work for a local newspaper in Germany. We can write our articels till around 22.30, depending on the page they will be on. Most newspapers consist of different \"books\". These are the parts that are folded together. Most newspapers print the parts that are most important, like politics, or that need to be most up-to-date, like sports, last. There will be other parts, like the literature-section for example, that can be printed in the evening. If there are big events, for example the terrorist attack in Berlin in december, we can even write while the paper is already getting printed. This will lead to different texts in the next days papers. Most big newspapers - afaik - print the papers that will be delivered far away first. For example the NYT that i can buy in Germany would not include the result of the superbowl while the NYT printed on the same day for New York will. I hope this helped, if not feel free to ask away ;)"
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5tl5en | What is the reasoning behind the response of a bootlicker in the given example? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, they're technically correct (the best kind of correct), but the situation would have also been avoided if the woman had jumped in front of a bus at the last second or if she had never gone out in the first place. Often people look at a bad situation and try to find the smallest change that could have been made to avoid it. In this case, that probably is the woman complying with the officer. This involves blaming the victim, which people are probably more likely to do if the other person is a police officer, someone that they have been instructed to trust from a very young age. When a situation can be impulsively resolved without a person having to check their moral compass, they are apt to take immoral sides.",
"I really do not know. It's an extremely common response, certainly on Reddit, and it drives me fucking bananas. I assume they just think enough fascists will agree with them to get them some karma. Fuckers.",
"> This whole situation could have been avoided if she had just shown the officer her ID This is, strictly speaking, true. What they don't think about(or don't consider important) is the precedent this sets, the violations of a person's rights and the illegitimate use of force. There are plenty of people who think unquestioning obedience to authority is a virtue."
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5tl5ts | Why is so much porn incestual? Do kids really fantasize about banging their moms or sucking off their dads/brothers? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"First of all, the major porn conglomerates suggest porn to you much the way google shows you ads for pregnancy tests after you search webmd for late period. There is no second of all. Don't be ashamed of your sexual preferences, but you don't have to carry out every fantasy either. ;D EDIT: also \"step\" whatever"
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5tl9e3 | Why the Ringo Starr hate? | What drives the Hate-on-Ringo bandwagon? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Am I out of the loop on something? Who hates Ringo?!"
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5tleoa | Why was domestic violence decriminalized in Russia ? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Domestic violence was not really decriminalized, they decriminalized the first offence. You still get a punishment for it, but if you and your wife had a big fight and it escalated to a physical one that ended *without injury* and that was the only time it's happened then you won't get in huge trouble but you still lose more than five hundred USD, 15 days jail time, or 120 days community service. You will get in bigger trouble if it happens again.",
"The prior regulation was (subjectively) harsh in comparison to even regulations in the US. Take NY Penal Law 240.26 which essentially proscribes the same type of conduct and calls it \"Harassment.\" If you don't injure another party but you make contact, it can be punishable by up to 15 days and a $250 fine. The new Russian statute has the same sentence except a higher fine and NY is just pass a whole mess of new family regulations punishing repeat domestic violence offenders, so it isn't that the State is lax. The outrage is just a media misunderstanding and geared at making the public hate Russia.",
"Domestic violence was reclassified based on the nature of the incident. If it was physical and a party was injured you will head to court on relevant assault criteria. If you called her a drunken whore (im assuming youre an adult eli5) then you will not be criminally considered. The previous law allowed too much freedom to judges. The current law is less abstract and enforces minimum CRIMINAL charges."
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5tlgcg | Why are not there just people called Jesus outside the Hispanic countries? | Just as in Muslim-majority countries there are thousands and thousands of people called Mohamed, in the Spanish-speaking countries (mostly Catholics) there are also many people called Jesus. Why does not this happen in the rest of countries of Christian majority, mainly the Anglo-Saxon countries? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Iberian peninsula fell under Islamic rule after the Arab Conquest of Hispannia. Muslims love to name their children Muhammad. As a response to this habbit by their Muslim rulers, the Iberians began to name their children Jesus. The short answer is Hispannia fell under Muslim rule, hence they adapt their practice of naming. The Anglo-Saxon countries, never fell under Muslim rule, hence they don't do that. Though, the anomaly to this is the Balkans since Jesus is not a popular name in that region yet the region was subjugated under the Muslims just like Iberia was.",
"Because the English name variant of \"Jesus\" is \"Joshua\" from the original Hebrew Yeshua. The biblical version is from the Latin translation of the Greek translation of that original Hebrew.",
"There are. Jesus is just a spanish translation pronounced \"heh soos\". Jesus as you know him, URL_0 .was \"Yeshua\" which means \"to deliver\" in Hebrew. Over time its translated into many languages, the english equivalent would be \"Joshua\" .",
"Jesus is a common name for Muslim's to call their children also. It's pronounced Issa. Jesus, as is Abraham, Adam, Noah, Moses and Mohumed to name a few, is a prophet in Islam and children are named after all of them. Yoshua is another prophet and this name is not used synonymously with Issa. Haven't cleared anything up but bought some more to the table! Cheers."
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5tljky | Why are some words translated [into English] literally, while others are translated phonetically? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Bit of a tricky question actually. I assume you mean borrowing words into English and specifically importing them rather than creating new words based on the old ones (substitution), in which case it depends how and when the word was imported. Typically and grossly oversimplifying, loanwords tend to remain faithful in English to their origin when they're not too hard to pronounce or write in the arrival language, but they often go through some morphological adjustment to make it more \"palatable\" to English speakers. More technical words (tempo), or words that sound very positively foreign (schadenfreude), will tend to be adjusted less; though words that are awkward to read in English, or simply already fairly close to English regular words will change more to fit in (music from musique, which is a slight adjustment over time to make the word more \"regular\" and native and less awkward to read). So obviously it depends on how it's used and what its speakers find more convenient, and it's a little random sometimes. On top of that, as time goes and words are used, even loanwords end up changing and being \"smoothed\" into the language, so even a perfectly transliterated word can end up changing. (café, with the dialectic, is more and more changing into cafe, since < é > is highly irregular and people bother less; likewise Kindergarten seems to be spelled Kindergarden more and more because while \"kinder\" is definitely foreign sounding, garten and garden are very close and it just becomes more convenient to use the already existing English word) However that is definitely not always the case, sometimes English retains the spelling even though the phonemes don't exist. Sometimes English realises when there's an affix or inflection and removes it, and sometimes it keeps it as part of the loanword. Sooo really it really depends on what's more convenient for the people who actually use the word, there are no real \"rules\", only trends, it is usually more helpful to simply check a specific word's etymology to understand its own unique evolution. And that's without going into the domain of substituted words, which are words created out of preexisting English words to copy a foreign word without bothering to actually import the foreign words; or loan-blends, which are a mix of the two. Quite sick, never quite sure how simplified ELI 5 should be, so not sure this is coming out quite right, but hope that's kinda helpful :D"
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5tlltc | Why did monks have bald spots on the back of their heads as portrayed in old paintings? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's called a tonsure, and was a sign of religious devotion. Different branches of Christianity had slightly different traditions, but to this day many monastic orders still expect their monks to have tonsures. It used to be more widespread. If you've ever wondered why senior members of the Catholic clergy, including the Pope, often wear skull-caps, it was from the time when they had tonsures: they wore skull-caps simply to keep their heads warm.",
"It's called a [tonsure]( URL_0 ). I'm sure the practice was sold to younger monks as a sign of religious devotion. But I'm willing to bet it actually started out as some bright spark's solution to male pattern boldness."
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5tloh0 | Why is Porn seen as Perpetuating Stereotypes/Unrealistic? | I'll be honest I agree with the viewpoint, but I'd like to have a more thorough understanding of the how's and why's from those who know more about it. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most of the positions you see in porn allow for a clear view of penetration. But many of those positions are awful for women wanting to achieve orgasm. That's why female orgasms are relatively rare in porn. Good sex involves lots of kissing and skin to skin contact, not having the girl do squats on top of you until her legs go numb, for example. One more thing. Go over to r/askwomen and see how many of them enjoy having a guy cum on their face. Not many. In conclusion, most porn is produced for men. If you want to be a good lover and consistently give your partner an orgasm, watch less porn.",
"Well, to answer that you've got to wonder what porn is, and really pornographic movies are just that : movies. That means everything is geared towards the audience, and that in and of itself is very different from having sex with your partner for yourselves only. Just like non-porn movies, the show comes first, and at such you have a lot of \"artistic licences\". The positions are aimed at showing you penetration (in typical porn - I'll be honest, I don't understand why, but obviously there's a demand for that) but in real life they'd be incredibly painful and not really comfortable or pleasuring. Obviously a lot of reactions are also acted and oversexualized, the point of view may be on the object of your fantasy rather than the scene as a whole (the girl, or the penetation bit, or whatever tickles the production team's fancy). The actors themselves are usually hypersexualized and \"stereotypically attractive\", especially females (but by no means not just the, male gay or lesbian porn is the same) unless (or even if) you cater to a specific fetish. So you do have a bias there which some may analyze as unrealistic or unethical - as an example, just googling \"bondage\" returns a lot of female models, but few male ones, and while there tends to be more female subs there certainly also are male ones, but it doesn't really -look- that way on first glance. All of these licences can also /seem/ to perpetuate the idea of women being sexually submissive, which is what I assume you mean by stereotypes. I don't know to what point it does, and to what point it only tries to cater to the assumed audience, really. And really all of these \"artistic licences\" and biases actually exist because, well, mainstream porn tries to appeal to the broadest audience, and that's stereotypically men who come to enjoy a good show. After all, you're making a movie, you're probably more fussed about being watched, why straying for what you know is in demand if it's harder to film, or gets you less views - and therefore less money? What this all leads to is reinforcing already unrealistic standards and established stereotypes and giving false expectations more than anything, though really movies are usually predicated on the idea that the audience keeps in mind it's all just make-believe, so I don't know if you can really wholly blame the industry when people take porn at face value. A very important thing that's often missing much for the same reasons is safe sex - and tbh it's alarming how people use porn as a substitute for sex ed. Again, you're watching a show - if you watch porn you probably don't want to watch the actors do birth control or struggle to put a condom on. It gets in the way of the show so it's kept behind the scenes. Maybe vaginal sex right after anal sex, for instance, sounds hot in your head, but it's also very unhygienic and chances are high, there's a cut in your movie where the actor goes clean himself before coming back. That, or they expose themselves to health risks and unsafe sex for the sake of the camera, which in real life I'd hope you don't really want to do. It's not just penetrative sex; for instance you could have picture of models in bondage that look really hot, but really in real life they sustained that pose for 15 seconds before coming down because in real life you can't actually stay in a given position for very long without injuring yourself. That's probably where 50 shades harms a lot, come to think of it, as it's really a movie, dramatized and all, and not a good introduction to alternative sex. And finally, though that is more about the porn industry than porn itself, there is often criticism that porn actors are exploited, forced to do things they don't like, or that production companies don't care about the safety of their actors. I don't know how substantiated these claims are, and a lot of criticism is probably overblown, but there have been major fuckups in porn history - for instance, during the 80s and 90s it turned out several porn actors had AIDS and unknowingly transmitted it while filming. These claims while probably not entirely truthful are also certainly not completely made up, and may be one extra reason why the porn industry in general is seen by some to perpetuate stereotypes, eg women being exploited for sex. ---- tl;dr the reason why porn perpetuates unrealistic expectations is, well, porn movies are fictional and commercial material but aren't always understood at such. Porn really isn't people having sex, but people putting on an erotic show for the camera and the (usually) broadest possible audience - and many folk out there, probably due to lack of actual sex ed or otherwise, mistake that for safe, fun sex and set their expectations of sex too high. In effect this is like the obscene version of the CSI effect, where people mistakenly expect real life investigations to be the same as the fun to watch, but overly dramatized and highly unrealistic CSI and clone shows to the point it colours their standards. URL_0",
"/u/mandingdong had good points, but missed a couple of nuances. Porn is about what people like to see, not necessarily like to do. Some of acts that are relatively common in porn (and presumably enjoyed) are MUCH less common/much less enjoyed in real life. It also involves a bunch of things that are downright bad ideas in real life. Things like going from anal sex to oral/vaginal sex are generally going to be an INCREDIBLY unsafe/unhygenic idea. Going straight to pounding away with anal sex would be another example of a bad idea. Similarly, there's often much less foreplay, much less emotional interaction, and generally less condom use than would be advised with new/multiple partners. That is even assuming the body types/proportions are realistic, which they generally aren't.",
"I don't know about the 'perpetuating stereotypes' bit, but there's no denying that it's unrealistic. Porn is made specifically to be aesthetically pleasing to a viewer, with no regard for the comfort, pleasure or even safety of the actors. In a real-life sexual situation, exactly the opposite is true.",
"It's unrealistic because it's not representative of reality. It significantly over represents the most well endowed of males and females. Perpetuating stereotypes? What stereotypes? The idea would most likely be again that it's not representative of reality. That reinforces the unrealistic views. Personally, can't say see I've seen any evidence for that. From the little I've read it seems we are pretty good at recognising it as fantasy. Perhaps there's been more developments since I looked or I was only exposed to some of the arguments, I can't say I'm well informed enough to know."
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5tm0g1 | Why we see so many great social programs featured on reddit from Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands? (and so few from countries with better resources) | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I don't know what you mean by \"better resources\". The countries you named are some of the wealthiest in the world. Norway, in particular, is flush with oil money.",
"Because Americans learn that socialism is bad. Even while they enjoy things like public education. In fact, they learn it within their public education system. The irony comes full circle as funding for education is going away and generally people just sit around and scratch their heads as to why. Perhaps I'm using 'irony' incorrectly. I wouldn't know -- I didn't really get a great education.",
"mostly because those scandinavian countries (in the past) have been largely homogenous, high agency, and high trust societies. they in the most basic sense were operating as a tribe.",
"I can only speak for Sweden since I'm not familiar with Norway as much. Norway and Sweden have vast natural resources. Oil in Norway and lumber and metals in Sweden. During the industrial revolution and all the way up to the middle of the last century, They became incredibly wealthy. Couple that with their strategic position next to Russia, which made them perfect for the US to put troops and bases in. Hence we have had an artificial canopy of American military support, and haven't had to spend so much on our own military, which consists of like 12 guys, three rifles and a tank. If we didn't have the US military presence, Russia would have taken us a long time ago. Hence we have been able to sink that immense wealth into social programs for decades, and through ridiculously high taxes recirculate some of it. The resources are pretty much drained by now, so we're running on fumes and have lost the entrepreneurial spirit that made us famous in 19 century US. Then we add to that about 200.000 refugees in one fell swoop last year, and now 33% of our budget is wasted on taking care of them and cleaning up the mess they make every day (social programs, police work, infrastructure damage, etc). Our health services don't work. You have to wait months to see a doctor, women are giving birth in cars because they are not admitted in hospitals, etc. And the police work with less and less resources in a rapidly more and more criminal society. One year ago, the local mall was the place for everyone to be. Half a year ago, roaming gangs of Muslim thugs made it dangerous at night. Three months ago, the recommendation was to not be there after 6pm. Last month the recommendation became to not go there after 2 pm. Rapid decline. Crime is skyrocketing and the police has no resources to deal with it. You can de facto get away with murder because there are not enough resources to investigate - the police are busy going in shuttle traffic to the local refugee centers. Media and politicians cooperate to hide the facts - even censoring the Internet - and shaming anyone who brings up the facts, calling them racists. All this and we have one of the highest tax rates in the world, making it next to pointless to do anything productive. Prices are slowly rising but income does not rise correspondingly. tl;dr: Socialism is an economical nightmare, however if you have a population that is resilient and not prone to complaining, as well as vast natural resources, you can stretch out the suffering over several decades. But sooner or later it comes crashing down. Now it's later."
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5tm1ky | Why is Ketchup sometimes called/spelled Catsup? Is there a difference? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The short answer is that \"catsup\" was a bad attempt at anglicising the original word. But then, \"ketchup\" may also not be a very good attempt. \"Ketchup\" came into English in the early 18th century, probably from Malay, although if that's the case then it seems that Malay borrowed it from Amoy Chinese. It's the consonant in the middle of the word that seems to have caused the most problems. Sounds don't often match up exactly between languages, especially languages that aren't closely related to each other. The sound in the middle of the original Amoy word doesn't exist in English, but to some people it sounded like a \"ch\" and to others it sounded more like \"ts\". In fact, the same Amoy word (which was a kind of fishy sauce) can be written in the Latin alphabet as either \"koetsiap\" or \"koechiap\" -- it can sound like either. So we got two slightly different English words out of that: \"ketchup\" and \"catsup\". Eventually, \"ketchup\" became the version we usually use, but \"catsup\" still hangs around."
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5tn06p | Why doctor's "kind of writing" is unreadable? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's probably not anymore unreadable then the next person's. It's just usally scribbled down quickly with the emphasis on speed rather than being neat. That and a prescription is made up mostly of drug names you wouldn't recognize or abbreviations/codes that a layperson might not be familiar with. For example a prescription for antibiotics might read Amoxicillin 500 mg 21 caps sig tid ac until finished Meaning the patient is to take amoxicillin in the form of 500 mg capsules three times a day with food until they've taken all of the capsules i.e. for a week.",
"During med school, doctors have to take notes basically at the speed that their professors talk. This means they learn to write really fast, sacrificing neatness for speed. It's a habit most never break. Source: a doctor I worked for once",
"Yeah I read somewhere that was takes so long at pharmacies because sometimes they need to call drs and find out what they were trying to write or check doses etc.",
"Am a doctor: it was all about speed. I remember writing pharmacy renewals on the wards, and my god, that was painful; having to rewrite 20 plus med orders over and over again on different patients. Or having to preround on 8 patients at 6am, and trying to have your notes done before rounding with your attending at 8am so they could cosign. I will say though, I had great handwriting (it was emphasized at my institution). We were often told that \"you aren't saving time if people can't read your orders/notes, you are just wasting someone elses.\" So it wasn't that big an issue where I trained. The only thing that suffered was my signature, which became a glorified first and last initial. In this day in age, now that we are all (hopefully) on electronic records (in the US), this shouldn't be a problem. I can't remember the last time I hand wrote a 'script."
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5tpb4u | Why is health insurance run differently than other types of insurance (car, home, etc.) | When your car needs an oil change or new tires (routine maintenance) you pay for those things out of pocket, you don't run them through your insurance. Same with house repairs. When your washing machine dies you buy a new one, you don't put in a claim to have that covered by your homeowner's insurance. But with health insurance we put everything through our insurance. Yearly physicals, well woman/child visits, minor issues like colds and flu. If health insurance was like other types of insurance we'd pay for all of that out of pocket and only use insurance for catastrophic things like accidents. So why is it different? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You can absolutely do it that way. Just buy catastrophic coverage only and watch all your routine visits get paid out of pocket."
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5tqjyn | Why Adele felt she had to start over at the Grammy's. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When I took the wife to see her last year she did this a couple of times. It was actually pretty funny when she did it, it was like she started the song and about ten seconds into it she said \"Oh f*ck, I totally screwed up that line, ooops I meant, oh sh*t! Oh wait! Sorry, sorry!\" In this thick cockney accent. Her explanation was that she wants to give her best to her audience, because they deserve to see her doing her best. She also says a lot of funny self-deprecating things during her shows. It really made her come across as a regular person the audience can relate to. Rumor has it she suffers from really bad stage fright, and this is one of the ways she deals with it.",
"Her voice was really flat and she thought that she wasn't doing any justice sooo she restarted. Also she cussed at her \"bad\" singing 10 seconds prior"
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5tqns6 | Beyonce worship | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Kind of feel it's just a weird facet of today's society. Religion is frowned upon, morals are shunned, everything is a joke... however, most societies throughout history have worshiped someone or something. Pop-culture is now the thing being worshiped... in a world with so many negative things being broadcast 24/7, people turn other people into god-like figures.",
"I think it's an idol complex. She is very talented and has been relevant for almost 20 years. Her early career success has given her an air of infallibility. Basically, at this point in her career she has had so much success, that anything she does, good or bad, is not big enough to offset her career up to this point. She could put out an album of just her farting into a microphone, and it would still go platinum and be up for album of the year, because... well, it's Beyoncé and she's a genius ... right? A good analogy is Tom Hanks. He has been in so many classic movies throughout his career that he too is infallible. Look at \"Cloud Atlas\". That was a giant stinker of a film. It was a bomb and just all around awful movie. Yet, in no way does it tarnish his reputation because he has such a long history of making great movies that this one God-awful bomb doesn't change his overall legacy."
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5troa2 | How come Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the United States all use the dollar, despite having all been colonies of Britain which uses the pound? | I've always found it odd that those countries don't use the pound. Did they use the pound when colonies and then switch after gaining independence and of so how long after and why? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'll answer for Australia Australia originally used the British Pound as their currency but in 1910 (not long after federation) converted to using the Australian pound - but still based on the empirical system. In 1966 Australia decided to decimilise their currency - the new currency was originally called the Royal but this wasn't a very popular name. Dollar was simply chosen out of a list of possible names - not 100% sure why but given that the US was strong economically at the time this was likely to be a big factor in the choice. In Australia although it's commonly shortened to just Dollar, the currency is actually known as the Dollarydoo (that last part isn't true, but should be)",
"Dollar is actually the anglicised form of Thaler, which was a really common silver coin between the 15th and 19th century. A whole lot of currency names actually go back to that \"coin\" (like the slovenian tolar, or other nations equivalents. Often called crowns hence the swedish krona or denmark and norway's called their the krone. The spanish eight real coin (other wise known as the Spanish Dollar, better known as pieces of eight) is where peso comes from. So on. Infact iirc the spanish dollar is why the US called their currency the dollar. It was in pretty common use in America at the time so they issued coinage based on it and the usual fractional denominations of it. Also as the spanish dollar implies, the word dollar predates the US by several hundred years (it turns up in Macbeth!) and pre decimalization it wouldn't be unusual to hear the crown or half crown referred to as a dollar or half a dollar. That's probably scotland's fault btw, prior the the Union of england and scotland, they had separate currencies. The british crown replaced the english crown and...the scottish dollar. Not really sure why the UK named their currency after the pound coin instead of the crown however.",
"Set the flair as Culture as I feel it's more appropriate than Economy for this, please feel free to challenge this and if it's appropriate I'll change it.",
"The US did it because the did not leave Britain on the greatest of terms, and wanted to be different. At the time, a Dutch coin called the daler was widely traded in the colonies, to the point other not British currency were called \"dollars\". By the time other colonies gained independence, decimalization of currency was getting to be a big thing, and Britain was pretty resistant to the idea. Also, one of the perks/responsibilities of independence was being able to manage your own currency, so there was some appeal to choosing something other than the pound, to make that distinction clear."
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5trwmi | Why is Adele's Hello song & album, 25, released in 2015 nominated for the 2017 Grammys? | thanks for your help:) | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The Grammys don't use the calendar year for eligibility, instead they use October 1-September 30. Since *25* was released in November of 2015, it's part of the 2016 eligibility year (which ran from October 1, 2015 to September 30, 2016)."
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5tryjo | Why are the elderly so susceptible to Internet scams? Weren't they functional, logical members of society once upon a time? Do they just suddenly become clueless upon reaching old age? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"There's a simple explanation for this type of phenomenon. Elderly people are sometimes less aware because of deteriorated mental states, like dementia or Alzheimer's. However, it's not always exclusively an illness but can be chalked up to fatigue. My grandfather used to tire out pretty quickly, in this state he wasn't as sharp. He could be encouraged to believe something sinister like a scam - or in a more memorable case, believed that another man stole his wallet, and proceeded to shout at him until finding it in his own back pocket. Also, this can include a lapse of understanding with technology. Entering card numbers and pins into a fishy website might seem totally legit to those who have nothing to compare it to. Source: grandparents, parents",
"I remember a study that actually showed that a part of the brain responsible for skepticism atrophies (shrinks a little) as people get older. [Here]( URL_0 ) is a link to an article on one of the studies. > The new brain research, published Dec. 3 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, finds older people, more than younger adults, may fail to interpret an untrustworthy face as potentially dishonest. The study, led by Shelley Taylor, a professor of psychology at UCLA, was funded by the National Institute on Aging."
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5tscla | what are the benefits of practicing yoga everyday? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"An Indian here.. I used to practice yoga daily early morning when i was 13 year old till 15 as it was compulsory in my school. After I completed my high school, I kind of completely left practicing yoga. The main difference i observe is the strange feeling of activeness i used to have the entire day when i used to do yoga. But now I feel lazy to do anything during the day. In addition to this , there is the fitness factor ,of course."
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5tsz00 | What is going on with the mandatory evacuation in California? There are conflicting news reports and personal accounts. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is a dam on the Oroville River. It has a huge amount of water behind it (3.5M acre feet). There is a spillway that is supposed to allow excess water to go around the dam in a controlled way. It has reached capacity and the water is rising. An emergency spillway (= trench in the earth) is being used to try and let the water out. However, being made of earth, the emergency spillway is eroding and could fail. This would let 20-ish feet of water out of the dam uncontrollably. That's 6-7% of the water behind the dam. It will flood a large area. The big worry is that since it's not controlled it will undermine the dam, and then all the water will come out all at once and wipe the valley out. There is a 200,000 person emergency evacuation ordered. This is very hard, and it's super difficult to organize that scale of an evacuation. However, if the dam breaks the water would kill almost everybody left in the valley.",
"If the dam completely breaks, then the entire Valley can flood, and quickly. They are evacuating because there is a high likelihood that the damage and loss of life will be severe."
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5twh76 | Why has the Wild West been explored so heavily in films and television when it was a relatively short moment in human history? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Oh boy oh boy I got this. Gonna be wordy but I hope still ELI5. Well the earliest Western cinema was contemporary. In fact the first ever film with what you might describe as a plot was a Western, centered on a bar room brawl. As the *actual* wild west died off and civilization spread, it was in many cases a form of nostalgia, or for others a chance for increasingly button-down society to observe a time and place of rugged lawlessness. Like how well-off people from 1st world nations like watching escapist action movies about commandos kicking ass in southern Asian jungles or Russian bareknuckle fighting tournaments or whatnot. In the 1930's, when movies were all gaining *sound* and directors began exploring what they could do with proper dialogue and sound, westerns fell out of favour with the mainstream for a while. Small studios just kept on churning them out and making a few little gems and lots of cheap crap. Why? Well they already had all the props, cliches and audience expectations of the past couple of decades, so they were so cheap and quick and easy to make but still made money. In 1939 we hit a landmark. John Ford made Stagecoach. It's one of *the* most influential movies ever made. Orson Wells used to watch it over and over while he was preparing to make Citizen Kane and called it the perfect movie. As these things always do, everyone saw something get huge praise and jumped right back on the bandwagon. Or stagecoach. So the 1940's saw the western come right on back into popularity. It also helped that Stagecoach had an actor in it named John Wayne, who became wildly popular, to the point that he became an American icon for his roles in Western movies over the next couple of decades. The whole era is called the Golden Age of Westerns. Everyone was trying to top Stagecoach and building off of what it had done. It was a glorious time in its way, with tons of well regarded classics coming out in this period in this genre. By the mid-50s though, the genre had gotten so popular that everyone was trying their hand, and as a result, the flood of movies led to stagnation. Most every tom, dick & harry who tried their hand at making a western ended up largely running on a really narrow set of tropes that celebrated the All-American Western Sheriff killing injuns and saving the good folk of the town through extreme violence. So along came John Ford again. The Searchers is a movie that just shits all over that idea. It deconstructs everything Ford and his imitators had built up, showing that archetypical sheriff, played by John Wayne or a John Wayne wannabe, to really be a xenophobic, prejudiced, violent shell of a man when you look beyond the thin veneer of \"heroics\" he performs. It was the beginning of the end for the golden era. It staggered on for a few more years, until Ford once more shot the genre and finally put it down, with his movie The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Gritty, unpleasant, completely stripped of all the glamour and glitz of everything he'd done before. Intentionally returning to black & white even though it was 1962, no more beautiful outdoor vistas glorifying the setting, everything about it feels like Ford rejecting his own oeuvre. Being such an utter demolition of the genre, people couldn't just keep making movies like that afterwards. It'd be like trying to make an 80's slasher movie the year after Scream was released. It's a masterpiece that grounded the genre completely. But of course, the genre, like an 80's slasher movie villain, somehow got up and staggered on. Enter Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. Some italians with no money and a guy known for a small part in a TV western series took inspiration from Japanese samurai movies and made something new and exciting. A Fistful of Dollars didn't give a crap about being realistic, nor about keeping all the trends of Hollywood's past 60 years of Western films, it was basically an opera of blood and bullets and by god people went \"HOT FUCK THIS IS GOOD.\" As a bonus, it cost very little to make, being produced in Italy with landscapes in Italy and Spain standing in for Mexico. So that thing happened again where every copied it. For 20 years, so-called spaghetti westerns (and revisionist westerns in general) became an easy source of revenue for small studios to make money from. Leone and Eastwood made some goddamn art too, but for every Pale Rider there was a Django, nasty, brutal movies of desperation and squalor. Hell, when exploitation movies got big in the 70's, you bet your ass there were Western exploitation movies too (Django even being one in a way). You know how after Paranormal Activity came out and made a hundred million dollars from a few thousand dollar budget, and suddenly everyone was making found footage horror? Yeah, like that. Every hero an anti-hero badass cigar-chomping grizzled macho asshole who shoots first and asks questions later, if at all. Hell, Eastwood even turned the character into a contemporary cop with Dirty Harry, leading to the creation of that whole loose cannon cop cliche. By the 80's, people started to get a bit bored of Westerns again, like they did in the 20's and 60's. This is getting a bit wordy now so let's just cut to the chase: Clint Eastwood made another of history's *greatest* movies, Unforgiven, and fucking murdered the genre again. Much like Ford showing how the classical western was often xenophobic and glamourized awful people, Unforgiven showed how the revisionist western glamourized violence, a eulogy for the genre having the final say on heroism, machismo and violence as a solution. There was nothing left to say after this. So the genre sorta died finally in 1992. We're in a weird place now. People are still nostalgic for them, and there'll remain a place for them based on that alone, but nobody's having new ideas. Instead the last 15 years have seen attempts to bring back the classical feeling (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Appaloosa) or the revisionist feeling (Django Unchained, 3:10 to Yuma), but that's all they are. Fun echoes of what people used to make. We enjoy the violence and lawless badass antiheroes, or we enjoy the principled and strongwilled but willing-to-take-action sheriffs, or the beautiful vistas and ways of life of an America long gone. Take your pick.",
"A good question, one that has to do with the US's culture, and also what it cost to **make** movies. Speaking of culture, you should definitely add a culture tag to this before the bot gets you! Anyway, the wild west image of the cowboy is something that appealed (still does) to a lot of Americans as this powerful, manly hero who goes out there and battles the elements in a lawless land to bring order and civilization to it. This is something that, especially in the era it was acutally happened, people considered an ideological goal the country, look up \"manifest destiny.\" A doctrine that the US's expansion into the western territories was justified, inevitable, a goal, and (some religious leaders said) God's wish for the country. The cowboy puts a face to that idea. Also? They're relatively cheap to make and fun to watch, especially in film's early years. Grab a few horses, go an hour outside of Hollywood, slap up some quick crappy wooden homes and *bam*, you got yourself a set. And as action packed films about guys chasing each other around and shooting at each other (long before today's idea of an \"action movie hero\" happened) these almost always saw box office success. Decades of this established the world and the tropes as their own thing."
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5twtdy | How does Germany and Japan handle atrocities of WW2 like concentration camps and Unit 731 in their history books? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"German history books vary from state to state (we have 16 states), but the condemnation of Nazi crimes is universal. It is also a crime in Germany to display the Nazi salute (\"Displaying symbols of anti-constitutional organisations\" - anti-constitutional in this context meaning: seeking to abolish democracy) or to incite hatred of ethnic groups. When I was in school, we took a trip to a nearby concentration camp and our class went to see Schindler's List, which was in the cinemas at that time. Various state constitutions exhort German teachers to always promote the two ideals of democracy and understanding between peoples (Völkerverständigung). There is no skirting around what happened, no apologies à la \"but the Nazis were in a bind\", no normalisation of the actions of the 3rd Reich - the books take the line that those actions and ideas were objectively evil, and that no excuse or explanation can justify them. One thing is the fate of the [expellees]( URL_0 ) from the Sudetenland and the former German territories in Poland. They were a significant voter block (nowadays, you don't hear so much about them because the first generation, which pined for their old homeland, has died off) and understandably upset at what happened to them; unfortunately (to my mind), history books sometimes seek to equate their deportation with that of the Jews. Personally, I think that that was simply to be expected when the dust settled after WW2, in contrast to what happened to the Jews, but it's an interesting example of how history books will always reflect the political stances of the author or those who commission the book (in this case, a state government that wanted to pamper the hurt feelings of the expellees). As for history books that are not school books, any serious academic German history book might analyse this or that aspect of Nazi rule slightly differently, but the consensus is that the end of Nazi rule was a good thing. Though even on May 8, 1985 (the 40th anniversary of the end of WW2 in Europe) then-President Richard von Weizsäcker made headlines with his speech (\"the 8th of May *was* a day of liberation\") because at that time many people were still alive who told themselves that they had only fought for their country and not the regime. The real difficulty in Germany always lay in people's perception of their individual guilt or non-guilt; the evilness of the 3rd Reich itself was \"officially\" never disputed in my lifetime (the 1950s is a different story), and anyone publicy doubting that quickly got into very hot water. Edit: There is an inscription on a wall of the Munich town hall: \"To the members of the US Armed Forces who on the 30th of April 1945 liberated Munich from the national socialist rule of terror.\" There are some objections to this \"cult of national shame\"; this week, a politician who voiced that view in a speech has been expelled from his right-wing populist party because the populists *do not* want to associate their brand with the Nazis (even if, in my opinion, they may privately have similar ideas).",
"I currently live in China not far from Nanjing, and before that I lived in Israel (10 years in both places), so I have some perspective. Whereas in Israel there's a lot of appreciation of how Germany has handled teaching about the war, in China the feelings are still very resentful, particularly because the Japanese (the ones I know here, at least) frequently claim the Chinese history is exaggerated or that it's all in the past and has nothing to do with them personally. There's a strong sense of a lack of closure here. Because feelings run high it's impossible to have a balanced conversation since nobody agrees on the facts. There are plenty of new reports about Japanese textbooks that obfuscate or rewrite the worse parts of the war. Chinese textbooks are not much more truthful, for example claiming (that I've personally seen) that it was the Chinese who really defeated the Japanese and the USA came in at the end and took credit (and then invaded Korea). Flick through Chinese TV and you'll nearly always find a docu-drama about heroic communist soldiers defeating evil Japanese. Part of the communist China national identity is based around the existence of enemies who are trying to destroy the state, be they internal reactionaries or foreign powers. Hunting these down serves to unify the country. Since there are still very real political tensions between the two countries, every few years this escalates into minor riots where Japanese restaurants get their windows smashed and housing subdivisions with a lot of foreign residents hire guards in riot gear to block the entrance.",
"Not a historian but I have been to both countries. Germans are very ashamed to even give you directions to the concentration camps. Japanese still sell some comic books and even video games aggrandizing WWII. The Germans make education on such atrocities mandatory, the Japanese do so much less.",
"Germany goes out of it's way to Never Forget and try to make up for that time they decided Genocide and Totalitarianism was a good idea. Japan, on the other hand, really seems like it just wants to forget it ever happened or, if it did, wasn't nearly as bad as people say. It's a real sticking point for East Asia that Japan really doesn't seem to understand just how badly they screwed up in the Meiji-First Half of the Showa era. In Europe, there's still feelings, but Germany has actually tried to fix their mistake, and people have reacted to it.",
"Am Chinese(not of China, Singapore) Japan never apologised. My late mother (born after the war), greatly disliked the fact they deny war crimes and never apologised. Kinda dislike that they deny it, greatly hate that they justify their war as liberating the 'imperialist colonies' (yasukuni shrine has a museum behind it, went there for a laugh. Laughed when they mentioned it in an exhibit. Most of the stuff there is talking about the 'glorious war dead', the battles, and of the rebuilding) So yeah, Japan uses a complete denial of their war crimes and chooses to remember the glorious defenders of the empire.",
"German here. Our schools do a lot to teach students about the atrocities of the Nazis during World War II. Here's a couple of things we did during my time at school: - Talked about it. A lot. Learned everything about that period during history class during several different grades. - At least in my school we also focussed a lot on the resistance like the [White Rose]( URL_0 ) and Stauffenberg - Visited a nearby Concentration Camp to see things with our own eyes - Invited people who once were interned in Concentration Camps to our school to talk to them. - Invited a German soldier from the eastern front to talk about his experience. Soldiers who had been POW in Russia for a very long time eventually returning to their families (sometimesto to wives who thought they were dead and re-married) is a big issue. - German class focusses a lot on German lierature during the Nazi regime. Authors who left Germany as well as ones who stayed but emmigrated \"in their head\" (we call it [inner emmigration]( URL_1 )). - German class later also talks about the issue of \"German guilt\" and how post WWII literature has dealt with the topic. - In Religious class you talk about the role of the church during WWII. - Another big issues of post-WWII Germany is the people who were expelled from former German territories in Poland and the Czech Republic. I think this is what opinions vary the most on. On one hand these were people who had literally lost *everything* when they were forcefully expelled from home, but on the other hand some people who try to put this on the same level of what the Nazis did to the Jews and Polish, which is think is an inadequate comparison.",
"Japan and Germany drastically differ in how they handle atrocities. Germany is quite upfront about them, they frequently issue public apologies(relatively frequently at least), and they have banned things like being a nazi, or using nazi symbols. In their history books, they are pretty upfront about it and books condemn the crimes universally. In Japan, they don't deny it, but they don't talk about it a lot, and textbooks tend to not go into great detail or reveal the full extent of Japanese war crimes."
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5tww9o | Why is paternity fraud not taken more seriously by US courts? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because the state wants to do whatever it can to make sure there is a father they can extract money from other wise the state has to give benefits to the mother and child. There is no systematically beneficial reason to punish paternity fraud cuz hell from the courts perspective there isn't much difference between a deadbeat dad and a guy who's not the father anyways."
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5twzw0 | Why do high profile autopsies take weeks to months to complete, yet the average person can be autopsied in a day or two? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Autopsies are more than just the physical cutting open and dissection. They also take blood samples for a toxicology examination (checking for drugs, alcohol, etc in the blood). The cutting open part is almost always done in a day or two from the time of death. The toxicology report is what takes several weeks to come back. The autopsy is not deemed \"complete\" until the toxicology is back and has been looked at. Only then can they determine a final cause of death. So, even a normal person will take weeks before its \"completed\" if they do blood. With it being someone who is \"high profile\" I would assume that they would go over it with a fine tooth comb to ensure they are correct. I'm sure there would be implications if they misspoke about a famous persons cause of death."
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5txuiz | What has the girl done wrong in this situation? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1) If the girl was sweeping she was working at the restaurant. It does not mean you are a low income. The assumption the girl on the date made is insulting. 2) Offering people who are in need food is great. Offering people partially eaten meals is insulting. 3) Pointing out people's poverty in public is insulting, pointing it out at their place of employment is extremely insulting. 4) It is a health code violation for partially eaten food to be taken by anyone other than the person who was eating it. The restaurant itself could be in extreme trouble if the girl accepted it.",
"The girl basically implied \"You must be poor enough that you need my trash to feed your family.\"",
"I think it has a lot to do with the assumptions being made by the girl that was offering the food. What makes her think that this woman - who has a job (as low-paying as it may be) - would want her leftover food that she's been munching on through the night? It'd be different if it was a full, untouched plate of food being offered to someone who is homeless, but offering your leftovers to someone who is working at a restaurant is seen as demeaning in this country. I would think it'd even be demeaning to offer leftovers to a homeless person, personally - if you want to be generous you go buy them a meal, you don't hand them scraps. She may have meant it as an act of generosity, but in our society, it comes across as demeaning and aloof, as though she is better than that person and doesn't know how to really interact with others.",
"Because the date girl was offering her *leftovers* to someone she *assumed* was poor and had children to feed. The Hispanic girl might have been well enough off to not have to worry about having to feed her kids. She might not have even *had* kids. Maybe she lived with her parents and was going to college and was just working part-time to help out, just like many white children. To be *assumed* to be *so* poor that you have to take people's *leftovers* home to feed to your kids... that's *degrading*. She wouldn't have done that to a white girl.",
"It was a terrible thing to do. It was condescending, racist, and ignorant: Condescending because: * she assumed the girl was so poor just because was sweeping in a restaurant...more likely she was a relative or family friend, very common with family owned restaurants * she assumed she would want the gross half eaten food that touched the silverware that had been in her mouth * even if the girl was poor, publicly calling attention to it to impress her date is very poor form Racist because: * she assumed the girl had kids, plural...it is a negative stereotype of Hispanic women in the US is they have a lot of kids, have them early, and often out of wedlock Ignorant because: * few people in the US with jobs go hungry * even fewer people who work in restaurants go hungry, between comped meals and messed up orders, there is plenty to eat * if she was into other people's half eaten food, there is no shortage of that in restaurants * most people who work in restaurants spend so much time smelling, looking at, and preparing their food, it is the last thing they want to eat",
"I once had a black friend of mine get tipped by a guest at a wedding. He was in the wedding party. The grooms side was old money and the guest assumed the black dude holding the door must be \"the help\". It was an honest mistake but really left a bad taste in my friend's mouth. The implied message is, \"Oh yes people like you work for us and that is totally normal\". Not completely analogous but touches on how simple acts can reinforce power structures and illicit a negative emotional response.",
"In American culture, it is extremely rude tell someone they cannot support their family. It's also considered arrogant to assume people want your leftovers.",
"The girl made an assumption with very little information about the Hispanic girl. How does she know that the has kids? Maybe the woman doesn't have kids and doesn't need a hand out? It's a very weird thing to do.",
"Why would anyone want to eat food that was on a plate from which a stranger had already eaten?",
"Watch the sienfeld episode about muffin tops, it's a great example of Elaine trying to do a similar good deed and everyone getting offended by her essentially offering them scraps"
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5txxnc | Why do ancient languages seem to be way more complicated than newer ones? | For example Latin, or the Icelandic language. If you compare Latin to some of its descendants, the grammar gets way simpler over time. How did earlier languages end up with those complicated rules in the first place? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It depends what you think is \"complicated\" and \"simple\". Perhaps you're thinking of something like the Latin case system as \"complicated\". For example, the word for \"master\" can take five different forms in the singular (dominus, domine, dominum, domini, domino) and another four forms in the plural (domini, dominos, dominorum, dominis). Contrast that with modern English, which has one singular form (master) and one plural form (masters), and a special type of form that uses what's called a \"clitic\" for the possessive (master's, masters'). At most, four forms in all. English, therefore, is easier, because you don't have to learn all the different cases. Right? Not necessarily. The point about a case system is that you can put the words of a sentence in any order you like, and it still means the same. Take, for example, the Russian for \"Anna sees the cat\", which is \"Anna videt koshku.\" You can see from the fact that \"Anna\" ends in an \"-a\" that she is the one doing the seeing, while the fact that \"koshku\" ends in a \"-u\" means that the cat is being seen. You can change the words around and say \"Anna koshku videt\" or even \"Koshku videt Anna,\" and it means exactly the same. But you can't do that in English: \"The cat sees Anna\" is a completely different sentence (in Russian: \"Koshka videt Annu\"). If there is some reason you want to put the cat before Anna, you have to say something like, \"It is the cat which Anna sees,\" introducing an extra level of complexity by having a relative clause; or \"The cat is seen by Anna,\" using a passive construction instead of the active voice. If you were to transport a Roman from the year 1 to the modern day and tried to teach him modern English, the first concept you have to get across to him is that the meaning of a word is dependent not on its *form*, but on its *position in the sentence*. Take a German sentence like \"Peter spielt Tennis,\" which means \"Peter plays tennis.\" In German, to make that sentence into a question, you simply swap the verb and the subject: \"Spielt Peter Tennis?\" In English, the sentence \"Plays Peter tennis?\" might have been acceptable in Shakespeare's day, but it no longer works. In modern English, you can't normally form a question without an auxiliary verb, and in our example we have no auxiliary verb. We have to *add* an auxiliary verb to our sentence to make \"Does Peter play tennis?\" So while some grammar rules become simplified over time, other grammar rules become more complicated. English, for example, may have lost its case system, but has gained a whole lot of new verb tenses in just the last couple of centuries. How did earlier languages get these complicated rules in the first place? They just basically evolved over time. We're not sure how exactly, because the oldest languages we have written records of already have complicated rules. For example, those cases -- how did they come about? Well, maybe originally those case endings were separate words used to mark \"this word is the subject\" and \"this word is the direct object\". They just got fused onto the ends of the words."
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5txyhw | The events leading up to National Security Advisor Flynn's resignation. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Washington Post has been reporting that Flynn had calls with a Russian ambassador about Russian sanctions (sanctions we'd put on Russia). Apparently he did this on a recorded line, and during the Obama administration. & nbsp; When asked, he publically claimed they never talked about sanctions, and VP Pence and other officials backed him up. Reporters kept digging, and State Dept. warned that he might be vulnerable to blackmail because of the phone calls. He's also on record as having attended a gala with Putin (as a retired general, it's very much a no-no) and potentially received some speaking fees & nbsp; We haven't seen the actual logs of the calls, but the Washington Post has been reporting on it consistently.There was building pressure/scrutiny, so he resigned. It's possible that some more information was going to come out at some point, or the State Dept had fairly damning evidence. In the letter, it says he had \"numerous\" calls, and admitted to giving Pence an incomplete picture, so take that for what it's worth. & nbsp; Talking about sanctions like that off the cuff is not great (depending on what exactly he said it can be quite bad).. but lying is a career killer,and it seems he got caught. Having a senior official potentially vulnerable like that is something the government takes seriously. edit: It's worth mentioning that while the WaPo has been reporting on it for awhile, it's likely we're going to get a lot more details in the next few days. People are going to be digging much harder, so keep an eye out",
"Flynn spoke to a Russian ambassador about Obama's sanctions just before Trump was sworn in. That means he was just a civilian, and in the US, private citizens are prohibited from engaging in diplomatic relations. URL_0 He then lied about it, denying that sanctions were discussed, but caught on tape. He tried to apologize publicly to Pence as a form of admission. Apology not accepted.",
"I wonder what if anything he may have said about this formally to Congress. It is a felony offense to lie to Congress concerning a material fact or in a false writing under 18 USC 1001. No idea if there is any indication he made any such false statement -- but if he did, consequences are more than just ethics violations. Kudos to WaPo for dogged investigative reporting."
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5txzm5 | How did conservative politics come to include more support for police and military. Isn't that just inherently more government? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Conservatives are not necessarily anti-government, they are usually anti-government when it comes to the economy though. Conservatives often support increased police and military spending because they believe police will preserve and enforce the rule of law, and the military will preserve the country, both of which are things that are necessarily implied by being 'conservative'",
"The shift happened in the Reagan Administration. Prior to that the second half of the 20th Century was a series of wars started by Democratic Administrations, and ended by Republican ones. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower even gave his farewell speech warning the American people about the dangers of the military industrial complex, a phrase he coined himself. Reagan began a military and nuclear build up, that contributed to the end of the Cold War, but also earned the Republicans a lot of new lobbies in the defense industry that have a stranglehold on the party to this day.",
"Law and order is important to conservatives. Maintaining law and order is one of the fundamental functions of government. Conservatives also value in-group loyalty. That means they draw a sharper distinction between \"us\" and \"them\". Defending \"us\" from foreign threats is another fundamental function of government. So the support of police and military could be seen as more government but is consistent with conservative values. Conservatives are not pro anarchy.",
"There is a distinction between federal/state(local). Military is an increase in federal power (negative for conservatives) but it is used primarily on foreign soil (positive for conservatives). Police (and national guard) are state/local (positive for conservatives). This sort of thinking can also be seen with voting, marriage, education, reproductive, health care, and many many other issues. Its not that conservatives don't want big government, they just don't want a big *federal* government telling them they have to allow abortions, or to let gays get married, or stopping them from teaching the Lords Prayer in schools, or gerrymander districts to retain bloc power. ---- That is one perspective. Another perspective is that the Republican party has traditionally been more authoritarian (strong enforcement) and \"tough on crime\" or \"war on drugs\". This view, as with all political generalizations, is growing stronger and eroding the party *simultaneously*. Pro-Trump are currently quite authoritarian, while the libertarian sections of the party are the opposite.",
"The primary tenants of conservatism are an endorsement of social stability, the preservation of established societal institutions (ranging from things as big as independent courts to as small as the family), and a respect for tradition. Thus, conservatism itself is not inherently anti-government. To the contrary, conservatives endorse a strong -- if limited -- government to provide rule of law, property rights, and general stability. This itself requires a strong police force and military. At the same time, conservatism's suspicion of change make it generally against activist government steps -- such as large amounts of redistribution -- that would upend the status quo of society. Thus, conservatives endorse government *to the extent it helps to ensure the status quo* but reject it *to the extent that it would unravel it.* EDIT -- One final thing I forgot to note originally. Conservatives are not necessarily against *all* social change. However, if change is necessary, conservatism generally believes it should take place slowly and cautiously."
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5ty6oq | Why do people refer to things as "gravy trains"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Gravy was originally slang for easy work - stemming from the fact that gravy was considered a luxury item (delicious food) that required little effort to make During the railroad boom this evolved into the \"Gravy Train\" as slang for easy work that paid well on the railroads. It grew and stuck from there."
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5ty8hl | Sanctions. Example: American sanctions against Russia. What does it mean? | I keep seeing the word and still confused when I google it. So ELI5 please. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A sanction is generally a non violet punishment from one country to another. So a sanction could be to kick out all diplomats. But often when people talk about sanctions, they talk about economic sanctions. These are generally restrictions countries put on trade to hurt the victim. So the US sanctioned cuba by forbidding US companies to trade with Cuba. Naturally this also hurts the US, but since the US is so much bigger it doesn't feel the loss nearly as much. Also technically Cuba can still trade with the rest of the world, but generally sanctions are imposed by an group of nations, like the EU or the Nato Mind you, just cause they aren't violent, doesn't mean their effects aren't unpleasant, if you sanctioned food export to a country that can't grow enough to feed its own populace, you can basically commit genocide without ever shooting a single man."
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5tzn4c | why modern humans enjoy most of our foods heated to a temperature that would never have been found in nature? | ~~,and is a "preference" that seems like it would have been negatively selected against. (Warmer "found" food, higher chance of spoilage.)~~ | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Meat would have been quite warm on a fresh kill. And no, since warm food wouldn't have caused a problem, it's highly unlikely to be selected or selected against.",
"Plain and simply - it was advantageous for us to evolve. Cooking removes parasites and pathogens. It also means we absorb about 30-80% more nutrients and proteins from most foods. Fire was the primary source and they get just as hot as conventional ovens today (and much hotter!!)."
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5tznlc | how did it become an employers responsibility to provide health insurance to its employees when did this start and why? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"During WW2, the American government instituted wage and price controls as a preemptive measure to keep inflation down. So businesses that wanted to hire the best people couldn't offer more money than their competitors. But they *could* pay for your healthcare, and it was a pretty sweet deal for both parties - the employer could use it as a tax writeoff, and the employee didn't get taxed on it because it wasn't a wage. By the end of WW2, employer-provided healthcare was basically universal. [\\(Source\\)]( URL_0 )",
"Technically it's not an employer's responsibility. It's a *benefit*. However, like most benefits that become universal it's seen as a given. Having worked many jobs over the years, including some low-level (min wage), restaurant, temp, contract, etc. I've had many jobs where health insurance was either not a benefit or the employer mainly just provided access to a plan but didn't assist with premiums."
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5tzqgd | Why are Americans so upset over Russia influencing the election when they influence elections around the world all the time? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Same reason a mobster is mad one of his crew gets killed when they kill people all the time."
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5tzy55 | What's the difference between Prison and Jail? | I was watching the AfterPrisonShow and it made me wonder exactly this question. What's the difference and is it different in different states/continents? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When you get arrested, you will be taken to jail. You'll be booked and charged with a crime. You will sit in jail until you either bond out or get your court date. Once you go to court, you will be sentenced. Assuming you are convicted of a crime that carries a prison sentence, you will be sent to prison, where you will serve out your sentence. So a jail is a temporary holding facility for people who have been charged but not yet convicted, or otherwise arrested off of the street. Jails are run by the county Sherriff's Department. Prison is a facility where you serve out a sentence after you have been convicted. Prisons are run or overseen by the State or Federal government. One caveat: you can, in some circumstances, be sentenced to the custody of the county jail. This is typically for misdemeanors that carry a sentence of less than one year, depending on the state. Source: I'm a cop."
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5u39aq | Why do we hear so much about Mexican drug cartels but nothing about the American distributors they sell to? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I certainly hear a lot about US gangs. They are covered in the news regularly. They're not using AK-47s to shoot up police stations, like drug cartels are, but they're generally seen as evildoers."
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5u3ku8 | Why do people seem to get more personal and open when speaking to them at night? | They don't even have to be under the influence of drugs or alcohol etc. it just seems that, in my experience, if you start talking to someone at night, conversations seem to get more deep and personal than they would be during the day. Most of the stuff I know about my mates came from them calling me up at night; we never speak or share stuff personal things during the day. Is there a reason for this? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Perhaps it's associated with [decision fatigue]( URL_0 )? At the end of the day, people are tired, their \"filter\" is slipping, they're more likely to open up and let things out. I know I've had countless experiences where something I've said in conversation at night seemed perfectly rational, even *important*, but felt terribly regrettable and much too personal the next day. I blame end-of-day fatigue and lack of clarity.",
"Most of the comments hint at a few things, but they're forgetting one major aspect of sociability: proximity. At night, when it's darker, you could be in an empty field but your mind acts like it's enclosed. A smaller space implies security of information. Just like being in a tent, or on the water at night. Your voice will carry, but you can't see that so you feel safer talking about more sensitive topics.",
"Well I guess it's cause people are usually too busy with their work, school, obligations, etc. during the daytime and usually reflect on the day by evening. When people are settled in their homes and done for the day they can then focus on their thoughts and are likely to talk more openly.",
"All the other comments here seem pretty good, but I'll add that it might just be more likely to get into one on one, personal conversations with someone at night. During the day, you're probably at work, school, or something with more people around, and night just happens to be more relaxed and more probable to produce situations where people open up more. And you know, there's sometimes booze, too.",
"Since the nighttime is for unwinding or other free-time activities, maybe people are just a little looser? Also, the darkness gives a person a sense of anonymity, like they won't be held accountable for their actions; why dimming the lights is a good way to \"set the mood.\" Maybe that has something to do with it.. Just some speculation."
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5u48s3 | How do business that hire illegals not get in trouble? How do they expense the labor costs? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"* illegal aliens are using fraudulent documents * they pay them cash under the table (not hard if you deal with a lot of cash, like a restaurant or a bar) * they don't hire the illegal aliens, they hire a contract company who provides them...which goes the another contractor, which goes through another contractor (common with agriculture)",
"A lot of illegals have phony SSNs. The IRS doesn't (or at least didn't) care, so long as they were getting their money. Nobody was checking."
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5u4bac | If we're in the most peaceful time in recorded history why does it seem like some entity's are trying so hard to screw it up? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because you hear every little issue magnified out of proportion by instant 24x7 media (social and maninstream) that are desperate for attention."
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5u4h1i | In criminal cases, why are a defendant's past criminal cases frequently off-limits for attorneys/witnesses to bring up or discuss? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They have to be extremely relevant crimes. You can bring up the convictions of a serial rapist in a rape case, but you can't bring up that he stole a car because stealing cars doesn't make you a rapist. Otherwise, it would be too easy to paint the defendant as guilty due to perceived criminality.",
"The point of a criminal trial is to determine whether the defendant is guilty of *the crime being charged*, not previous acts. If the jury is told of prior acts, there is a substantial risk that the jury will convict based on the prior acts and not the one actually at issue in the case. Other considerations play into it as well. For example, judicial economy (meaning the time and cost efficiency of the trial) is a factor. If the scope of the trial is expanded to events or acts that aren't being charged, then it will take a lot longer and cost a lot more money to try the case. There are exceptions when such evidence is allowed to be introduced, but they are rare for the reasons discussed."
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5u4ky5 | The stick figure family decals on the back of cars | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"My explanation is that they are cute and fun, so some people some people doing it and then they thought hey i like this, i like stick figures make cave man brain think good put on car family i like"
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5u5bxl | The difference between Prussia and Germany | It is a bit confusing to me the difference between the two. Was Prussia just a part of Germany, or how did the borders work back then? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Prussia is a region of Europe roughly comprising what is now northern Poland, parts of Lithuania, and the Russian exclave of East Prussia. This region was given to the Teutonic Knights during the Crusades to fight against the native Baltic pagans, which was the first German state in the region of Prussia. Fast forward a few hundred years and Prussia is now the largest and most powerful of the many German states, comprising the aforementioned territory along the Baltic sea and roughly the northern half of modern-day Germany. In 1871 the German states unified into the German Empire (minus Austria, which already had an empire of its own) with the Prussians dominant; the Prussian king Wilhelm I became Kaiser and the Prussian prime minister Otto von Bismarck became Chancellor. After Germany lost World War I the Treaty of Versaille forced them to give up most of the territory in Prussia proper, giving it to the restored states of Poland and Lithuania, as well as Russia. Much of the German-speaking population left or was expelled.",
"After the Holy Roman Empire fell apart the area of modern day Germany was home to a large collection of independent states in a confederation. By the 19th century Prussia had become the most prominent and militarily skilled of the german states, which lead to them forming a unified German state in 1871.",
"Germany hasn't existed as a nation state for a very long time. If you go back just a couple hundred years or so, while most of Europe had got the hang of it and formed countries like England, France and Denmark, the German-speaking lands were still a patchwork of tiny kingdoms, principalities, duchies and other territories, as in [this map showing the situation in the early 17th century]( URL_0 ). These territories were constantly changing and shifting, battles and wars flared up, ruling dynasties married into one another or divided into different branches, and so on; but they were loosely organized as the \"Holy Roman Empire\". Starting in the mid-17th century, two powers became dominant in German-speaking countries: Brandenburg-Prussia in the north and Austria in the south. As Prussia gradually became larger and larger, swallowing up more and more microstates right across northern Germany, the smaller states found themselves squeezed between these two superpowers. The French Revolution upset the political situation in central and western Europe, and led to the Napoleonic Wars which brought about the end of the Holy Roman Empire: this was replaced by a closer union called the [German Confederation]( URL_1 ), in which Prussia dominated the north, and Austria and Bavaria the south. The Confederation failed fairly quickly. Prussia and the northern states formed the North German Confederation, with Prussia now by far the dominant political and military power. The goal was the unification of all, or most, of the German-speaking lands into a single nation state. It was the Prussian Chancellor Otto von Bismarck who achieved this, except that he didn't want his hated enemy Austria to join. To this end, he provoked (or at least took advantage of) a number of wars: the Second War of Schleswig, the Austro-Prussian War (which shifted power from Austria to Prussia) and the Franco-Prussian War (to unite all the other southern German-speaking states against a common enemy). The result was the German Empire, which was founded in 1871, with Prussia as one of its provinces (the grey area on [this map]( URL_2 ).) Prussia no longer exists as an entity, but some of the things you may associate with Germany -- spiked helmets, ruthless efficiency, militaristic zeal, stiff formality -- come from the upper classes of Prussian society. To this day, Bavarians will sometimes call people from northern Germany -- or even from anywhere outside of Bavaria -- \"Prussians\", and it's not intended as a compliment."
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5u70jc | Why does classical music have the key of the piece in the title and none of the contemporary music do? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That is because many of those pieces were never titled by the composer. They were titled by archivists and people studying their music in order to have a uniform referencing system after the composer's death.",
"In earlier times the key made a difference. On an instrument some chords would sound good and others would be dissonant, because of how the instrument was tuned. Nowadays most instruments use \"equal temperament\" and on a piano or organ or similar all keys sound basically the same in that.",
"Classical music has the key of the piece in the title when it has a standard title, to tell it apart from other pieces of the same kind. Say, a sonata, or a fugue. There are plenty of them, so you specify: sonata in C major, or fugue in B minor. When it has however a name of its own, like \"turkish march\", \"eine kleine Nachtmusik\", \"clair de lune\", \"Don Giovanni\", you don't need to say the key, there is only one."
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5u7d3a | Why is it preferable to ask for someone's resignation rather than just fire them with cause? | Recent National Security Advisor resignation got me thinking about this. Also the US president's penchant for firing people before he took office would lead me to assume he would rather fire people | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's less of a hassle, less paperwork, and less conflict. A person who *signs* a resignation letter even under pressure is less likely to stir up a shitstorm afterwards, because the administration / company could always say that *they* resigned and deny any pressure if necessary (arguably not in the Flint case, but in general). It's also supposed to be a good practice because it allows both sides to keep face. The resignee does not get the stigma of being fired, and the employer does not get to field questions on why that person was fired.",
"IF they resign they don't get to fill out a unemployment claim which is beneficial to the company.",
"A lot of answers here are correct. But there is another angle to this. At Wendy's it was far better for an employee to quit then to fire them. Because if they got fired they had access to unemployment benefits. Especially if the reasons for termination were not properly documented (they typically had to have 3 write ups on the same offense unless it was something like stealing). If the employee quit however they would not have access to unemployment benefits. Whenever an employee successfully got unemployment it would cost Wendy's $ through raised premiums.",
"My police friends tell me it's common to ask for resignation rather than get fired because you \"choose\" to leave and look for employment elsewhere whereas being fired is a career ender. I'm sure a lot of this applies elsewhere, even in politics. Beyond that, I dunno.",
"For the person who resigns it is them leaving on their own terms, technically, which helps them on their next job search. Nobody wants a with cause termination on their employment record. For the employer it saves them a lot of legal headache. When you fire someone you generally have to go through a lot of legal hurdles to ensure that everything is by the book in case the employee sues for their job back. But, if they resign you have much less fear of a legal battle and you can have them leave immediately rather than checking all the boxes from your legal/HR department to protect the company from an unlawful termination lawsuit. I work for a large company, when we fire people we generally have to put them on a performance improvement plan, then document the hell out of everything, then have counseling sessions, training sessions, etc etc etc. All because we're afraid of getting sued. It usually takes us 2-4 months of headaches, training and documentation to terminate someone \"the right way.\" This is also why if the person was simply a bad hire you'll often hear companies giving a compensation package. This is done so the employee is enticed to resign rather than try to stick it out during the process to terminate them. They'll get a lump sum of 3-6 months pay (usually) and can say they weren't terminated on their next job opportunity, they can simply claim to be the victim of \"downsizing\" or whatever it is they want to claim."
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5u7pr9 | What do robbers do with stolen objects from museums? Why would anyone buy these stolen objects other than keeping them for their private collection? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are a lot of people in the world who don't care about laws, or the laws of other countries, or the property rights of other people. For example if you stole a piece of art from someone in England that a wealthy member of the royal family in Saudi Arabia wanted they probably don't care at all that it was stolen. African warlord/dictator? You could sell them a stolen baby much less art. Drug cartel leader? They break laws all the time, why would they care about that? Many really wealthy people can basically ignore many laws in their own countries much less the laws of foreign countries. How is Scotland Yard going to search the palace of a Saudi prince? They aren't and they couldn't arrest the prince even if they wanted to.",
"Private collections are actually a pretty big problem for disciplines such as archaeology. As pointed out in this thread, people with large amounts of money will buy these things, and this would be the targeted buyer for these items, as no one else would realistically have the money to buy them. From time to time items are discovered by descendants and gifted/sold to museums to add to their collection, but, for the most part, a lot of useful artifacts that could be used to answer a lot of questions about past human cultures remain in private collections. Anything from ancient clothing and jewelry to actual fossils of proto-homonins could be found in these collections. Edit: as some people have pointed out, yes, some museums don't display their entire collections, for the public that is. Researchers can still get access to these collections for academic purposes, but getting access to a private collection is a much more difficult process. Also, museums, at least I assume, have much higher quality preservation technologies, and thus can better maintaining the quality of their collections. But I agree, it would be nice if museums could display their collections more Edit #2: rereading this, I realize that maybe I shouldn't have used the word \"problem\" to describe private collections. I am coming from an anthropology background, so my bias points me to not being a big fan of people who keep their collections private instead of allowing them to be researched. While there are a lot of issues surrounding research done on private collections, my stance towards it is usually along the lines of \"better than nothing\", but other people see it differently. Thanks to everyone for replying, I quite enjoyed the replies. Edit #3: someone asked me for my credentials, and I realized that that would have been a good idea to post my original post; I am an *anthropology undergrad at the University of Waterloo. I apologize for not having put this earlier",
"All these answers are basically correct. I don't know how sophisticated the market for this stuff is nowadays, but I was in England nearly 20 years ago talking to a woman at a Heritage Trust manor estate. Turns out she was one of the extended family members whose estate it was. Long story short, at one point she had made enquiries about purchasing antiques and was given a catalog with pictures and prices of various objects - curios, furniture, etc. Turns out, some of the pictures were of the estates' own stuff taken in situ. Basically, if someone got an \"order\" for a piece (presumably paid p front), thieves would break in and steal the piece to fill the order.",
"Although other answers here are correct, I don't think any mention that stolen art and artifacts are often used as a sort of black market currency. Because it has some sort of intrinsic worth it doesn't really devalue the same way other goods might, it's much more compact than the 'equivalent' cash, and it can't be tracked the way that bank transfers can be.",
"Speaking as a reformed collector, you have to understand the collector 'mentality' and how diseased it can become over time. There are a lot of reasons why people collect things. At the best and most wholesome level, its because you're interested in something and collecting it can be a fun way to engage in that passion. Maybe you enjoy playing the vintage video games you had as a kid. Maybe you're interested in coins or stamps or you like reading comics from the mid 1970's. There's a large majority of 'collector sentiment' that's perfectly reasonable, sane and even worthwhile. So lets say that the next 'level' of collecting (where a ton of people exist) is 'ego collecting' - that is, collecting things because you realize that they're impressive to other people and you have a deep, insecure desire to impress others. A ton of collecting is rooted in this sentiment. Same with the high end wristwatch market and other things. 'Collecting' can also become very competitive, where you collect not because you particularly 'enjoy' your collection anymore but because you're obsessively trying to make it 'the best'. At the furthest end of the spectrum, you have people with a lot of money, with deep rooted 'collector' obsessions and very skewed values, that are willing to have something stolen so they can own it. These aren't common, but they're common enough that museums with shitty security practices can find themselves vulnerable. A totally bang-on accurate quote from the movie Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps: > \"Only the obsessive compulsive or the insecure egotistical feel the need to collect things.\"",
"How do I become a thief that works for international ultra-rich collectors? I'm willing to work with a team.",
"Stolen to order.......... An artwork is work 10 million, get's ordered and stolen and sold to the buyer for 2 million perhaps? Nice money for the work. Sometimes stuff is stolen with a view to finding a buyer, and sometimes the buyer may get cold feet. this is probably what happened with the Scream by Munch that was stolen and recovered. Why do people buy stolen art? Uniqueness. As simple as that. It's an extention of the mindset that buys one-off cars or yachts because no-one else has one. Whilst they can't publicly admit it, in their heads the pleasure comes from saying to themselves \"Ive got it! It's MINE!\"",
"The truth is that most of the time, the stolen art/artifacts are returned to its rightful owner or destroyed. The most common scenario is that the thief will try to ransom the work back to its owner, and the insurance will pay. Sadly, if the work can't be ransomed, it is usually destroyed. The notion of these sophisticated art thieves and cat burglars, is largely fantasy. That's not to say that it never happens. There are dictators, and wealthy collectors, who will target specific pieces of art. But the vast majority of artwork stolen is stolen by fairly low-level and/or unsophisticated thieves and used for ransom money. Less common, but still prevalent, is that they are used as currency on the black market, but this is becoming less and less common.",
"It's almost always for a private collection and the black market for museum pieces is huge.",
"\"Why would anyone buy these stolen objects other than keeping them for their private collection?\" Greed Ego Spite Fame Selfishness Boredom Stupidity Get even with someone Wanting to get caught Wanting something that originally belonged to them back Wanting to deprive the world of good art Wanting to destroy the item since there are only two left in the world and the person who bought it has the only other one Wanting to see the museum or actual owner squirm Owns the museum and wanting the insurance company to pay out Doesn't own the museum and wanting the insurance to pay out, after shorting said insurance company's stock World's most expensive scavenger hunt game Bucket list (steal something from a museum) Why steal it? Because it's there. So and so dared me to do it/buy it.",
"I just did it to test my skills. I was surprised when it didn't make the national news, and I lost that pen like years ago, but the Smithsonian will never be the same.",
"The correct answer is insurance money. Suppose it costs $1,000,000 for an insurance company to pay a museum for a stolen work. The criminal contacts the insurance company and is like \"Just give me $300,000 instead and I'll return it\" and the insurance company saves $700,000 and everyone wins.",
"> other than keeping them for their private collection Right, that's it. That's one thing that protects museums from robbers, who's going to hang the stolen Mona Lisa on their wall.",
"Wealthy people like to have things they aren't supposed to, it is a power move, like look at this long lost painting that should be in a museum but here it is in my living room. These items are sold on a decentralized criminal underground comprised of many different people and places called the black market, where you find reclaimed goods and otherwise illegal things. Some of these objects can be used as filler pieces at a dig site to help boost someone's career, they can be seen as an investment that grows in value, some do it for superstitious purposes.",
"The first rule of a professional thief is that you never steal anything you don't already have a buyer for. So if a professional thief steals from a museum, a buyer and price has already been established.",
"I had a lecture on this as part of my course (Archaeology Masters). As far as I remember, there are many different groups doing the stealing, and it wouldn't all be from museums. The police say that it's not like films, they don't come in through the ceiling on a harness... because they can just as easily get a ladder and go in through the window. Sometimes corrupt officials using government resources, sometimes terrorist groups taking stuff from war zones, or just ordinary local people who aren't criminals but have little option for paid work, etc. The speaker said that collecting antiquities is like a compulsion for many rich collectors. These people can be all over the world, and they'll say to an art dealer for example, \"I really would love a piece of a particular statue.\" The dealer will generally know someone, who knows someone, who knows someone who can get it stolen or acquire it from a war zone. There are mafia groups which are archaeology gangs, dealing in antiquities. A lot of illicit antiquities will end up sold at legitimate auction houses. A lot of illicit antiquity sales fund terrorism. Antiquities get traded for drugs, and then the drugs sold. So yeah, essentially a lot of filthy rich people don't care how they come by it, as long as they can have it on their mantelpiece. There was a collector who was obsessed with collecting old opium pipes, like Victorian-era. He started going to opium dens to find out how they were used, out of curiosity, but ended up hooked. He nearly died, but he couldn't afford to fund both his addiction and collecting. His drive to collect overcame his addiction. The worst part was that many organisations like Interpol, Europol, and other police organisations claim that illicit antiquity trading is not a massive issue, or that they cannot find much evidence for it... even though there is so much of it going on, so blatantly, that it seems impossible for them to miss it. It was relatively easy for the lecturer to find people advertising antiquities online. There's also a big trade in fakes, which... at least it's not the real thing. So, the conclusion you come to is that there is so much that the police organisations don't know where to start and so ignore it, or more sinister reasons (e.g. they are complicit). The UK government for example hasn't done anything to make auction houses be more responsible about the illegality of items they sell, and then you look at the backgrounds of some of the politicians and find they used to work for or currently work for auction houses. Hmmm...",
"There are a lot of people who would pay a lot of money to put something in their private collection. If you can get a $5M artifact for $500K, it might be worth it to you that there are some strings attached. Also, there are parts of the world where your collection wouldn't have to be that private. The Russian or Chinese authorities aren't going to go very far out of their way to recover something stolen from an American museum, especially if it is in the hands of someone rich and influential. And the US has bigger diplomatic fish to fry with those countries, they are not going to press the issue very hard.",
"Imagine you've become wealthy ... but by rather dubious means. Drug dealing etc. So you've got cash. You launder some - but doing so is costs a big %. You've also got to keep under the radar. Splashing cash on big art's going to catch the eye of the fuzz. But you want art .... so you get someone to nick it for you. It's a double bargain. You didn't have to pay the % to launder it. And you didn't pay the proper price. Your close friends - the few you allow in your inner rooms - already know what you do so they think it's cool that you've got famous nicked art on the wall. Even if the fuzz did come round you'd show a forged receipt to keep you in clear. tld:dr: corrupt money might as well buy stolen things.",
"Well the English stole a lot of valuable shit from India during their rule and these adorn their museums now. So basically, entities don't care about property rights of other countries because no one is going to wage a war over missing jewellery",
"They usually just hold it until they get caught or destroy the evidence. People who rob famous art and so on think that they might sell it, but it's hard to sell. Edward Munch's \"Scream\" was stolen from a museum a decade or two ago. And the thieves just held on to it and kind of destroyed it by cutting it out of the frame and so on. They never managed to sell it to anyone and then they got caught and arrested",
"I work at a national library and a few years ago a man was caught (at a different library) stealing ancient maps and unbeknownst to us, we were one of his victims. He'd ask to see certain books and cut maps out with razor blade and leave with them rolled up and shoved up his sleeve. Now we have a policy of not allowing patrons unattended access to \"valuable\" books and a member of staff even turns the pages for them. The guy served a few years in prison but the the majority of maps he stole were never recovered.",
"Are you the person who stole Brady's jersey?",
"Bargaining chips for when criminals need to negotiate with authorities. There was an interesting piece on NPR about a special squadron with the Italian police that tracks down stolen masterpieces. They spoke with a member of the squad who said that criminal groups (such as the Camorra) will tuck away art, and when their members are caught and imprisoned they'll produce the art as collateral for their release.",
"I just finished a great book on this very thing; \"The Rescue Artist: A True Story of Art, Thieves, and the Hunt for a Missing Masterpiece\" by Edward Dolnick. He goes into detail about many thefts but the one he was involved in was the theft of \"The Scream\" Excellent read. The brutal truth of art theft is simply it's not a priority by law enforcement. Some rich family or dusty museum got robbed. Nobody killed or hurt? OK then off to solve \"real crimes\"",
"Just adding that I once met a British dude at a party in NYC who claimed to restore stolen art (especially ancient things, like sarcophagi and statues). I know a bit about art and we talked for a while and he sounded pretty legit. Interesting dude, and he said his clients were wealthy collectors.",
"TL;DR And I woulda been the king of Mexico if it weren't for them meddling kids. Most of these answers are assuming the theft of high profile items from high profile museums. The majority of museums, and the majority of artifacts, aren't going to experience this kind of theft. I worked in a museum that experienced a theft of a number of firearms. I didn't work in the museum at the time of the theft, but I was attempting to bring their security policies and their inventory up to modern standards and reviewing the theft with the curators was a part of my job. In this case, the rifles were all antiques. Two of them had been seized from Pancho Villa's army in 1916. The perpetrators were juveniles. They immediately attempted to sell the rifles in town. Everybody knew where they had gotten them, and the juveniles were turned in by their grandfather. The rifles were recovered. The museum had fortunately catalogued the firearms. Complicating this situation further was that at the time, the town was embroiled in major drug cartel politics. The museum, though, was hands-off. Neutral territory. It's not worth committing a petty crime against a sympathetic target. So when the juveniles were turned in, the curators were potentially put in a dangerous position. The theft of firearms demanded prosecution, and if either of those juveniles were connected with the cartel, then this introduces two possibilities: One, the cartel may choose to protect those juveniles. Having stolen antique firearms, those juveniles removed both themselves and the museum from the precarious détente/stalemate/DMZ that tends to prevent little blowups from escalating into a war. Two, the cartel could do the museum a solid since it's an educational institution, and let the American justice system work something out. And that's what happened - the juveniles were convicted of a single misdemeanor, sentenced to community service, the firearms were all returned, and the museum was paid a suspiciously large amount of money in restitution. Ok, so if you steal a bunch of firearms and try to fence them near the US/Mexico border within 100 yards of a border facility, does that sentence make any sense to you? What about when I tell you that the grandfather had no reported income but had no problems paying the restitution? Does it seem odd to you that the court system would have cooperated to keep two possible cartel affiliates out of prison? A person might suspect that something else was going on at the time, something very big involving very serious weapons violations. Something that could have been upset by probing too deeply into a theft of antique firearms. It was called Operation Fast and Furious. The mayor, some of the police force, and most of the city council were running automatic weapons and drugs over the border for the cartel. Most of this was done with the knowledge of people in the Border Patrol. And the ATF. And two Presidents. Operation Fast and Furious was already going tits-up and people were getting murdered with the non-antique guns supplied by the US (and, well, our mayor) but the trap was about to be shut on the town. Anything else involving firearms needed to disappear. So the theft happened because kids are stupid and do stupid things when they want money more than they want brains. But the implications of the theft could have been huge. Museums get into some weird shit.",
"Some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.",
"If I had a ton of money I would pay whatever the hell it cost to have La Guernica stolen and put in my bedroom to never let anyone else see it. I imagine there are a lot of rich people who feel the same way.",
"Ok.. dangerous subject here. But this occurs a lot in the antiquity/ archaeological and paleontological worlds.. because there is tons of money to be had. I know because I wore a wire for the fbi against an archaeologist who I helped sell 3.5 million dollars worth of goods in two months. Unfortunately he committed suicide rather than facing prison time. Some and I often wonder believed he may have been killed for it. I actually had a few transactions with the infamous Torontonian Billy Jamieson who also had a sort of mystery death.",
"you guys are asking the wrong questions here, are all these expensive, irreplaceable works of art guarded by laser trip wires requiring olympian levels of agility and cat like reflexes to get around? are these people diving from the ceilings mission impossible style?",
"There was a cool episode of the old Dr. Who (Tom Baker era) where an alien stole the Mona Lisa, kept it, and was going to sell multiple forgeries. The thinking was: (1) it had to be known to be stolen for anyone to think a forgery was the real thing; (2) nobody would be able to show it around so they wouldn't find out multiple people own \"The Mona Lisa\".",
"As some have already mentioned, it's been proven time and again that robbers take items of high value, such as paintings or other objects, because of their black market currency values. It's much easier to deal in the million dollar range with just one painting that with a briefcase of money, or something like a property which has a paper trail. Some of these kingpins will show the artwork in their house under close guard, others keep it in a vault. Just knowing you have a Monet in your walk in vault makes you feel pretty good, doesn't it? They know these works will never be sold on the real market, and because of this, the black market value of a work is typically 10% of the estimated auction value. For more of this type of reading, I would recommend Priceless: How I Went Undercover to Rescue the World's Stolen Treasures by Robert K. Wittman and John Shiffman. For a different look, check out Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art by Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo.",
"I used to work at a coin and antique store and a sketchy man came in with a box with w bronze hitler head that came from a famous statue in Germany. Apparently his grandfather cut it off the statue and stole it and international laws were looking for it or something. My boss was Jewish so he was very very upset and told the guy to leave",
"I study history and archeology, and in my underwater archeology class I learned there are more artifacts taken illegally and kept in private collections than exist in museums. Thats because, like stolen museum pieces, there is a huge market for these items. People like wealthy drug dealers, criminals, warlords, or most common just rich assholes buy this stuff all the time. It's a big problem for archeologists .",
"Do not underestimate how much wealth need to be hidden. For a part of the criminal/corrupt elite too much cash is a problem. Having some obscure paintings or other random objects might go unnoticed from a tax or police inspection. I knew a painter once who sold 100k$ paintings like it was nobody business (that he painted) and he expected most of that to be dirty money in one form or another.",
"They're basically used as a tradeable commodity between large criminal gangs/terrorist organisations etc. Obviously they're not liquid like cash, but they are small and high value. However should they wish to 'cash in', negotiations can be made with insurers, probably without government involvement that will realise about 1/3 of the true value of the item for the criminal. The notion of secret collectors, a la Thomas Crown Affair is fanciful and not really realistic.",
"When I visited the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam I was so astonished by some paintings that I wanted to steal them, put them in my living room and staring at them all day.",
"I'm sure Egypt would like artifacts exhibited at the British Museum returned and considers there removal to be theft. I understand the case for preserving antiquities in the hands of stable societies, but I think that that argument can be coupled with diversification to make a similar case that private collections at a micro scale also contribute to the preservation effort. For example, pre-WW2 Germany may have qualified as a stable first world storage location. Meaning that, national stability is a short term characteristic compared to the age of some artifacts.",
"A robber could hook up with an art forger and really rake in the black market bitcoin selling fakes.",
"URL_0 Tldr: Lots of reasons including, use as collateral in other criminal endeavors, ransoming them back to insurers, and use in attempts to reduce their sentence.",
"Not sure why more people aren't saying this, but most of the time the stolen object isn't simply purchased by some collector sitting in his lair on a snowy mountain; much more often the stolen objects are ransomed back to the museum, like a kidnapping victim.",
"Recently in Canada a situation happened where a golden eagle statue and silver statue were stolen while being transported: URL_0 \"International Police Forces\" were the only ones to know of the movement of this object, which might mean, one member (or more) of those police forces stole the objects.",
"Everything I know about selling stolen goods is from the TV show White Collar but I believe it's somewhat accurate. The thief will pass 'hot' stolen goods on to a 'Fence' who has connections to people in the underground criminal network (basically a criminal antique dealer). The item will sometimes be sold directly or go to an underground auction house.",
"Think about this: Someone steals the Mona Lisa. The next day, eight of them will pop up on 'the black market', in Japan, Spain, Mexico, Chili, Canada, Australia, France and Finland. None of them is real, but no one knows. The authority will be distracted by all of them. Meanwhile you can sell it elsewhere. The buyer will also be anonimous, because all the attention is shifted to these fakes.",
"Honestly, while some can go to private collectors that is NOT the chief way for the thieves to normally make money of, for example, an art theft. Instead what they do is try to ransom the pieces back to the museum or gallery, this is also true for other objects. The museum generally have insurance to cover this exact eventuality. At least this was the purpose of the art thefts in Stockholm some years back. ELI5 version: It's artnapping.",
"Sometimes museums buy pieces they know or have reasons to suspect have been stolen. Unless it's a piece that's immediately recognizable or has been well-publicized as stolen, a purchaser might buy it because it's too good to let slip away. No one's going to be able to sell the Mona Lisa, but a sketch by Michaelangelo that isn't well-known and well-documented might be worth the risk. This is less common in the past couple decades, since provenance documentation and ownership history is frequently required when attempting to sell art and artifacts, but not every establishment follows these protocols and the buyers are only human.",
"Most valuable antiques and archaeological objects that enter the black market don't come from museum thefts. They come from looting actual archaeological sites, or sometimes from looting museums in countries thrown into chaos by war, for example the museums in Iraq that once contained the treasures of Mesopotamian cultures. The fact of the matter is, there are a relatively small number of countries out there with strong governments and the desire to preserve historical objects. A lot of countries out there, including countries with immense historical richness, have weak or non-existent governments, riddled with corruption and a culture of selfishness, rebel groups who will do anything to make money (or in the case of some radical Islamic groups, who actively want to destroy history for ideological reasons), porous borders, incompetent police, and honestly just bigger problems to deal with than the drain of historical artifacts into the collections of rich foreigners. A lot of these objects don't even have to be sold furtively on the 'black market.' You can just walk into high-end auction houses and bid on them. It's relatively easy to obscure their origin."
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5u7qhg | Why does mutually assured destruction work? From what I have learned, basically 2 countries will keep nuking each other, if one country nukes one first. And they will keep doing this until the countries don't exist anymore. Why does this make sense? It seems like a stupid thing to do. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The idea was to prevent a nuclear war by making it unwinnable. To do that you have to impress on the other guys that no matter how clever they are or how lucky they get you'll always have enough nukes left to burn them to the ground and then scatter the ashes across the wasteland. Because if they think they have even a tiny chance of winning a nuclear exchange, they might start one. Mutually Assured Destruction was the name of the game. Nobody wins. Everybody dies.",
"> It seems like a stupid thing to do. It *is* a stupid thing to do. Ergo, neither side wants to do it, because both sides lose. It's considered a balanced, and therefore relatively stable situation. A can't blow up B without B blowing up A. So neither party has an incentive to attack. Alternatively, if A can blow up B safely, the situation is thought to be more unstable. Both A and B have an incentive for first strike, A to destroy B and not take damage, and B to disable A before A can destroy it.",
"\"The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.\" ― Carl Sagan",
"> It seems like a stupid thing to do. That's the point. It's a stupid thing to do, so the reasoning is no one will do it. But MAD is ultimately not tenable because it depends on people not doing stupid things. Once nukes get into the hands of stupid or irrational people, MAD no longer applies.",
"Because \"the only winning move is not to play\". There's no way to win a war with these premises: even if you attack first your opponent can retaliate and destroy you, and you cannot stop him because he has so many bases that even a massive attack will start a devastating counter attack. It's like two men pointing a gun to each other *except* that the second gun goes off as soon as one of the contenders shoots (and you cannot avoid that, you cannot be faster or crouch) Nobody wants to be the one who starts a battle that will end without winners.",
"Mutually assured destruction means that at first sign of a nuclear launch against you your country launches all nuclear weapons at your enemy and their allies. The natural human impulse to not die is what prevents countries from attacking each other. It is not possible to take out a country with a single strike before they can respond if they are also a nuclear power.",
"> will keep nuking each other This seems to be your problem with understanding MAD. Launching nuclear weapons is not a matter of firing one and then waiting around for 30 minutes while another one is loaded into the tube. A nuclear war is not a back and forth gun battle where you slowly whittle down the opposition until one side surrenders or is eliminated. It's an all or nothing exchange, like two men in a pistol duel only they stand 3 feet apart and can't miss. In a nuclear war nations fire many nuclear weapons (in just about any case *all* their weapons) at pretty much the same time. Those weapons, mostly intercontinental ballistic missiles these days, take about 30 minutes to fly up into space, go around the world and then come back down on their target. That means that another nation would expect to get some warning of an attack in which case they launch all of *their* weapons. The missiles cross paths at some point and then both nations, and likely the world, are destroyed. So why not just fire one or two nukes instead of all of them? Imagine there is some war, like Russia attacking Poland. The US decides to respond by launching a single nuke at the advancing Russian army. This raises the stakes and the Russians now respond by launching 5 nukes to take out all of the major US staging bases in Europe. So the US responds with 50 nukes and so on. This is called escalation and it's pretty much the only thing possible when nukes are involved. Of couse all of that escalation theory was figured out from day one of the cold war. And so everyone realized that the only viable \"winning\" move is to jump immediately to the fire everything step. If the enemy launches one nuke, you launch 1000 and hope that a miracle happens and he can't respond in time (rather then the alternative where you both escalate a few nukes at a time, in which case there is a 100% chance he will be able to respond to the final doomsday exchange and everyone dies).",
"Nuclear war is stupid for many reasons (for instance the land you're \"conquering\" becomes unusable to the \"winner\" for decades), but the only one that keeps us from trying it is the certain knowledge that we'd be committing suicide in the attempt.",
"The question has been answered effectively for this forum but if you want to know (a LOT) more about this subject listen to Dan Carlin's new [Hardcore History]( URL_0 ) \"Destroyer of Worlds\". Dan presents information/history in an incredibly engaging way and, especially if you have interest in nuclear programs/history/theory, this is a great episode of his podcast.",
"It's not about perpetual attacks. The idea of mutually assured destruction was that if a country attacked another country, the attack would be recognized well enough in advance for them to mount a counter attack using their own nukes. This would ensure that both countries would be destroyed, likely in the first salvos. There was no possible way to mount a surprise nuclear attack. All attacks would be recognized as missiles were launched, planes were launched or subs engaged to launch missiles, most likely as soon as or immediately after launch. This is a deterrent because the attacking country knows they cannot ever attack fast enough to ensure the counter attack never happens and therefore any aggressive action would result in their own destruction, even if they were successful. The expectation was always that the conflict would be so devastating that it would end after the first or maybe second salvos of attacks, at which point both countries would be so devastated that they'd never recover."
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5u8p53 | Mongolia is sandwiched between Russia and China, the two biggest biggest political controversy countries to the west, how come we never hear of Mongolia doing anything at all ever? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because Mongolia is a poor country with a tiny population and no natural resources of note stuck between two major regional powers. What are they gonna do, invade Tibet?",
"Mongolia has just over 3 million people, less than the city of Seattle. It may look like a vast country, and it is, but it's nearly deserted. It's like the Nebraska of Asia - decently big, but nobody lives there. That's why we don't hear that much about it. It's just not a big geopolitical player with that population. (It's also a fairly poor country, another reason we don't hear much)",
"It's a very sparsely populated landscape, with a significant proportion of its population remaining nomadic to this day. It lacks access to water routes for their trading potential, it lacks lots of good farming land, and largely survives economically by exporting what minerals it can. Compared to its powerful neighbors, it's hard pressed to generate the level of news."
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5u9s87 | What's the psychological mechanism behind why incestual porn is so popular but most people are grossed out by the thought of having sexual relations with a family member in real life? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Kind of guessing here but one answer that comes to mind is how arousal works. There are studies that show that being sexually aroused or anxious are not really that different, mostly the context is different. So the wires cross fire when it comes to incest. Incest is \"wrong\", which makes you anxious and uncomfortable, coupled with sexual arousal it intensifies it, which is where the \"forbidden fruit\" arousal comes from, basically because of us feeling it's wrong. However, it's still a fantasy, you can enjoy fantasies but in real life you would never want to do it. It's almost like you're highjacking the anxiety that the idea incest gives you for a better sexual high, but wouldn't want to do it in real life. Same way with how we kill people in video games because we high jack the high, but would never want to kill someone in IRL. Also from what I've seen the most popular porn seems to be \"step moms\" and cousins, and cousins don't count!",
"On the grand scale of human evolution, incest isn't particularly out of the norm. We're not well hardwired to avoid it in the short term which is pretty much the only way we think at a basic level. Thus what we find \"sexy\" and what we deem as \"gross\" often overlap as one is societally imposed and the other is pretty much what the small lizard brain at the base of your skull likes. Let's take \"mom and son\" porn. You've got a young male (probably similar age to yourself) and an attractive fertile woman. The concept of mom and son can be almost completely ignored, instead you're seeing a sexy woman and a guy who you can put yourself in the place of."
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5uaa5r | Why do people have favourite colours, and for what reason is my favourite colour different to someone else's? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"personal aesthetics are a complex issue. why one person likes a song or color or food is not really explainable other than that it happens to be what they like. sometimes people have a reason for liking a color. \"i like red because fire trucks\" \"i like blue because ocean\" but for a lot of people it is \"just because\" so there is no answer to your question"
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5uaoad | Why couldn't artists from the 16th to the 18th century create hyper-realistic paintings, as we can today? | Given much of the span of time I'm asking about was before photographs, I imagine that a patron (merchant, royalty, etc) who commissions a painting would want a painting that captured him as closely as possible. It seems to me that the great masters of those times were more than skilled to create realistic paintings. Is it because they chose not to do it, needed some special paint that only arrived in modern times, or no one attempted to try. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Check out Johannes Vermeer, he worked in the early part of the 17th century and is especially noted for making hyper-realistic, almost photo-realistic painting. (Keep in mind, when you look at his paintings that they are nearly 400 years old and show their age somewhat). I'd say it's safe to say that it was definitely possible since it was actually done by at least one artist. As to why so many of the other celebrated artists of the period didn't bother to be quite so realistic is another question that I can't answer.",
"Two aspects to this question, which I will address separately. Let's call them the pragmatic and the aesthetic aspects. First, the pragmatic limitations. The major thing to note here is the industrial revolution in the 19th century. This introduced a variety of innovations in chemistry and also the standardized, mass production of paints. Before this, especially in the Renaissance, the artist's palette was more limited. Most artists mixed their own paints, according to individual recipes and so on. The second aspect is aesthetic. It's questionable that more realistic was necessarily thought to be better. Patrons wanted idealized images of themselves. But it's canny of you to mention photography because it's useful to read developments in painting history against it. Art didn't develop in a linear way towards increasing realism. In fact, the paintings of the 19th c.--when photography was being developed--were sometimes less \"realistic\" than their predecessors. That's when you have Impressionism, etc. The effect was to be a painting, as opposed to a photograph. Photorealism in painting stems from a movement in the late 20th century, a reaction against abstraction. What's important is that photorealism does not aim to depict reality *but a photograph of reality*"
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5uapk9 | How do the Germans teach about Nazi Germany? | How do the Germans teach about Nazi Germany? If they even do, if they don't how do they get educated? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Germans as well as Austrians have been learning about WWII, Nazi Dictatorship and the Holocaust in schools for a few ~~centruries~~ decades ^^wtf ^^brain? now. It should be covered in history classes, depending on the curriculum, in 6^th, 7^th or 8^th grade—also depending on the Bundesland (both GER and AUT). People born as early as the fivties and sixties didn't learn much about it. For later generations (70's to millenials) goes, we even visited a death camp in 8^th grade, so we know pretty much everything about it, we learn about all the ghettos, coalitions and fronts. There are deniers of the holocaust and Nazi atrocities (criminal in both GER and AUT), but mostly the historical facts are agreed upon. edit: added some words for clarification",
"Half of my 8th year was devoted to nazi germany. We watched documentaries, had a holocaust survivor visiting and telling us about what happened there first hand and went for a class trip into a concentration camp ourselves with a tourguide On top of the usual reading about the subject and writing tests, obviously. We held discussions in class, how WW2 could happen, how it was interconnected with WW1 and we were taught that Hitler was not some kind of genius politician that convinced every living german that the jews were a bunch of evil monsters, but that instead the people back then happily accepted a common enemy that they could blame for all their frustration after a pride and mighty nation like the german reich was buttf*cked in WW1.",
"I'm not German, but I know several, and they're taught *a lot* about it. Not just about what happened, but also *how* it happened and how it was *allowed* to happen. They have school trips to visit old concentration camps and learn about what was done there and who were killed and so on. but most importantly, they're taught that it was *not* just one almost supernaturally evil monster who made it all happen, that ordinary Germans share the responsibility for it. They're taught that ordinary Germans made it possible, and ordinary Germans share the responsibility for making sure it doesn't happen again. And they're taught not to treat it as a taboo. It's obviously a sensitive subject, something you take seriously and treat with respect, but it is also something they are taught to talk about openly. I think most other countries could learn a lot from how Germany has dealt with their past. (The US and their treatment of native Americans, or the UK and their colonialist past come to mind as obvious ones, but many smaller countries also have things in their past that they should face up to and have a serious national discussion about)"
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5uayk4 | Why U.S. schools rarely teach financial literacy to students? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Finances used to be a lot simpler. Most people did not have credit cards or any real interaction with the financial system beyond paying their mortgage or car loan, and most of middle America was just paying their taxes on a W-2 taking the standard deduction. Because it was very difficult to incur meaningful amounts of debt, during that time \"financial literacy\" consisted of being able to balance a checkbook. And this is not from 50 years ago. Credit cards were still relatively rare as of the year 2000, it was really the mid 2000's when there was a sudden explosion in the availability of consumer credit that has continued to this day. The reason that financial literacy is a problem now is because it is very, very easy to accumulate large amounts of debt very quickly. But again this is a very recent problem and schools just haven't had time to catch up to it. It will be surprising if most schools don't bake it in as part of their math curriculum over the next 20 or so years, but its not unreasonable to think it will take awhile before the problem is recognized and fixed.",
"They do. I took it in the deep south at a fairly poor school - we had personal finance, econ, household budgeting, etc all in 9th and 10th grade. I've traveled A LOT globally in my time, so I'll chime in with this: I really don't think that Americans have poor financial literacy, per se. 1) I do think that Americans culturally have a very deep 'eh, I'll worry about it tomorrow' culture compared to Europeans and Asian cultures. 2) Americans are extremely pretentious with displays of wealth. 3) credit is *insanely* easy to get here. I mean ***insanely*** easy compared to Asia/Europe (I can't speak to Africa/India/Middle East as I've not spoken to anyone about actually money lending there, or money 'leasing' in the case of Islamic countries). So you have in America: (consumer-driven society) * (a very 'live for today'-type culture) ^ (waaay easy credit) = a lot of people in financial distress. **Side/mini rant as it pertains to American's over-reliance on credit/borrowing, particularly in low income areas:** Banks **are NOT** the bad guys. I worked at a major bank pre-the 2008 crisis. We saw all the shitty mortgages coming across, and we said 'maybe we shouldn't loan these people money b/c they can't repay it'. We raised the issue with the gov't, and were expressly told by HUD/Fannie/Freddie (via the DOJ/FTC) that 'the perception of stripping the American dream of homeownership from low-income people is thinly veiled racism which will be investigated.' We were trapped, and we also know how that ended. (If you care to read about this, look up the NINJa loan - 'No Income No Job' loan controversies. My bank was told that pulling back on NINJas would be investigated; they became nuclear/toxic waste during the crisis.) Its the same thing today - you pull credit back from low income people and you are going to disproportionately impact blacks/Hispanics - then you get sued by the DOJ."
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5ubgzg | Politically, what does Russia want? What is their goal, their endgame? | From what I've gathered reading recent articles, it seems like Russia seeks to destabilize the US and, by extension, NATO. I don't know much about history/international relations, so I'm wondering - why? What do they want? What advantage does having a weakened US give them? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They want their sphere of influence back, as well as their economic/political/military prestige. That sphere of influence used to extend halfway into Germany, now NATO is on their border. Basically they want Russia to return to being what the Soviet Union was before it collapsed minus the governmental system."
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5ubxw0 | Why do people say 'Cheese' when taking a photo? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Saying the \"EE\" noise looks like smiling. Why it's specifically cheese and not like breeze or please or any other EE word I do not know"
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5uby75 | Why are expressions using "the west" synonymous with a developed society? | When I grew up "living in the west" or "the west" was equal to having an often privileged life and anyone living "not in the west" meant being poor or in a less developed society. Why and how did the west become better? (Also, if you live in Japan or Korea, does the expression change to "living in the east"?) | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because the west won. In the grand schemes of societies developing over the ages, our current age is completely dominated by the western (european) powers that conquered and shaped the world from the lesser developed areas of well.. everywhere else. Lets point out though that this wasn't always the case, in different parts of history, both China (the east) and the Middle East were also synonymous with culture and developed societies -- but today, how the world is currently rolled out, the west dominates the discussion, as it has for the last roughly 500 years. As another notch, the East, except Japan, being more developed is a VERY recent thing, until closer to the mid 1900s, the only really \"developed\" country in the East was Japan, who took many of lessons learned from European development and made them their own. Even now, compared to \"the west\" the disparity in development is incredible when we look outside of there. Laos and Nepal don't compare to Denmark."
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5ug75p | Why is Climate Change a partisan issue? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Primarily because one party (GOP) supports industry and business in general, which includes oil. Petroleum products are used in all sorts of functions in our everyday lives in ways that you may not even be aware. So the burning of these fossil fuels is what has been found to cause climate change (according to climatologists) and what this means, indirectly, is that in order to stop it - we have to cease burning fossil fuels in the amount we do today. Since this makes up a *huge* part of our infrastructure, acknowledging that climate change is real means that they would need to also agree to massively change our infrastructure in ways which they feel may not be economically viable. There's a *lot* of private interests involved in both sides of the political spectrum, so they also receive huge pushback from donors etc.",
"One big reason is Coal. The whole industry is dying, and the guys working it have virtually nowhere to go. Their only real option is to uproot the family, leave the county/state, and start working in a totally new industry in a entry-ish level position at half the wages. Global warming, climate change, and general needs to improve efficiency have pushed coal out of fashion. However, if you can promise to make Coal great again, they don't have to leave friends and family, and can keep working in the industry they've trained for and are making a good steady wage in. Same goes for Oil & Natural gas, but their threat isn't nearly as immediate. Until someone invents a reliable and safe way to produce power when the wind isn't blowing and sun isn't shining for less than $0.04/kwh, they'll have jobs. So if you want to score easy votes from WV, VA, KY, TN, and bits of MO, there's a whole demographic ripe for the picking. Promise Global Warming isn't our fault, and that you'll bring coal jobs back and you'll have an easy win from those counties. Fact is, where coal is mined Climate Change isn't as much of an immediate threat the their way of life as the entire town losing their jobs. The desperation is real. Pop up a solar panel or wind turbine factory in a coal town that hires laid off coal miners and you'll start flipping votes to team Climate Change pretty quick.",
"for a lot of people it's not an issue of if climate change is happening or if it is bad, but more so if it is worth dealing with it monetarily. this often is a division among left/right as one is more fiscally conservative than the other. other issues include one side doesn't want to have government regulation on business, like pollution, etc and the other does. these are just a couple issues that are part of a much more complex question/answer"
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5uhdta | How is the Han Chinese ethnic group so large in comparison to other ethnic groups? | Today, Han Chinese make up 90% of their country's population. In contrast, the next largest nation in the world, India, has many multitudes of ethnic groups, with no ethnic group being anywhere near 90%. Is this because the Han Chinese group simply, to excuse my crude language, "bred well" and simply outpopulated other ethnic groups, or is it the fact that the Han Chinese is more of an amalgamation of ethnic groups, as opposed to one set ethnic group. Thanks for any responses! | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In regards to India, the explanation there is actually surprisingly simple. India was never unified before the British so the language had opportunity to shatter as various monarchs encouraged their local power base. China is very different historically however, and though they, like most nations, have spent a lot of time in 'warring states' periods, the Chinese have also spent a lot of time unified. The name 'Han' refers to the first time that unity in China is known to have happened, so 'Han' Chinese simply means people in China who's culture goes back to the Han. It's also the result of the Chinese government wanting to portray itself as unified for political reasons. If you actually go and visit china you'll find that the actual day-to-day culture varies as much as any other place, with even different languages being spoken all over the place, but the Chinese government is interested in portraying a united front. It's actually true that the group expanded it's population tremendously, but that's more because of what their population base was when the baby booms that hit the world in the 20th century reached them. European nations started way lower in population whereas China, with it's relatively high fertility and relative stability compared to the rest of the world in the pre-modern era was able to sustain a higher population than their neighbours which gave them a leg up when the population boom hit. Source: Various History Professors"
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5uhf4f | Why do degrees from universities known for grade inflation still have credibility? | I would think grade inflation would result in the loss of validity of the degree that universities that are known for inflation, give out | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because your grades from university are largely irrelevant. Pretty much the only time anyone will care is if you transfer or apply to grad school. Employers just want to know if you have a degree. So long as that degree corresponds with basic competent in your field, whether your grades were inflated or not doesn't matter.",
"There are other good answers, but I would add that colleges are much more focused on giving customers what they want. Since customers (students) want good GPAs and great amenities, colleges compete to provide those things to them. Since there isn't a good metric to judge the quality of an education, there is no strong check on grade inflation. Also, grade inflation is rampant and so punishing offenders would be impractical."
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5uhhur | Why can politicians get away with telling blatant lies? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In our systems there's a fine line between fact checking and censorship. In the US if the lie doesn't amount to libel or defamation, virtually anything can be said. *Legally* there is a very good reason for this. Some statements are simply incorrect. Some are mistakes. Some are meant to be rhetorical hyperbole. Some statements are made based on facts that may be proven false at a later date. No one would argue for punishing someone who made a simple mistake. Correct? Ok so if someone says a false statement, who decides if it was a mistake or malicious? Whose the arbiter of this decision? Do you see how this could get political real soon? If there is a Republican running for mayor who states that the city lost 16 million dollars last year. What if the sitting democratic mayor orders the police to arrest the Republican for presenting false information? What if the fact was 16.6 million dollars? The Democrat just imprisoned someone who made a simple mistake or a rhetorical shortcut. Now what if the Republican goes to court and the presiding judge is a democrat? What if the populous is overwhelmingly democrat and doesn't care about injustice, they just plain don't *like* the Republican? Do you see how this could slip into a very damaging problem for free speech? Everyone would be afraid to speak out against the government for fear they'll be arrested for false information. This is why it's dangerous that our president wants to expand libel and defamation powers. Now back to our Republican candidate. Even if he fights and wins in court, he's lost Alot of money, time and Capitol fighting those charges. Now he has to answer questions about jail time to voters when he could be making his case for why he's the better mayor. All of this differs from corporations who cannot present false adverisement. As this is a law for consumer protection. Because of industry trade secret, it's difficult for consumers to absolutely know all information regarding a product. In contrast, our system entrusts the voters to properly \"punish\" those who \"lie.\" That's why you need a strong Press with plenty of leeway to report. That's why we need access to proper education so that we can develop problem solving skills. That's why we need more visibility for what government officials are doing on behalf of us.",
"Because the media, which would be the primary check against this behavior by the politicians, has settled into a pattern of not being \"pushy.\" The papers, stations, sites, whoever, prefer to not \"burn the bridge\" with both individual politicians and larger organizations like state and national parties. If the bridge isn't there, they don't get interview or quote requests granted, they don't get tipped off with advance information on things the politicians are doing, and so on. The media outlets have collectively more or less demonstrated they'd rather have the access than to act the way most people *assume* media would act; as an information channel and check on what comes out. We're seeing it right now with how Trump and his administration are treating a large number of media entities. Closing off access, not calling on them for questions; that's just what we can easily see. If that's happening in view of the public, then it's extremely likely that none of the outlets are able to receive replies to phone calls, emails, whatever, from the folks on the far sides of the burned bridges. Does it suck, that they value the bridge over doing what most of us would assume to be their job? Yes. Will it change? At this point, probably not; because it's *easier* to keep that bridge so they don't have to work as hard. In the current situation, possibly we might see some of the excluded outlets see increased ratings as they revert to pre-bridge behavior and start pushing for confirmed information. If they do get more ratings, well, news isn't a service (though most people assume it is, or at least should be); it's a business. If they make more money acting properly, then they'll start acting properly. Which also sucks, but these enormous media companies have a lot of power to control the information flows. They use it to enrich themselves, and rarely even pay lip service to actually disseminating real info.",
"Because we let them. \"Government of the people, by the people, for the people...\" Everyone puts 100% of the responsibility on the politicians. It's up to us (the people) to research them, keep them accountable and make sound choices. And when there are no sound choices, it's up to us to step up and either field a candidate or become one.",
"I think it is because regular people allow them to. When i talk with friends and family about their political positions, they will support a politician who is caught in a blatant lie. In addition, we do not reward politicians when they do tell the truth. Politicians have learned for example, that they should over promise both more spending and lower taxes and that doing so will not keep them out of office. But if they said \"we have to raise taxes to pay for the services we provide\" they won't get elected. So I think our whole society needs to be willing to elect honest people. Then, the free press has been eroded. One of the reasons for that is the flattening of expertise and the amount of noise on the internet. Anyone can claim anything they want and people will listen to them. The public needs to support scientific integrity for example and say - I will support scientists' right to not be political tools in order to get better information from government agencies. Or- I won't look at random blogs and then conclude that hundreds of thousands of experts around the world are lying to me. Because people have spent a lot of time undermining the reputation of the press,scientists, and others who might have more insight, some people will believe anything. I think fake news is a huge problem. Its like we have purposely infected our whole society with a parasite. Overall, our society does not punish lying, and cannot sort truth from fiction",
"Because it is almost impossible to make sure you are telling the truth 100% all the time, simply because person can not know everything but has to make assumptions and guesses. So we have to leave a bit of grey area to get some communication done in time. We can't always wait how thing turn out and then knowing what should've been done is kind of stupid. Politicians just started running wild with that excuse more and more in the last 2 decades and voters do not seem to care. Media has not done good job either, establishment half truths spread in mass media has been the norm for.. for ever actually. I'm not on any sort of \"fake news\" crowd on any side but large part of the problems we see now is the lack of challenge on the part of commercial news media. In countries where there is nothing else, the situation is the worst, countries with stronger national, publicly funded broadcast is much better. Not good but better. it is much harder to pass so bold lies, allthough Brexit is good example how little people actually want to know and how much they want to believe. It's getting worse, globally. And we are the ones that should do something about it but aren't.. Don't keep voting liars to power is my plea. Much rather put the boring dude who has no radical ideas how to improve anything than the one who swears he is goig to change everything but has no rational plans to do so. And under no circumstance should one vote for people who want to destroy government's power as they are going to sabotage the whole thing; that is their agenda ffs, \"government doesn't work and we should get rid of it. Vote me in the government.\" It for SURE will not work after that guy is in power.",
"Think of it this way. I don't know (and don't want to talk about) whether you were pro-Hillary or pro-Trump in the last election. Regardless of who you chose, if undeniable proof of your favored candidate lying about something less than massive came out, would you then vote for the other candidate? Or had you already made up your mind that that other guy is just no good?",
"Because they are people in power. Not just any power, though, they are people with *symbolic power*. It is pretty much the same reason why we all listen to our doctors - because they're the ones wearing the white lab coat, and we trust them because that is their job. We say, \"hey this guy is wearing a white lab coat so he must know what he's doing!\" Politicians have a similar symbolic power as doctors do. We say, \"hey this guy was elected to sit in the Oval Office all day, better not protest against him!\" Although, as we know, many *many* people see past this symbolic power and actually do protest against him. For the people who tolerate political lies, it is because they believe that any harsh word against a political leader is a harsh word against their entire country. It's all symbolism.",
"Because ignorant people choose to believe them because the lies align with their beliefs, instead of facts. And there are far more ignorant peopl in this world than there are rational, fact checking people.",
"Because people are dumb, stupid, cannot draw a causal relationship between themselves and politics, and are quite honestly content with getting fucked in the ass as long as you wave Sky Sports and advertising in front of their faces.",
"You have to ask yourself what is a lie. The world isn't as black and white as we think it is. People like to reference statistics to support policies but very nature of statistics leaves them open to interpretations. There are very few absolute truths in life because subjectivity is fundamentally tied to the human experience. The function of the politician is to create a \"Truth\" that aligns with the \"truths\" of as many people as possible.",
"Cognitive Dissonance. You just don't want to believe they're lying. For one of many reasons - you don't understand the issues deeply, you voted based on personality not on substance, whatever - you voted for some person who is now screwing you. now, do you turn yourself around, change how you feel, doubt your decision making abilities, and restructure how you make decisions? Or do you ignore all this bad stuff?",
"We do have things in place, they're called elections. The voters are responsible for vetting candidates and determine what they say is true or not.",
"The majority of their constituents either don't care or aren't smart enough to know they're being lied to. Law wise, it's not illegal to lie unless you are under oath.",
"The labor force participation rate is at a 38-year low. The unemployment rate is at 4.9%. Both are objectively true, but a politician can use either to praise or criticize our previous administration's handling of the recession, depending on what side of the aisle they're on and what they stand to gain from it. Not exactly what you asked, but it is at least one reason for why you will see pundits on TV or candidates in debates seemingly spouting opposite opinions all the while screaming that their side is telling the truth and the other person is full of shit. It's all great fun!",
"Answer this. If you know that a politician is lying, what can you do about it? The problem is that aside from voting, you can't really do anything about it. You can protest all you want but the only thing that can replace the person is voting. But there is the other problem. We have a rigged two party system and we saw what happened when someone like Bernie Sanders tried to shake things up. He was railroaded and the parties in power made sure that you only got to pick from Liar A or Liar B. So I don't think it's that we tolerate it so much as we don't really have a choice and people are too apathetic or get too polarized by issues designed to emotionally rial them up that they keep electing the liars.",
"To a great extent, especially the last couple of years \"lie\" is only about who is currently telling you the \"truth\". Sadly with so much hype, spin, and desperation for ratings there simply is not a news source out there that you can trust with the \"truth\", reddit has NO \"truth\", it's elusive and buried in the middle road positions that nobody has any interest in. SO, \"Blatent Lies\" ends up sounding naive because there simply isn't a source you can trust to find out what is or isn't a lie. Hearkens back to the precedent set by the last Clinton... \"It depends upon what the meaning of the word 'is' is. If the—if he—if 'is' means is and never has been, that is not—that is one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true statement\".."
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5uhr0x | Why is it appropriate for PG13 movies/shows to display extreme violence (such as mass murder, shootouts), but not appropriate to display any form of sexual affection (nudity, sex etc.)? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Watch [*This Film Is Not Yet Rated*]( URL_0 ). The MPAA has a shadowy \"ratings board\". No one can find out who's on it, anyone whose name becomes known is removed. How they got appointed is unclear. The actual profiles don't seem to fit what MPAA described. The MPAA believes this represents the viewing market. They may not be that far off. Sex IS seen as shocking and a moral threat but not violence by many people. Other things of note: Specifically, WOMEN enjoying sex or even being an active participant is seen as 10x more serious than just sex. Seriously, a guy getting a blowjob is NBD. Even the guy moaning out an orgasm is more or less ok for a family-ish comedy. But a woman getting eaten out and enjoying it with equal focus on her reactions is just porn... a moral threat.",
"Short Answer: Because the MPAA says so, they have a monopoly on the rating process. Also, part of the distinction lies with the simulation of the act versus a graphic depiction of it. For instance, graphic violence gets you an R rating, but simulated violence doesn't (so if you see lots of blood it goes to an R but otherwise you can blow up as much stuff as you want.) Likewise, sex receives a lower rating the less graphically you depict it. Edit: For instance you can have Austin Powers and Two and a Half Men talk about sex all the time, but as long as you don't show anything besides a shirtless man and a woman covered up in bedsheets then you are in the firm PG-13 territory. Likewise, Wolverine can stab and slash tons of soldiers without any blood and stay PG-13, but if you show a realistic portrayal of war like in Saving Private Ryan then you move up to an R rating. Edit 2: [An example of a PG-13 sex scene from the Notebook]( URL_0 ) Also, somehow Top Gun managed to stay PG with this [love scene]( URL_1 ) although granted they still hadn't ironed out the kinks for what the PG-13 rating was going to be yet (it was only introduced 2 years prior to Top Gun).",
"Growing up, my very liberal psychologist mom would allow me and my brother to watch any film with sex/nudity, but abhorred violence and gore and would not allow us to watch violent movies. I remember fondly watching Cat People with Nastassja Kinski, when I was around 9, OMG. I even got my grandma to take me to see Fast Times at Ridgemont High in the theaters when I was 8, she was not real happy with me, but didn't make me leave. The result, I now spend all my time on r/watchpeopledie",
"I live in a country where [full frontal nudity won't affect age rating]( URL_0 ). It's the norm to bathe in sauna - you have seen your entire family naked every week ever since you were a little kid. Childrens' programs on TV can have nudity when it is not sexualized. Cursing is considered rude but is in no way censored, not even on shows meant for everyone. Our [rating system]( URL_1 ) has this scale: * S = allowed for all ages * 7 = recommended minimum age * 12 = rec. min. age * 16 = rec. min. age * 18 = strictly enforced Examples of the what causes the rating jump from appropriate for all ages to min. age 7: * Violence: mild, slapstick and unrealistic **or** single short but realistic expression of violence. * Sexuality: mild sexual themes, concealed eroticism",
"Can I recommend an excellent podcast URL_0 There is an episode called \"Sex in Monochrome\" which is very relevant to this. There is a period in Hollywood called \"Pre-Code\". During this period, before what we call the Golden Age films had a lot more sex and violence URL_1 > In 1929, an American Roman Catholic layman Martin Quigley, editor of the prominent trade paper Motion Picture Herald, and Father Daniel A. Lord, a Jesuit priest, created a code of standards (which Hays liked immensely[11]), and submitted it to the studios.[7][12] Lord's concerns centered on the effects sound film had on children, whom he considered especially susceptible to their allure > The Code sought not only to determine what could be portrayed on screen, but also to promote traditional values.[18] Sexual relations outside of marriage could not be portrayed as attractive and beautiful, presented in a way that might arouse passion, nor be made to seem right and permissible.[14] All criminal action had to be punished, and neither the crime nor the criminal could elicit sympathy from the audience.[4] Authority figures had to be treated respectfully, and the clergy could not be portrayed as comic characters or villains. Under some circumstances, politicians, police officers and judges could be villains, as long as it was clear that they were the exception to the rule.[14] > The entire document contained Catholic undertones and stated that art must be handled carefully because it could be \"morally evil in its effects\" and because its \"deep moral significance\" was unquestionable.[16] The Catholic influence on the Code was initially kept secret.[why?][19] A recurring theme was \"throughout, the audience feels sure that evil is wrong and good is right.\"[4] The Code contained an addendum commonly referred to as the Advertising Code, which regulated film advertising copy and imagery.[20] Also I would recommend that podcast again and also it's sister podcast \"Attaboy Clarence\" Edit: It's just come out now on Audible URL_2",
"The U.S. has puritan roots that are still evident today. Other countries have different views.",
"It's a matter of what might be emulated. Parents generally are not afraid their children will copy characters who kill each other. They don't expect a movie beheading to lead to anything worse than a pretend beheading in a game. Whereas parents *are* afraid their kids will copy characters who have sex. Other than rape, sex in movies is generally something everyone does with people they love, and it feels great for giver and receiver. Show sex to a bunch of kids and some of them are going to try it: \"Mr Johnson, I just caught your son and my daughter...\" It's that simple.",
"Assuming you live in the USA.... Much of it is cultural as well. As a Francophone Canadian, I see the dichotomy on a regular basis. Our state broadcaster is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation/Société Radio-Canada (anglo and franco divisions, respectively). The English language side will have violence (though nowhere near as much as US productions) and zero nudity and sex. Tbe French language productions have plenty of contextual nudity, but very little violence. And the violence that is shown is essential to the plot. Breasts and full rear nudity are not hidden even if the show is during primetime. As another example, English radio stations censor some works like bitch and fuck. That same song played on a French language station will not be censored. In short, French Canada still holds European standards (to an extent) while English Canada holds American standards (to an extent as well) possibly due to the massive media import from the US which that segment of the population consumes. If you want to see what some or most of the rest of the world sees, check out r/nsfwadverts",
"First time I went to New York, (I'm from the uk) it was Halloween 2006. They were showing the directors cut of the Dawn of the dead remake at like 4 in the afternoon. So harsh(ish) gore. But all the swearing was cut out! That really confused me...",
"My layman's opinion FWIW We have an inate aversion to violence. Our unequivical social attitude towards it as an evil (if sometimes necessary) means it can be safely depicted without confusing people or leading to imitation. Where it is imitated, it is fairly easy to identify why it is wrong. Sexuality cannot be treated with negative generalizations because it serves a definite good. When it is imitated, it is complicated to identify the wrong behavior, and a person's sexuality can be damaged.",
"I have a theory that explicit sexual imagery is discouraged more than violence because it is more likely that a teenager/preteen can go have sex than them being able to go commit acts of violence. It probably also has something to do with everyone knowing that teenagers want to have sex already, so maybe if it is normalized in various media they are more likely to find someone to do it with. Of course I don't agree with this logic, but if a puritanical censorship board believes this way, I could see how the way they currently react to explicit sex in movies would be acceptable to them.",
"Because images of people killing each other suits the perpetuation of the military-industrial complex. Images of people loving each other only makes people horny.",
"Partly because when it comes down to it, comparing violence and sex is kind of comparing apples to oranges. On violence, it depends on the type of violence portrayed, anything overly gruesome or realistic will get a higher rating due to both the potential for imitation and the possibility of the audience having a reaction to it. A kind of example for this is Dr Strange, in the early part of the movie, they show him getting his hands crushed then proceeding to have surgery after surgery and rehab in an attempt to regain the use of his hands. The scenes look somewhat realistic, to the point that someone in the audience when I saw it actually passed out and had to be taken to a hospital to be checked out. Now, imagine someone having PTSD or something similar seeing a scene of realistic violence, as opposed to clearly fictonalized violence as most violent movies tend to have, and before you say \"well they should make sure beforehand\" remember how many parents took their kids to see Deadpool and the south park movies. Now look at sex, very easy to imitate, and easy to offend a lot of people because it's not something you can make overly fictonalized like violence without it just being weird, so there's just less space to draw a line, if that makes sense.",
"Living in Germany it is completely the other way around, coming from Mexico I find out hilarious that having so many problems and internal discussions about gun control and what not. While the average virginity loss age in the US is 14 according to the NSFG",
"To keep it simple, we raise our kids to handle violence properly at a younger age than we do sex. At a young age, we teach them violence is wrong, all that nonsense. Therefore, by teen years, they should be able to handle some violence on screen without acting in out. Sex, however, we as a society poorly handle due to being uncomfortable with the topic and therefore we are uncomfortable with giving teens the idea of sex with great detail, so we simply reference it. We have such poor confidence with teens handling sex that we do not even want to show them too much nudity. Everything I said is exaggerated bullshit, but beyond the whole \"because our culture is stupid\" explanation, this is the only more official explanation that doesn't over simplify it. The real truth that does over simplify? Our country, the USA, in particular is more heavily influenced by religion and religious values than any other country. Whole European countries are a bit more open and mature about nudism or sex, we avoid it like the plague because it's something we are wired to be uncomfortable about.",
"because sheltered kids make ignorant consumers. the epitome of how america works. How else will they sell you cheesburgers using sexy naked women?",
"The same reason why The King's Speech got rated R- because apparently saying \"fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck\" in one scene means that it's more inappropriate than [list any pg-13 movie]. We need a better rating system.",
"I've always thought it could be sooo much more simple than any of these reasons. It's easier to make violent special effects, and explain them as such. You can teach kids how those effects are done, and that *it is not real*. (Maybe easier isn't the right word but you know what I mean?) Nudity for example is something kids know is real - they've seen themselves nude. Since they know that's real it's more difficult to explain that well, yeah, parts of those people in bed are naked, but *they're still just acting*, with dozens of people around holding lights, cameras and microphones. Edit: words.",
"It's actually the opposite in Germany Sexual themes are good to go but by the slightest hint of violence you gotta bump that up to R rated",
"Violence: \"What they're doing is bad and hurtful. Never do that.\" Sex: \"What they're doing is awesome and feels great. But...um...don't try it yet\"",
"Cultural values. In the U.S., you can show someone being murdered, but can't show a nipple. In Europe, you can sell porn magazines and condoms next to the toy section, but can't really show blood. And then there's cartoons, where you can effectively torture someone onscreen, but heaven help you if people actually use guns. Except for Japan, where you can watch someone being raped then shot to death in anime. But no pubic hair allowed. No real sense to it other than what people in different parts of the globe have deemed appropriate/legal based on their own culture, and different companies' attempts to fulfill the letter of the law while skirting the spirit.",
"SHORT ANWSER: Because the US rating system is fucked by the MPAA who are still holding onto archaic ideas about sexuality and how it should be displayed. Honestly it goes back to the christian elite who basically began to rule america in the mid to late '20s and who built a monopoly over hollywood.",
"Because the majority of Americans are hypocrites: - Aaargh, Janet flashed a boob! But the porn industry is huge - Mass shootings are weekly news, but we have a right to own a gun! - Every F*ck is beeped away, but my guess is that it is the most used word by all Americans - We are the most peaceful country in the world! Let's invade Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen etc. - We are the economic leader of the world! Let's blow up the internal mortgage market and bring the world economy to a halt - Putin interfered with our elections! Well Wikileaks showed us yesterday how the US interferes with the rest of the world (tip of the iceberg) And I think if I put some serious effort in this, I could make the list 5 times longer. Ergo, it is time for some self-reflection guys...",
"Because in America violence is ok and nudity is a no no. Thank religion for that. This is not the case in Europe, Canada, or Russia. In those areas nudity is ok while violence is much more heavily regulated.",
"It's not strange Christian morality, or the MPAA or anything so sinister, despite many comments here. It's actually more straightforward. In our culture, violence is taboo. But movie violence is fake. It's simulated. It's not the actual taboo, but a simulation of it. Even if that simulation looks real, it's not. In our culture, nudity is taboo. Movie nudity is *not simulated*. It is the actual taboo. It's not faked. It is not a simulation. Consider: A movie that showed *actual violence* would certainly be rated R at the least - more likely worse.",
"It is far more likely for a 14 year old to have unprotected sex than it is for him to shoot up his neighborhood with a machine gun.",
"I'm seeing this a a lot on TV: \"The following program contains scenes of smoking. Please be aware that smoking can be harmful to your health.\" I've never seen this one though: \"The following program contains scenes of fighting, shooting and murder. Please be aware that fighting, shooting and murder can harmful to your health.\"",
"because as a parent/guardian, it is easier to explain violence to your kid. 1) violence: kid, sometimes people need killin'. 2) sex: kid, so what is going on here is, uh, welll ok, as you grow you will notice certain changes in your body. Hormones will start making changes and start your maturation into an adult. Puberty is when a child’s body begins to develop and change as they become an adult. Girls develop breasts and start their periods, and boys develop a deeper voice and start to look like men. The average age for girls to begin puberty is 11, while for boys the average age is 12. But there’s no set timetable, so don’t worry if your child reaches puberty before or after their friends. It’s completely normal for puberty to begin at any point from the ages of 8 to 14. The process takes about four years overall. The first sign of puberty in girls is usually that their breasts begin to develop. It’s normal for breast buds to sometimes be very tender or for one breast to start to develop several months before the other one Pubic hair also starts to grow and some girls may notice more hair on their legs and arms. Girls' breasts continue to grow and become fuller. Around two years after beginning puberty, girls usually have their first period. Read more about starting periods. Pubic hair becomes coarser and curlier. Underarm hair begins to grow. Some girls also have hair in other parts of their body, such as their top lip. This is completely normal. Girls start to sweat more. Girls often get acne – a skin condition that shows up as different types of spots including whiteheads, blackheads and pus-filled spots called pustules. Girls have a white vaginal discharge. Girls go through a growth spurt. From the time their periods start, girls grow 5-7.5 cm (2-3 inches) annually over the next year or two, then reach their adult height. Most girls gain weight – and it’s normal for this to happen – as their body shape changes. Girls develop more body fat along their upper arms, thighs and upper back; their hips grow rounder and their waist gets narrower. For boys, The first sign of puberty in boys is usually that their testicles get bigger and the scrotum begins to thin and redden. Pubic hair also starts to appear at the base of the penis. After a year or so of puberty starting, and for the next couple of years: The penis and testicles grow and the scrotum gradually becomes darker. Read more about penis health. Pubic hair becomes thicker and curlier. Underarm hair starts to grow. Boys start to sweat more. Breasts can swell slightly temporarily – this is normal and is not the same as \"man-boobs\". Boys may have \"wet dreams\" (involuntary ejaculations of semen as they sleep). Their voice \"breaks\" and gets permanently deeper. For a while, a boy might find his voice goes very deep one minute and very high the next. Boys often develop acne – a skin condition that shows up as different types of spots, including whiteheads, blackheads and pus-filled spots called pustules. Boys go through a growth spurt and become taller by an average of 7-8cms, or around 3 inches a year, and more muscular. So now, New life is a wonderful thing, and creating babies is something that many men and women look forward to. Becoming parents can be a beautiful time in their lives! But before you take that big step, it helps to know exactly how to go about the process. The more you know about what is happening inside your body – both before you try to get pregnant and while you try to conceive – the better prepared you will be to create a happy, healthy pregnancy. How are babies made? It might seem like an elemental question, but there are many miraculous things happening in your body that make a baby happen. Here’s how it works. How Are Babies Made? Making a baby starts with two key things: Eggs and sperm. In a woman’s ovaries, there are hundreds of thousands of tiny eggs, waiting to make the trip down the fallopian tubes and into the uterus. These eggs are an integral part of a woman’s body – in fact, when a baby girl is born, her body contains millions of eggs. By the time a woman is old enough to conceive, that number has dropped to several hundred thousand eggs. Most women release one egg per menstrual cycle, but sometimes your body might release more, and some months it might not release any at all. During the release, the ovaries release the mature egg – or eggs – and they are immediately sucked up by the fallopian tubes. These tiny tubes are where the magic really happens. The egg moves through the fallopian tubes, waiting to be fertilized. This is known as ovulation. Most eggs will live for about 24 hours after ovulation. That’s why many women make a point of tracking their ovulation with various products, such as ovulation testing kits. When you begin to ovulate, it is important to have sex, because the sperm needs time to get to the egg before it dies. On the other side of the equation is the male, and the sperm he provides. The man’s body is continuously producing new sperm, at the rate of millions. In fact, a man releases about 40 million sperm with each ejaculation! The amount of sperm produced is necessary for many reasons: First, sperm can only live for a few days before they die and must be replaced with new ones. Second, sperm must be able to swim hard and fast up the fallopian tubes, and that means only the strongest ones make the trip. And finally, those millions of sperm increase the odds of pregnancy happening – it’s nature’s ‘insurance’ to keep the human race going. The sperm is created in the testicles. The sperm must be kept at 36 degrees Celsius in order to stay viable, and that explains why the testicles are outside the body – this temperature is about four degrees below body temperature. Each testicle has a small tube inside, and that’s where the sperm wait for ejaculation. Right before ejaculation, some of that sperm mixes with semen, which helps it get near the uterus. The job of the sperm is to swim toward the uterus, into the fallopian tubes, find the egg there, and penetrate it. How are babies made, to some kind, equals to the question: how is the egg fertilized. Once the egg moves into the fallopian tube, it is ready for fertilization. Your body has been preparing for this by building up a lining in the uterus – if you don’t get pregnant, that lining is shed as your menstrual period. If you do get pregnant, the lining stays where it is to nourish the new baby. When you have sex and your body is ready for pregnancy, several things happen inside you. When a man ejaculates, his body sends semen into yours, and that semen has millions of sperm inside. When a man ejaculates, semen is pushed out at about 10 mph. That helps ensure that the semen gets close to the cervix, and then get past the cervical mucus to the uterus. Those sperm begin swimming toward the entrance of your uterus. The millions of them are suddenly in a race against time and each other. Many are held back by the cervical mucus, but some of the strongest ones get through. Once they are through, they go into the fallopian tubes and search for the egg. This is a big job – they have to move into the fallopian tubes, which takes a great deal of time. Most sperm can move about 2.5 centimeters every 15 minutes, so the journey can take a while. The good news is that sperm can live in your body for up to seven days, so if you haven’t ovulated yet, there is still an opportunity to get pregnant. Once they find the egg, the most viable ones fight frantically to get inside. Finally a single sperm penetrates the egg and fertilizes it. Once the egg is fertilized, several things happen. The moment the sperm gets through the outer shell, the egg changes, preventing other sperm from entering. The egg then continues the journey down the fallopian tubes. You aren’t technically pregnant yet – that doesn’t happen until the egg, now known as a blastocyst, implants in the wall of the uterus. That might take another three days after the actual fertilization. But as soon as fertilization happens, things begin to change in your body. The egg and sperm produce cells that grow at an unbelievable rate. This is the start of what will soon become your baby. After the blastocyst implants in the lining of the uterus, it starts to grow even faster. Sometimes things don’t go well, however. The blastocyst might implant too early, in the fallopian tube. This is known as an ectopic pregnancy, and it requires medical attention, because a baby cannot grow outside of the uterus. However, prompt medical attention can help ensure that the fallopian tube is not damaged, and you can try again. In other cases, there might be something wrong with the egg or the sperm. Your body might then simply expel the fertilized egg, and you will have your period – and then you can start trying again next month. But in most cases, things are just fine. Assuming all goes well, you will miss your next period, and then you will soon have a positive line on a pregnancy test",
"When I was a 10-year-old kid, I used to subscribe (via parents of course) to Spider Man comic. They once worte in my country's local magazine issue about the same subject. I somehow agreed with what they wrote about not showing even a nipple on TV but showing heaps of corpses without a problem. Show people some love instead of killing just for once.",
"Because the US is a strangely prude country about some things and has bizarre double standards. It's only the US that rates films and media in this way, in case you weren't aware. Other countries in the West at least rate graphic violence and graphic sex on a par. I personally find the levels of violence acceptable in US PG-13 films a bit shocking to be considered acceptable for that age group. I was also amused when I found out the 'R' rating that US films apparently try and make cuts to dodge is not the equivalent of an 'X' or 18 rating for adults only, but instead is the equivalent of what in Europe would be rated a '15' or '16'. So all moviegoers should be kids in the US?!",
"because..... the Puritans. most all of the sexual repression of the usa stems from the fact that they colonized america, passed a bunch of laws, and established some important pieces of what we have now as american culture...",
"In addition to what others here have been saying, one thing to realize as well is that there is a gradual trend for \"extreme acts\" to descend in severity. The good old \"fuck\" word is a great example of this. There was once a time when even a single use of this word jumped you beyond an R rating. Then eventually you could use it a few times without this issue, and now you can use it every fourth word and other than having shitty dialogue nobody would care ratings-wise. PG-13 several years ago wouldn't allot it at all. Then there was a period of about 4-ish years where they would allow ONE use of the word before they bumped you up to R. Now they are at around 3-5 times I believe. When The Martian was in development, the greatest amount of speculation (considering the intended PG-13 rating) was on where they were going to use the critical one-off F-bomb. Well, it turned out that some point mid production the rule shifted to allow another use or two. Though there are some theories that they made a trade with the ratings people to drop the ascii-boobs in exchange for an extra.",
"This is purely an American thing. Sex in most of the rest of the Western World is considered a natural, even beautiful thing. Having said that, many other \"non western\" countries are the same. I always used to joke to a friend that in Singapore, for example, if you're 18, you're old enough to vote, drink, get married, die for your country, but goddamnit you're not allowed to watch an R-Rated film (must be 21+)... At least that's how it was when they first brought the R rating in Singapore.",
"Sexism. Female and LGBTQ individuals shown receiving pleasure usually gives the movie an R or NR rating when the same exact scene showing a man with his \"O\" face gets one rating lower. And because we live in a world where sex is more of a sin than violence (unsatisfactory sex education in schools or none at all, slut shaming, limited/expensive family planning in all its forms, etc vs. the fact that you can buy an assault rifle without a background check, the fetishization of power and violence through constant televised contact sports--especially football, etc.) obviously violence is seen as \"bad\" but not as likely to morally corrupt our youth if depicted in movies. Fucking dumb.",
"While watching something doesn't inherently mean you will imitate it, it's not uncommon for teens to be influenced by actions in movies. Now, teens are old enough to understand that absolutely over the top violence is not real. That's why you can have a heap of dead bodies. Because that, usually, cannot be imitated in real life. Now more realistic violence, that's a different story. However, sex, is far easier to imitate than mass murder (for most people, anyways). A 14 year old can realistically have sex, it's not uncommon at all in America. Thus, putting it in movies might drive their already strong horomones through the roof. Thats not the best thing for a population. That's my theory of it, anyways.",
"Sorry if I can't quote anything since this was explained to me a while ago but it's due to western culture. The rating system varies country to country but I'm assuming you're talking about it from a U.S. point of view. U.S. culture was highly influenced by the Puritans who were a religious group and I believe were the dominant religion of the first people to settle the U.S. While violence was common in those days, the Puritans shunned nudity and sexuality. While the U.S. has changed quite a bit since then there is still an echo of that in current culture equating to nudity being something naughty while violence is something cool and interesting. URL_0 If you compare it places like Europe where nudity is more common you can see quite a difference.",
"Because America is backwards religious. I wouldn't say it's the other way around in other countries, but they certainly show a lot less violence and some nudity.",
"Because Canada got the French, Australia got the criminals, and America got the puritans. Never forget that the \"freedom of religion\" principle we were founded on was the right to practice a more ultra-conservative religion than England would allow.",
"It's all based on the culture. Your basically asking the internet why this culture is like this? When you could just ask your parents why it is such a big deal. Other cultures have different values and don't care about a guy and girl doing something, but when it is shown it's not a big deal. As in its not in the center of the screen with big lights showing all the body parts. I guess what I am saying is, when sexuality is shown on TV or movies, it is typically shown as a perverse thing. Not just, o the next door neighbors are banging far off barely noticeable, but rather let's visually show a close up of them with a brief titty or ass flash that is obviously perverse.",
"Pretty much because the ratings system (MPAA) decided as such. Assuming you're American then we go by MPAA ratings. These ratings are representative of what we think is appropriate. Note that when I say what \"we\" think I really mean what they think. See, the MPAA is designed to filter the media to what the modern adult sees as okay to be viewed by certain age groups. Actually, it's similar to the FCC for television. Within these groups people view violence and gore as less of an issue than nudity or sexual behavior. This could be attributed to our current state of being desensitized to violence but not to sex, particularly in America. We consume violence, war, gore on a day to day basis in our media and therefor we have grown to be indifferent. However, for some treason we are still very uncomfortable about the nude human body and sexuality. This is perhaps due to our obsession with appearance and stature and how we choose to portray people as \"pretty\" or \"sexy\" or even just as \"attractive\". This is in contrast to many European countries who have more outspoken ideals on nudity as a pride of the human body in its natural form. A German class I once took with a woman who lived in Germany for many years once stated it was very common to see naked bodies on television alone, nevermind in movies. Sometimes even in children's programming. The body isn't sexualized the way it is here in America. It is viewed as \"okay\" since everyone has one, but here we think it is something to sculpt into a perfect model of what our culture views as beauty. The MPAA also stems from a long history of strange American censorship, often religiously based. We once had a film censorship outline known as \"The Hays Code\". It was highly based upon Christian ideals and prevented many things such as portraying criminals as heros (Tyler Durden, Dillinger, even Jack Sparrow may all have been disallowed under this code). It also seemed to disallow a poor portrayal of the church (good bye Spotlight). And it rendered any type nudity or sexual conduct unfit for film. To counter this, many films started to go the tongue in cheek method. There is a film, the name eludes me at the moment, in which a woman references sex indirectly as she undresses behind a curtain. Both characters had to have separate beds and couldn't talk about sex but used innuendo to create the same effect. Another example is \"Some Like it Hot\". The film involves two men cross dressing to disguise themselves in a women's band but by the end Jack Lemons character identifies with a woman's feelings more. This lead to a large issue between the church and the code and the industry. This argument was ignited further by the ending scene on which an old man who fell in love with Lemons woman persona helps them flee and raves about finally being together. Lemon makes up a few excuses as to why they shouldn't marry but the man dismisses them. At a loss, Lemon removes his wig revealing himself as a man to which the man responds, \"well, nodbodys perfect\". Obviously this hinted at homosexuality and that was a big no no. And yet it's one of the most famous lines of all time. Basically, we allowed the motion picture industry and American culture as a whole to shape our views of what is and is not okay. This has lead to a skewed rating system of us bearing witness to intense violence without emotion in contrast to sexuality as a plague. It is mainly founded originally in religious views but has changed to simply fit the modern imagining of American acceptability. TL;DR: America is very uptight about nudity and sexuality whereas Europe is not. This stems from the beginning of our film industry and was fueled by religious beliefs and values and today is still heavily censored due to or desensitization to violence and our continued fear of sex and nudity. I've added a link below to the code on Wikipedia. It is important to note how ridiculous some of it is such as banning the use of fire arms (which was truly only enforced if the firearms were used against the \"good guys\") as well as the banning of excessive kissing and even violence perpetrated against officers and much more. Essentially the code banned a lengthy amount of conflict and tension in movies and was fought against by artists. Also, while we are on the subject, as silly as some of our current fears of nudity and sex may seem and as ridiculous as the code once was, it actually side some good. It forced filmmakers to approach things from a new perspective. It forced them to try hard to find ways to incorporate these banned subjects through loopholes which lead to some really interesting and innovative techniques. Many of which are still used today. EDIT: read the \"pre code\" section here for a breakdown of the early dos and donts of the code: URL_0",
"Because the system in which we live wants us to be ashamed of our bodies and proud of killing our brothers and sisters.",
"For those knocking Christians for this, consider that in Muslim majority countries, pornography and nudity in films is illegal, and therefore punishable by law.",
"Because the US was originally settled by crazy puritans who got chased out of England for being completely fucking mental and they've left their stain on the culture.",
"The deeper answer is that the MPAA value system is at its root based in conservative American values which is heavily based on christian values and the Bible has plenty of violence in it, but is pretty debbie downer about lust.",
"Plus it is a cultural thing. Most European movies actually display the opposite. In a culture that is traditionally romantically inclined (French and Italian), sex is Usually seen as a common place issue in society. Americans, typically, are more conservative when it comes to sex. The exact opposite is true with violence. Since the U.S. did not endure two brutal world wars in the last century, it is far more comfortable with violence than there violence-phobic neighbors.",
"How can you create wartime propaganda without graphic violence saturated through media aimed at younger walks of life? Kill more, hate more, revenge more, harder better faster stronger. Make guns and money and experience and anger, keep the wheel rolling because sex only sells so much, and we must protect the children who should not be touched by hunger for flesh; just blood, more blood, get them thirsty for conquest, get them eager to throw themselves under the boots of their country's quest for cash",
"If you look at other happy cultures, like France, they are very open about nudity and sexuality. It's not the taboo that it is here. It's part of being human, and is quite necessary for life. When it's locked up in a closet, and unknown to kids/adolescents growing up, there are much higher cases of development and sexual issues as a result. I'm sure you've heard of all the sexual misconduct by priests over the years. They are supposed to be the moral experts, but are developmentally stunted.",
"There are several reasons. First of all many people are uncomfortable talking about sex openly with children. Violence is something that they can wash away as \"fiction\" but sex is \"real\" and so they have to actually talk about it. Further, exposure to lots of violent imagery causes Mean World Syndrome in the population. This makes everyone fear each other and feel that the world is more dangerous than it actually is. This has the side effect of keeping people isolated instead of organized, they are then more likely to want authoritarian governments and it keeps them behaving as good consumers. URL_0 Finally, not all countries are this insane. In many European countries it's the opposite. Violence is taboo and sex and nudity is normal.",
"Because violence is inherent in the human condition. If you leave any two siblings alone for any extended period of time without interfering, one of them will likely either severely wound or kill the other. Certain levels or degrees of explicit violence are still markedly traumatizing, but kids aren't surprised or offended at seeing someone get punched. Sex and sexuality on the other hand, carries with it the danger of premature reproduction. Children may have sexual urges, but teaching them explicit ways to carry them out is a path fraught with peril. There are few ways to see a child expressing sexuality (especially at another person) that isn't going to create a moral & legal quagmire. In short, violence permeates every level of our society. It's a direct expression of power through physical contact which children explore with their world. Sex is natural but also a social construct with rules.",
"I think the most important difference between violence and sex is that, in general, anyone of any age knows violence is bad. Any form of violence, for any reason (other than to stop more violence) is bad. However, sex is a normal part of our lives. The problem is that with sex, there is good and bad. There are guys putting pressure on girls, girls giving in, feelings of love, deception, etc. For young teens, seeing all that sex can skew what they think 'normal' sex is. If they see more and more movies with casual sex, or sex that takes place after the guy is 'persistent', then guys will think that's what they have to do and girls will think they should give in if guys are that persistent. It isn't hard at all to determine if your boyfriend hits you that it's wrong. It takes a lot more maturity and a clearer understanding of sex to know what is okay and what isn't.",
"\"Because Jesus\" or a corrupted ratings board aren't wrong answers, but they're a little dismissive. Most cultures, even cultures without either of those factors, have laws or rules which prohibit viewing of sexual content; sometimes, even if you're an adult. The laws may go overboard to the point of absurdity, but they're not entirely without merit. People tend not to have a physiological reaction to watching violence in the same way they do to watching sex. If watching people getting shot gave a large percentage of people an overwhelming urge to shoot others, then violence in media would be pretty hard to find. But watching sex often triggers the urge to have sex; that's the major difference. But even for those without the urge to fap in response to what they're seeing, many have a strong reaction that just doesn't occur with other scenarios. Violence in the form of horror may also provoke a strong reaction, but violence at that level is usually rated similar to content with sex."
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"https://fi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuvaohjelmien_ikärajat_Suomessa"
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"http://www.audible.co.uk/pd/Film-Radio-TV/Sex-In-Monochrome-Part-1-Audiobook/B01LXU6L9P/ref=a_search_c4_1_3_srTtl?qid=1487904141&sr=1-3"
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5uhyia | The legal status of marijuana in the USA. | If Colorado says it's legal, but it's still a Schedule 1 narcotic, then in what sense is it legal? Also, what about trafficking? Can I send some pot from Colorado to my friend in Massachusetts, where it's also legal? And where the hell is Washington, DC in all of this? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddu4vu7",
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"City and state police in Colorado will not arrest you for posession of marijuana. Federal law enforcement (FBI, DEA, etc.) still could arrest you although they don't usually chase down people who buy weed from licensed dealers in places that have legalized it. If you send some pot from Colorado to your friend in Massachusetts, you committed a crime that crossed state lines which gives the feds reason to get involved and arrest you.",
"Federal law: still 100% illegal State law: varies by state. Colorado allows normal use with limits. Some states allow use for medical reasons. Some it's still 100% illegal."
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5uijgt | Why should men pick up and put down toilet lid instead of women just putting it down? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddu9h64",
"ddu9jt6"
],
"text": [
"I put the lid down when I am done so that when I flush it doesn't spray particulate feces and urine across everything within five feet of the toilet. Nothing to do with females.",
"The Lid of the toilet is the solid covering that prevents children and animals from getting to the water. It should be lifted and put down by both genders. Men if they are standing should then also pick up the seat of the toilet, so as to not pee on it."
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5ujgph | Why does everyone feel the need to go to university after high school? Where did this culture come from? | I'm pretty sure the majority of people in the past turned out fine and didn't feel the pressure to apply to university even though it doesn't guarantee jobs. But the main issue i have is that people who clearly weren't meant to go to university still go. Where did this culture originate? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddui8y3",
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],
"text": [
"The world got more complicated and jobs got a lot more competitive. Think about how much more a doctor needs to know these days than they did 100 years ago. The level of knowledge required to be adequate at a job keeps going up because we know more AND because standards are rising. Jobs are getting more competitive because of this and because we're getting more and more efficient at everything. It's taking less people to get the same job done.",
"3 reasons: 1) In the past, having a college degree was a lot rarer than it is now and was seen as a competitive advantage. Most high paying careers (doctor, lawyer, finance, engineer, etc.) required a degree. Hence, it was very desirable to go to university if you and your family could afford it (remember student loans didn't exist back then). Because of that state of affairs, it became social knowledge that a degree is a path to success. Many from those generations then wanted to ensure their kids had that opportunity. 2) Jobs have been shifting from manufacturing and skilled labor towards science, engineering, and technology. These fields require degrees. At the same time, opportunities to earn a decent living without a degree are shrinking. 3) Easy access to student loans had removed the financial barrier to entry into university. Now anyone can get a loan and go to college. People realize that they need degrees to get high profile jobs. Unfortunately, some students try and fail, racking up huge amounts of debt."
],
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5ujsus | How are the Sami people of Finland "indigenous" compared to the rest of the Finnish people? What makes them so different? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddukpmk"
],
"text": [
"Most European peoples are truly indigenous, at least going back as far as anyone cares to remember. After all, go back far enough and we're all Ethiopian. What makes groups like the Sami special is that they are indigenous but are a minority in all the states they inhabit, and/or have been marginalized by a non-indigenous group (as is the case in the Americas and Australia). The Basques and the Bretons are also often included as \"indigenous\" minorities of Europe. This is in contrast to minorities who aren't indigenous, like say North Africans in France."
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5ujvhb | In most European countries, family culture is a massive factor in life, why is it so different in the US? Why do people avoid it and hate it so much? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ddulo11",
"ddupwus",
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"text": [
"I think op is asking why do a large amount of American (white/black) families kick their kids out at age 18. Or once the kid turns 18 s/he peaces the f out.",
"Individualism in America is considered a virtue and a trait indicative of success and leadership. It's like a baby bird leaving the nest and flying on its own and catching its own food. Many Americans are like this, but there are also groups that remain very family centric.",
"I don't really think it's all that different in the US. You're talking about a huge landmass with a diverse range of cultures. There are large families here who are, and stay, interconnected, and there are other families who want nothing to do with each other.",
"I think you're over exaggerating a bit. The one major difference is multi generational households aren't very common like they are in some parts of the world, but it's not like Americans are walking around in mass trying to avoid their families all the time. There's a reason the day before Thanksgiving is the biggest travel day of the year, and not one of the summer holiday weekends; people are traveling to see their families."
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