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61tsfi | Why do we accept the euthanasia of our pets as an act of mercy but (overwhelmingly) do not euthanize our human relatives? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Legally speaking, animals are generally treated as property and you can do whatever you want with them provided you're not abusing or torturing them. If you want to kill your cow and eat it, the law doesn't stop you. If you want to euthanize your dog, the law doesn't stop you. People are subject to different laws. If you want to euthanize grandma, that's technically murder in most states. There's an obvious disconnect between the fact that vets recommend euthanasia for animals and the fact that it's usually not allowed for humans. Some states have dealt with this to some degree by passing laws allowing euthanasia. The most common opposition comes from religious groups who believe that humans are different from animals and that we have God-given duty to keep humans alive. Some people also worry that humans will abuse euthanasia to get inheritance faster, to get rid of annoying family members, or to avoid healthcare costs. In every state you can at least fill out something called an Advanced Directive (or a similar document), which specifies your medical wishes in advance in case you end up on life support with little hope of being revived. You can't ask a doctor to kill you, but you can order a hospital to remove you from life support and let you die on your own.",
"I really hate these ELI5 posts that obviously have no clear answer and are only questioning why something isn't the way the OP thinks it should be."
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61umep | How were soldiers in old messy wars able to avoid killing friendlies when their armies clashed? | Especially considering everything must have happened so quickly and alot of the time they were wearing very similar looking armor | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is one of the main reasons armies started colour coding themselves. For a while it was pretty easy, kill everyone not wearing the same colour shirt as you, or stay in a line and kill everyone in front of you. It was only with the invention of stuff like cannons and artillery and small arms that \"accidental\" friendly fire started being a real risk. Especially given the way black powder firearms smoke up the place. The fog of war was a very real thing. Way back in the day it was unlikely that you'd launch a volley of arrows at a cluster of people and not know if they were yours or the enemy. Stuff does happen though. I suppose it would be more accurate to say how they minimized friendly fire rather than how they avoided it.",
"The armies would control their ranks, have distinctive armor and clothing, and most likely know the members of their unit fairly well having marched with them in the military for months before the battle. When you live 24/7 with the same group of guys it becomes fairly easy to recognize them even in the heat of combat."
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61va36 | Why are people tried for hate crimes and not just the original crime like murder? | I understand what a hate crime is and I find it deplorable to target someone for their race, sexual identity, etc. Are there stricter punishments for a hate crime murder as opposed to a regular murder? I feel like most crimes are inherently hateful so I'm hoping someone can clarify. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Hate Crime indictments add to the penalty imposed for the original crime. You are tried for murder, but a murder which is also a hate crime will get you a larger sentence.",
"It's the difference between Dylan Roof shooting up any church at random vs specifically targeting a historical and prominent black church with direct intention to hurt and kill black parishioners/people and with the seeming attempt to incite additional racial violence. All crimes are hateful, but the large majority are \"blind\" crimes that intend to generally hurt, vandalize and otherwise cause loss and suffering; but, not hurt someone solely as retaliation for being a specific color, gender, religion, sexual identity, etc. And typically, hate crimes are seen more like domestic terrorism and generally do come with stricter sentences because the crimes tend to involve a deeper level of intention behind them.",
"The federal hate crime law does not add to the penalty for a crime. It merely makes federal resources available for the investigation of a hate crime. This is to empower local prosecutors who might have trouble getting their colleagues in local law enforcement to do their job if the community at large shares the prejudices that led to the victim's demise."
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61veir | What would happen if all foreign troops were pulled out of the middle east this next month? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Political/social consequences are anyone's guess but this is for sure: logistical nightmare to move that many people on such short notice. The cost would be astronomical to accomplish in that timeframe (think: airplane and ship fuel, personnel, short notice contracts, loss of other revenue). A ton of money would be lost in equipment left behind, and in local nation contract abandonment (base food delivery, sanitation, etc). This would cost hundreds of millions if not billions. Give it six months, 12 months, or two years, you'd have a better phased draw-out, where contracts can be properly sourced and terminated, equipment can be salvaged or sold or transported, and persons can be flowed more sensibly over existing transport. Imagine if you had to move out of your living place tonight - everything gone with no exceptions. A lot of disorganization of your stuff and a lot of your stuff would end up abandoned or in the dumpster. If you had a week, it'd be better but still a minor disaster, and a month would be great. Pulling all the non-local military out is kinda like that, but enormous in scale. Edit: if for of"
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61vroy | Why do criminals in movies always ask for unmarked bills. What is the difference between marked and unmarked? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Marked\" bills have had subtle distinctive markings added, or their serial numbers have been recorded, as an anti-theft measure. These bills were never intended to be handed out to customers; they're something for thieves to take so that the police can identify them if they're found in possession of the marked money later on. \"Unmarked\" currency is just regular cash.",
"Banks carry fresh sequential bills. If you rob one then buy groceries every week from the same store you may expect some silver bracelets as change one day. If you hold a hostage or other stupid threat and ask for a pile of money they may mark the bills with special paint to track where you spend them. This could lead you to the same set of bracelets. Hence the request for \"unmarked\" bills."
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61xbby | Can a standing president pardon someone who is charged and found guilty of treason? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes. The president can pardon someone for any crime against the United States. The only limitation is that the pardon cannot effect impeachment proceedings."
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61xm1k | Why aren't telephone scams stopped? | I receive the same telephone scams over and over, people using automated tough guy sounding voices pretending to ask for charity for the police, people with Indian accents and American names who say they are working for microsoft calling about my computer, and I'm reading now that people are getting fake IRS scam calls. How come these people aren't being caught and do we have any potentially effective means of stopping them? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Unfortunately it's because telescammers are now very mobile and use technology to both hinder people from identifying the caller and keep law enforcement from using methods to track and prosecute them. They use techniques like spoofing unknowing peoples phone numbers, or using disposable phone numbers through less than reputable dealers that can be quickly and easily disconnected before moving to the next victim number.",
"those calls originated from other countries. you can't prosecute someone in India for violating a US minor law.",
"best way to deal with the MS callers, is to pretend your doing what they ask. pretend to be completly inept at using the computer. then after about 10-15 mins, reveal that you are actively wasting their time. you know what they want, and you actually just sat on the toilet. they will call you names, and say they will kill you, then they will hang up. and the calls stop. or at least they did for me.",
"The end of phone scams begins with the fact that you own the phone and are in no way obligated to even answer it much less be polite to someone who calls it. Someone calls about your credit card, hang up without an explanation and call the number printed on the back of your card. Someone \"from the IRS\" calls you, hang up the IRS doesn't call you. If the utility is threatening your service unless you pay up immediately, hang up and look up the number for the utility and call directly. If you are actually in trouble with local law enforcement they'll be at your door not on your phone. Hung up. Anybody spot a theme here?",
"Because there is no way to stop it. The way the phone system is built today you can pretend to be any number you want.",
"I had my number spoofed about a month ago (people from my area code texting me or leaving voicemails saying \"who is this?\" or \"take me off your call list\") I contacted authorities and such just to find out if there was a resource for reporting this and was basically told there was nothing to be done and to change the # that I had for years. Also checked with several representatives of the service provider to see if they was any resource for noting the assigned phone # as being associated with fraudulent activity and found that every person I spoke with barely seemed to care. It's curious that companies wouldn't take the same approach with phone fraud as credit companies do with fraud in their industry.",
"You ever played whack-a-mole at the arcade? Same thing. They are constantly moving/changing targets. They use spoofed/fake numbers, and like others have said, it's not feasible to try to prosecute someone in Nigeria for breaking a minor US law.",
"I've worked in a call center for small business voip phones and a major credit cards fraud dept, so with hopefully some information on this here it goes. A small company in India will call a voip provider to set up and account so they have phones that ring as US phones, the name will be [tech word] and some thing generic like geek help or something. Some companies will rent these phone line and use it as much as they can before the payment they made doesn't clear at which point they just set up a new company name and continue businesses. We can't just say no tech companies in India can use voip in USA or something because there are legit companies and legit customers, although some voip companies do blacklist some countries. Additionally credit cards face much the same program where when verifying a merchant so they can run charges through your card it can be hard to verify the legitimacy of a company. Right now the big things I see are companies saying they're the Irs and coercing people to buy gift cards and read them the code, we can't ban Walgreens and we can't ban gift cards. Sometimes it's a scam to sell skin cream or junk that doesn't work with free product, just pay for shipping that turns into an 80$ subscription monthly that you technically agreed to, these companies pretend to be legit and have a million generic names, we blacklist companies after a trend but it takes time and they can just make a new name. The last one we see related to this is tech support being billed at ridiculous amounts, it's often \"legit\" or just the company pretending, but it's billed after tricking the customer agreed to pay, which is in truth partially the customers fault for being naive. Sometimes we just write off this debt to keep a customer happy but I try to kindly convince people to be a bit more skeptical. Hope that helps"
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61yg2a | Why violence and bad behavior is more tolerated among sports players in game than members of the general public. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Often enough when playing physical sports especially high contact sports like football, players will get intense adrenaline rushes and it will often activate a fight their flight mode. As someone who played as a lineman in high school football, blocking or pushing at the front line is practically always a fight as part of the game. You push pull, switch, pick, block you name it, some players will punch you in the gut if they know they can get away with it and a ref doesn't see it. A player getting a hit on you by accident will happen too. Often all this will lead to other player feeling attacked and will cause them to retaliate. It's more accepted because it's more natural due to the nature of the sport. A regular guy on the street fighting a person is not, and there is much more intent on harm."
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61zjd2 | Why do the Beatles' recordings have such higher audio quality than their contemporaries? | What were the Beatles doing differently that allows the quality of the recordings to still sound so modern today, when most of the rest of the music of the era sounds like it was recorded in a basement or something? Obviously the quality of the music is subjective but for some reason the quality of audio just seems so next level with the Beatles. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you're talking about the original recordings, I would speculate that being the biggest band in the world gave them access to the best recording equipment and technicians/producers in the world. If you're talking about modern recordings, The Beatles (as well as many other popular bands) have had their music remastered and remixed a number of times as audio technology has improved because the songs are popular enough to warrant that kind of investment. A less popular musician may not be worth that kind of time and money, so the songs are just digitized over with minimal processing.",
"Quite a few things - for one, good song arrangement which allowed for good clean recordings. Secondly, a legendary producer in George Martin. They were also very innovative in the studio as well, so even though much of the recording technology used would be antiquated by today's standards, they were able to get really cool sounds. Also, that said - they also had nice gear in terms of instruments and microphones. Since most of their stuff was recorded with only 4 tracks, there is a lot of bouncing around that happened and (what would today be consider) weird mix choices - for example, in many mixes, drums and/or bass will only occupy the left or right channel of the mix. But - everything is mixed really well because George Martin was extremely adept at mixing and producing to bring out the best elements in each song."
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61zzyx | How exactly did Russia influence the US elections? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The full extent of Russian interference, we do not yet know. Publicly we only became aware of their actions a few months ago; the FBI has only been investigating these actions since the summer of 2016. Russia has a powerful and well-practiced intelligence organization; thus, it will take some time to uncover the full width and breadth of their involvement. I won't go into details regarding the [Extent of the Trump Administration's Ties to Russia]( URL_2 ), but you can check them out on the handy linked chart becuase they provide means, motive, and opportunity to explain *why* Russia would hack our elections in favor of a particular candidate. To begin, [The FBI and American Intelligence organizations have confirmed Russia interfered to back Trump]( URL_1 ) The following quote is a collaborative statement from American intelligence regarding the matter: \"Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the U.S. presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary Hillary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We have high confidence in these judgments.\" The manner of their interference, that we are currently aware of, [Begins with their hacking into the databases of Democratic organizations]( URL_3 ) From there, [Russians used intermediaries to pass the information to WikiLeaks, so as not to reveal their hand behind the manipulation]( URL_0 ) WikiLeaks released documents strategically, at key moments for Clinton, to put serious dampeners on her already fraught public perception. WikiLeaks has continued to release nothing related or damaging to Trump, while releasing details related to the CIA with very suspicious timing just days after Trump made self-damaging accusations against Obama for spying on him, in what would appear to be an attempt to deflect attention from him. Additionally, [Russian botnets appear to have helped spread fake news articles with misinformation about Clinton and with Pro-Trump messaging for months during the campaign]( URL_4 ). These were shared extensively on social media, and helped influence public perception of the candidates based wholly on false and manufactured material. This is the interference *that we are aware of*. That is to say, this is what our intelligence community has material evidence of, and has gone on public record to disclose. There are numerous other theories about deeper levels of involvement. Whether or not Trump was knowingly colluding with Russia is still under investigation; however, balance of probability strongly suggests that he and his lieutenants could not, and would not have been the benefactors of the aid of a massive Russian intel operation without"
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6204iw | How do you play Dungeons and Dragons | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> and think it's a total nerd game. That reputation isn't entirely inaccurate. > I do have plenty of imagination. Well then you may enjoy the game. D & D is a particular subset of \"role-playing games\" which is focused on a setting of mideval knights, swords and sorcery, and mythical beasts. Think about the genera of \"fantasy books\" within \"fiction books\". A role-playing game is basically a method of collective storytelling, coupled with elements of improvisational acting and board games to varying extent. The structure is that one person \"runs\" the story, deciding the setting, environment, and challenges presented to the main characters of the story, as well as the behavior of minor characters. The other players decide who the main characters are and each control the actions of one of those main characters. The GM (or Game Master) is basically the central author of the story. They invent and describe the world in which the other player's characters exist. For example, \"You find yourselves in a dimly lit, rustic inn. Dirty quilts and even rugs cover the walls displaying past battles and triumphs, which today are faded and lost equally in the memory and flickering light from the central hearth. Your compatriots have been working together for several weeks to guard a trade caravan coming to this town with a port to a major river, and as the caravan is moved to a barge you find yourselves unemployed. Please describe your characters to everyone.\" At this point each player takes turns describing their fictional character, from their appearance to personality. The players decide what they are going to try to do while the GM decides what is available to happen, what can happen, and ultimately what *does* happen. They might add in an obvious story hook, like \"Sitting nearly hidden in the corner of the room is a stout, honest-faced man with four empty chairs around a table, each equipped with a mug of beer. Evidently he has been waiting for four people to arrive for longer than expected, as the lack of foam and increasingly nervous expression shows something must have gone wrong.\" At this point the players are expected to inquire with this man about his troubles, which probably will end up with him hiring them to solve some problem involving the disappearance of his compatriots and catapult the group into an interesting adventure. The actual mechanics of the game are used to provide a sort of structure about what can occur in the world. For example a player might say something like \"Edward, my character, attempts to leap onto the roof of the inn with a single bound!\" at which point the GM needs to decide if this can occur or not. By having a series of rules governing how strong or agile a typical human, or whatever the player character is, can be will either allow or disallow such an action. But having success or failure be assured would make such a collective storytelling somewhat dull so an element of randomness is added to spice things up. For example suppose Edward is walking across a narrow building ledge above the street, in the icy cold of a January snowstorm. Edward is a somewhat skilled sneakthief, but these conditions likely challenge even him. Does he successfully navigate the ledge or not? The game rules will provide guidelines for how difficult such an action is in order to provide a \"DC\", a number which indicates the criteria of success. Similarly the rules also specify the benefits of the skills Edward has both natural and acquired, by adding numbers for his natural agility to a number indicating his trained acrobatic skills. Finally whoever is playing Edward will roll dice, usually a 20-sided die, and add that result to the sum of their skills and natural attributes. If this exceed the DC then they succeed, if it does not they fail, with the GM deciding what occurs in both cases. Likely Edward would fall upon failure and the rules provide guidelines for working out how damaging a fall from various heights would be, and the GM deciding how high he was. Anyway, the mechanics can become complex in some systems or extremely simple in others. The main idea of the game is to collectively participate in forming a story and the inevitable hilarity and enjoyment of the imagined events. Do two close friends stand stalwart together against a hopeless tide of oncoming beasts? Do new acquaintances bond over unraveling a devilish mystery involving marriage, murder, and the blackest vengeance well-earned? The game is only as good as it is played, and excellent players can form an excellent experience. If you aren't having fun you are doing it wrong and should stop doing it that way.",
"Think of it as an interactive story told by the DM rather than a game. You build a character, you're responsible for that character and its story in the story world of the DM.",
"It's not that complicated and you can even play digitally. Check out URL_0 . Everything is done by rolling dice and cooperative story telling between the players, and the game/dungeon master. The basic rules are available for download, and they describe more than enough to get started.",
"Okay. So the main idea of the game is that a group of geeky people get together and tell a story by playing a game. One person is the Dungeon Master. They arbitrate rules, and come up with the adventure that the other players, who will be playing the Heroes are going on. They will portray the villains, the various incidental characters (the kindly old man who needs to be rescued from the dragon, the Queen who demands her uncle be rescued, the barkeep who gives the heroes advice) and figure out the basics of what the story is going to be. There is a series of rules that the players use to come up with their characters, who will be fantasy adventurers that use weapons or magic or both to go on grand quests, usually involving breaking into lost dungeons, dealing with traps and monsters, finding treasure and slaying evil creatures. The basic gameplay mechanic involves rolling a twenty sided dice. Basically, if there's anything that requires luck or chance, such as trying to hit someone, or casting a spell, or disarming a trap, you roll dice and add the relative stat from your character sheet, a list of what your character is good and bad at that the rules help you generate. Some games are very much just tactical combat, like playing an MMO to win. Some games are very much just roleplaying, like an evening of improv theatre, only much geekier. Many games are somewhere in the middle.",
"> How do you play Dungeons and Dragons It helps if you actually look for instructions. Particularly, the subreddit /r/dnd would be of interest. They have a page called [Getting Started]( URL_0 ) that will be of use. Chances are, you'll want to start with the *5th Edition*, as it is more simplified than the previous. Under that heading on the *Getting Started* page, there is a link to the free official Basic Rules/Guidelines to start playing. Beyond that, /r/lfg can help you get in touch with others who might be interested in playing either locally or online. It's usually a very friendly community, and easily willing to engage with interested new players."
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621ea2 | How is it so many books say 'New York Times Bestseller'? How is this possible? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The NYTimes Bestseller list just tracks sales numbers - it says nothing about the quality of the book. It also says nothing qualifying about the title itself - if your book showed up at the bottom of one of the multiple Bestseller lists for just one week, you can call your book a New York Times Bestseller for the rest of its printing lifetime. There exist firms that will manipulate the list for a fee to get you onto it for that week. Not only that, but some authors/publishers will carry that title over to other books. If you look at some books that claim they were a NYTimes Bestseller, you'll sometimes notice underneath the header, \"author\" written in smaller font. This book that you are holding wasn't a Bestseller, but the author did write one in the past and can continue to advertise his work forever afterwards.",
"The New York Times has numerous Best Seller lists that are broken down by genres, mediums, demographics, etc. So when a book says \"New York Times #1 Bestseller\" it doesn't necessarily mean that it's the #1 best selling book in the country, but it MIGHT be the #1 best selling Young Adult fantasy paperback imported reprint.",
"The New York Times keeps a list of the best selling books of each week. So a book just needs to be one of the top ten books sold in that week, in one of the various categories that the New York Times keeps track of. (Harry Potter was so popular that they made Young Adult fiction into its own category so that the series wouldn't crowd out every other book published.)",
"A couple reasons... all they have to do is make the list, not be #1. If they reach #1 then it'll say #1 Best Seller. Also, there are a number of different categories for fiction, non-fiction, business, trade paperback (the ones for $5.95 at drug stores and airports), etc. And they only need to make the list for a week to claim they're a best seller. Sometimes, publishers/publicists will even bulk buy 1000's of copies if close just to make the list, figuring the investment will pay off with more sales later on. They may send to media/bloggers, give out at speaking events the author does, etc."
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6225us | How could the Ancient Greeks have such detailed immaculate sculptures, and such basic paintings? | I mean, no disrespect at all to the painters of the day, but if you compare the two there seems to be a real lack in detail. Was it just a cultural thing, like they didn't take paintings that seriously? Or could they just, like, not imagine three dimensions within a two dimensional space? What was going on with the ancient Greek painters? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Believe it or not those basic paintings were the style of the day. It is not like Greek painters could not paint intricate works of art due to lack of skill. It just so happened that people wanted painting in that style of simplicity."
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622v7k | Exactly what do consultancy firms do? | I'm graduating soon and I have several friends who will shortly be working for consultancies. I have no idea what they do. The only explanation I've gotten is "solve problems," and I know that's at a large-business level, but what the heck will my friend be doing day-to-day? What kinds of consultancies are there? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"a consultant's job is to be the specialist. specialist of what? well it depends on the job. consultancy firms are basically full of specialists of every specialty. some are specialists in computer systems, others in accounting and finance, others in business analytics. companies hire consultants to deal with short term projects that they need a high skilled person without having to try to hire one blind from general job market.",
"Usually they find ways to save companies money. They can also find ways to save the owner time, so he or she can spend more time with family. They can also find ways to improve employee morale or employee production. Often the case, despite costing the owner or company money, consultancies will save the company more money in the long run. This is most often the case for large size businesses (ones that make at least US$1,000,000 in revenue per year). Of course businesses that have little to no money would not benefit as much from consultancies because they shouldn't be spending thousands of dollars on consultant data that tells them they shouldn't be spending thousands of dollars on consultant data. I hope that makes sense."
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623f82 | Why is America so far behind other countries when it comes to things like PTO, maternity leave, etc? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The wealthy have managed to convince the working class that the working class is evil and the cause of all their problems.",
"The United States is much more laissez-faire in regards to the economy than most other places. Anecdotally, a common response I've heard is that \"why should I have to pay for your decision to have a child?\" This refers to public sector (one's tax dollars are paying for it) and private sector employees. It's also arguable that businesses have much greater influence in the United States vs. other developed countries due to their ability to extensively lobby members of government. These businesses, of course, would be opposed to being required to provide PTO and maternity leave. Another reason is culture: in the US, many people don't use their existing PTO due to responsibilities at work. We as a culture make it acceptable to obligate ourselves to our work even when we could temporarily leave that job while getting paid. Significant social pressure could theoretically shame companies for pressuring individuals to not take their PTO and make this much less likely. This culture can be traced back to the US as a wide open \"land of opportunity\" where significant effort is/was the only thing keeping you from any level of success you desired, or at least that's what we celebrate. It also doesn't help that many of the immigrants during the formative years of the country were from northern Europe, themselves known for work ethic, specifically the \"protestant work ethic,\" in which \"god helps those who help themselves.\"",
"The government doesnt set that - Individual companies do so. Thats the way things were done post ww2, benefits came as part of compensation because the state wouldnt do it. Ie, california has much better worker rights than most states, 3 month maternity leave or something compared to 6 weeks in texas (making numbers up but its close) On the other hand though, if you work for a very good company in an important role, no country can really beat the salary and compensation of an american engineer / banker / lawyer. Facebook offers like 150k salary + stock + benefits starting to new college grads. They offer paternity leave and will freeze your sperm/eggs for you as well"
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623o43 | The Philosphy of Objectivism | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Reality is what it is--facts are what they are--independent of anyone's wishes, hopes, or fears. This goes for cultures as well as individuals. Human beings can gain knowledge about reality only by using reason, which is based on sensory experience. Since contradictions can't exist in reality, if you arrive at a contradiction, you have made an error. Human beings have free will and must choose to act to sustain their own lives by their own choices. These choices need to be guided by morality in order to consistently support human life. Morality consists of principles akin to the principles of science, but applicable to the living of one's life generally. Moral virtue means sustaining one's life by reason-based action, (rationality.) The initiation of physical force is always destructive to human life, and, outside of some emergency situations, is immoral and always worse than not initiating force. Government should exist solely to protect individuals from initiations of force by others, such as robbery and murder. Genuine art is a recreation of reality in such a way that it depicts the artist's basic view of life in a perceptible form. Technically good art performs this function well. Philosophically good art is art whose depiction matches the reality of human beings and their relationship to existence. Those are the very basic positions Objectivism takes. My [Introduction to Objectivism page]( URL_0 ) starts with an ELI5-friendly video, as well."
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625363 | why numbers are generally the same despite people using different alphabets. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Numbers are easier to learn then an alphabet. And our current number system are not very old and spread well after we had alphabets that is recognizable today. Before the Arabic numerals (which came from India) the Roman empire used Roman numerals. This was very good at counting and organizing units but was rather difficult to do maths with. There were a number of different techniques used based on physical objects. However when the Arabian scholars and merchants brought the new number system from India it soon replaced the old systems. This allowed for a better economic system. It was now much easier to calculate interest and divide ownership and so on. This was things that were very hard to do with the old systems. And even when most switched to using the numbers that came with the new number systems there are still alternative numbers. For example Chinese can use the traditional symbols for the numbers."
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625hkb | If Islam is aniconic, why have Ayatollahs allowed their images to saturate the landscape? | At least in the context of Iran (a self-proclaimed Islamic republic), the Ayatollahs are considered semi-divine, in some cases even on par with the Prophet ( URL_0 ), so why have they allowed their images to become iconic when iconography is forbidden? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This isn't really a situation that singles out muslims or Islam. The fact is every single religion has followers that do not follow the rules set in place by said religion. Christianity, well known for its belief that children are without sin, always go to heaven, and other such claims has many high ranking Christian officials in the church who molest children. Buddhists, well known for their pacifism, has followers who are violent. And Islam has their iconography. These are just a few quick examples but basically the answer to your question is the human race will always have hypocrites and no religion is perfect when it comes to its own rules or followers. When it comes to religion, my general consensus is to follow the moral outlinings in order to be a better person, but leave the rest at the door. Fanatics are not incredibly religious, they are just crazy. And every religion has them.",
"Iconography is not barred by the Koran. The ban on iconography comes from the Hadith, a collection of stories about Muhammad and quotations attributed to him. Some Muslims treat the Hadith as religious law. Some Muslims think it’s a bunch of nonsense that was mostly cooked up after Muhammad died. It’s similar to how some Jews see Kosher as a set of food preparation laws that only mattered in the ancient Middle East while other Jews have expanded them into a complex web of restrictions to ensure that they couldn’t possibly transgress against God. These different views tend to be expressed through the Islamic sects that dominate Islam in different regions of the world.",
"Iran is primarily Shia/Shiite (singular/plural of the same word). The description OP gave is not accurate for Sunnis, who make up about 85% of people who identify as Muslims. It is more accurate to describe many Shiite's views, however."
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625n6q | Campaign contributions vs. economic pressure | It's common for people to feel that corporate political campaign contributions are not good things in many cases, and that they should be severely limited, or even banned. Many of those same people are also in favor of corporations using financial pressures to change policy (like the companies that are moving business away from NC because of the "bathroom law" issue). What's the difference between the two that makes one okay and one not? I want it to be more than "when they're on my side, it's ok", but I can't find an overarching principle that makes this view workable. What am I missing? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I think I can explain my opinion of the difference in terms of a real world example. If you're a farmer selling to a butcher, you might be clear that you only support butchers who sell locally grown meat. If the butcher decides to start sourcing outside farmers, nothing's forcing you to keep doing business with him. On the other hand, if you start donating money to the butcher, and saying \"isn't it good that you only source local farmers? Here, have some cash because we're friends\" then you're manipulating the market at the expense of the consumers. You're not threatening to go to another butcher, there might not *be* any other butchers who are happy to do business with you under your (perhaps unreasonable) terms, so you use bribes and the threat of withdrawing money to coerce the butcher into doing what you want him to. The difference is that one is a free market, you get to take your business with people prepared to work for your terms, and the other is bribing someone in a position of power to strongarm them into giving you a consumer-unfriendly advantage.",
"Using your business as a tool to make a statement to legislators is a simple, direct and clear way to let them know you want them to change their policy and cause them some headaches if they do not comply. They have no obligation to give in to your demands in order to stay in power, but they are given a clear message indicating that their actions are not popular with you. This is a protest against a specific policy and very clearly advertised as such. Corporate campaign contributions affect the political system in a much more covert and sinister way. The power in any free society should originate from the people, not corporations. This is because a society by definition is made up by a group of people who collectively decide what is moral and ethical behaviour. A corporate entity has no sense of morality since it's only goal is to maximize profits. Granted, a corporation may appear to act according to the moral standards of society, but this is merely a way to avoid lesser profits due to public backlash or outcry. I don't mean to act cynical or accuse corporate leaders of being inhumane and bad persons. This is simply a consequence of letting a group of people work together with limited personal liability and a common goal of getting money out of the enterprise. As the decisions as to where to spend the corporate assets are made with regards to what will give the best return on investment in the long run, there is no real connection to what the members of society would regard as being \"fair\" or moral (when taken into account the above restrictions due to the company wanting to avoid bad will). Corporate donations are thus made to those legislators who are judged to be likely to enact policies beneficial to the corporation's profits. Donations in and of themselves do not cause the legislators to change policy. That would be bribery and is naturally illegal. It is the knowledge of the legislator that the corporation's money will help them get their name plastered in front of all their constituents' faces, and thus be more likely to be elected, that causes the legislator to align their policies with the interests of the donors. This is a simple relationship: * Legislator wants to get elected or re-elected. * A corporation donates money to a PAC which promotes the legislator. * The legislator realises they are more likely to be elected if they enforce policies which benefit the top donors. * The corporation sees that the legislator is susceptible to this investment and pours more donations promoting the legislator. * The legislator gets elected since the voters are not unbiased and well-informed. They do not have the time to research all candidates, they pick the one they are most familiar with. * The legislator enacts the corporation's interests in the hope that they will get their support in subsequent elections. * The corporations happily obliges since they now have gotten ample return on their investment. And the cycle continues... That is the difference. The difference between letting a soulless corporation indirectly dictate laws that affect the members of society, as opposed to just protesting policies they to not support."
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62804t | Why do large telecom, cable, and internet providers have such a culture of poor customer service? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In the most simple terms, customer services does not make the company any money. In fact it COSTS them money, so they try to find ways to reduce that cost the most they are able. They only want to keep it so that the cost of lost customer revenue is less than the cost of operating the service. If lost customer revenue is more than service, they will pay to get better service, if less, they will skimp on the service budget until it reaches an equilibrium.",
"Usually, its the cost of customer acquisition vs cost of customer retention. You examples are companies that have a high cost of customer acquisition and a low cost of customer retention. This means, it's really expensive to get you to be a customer, but once you are a customer, it doesn't cost that much to keep you. These are mostly subscription services, where there is a lot of inconvenience involved in switching to a competitor (if there is a competitor). This means you will accept a heap of abuse before you take your business elsewhere (if you even have a choice). So, they will save money where they can (customer service) and spend money where they must (get new customers). On the other hand, services, like a carpet cleaning service find it hard to retain customers, so giving good service becomes a reason you stay. They spend money on customer retention and spend money on customer acquisition and they can't really afford to cut costs on either. In these cases, the place they save money is the cost or providing the service in ways that aren't detectable by the customer.",
"Because the don't NEED to treat you well - generally, telecom companies have regional monopolies so they don't really risk losing you as a customer. All you really are is an account that sends monthly payments to them. This might change with new players such as Google entering the market dominated by the major Telcos, and providing new competition. Additionally, there is no real separation between customer service and sales. CSRs are expected to upsell or at the very least retain your business (and can lose out on compensation for not doing so), which can come across as pushy and can take away from the caring and service-oriented experience a customer might expect."
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628u4c | How come accents go away when people sing. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't. What you may be hearing is someone imitating a singer with a differing accent. You will note that in certain cultures you'll detect very strong accents in singing. Country music usually has a very Southern United States accent attached. British rock music can sometimes be detected because of how it's common for British people to sometimes add an intrusive \"r\" sound to the end of some words. Think *\"idear\"* instead of idea, or *\"sawr\"* instead of saw.",
"It's always freaked me out that you can't understand Ozzy Osborne when he talks, but is clear as day when he sings",
"At least for english, it is just that some pronunciations are easier to produce while singing, and it happens to be vaguely American. [Today I Found Out]( URL_0 ) has a video on it that is pretty good."
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6292d5 | Why must we fight for net neutrality EVERY year? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because removing net neutrality can earn ISPs billions of dollars. It is in their best interests to try to get it removed (but not our best interests). 2 years ago, by making ISP's Common Carriers in the US, this was the official enforcement of net neutrality, but the ISP's can still try to get congress to change the rules for common carriers.",
"My understanding of stuff is that net neutrality and net privacy are not the same things at all. I'll try to paraphrase by memory how the two things were explained to me as if they were different. Net neutrality became a buzzword for a specific thing that ISP providers were doing to other corporations and how that affected us as customers of those corporations. To give an example, TimeWarner would block all access to connection to websites for Verizon because they didn't want their ISP clients to search for better deals from a competitor. Sometimes it even became a sort of extortion racket. An ISP could block a website from their customers and then demand payment for \"reparation of excess stream useage\" from the website before they would unblock the website for their customers. The most common example of net neutrality issue was that some ISP providers were throttling and restricting streams from Netflix because they were \"using too much bandwidth\" which is an issue because all ISP's like to tell you that data is a rare and expensive limited natural resource that they must carefully regulate before we use it all up faster than it can replenish iteself! (rolls eyes). Back to serious topic, another thing ISP providers were doing were charging huge surcharges to companies like Netflix to refrain from throttling their streams, or to customers to allow \"extra streaming capacity\" to use Netflix. The major reason ISP providers did this was because again, companies like Netflix were competitors. If you stream video from Netflix, the chances are higher that you will cancel your cable bill, or something similar. So the \"neutrality\" part of the FCC laws that were enacted was to stop this sort of thing, because ISP's should have no right to filter or throttle what content you want to consume out of the desire to interfere with fair market trade. This is especially true when you consider they often have a monopoly in their markets. If you don't like what your ISP is doing, most people don't have any options to find some other provider in their area. This is a whole other issue that needs to be dealt with. The net privacy issue is the one that concerns people because of the bill was just passed by senate and house. It's a bit more complicated than that, because the bill is actually a repeal and replacement of some points of another bill that was started last year, and also the relocation of jurisdiction from one overblown bloated government regulation department to another. But that's really not \"the issue\". The issue is that the concept that Google, Facebook, and now your ISP should have some right to monetize your own personal activity on your internet time in order to generate ad revenue, or sell the data to massive analytics companies that use the data later for targeted \"marketing opportunities\". The thing about this bill is that previously, it didn't stop Facebook from such practices, or any other website company where you had to create an account. The concept behind that was if you wanted to keep your life private, simply don't use those social media type websites because there are other alternatives. The new bill is basically giving the same opportunities to ISP providers who you purchase your internet access from, because they complained that websites aren't regulated and have an unfair advantage in opportunity. The concern is further than the concept that they might just sell what you do to advertisers, but say, they could sell your health searches like \"lung cancer\" to insurance companies who can then see what you're searching and prepare to raise costs and premiums against you personally based on that data that you might have lung cancer issues and thereby avoid the law in the Affordable Healthcare Act which requires that they cannot raise costs to customers based on previous conditions. Again though, this is nothing that Google wasn't already legally allowed to do before now anyway. I used to work for this guy, this really shady guy in the late 1980's who did a mailing advertisement scheme. Some of you may remember, how you'd get these envelopes full of coupon printouts trying to get you to go take your business to a lot of other places, like $5 off coupon for a drycleaner's shop, buy one steam carpet room and get a second free offers, stuff like that. Well that's a mailing ad scheme. The people who print the coupons purchased mailing names and lists of people and their addresses from phone companies, or other middle man companies that laboriously copied it all from phone books and stuff. Then they'd sell the concept to businesses that we can send coupons in the mail to all these people on this list for x amount of dollars to bring you new business! And the advertising/publishing company that did all this purchased block lists of names and addresses, like 500 dollars to get 2000 addresses with x zip code, etc. This is really not any different than what's going on now. People have been selling your personal information for profit since before there ever was an internet. The truth is, large companies have been invading your privacy for almost a century now, regardless of the technology involved. edit: removed opinionated speculation",
"Defeating an enemy one time doesn't make it never reappear to oppose you again. If it lives at all, unless it changes its principle reason for opposing you in the first place, it will go away, regroup, retrain, strengthen, then attack again. That's how it is with everything in this representative republic. If you value something strongly enough, you must continue to fight for it to keep it alive, and teach your children and grandchildren why and how to effectively fight for it as well. Imagine the thing you value as being a plant. If you stop watering it, it will die. If you don't keep pests away, it will be consumed. If you don't protect it, it will die. If you don't fertilize it properly, it will get sick and die. If you don't trim and prune it properly, it will become overgrown, consume all its available resources, become anemic, and die. Keeping your plant alive and healthy requires regular attention and maintenance, and, sometimes, 100% focus on defending it.",
"Because somehow every year people forget that state-endorsed monopolies that receive billions of dollars every year in tax credits are not plucky small businesses on the verge of going under...",
"Because our victories on net neutrality have been really weak. The bills that we've been fighting, like PIPA and SOPA, weren't voted on. They were withdrawn. The 2015 FCC regulation on net neutrality was just an administrative reclassification of Internet service providers as \"common carriers\" which then subjected the ISPs to rules that prevented paid prioritization under Title 2 of the Communications Act. Hillary Clinton in 2015 described this as merely [\"a foot in the door. It's a values statement. ... [The FCC] is hanging this on Title 2 because it's the only hook they've got.\"]( URL_0 ) What we really need, in order to make a victory on net neutrality stick, is to pass a law through Congress. We need a majority of Representatives in the House. We need a majority of Senators in the Senate. We need the President to sign it into law. We don't have that yet, and the majority party in Congress is on the other side, so we have to keep fighting for net neutrality and privacy every year just to prevent laws that would make things worse.",
"It's a war of attrition, and the money hoarders are very patient and determined to steal your liberties and money. Let your attention wander and theyll push their agenda through and itll take a generation to get it back (if ever!)",
"Our country is set up in such a way that money eventually wins out. There's money to ve made in not having net neutrality, so money gets sent in a constant stream to anyone who supports that agenda. Eventually the money buys the votes needed to get enough lawmakers to make it win. When it gets shot down, they are allowed to keep trying, year after year. Since money buys votes and there's always more money going to the law makers willing to sell out their citizens, it always happens.",
"Because the \"enemy\" in this regard is fighting against net neutrality EVERY year, and they will NEVER stop.",
"There was an election in 2016 for control of the senate and the White House. One side said they would repeal regulations which they claimed was bad for jobs. That appealed to working class whites, so they won. These regulations included protections for the environment and consumers. Net neutrality falls into the latter category. People stopped talking about net neutrality because everyone assumed Hillary was going to win, and it would have just stayed in place.",
"Because you, as a people have repeatedly voted against your interest to have money grubbing lawmakers, empowered lobbying groups and corporations, thereby allowing them to collectively screw you every opportunity they get.",
"Short answer: The corporations OWN the politicians. The corporations OWN this country. That thing you get to do in November, where you walk out thinking you're an awesome citizen for participating in the process, then doing nothing until the next election day...that's an exercise to make you think you have a say in how this country is being run. Newsflash...you don't. Often the politicians themselves don't have a lot of say because if they don't kowtow to their campaign financiers, they'll buy another politician in the next election. The real reason we'll never see real tax reform and publicly financed elections is because that would remove too much power from the politicians' and corporations hands. It will never happen. The public just isn't interested in anything more than the letter behind their candidate's name. Washington knows this. The corporations know this. They are laughing at us!",
"Silly human. Rights must always be fought for. Over and over. Corps want money and governments want power. Those are things they can only get by taking them from the people. Corporations use government to compel you to spend and government gets the power of how you are allowed to spend. You should not only know this now and here. It should be ingrained upon you forever. When you see a new law passed ask yourself, How does the government benefit? When you see a regulation being passed to keep evil companies from getting evil all over you instead look closely and you will almost always see how it just insulates big companies from having to compete with newer companies and gives more regulatory power to the government. Almost every new law or regulation follows this. In short, the nature of government requires you to be vigilant all the time, forever. The only way towards not having to defend your freedoms every year is to no longer have any worth defending.",
"Two reasons, neither of which are specific to net neutrality. First, people don't care enough to get involved in a long-term fight if their short-term needs are being fulfilled. The cycle is easy and obvious: our government overlords want to do something the people don't like, the people rally against it, our government overlords back down a little to see how serious it is, the people continue to rally, and our government overlords drop it — for now. Then, later on, when the people are distracted by other things and the immediate crisis has passed, they do it again. Only this time there isn't as much of an uproar. Some people think it's old news that's just popping up again, other people think it's already happened, other people are distracted by other things, and still others just can't or don't care any more. But maybe the people get heard again, and our government overlords drop it again. Then, a few months or a year later, it happens again. And this time it gets passed. Where there were a million people screaming bloody murder all over the news and the internet the first time around, by the third go-around it's old and boring news and people don't like old and boring news. They ignore it. And second, our government overlords get paid *big money* by special interest groups to make things happen for them. Don't be deluded into thinking that they work for the people. They don't. They work for industry and nobody else. Unless you have a few million dollars to throw their way, they aren't going to do anything that's in your best interests. \"Elected\" officials are little more than spineless puppets who are willing to sacrifice everyone and everything (except for what's near and dear to them personally, of course) in order to make money. So when the telecom/ISP industry wants to gut net neutrality, you can be damned sure they're laying out millions of dollars into the coffers and pockets of every elected and appointed official out there to make it happen. And if it doesn't happen this time, it'll happen the next time, or the next time. So long as those companies are raking in billions of dollars in profit and paying virtually zero taxes, they'll have enough money to pay off whoever they want."
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629aw2 | Why is it that the government can't distribute part of our tax money evenly across presidential candidates and remove lobbying from the equation entirely? Wouldn't this level the playing field in terms of campaigning while limiting the level of influence business has in government affairs? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Of course this would be an ideal system! But corporate interests prevent this from ever coming to pass. Right now they can pay money for influence via PACs and outright donations. Any politician who proposed reform of the campaign finance system to resemble something like this would be starved of funds by corporations, and never get elected into office. [The Democrats have tried to push for finance reform several times]( URL_0 ), and the Republicans have always voted it down.",
"We do something like that, offering presidential candidates matching funds if they agree to certain spending limits. However that creates a new problem. It makes the government (through the FEC the agency that distributes the funds) essentially the arbiter of who is and isn't qualified to be president. One reason (far from the only reason) third parties have no shot at being president is they need to get 5% of the popular vote before they qualify for these matching funds.",
"They *could* get a bit - URL_0 *Side note* You can also see who gave how much money to federal candidates on the FEC page, if you're interested. It can be good reading when paired with google searches of top donors for politicians who especially seem to have interests beyond their voters. States have their own board of election websites with information for state campaigns. Back to your post - A couple problems. 1) it's not just the president that matters - in fact some would argue he matters less than the composition of congress. 2) state politicians often have a bigger immediate impact on a person's quality of life than federal politicians do. In short, it's my opinion that other elections should be in the loop on any funding reform - though that would likely be handled on a state by state basis. 3) the amount of private donations so overshadows anything *the could be provided* publicly that the bit of public funding that *could be provided* wouldn't matter. Media buys alone are absolutely outrageously expensive-and one of the most important things for candidates who aren't widely known. If you want elections to be about issues that matter to everyday people, get rid of private money. Give every candidate who reaches a certain margin of support equal air and radio ads, equal (minimal) funds, and let them have as many volunteers as they want. (*edit*)"
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62aol2 | Why is Parma-style ham called Parma ham, but Parma-style cheese called Parmesan cheese? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Parma ham is properly called \"prosciutto\" or, if it's actually made in Parma, \"Prosciutto di Parma.\" Parmesan cheese is more properly \"Parmigiano-Reggiano\" but \"Parmesan\" is a close-enough English translation. Both \"Prosciutto di Parma\" and \"Parmigiano-Reggiano\" are protected terms under EU regulation, which is why you often see similar products labeled \"Parma ham\" or \"Parmesan-style\" cheese."
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62apfp | Why the death penalty cost so much ? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Lawyers fees through many court cases. You go through tons and tons of court appeals and trials etc before being executed. It's also a lengthy process lasting many years in most cases, so they also have to pay for your jail costs, and provide you with a lawyer for the entire time, and pay their lawyers to fight against you",
"Most people who are sentenced to death in America are represented by a public defender or a court appointed attorney (usually, attorneys). [The death penalty information center has a lot of useful information:]( URL_0 ). Here's the typical arc of a death penalty case, noting where costs are substantially higher, assuming that the person charged is represented by public defenders (higher, not because PDs are themselves doing abnormal things, but because the attorney fees are being paid by the state): 1) The government (state attorney, prosecutor, whatever they're called in the particular state) files a document that says they want to seek the death penalty. This immediately (usually) triggers the court to appoint multiple different attorneys to represent the person who is accused. Even though these attorneys won't be able to charge $300/hour for their representation, even $50/hour (just an arbitrary number, but let's say) gets rather expensive given how much work is to follow. 2) Once the attorneys are appointed, they always (if they're competent) ask for the court to fund certain things they need to prepare their defense. High on the list is an investigator (to help with their preparation of the case), and a mitigation specialist (more on him/her later). Sometimes these are the same person, but not always. 3) The pretrial discovery process (the process by which the defense attorneys get to learn about the government's case against their client) can take a very long time, and is always (again, assuming the lawyer is doing their job) very thorough. No lawyer who is representing a client that the government is trying to kill wants to lose a case and have a client executed because they missed a critical detail here or there (there are checks on this - more on that later). Depositions (recorded statements under oath with attorneys for both sides present) will be taken of anyone that knows anything in the case. This is not usually much different than the discovery process in, say, a murder case where the government isn't trying to kill someone, but the lengthier process comes in with mitigation. I'm waiting to explain that until a little later, because the purpose of mitigation doesn't make sense until then. 4) There will almost always be a lot more motions filed before trial in a death penalty case than in a non-death penalty case. A lot of these motions are directed at trying to get the judge to rule that the death penalty is unconstitutional. The traditional argument for that is that the death penalty violates the prohibition on \"cruel and unusual punishments\" in the constitution. But there are other interesting nuances to motions in death cases: The Supreme Court has held, for example, that it's unconstitutional to execute a person who has a lot of mental problems (that's not actually the legal standard - some states still use the word \"retarded\" and tie it to an IQ number, others ask the judge to make, well, a judgment call; how that process works could be (and has been) the subject of pages and pages of analysis and I'm not really trying to go over that all here). There's a lot of interesting litigation on this topic recently because of the ways in which the government has tried using various chemicals to inject people with in an attempt to kill them. If you google for recent botched executions, you can read some pretty gruesome stories about how the government doesn't really know what chemicals can \"humanely\" kill people, and how basically no doctors will ever help them because it violates their oath as doctors. Again, that's another paper. 5) Once we've progressed all the way to the start of trial, we then begin with jury selection, which typically takes a LOT longer in a death penalty case then a non death-penalty case. The reason is that the parties have to ask each juror all sorts of questions about their opinion on the death penalty. Interestingly, any juror that says they will never impose the death penalty is not allowed on the jury. This is called \"death-qualifying\" the jury pool, and is, as you might expect, controversial among defense lawyers. But that's another paper. Relevant to your question, how does this cost more? Well, even if a death penalty jury selection process only takes a couple days longer than a non-death case, that's still 1.5-2 days of monopolization of the time of judges, bailiffs, clerks, court employees, etc. Not the biggest amount of money, but it costs more. 6) Now we've picked a jury and we're ready to start the trial. Generally speaking, death penalty cases operate in two phases: one, the \"guilt\" phase, and two, the \"penalty\" phase. These are commonly called phase 1 and phase 2 by attorneys who are experienced in the area, or by Dr. Seuss fans with a really dark sense of humor. So the first phase of the trial looks a lot like any other trial you may see in a courtroom - the prosecution presents evidence of the defendant's guilt, and the defense attempts to challenge that evidence and (maybe, they aren't required to) presents evidence of the defendant's innocence. IF the defendant is found guilty of the most serious charge (which can carry the death penalty), then we go to phase two. If they're found not guilty of anything or if they are found guilty of some lesser charge where the death penalty is not an option (ex. if they're charged with murder but get found guilty of manslaughter), then the judge will have a sentencing hearing at some point, but the jury is not needed anymore and they are sent home. 7) Assuming we're now at the point in time where the jury has found the defendant guilty of the most serious crime (generally murder) and the death penalty is on the table, we now go to phase two. This is where that mitigation expert I mentioned earlier comes in. What's going to happen in phase two is that both sides will present all sorts of evidence. The prosecution will present evidence about how the crime impacted the victim's family (because the victim is dead), and argue about how the murder in question was particularly bad. Then the defense will present evidence about how the crime was, while bad, not as bad as the prosecutor is suggesting. **But then** the defense is permitted to, and will, present all sorts of mitigation evidence about the defendant: they were abused as a child, they have lots of mental issues (but not quite enough to bar them from being considered for the death penalty), they were a minor participant (lookout, driver) in a crime, they were being ordered around by someone else, this crime is a horrific aberration in an otherwise \"meaningful\" life, etc., etc. **This** is where the cost of the mitigation expert, and the time spent by attorneys really starts to escalate rapidly. Mitigation experts in death cases will travel to foreign countries to find relatives that haven't seen the defendant in years, but have important information about the defendant's childhood that the jury should know about. They will go out to homeless shelters every day for two weeks to try to find the client's best friend that doesn't have a cell phone or a known address, but does have important information. They will do all of this and more, if they're doing their job, because what they find could literally save the client's life. And also, remember that a large portion of people charged with crimes have various degrees of mental health issues and aren't always the best at remembering important things from their life. Investigators are critical, and they cost money. The jury is listening to all of this evidence, and at the end of the evidence they will go back and vote again - death or no death (usually death or life in prison). This is not always binding on the judge - see below. 8) But now, let's say, our fictional defendant has been sentenced to death (how they get sentenced to death is an evolving area of law as well - some states say that the jurors have to be unanimous in recommending death in order for the judge to impose a death sentence, others disagree; there's a supreme court case that just came out dealing with this, but again, that's another paper). Now the real litigation begins. Lawyers for the defendant will now file what are called \"direct appeals\" of the verdict and/or sentence, meaning they will go to higher courts in the specific state and say that the judge that did the trial did something wrong - let in evidence that shouldn't have been admitted, didn't let in evidence that should have been admitted, made some wrong legal ruling on a motion, etc. Appeals take a long time. Each step of the appeal process can take 1-3 years, sometimes - states usually have at least one court in between the supreme court of the state and the trial court, so there are usually at least two steps to the direct appeal. And, sometimes the trial court does something wrong that needs to be corrected, but isn't bad enough to do the whole trial over again, so the case gets sent back, something is fixed, and then the appeals start again. This is often similar to what the process might look like in non-death cases, but there tend to be more issues in death cases, if only because death cases have two phases and there are more opportunities for the judge to make a mistake. ...",
"Because if you kill someone, you can't undo it. As a result, if you think killing someone as a response to a crime is just (I don't, but that is a different question), you better be damn sure they did the crime. Being damn sure you did the crime means lots of appeals, and lots of appeals means lots of lawyers. Lots of lawyers means lots of fees, and since lawyers are expensive and everyone on trial has a Constitutional right to competent legal protection which the state is obligated to pay for, those fees are paid for by the state."
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62asna | What factors could lead a property to be sold under market value? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The two biggest ones are: A) The seller has some sort of personal issues. Maybe there's financial distress & they urgently need money for something else. Maybe they need to move across the country on short notice. Maybe the owner died/divorced & their estate just wants to get the property liquidated ASAP so the funds can be redistributed. B) There's something wrong with the property that's not immediately obvious that *actually* lowers its value below *apparent* equivalent properties. It might be a structural problem that requires expensive repairs, environmental issues that will be costly to clean up, future zoning/construction changes."
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62cf6w | Why do pornsites have so skechy advertisement? | Even on the big sites like pornhub or youporn you get popup ads, those stupid "Lisa close to you wants to fuck" (who does even believe them), make your dick bigger and WARNING YOU HAVE VIRUS ON YOUR COMPUTER. Isn't it a bad rep for the site, annoying to customers etc? I understand they pay money but couldn't they get better ads that are not scams like sex toys or something. Bonus question: Who the hell would like to share porn videos on facebook or twitter because there are banners for that? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The reason for this is, \"normal\" advertisers do not want to be associated with porn. Which means these sites have to turn to other advertisers to generate revenue.",
"> who does even believe them Never underestimate people's stupidity. I know too many people who have tried those things. And surprise surprise, none of the shit works. Having said that, they do send you physical stuff most of the time (I was honestly expecting it to be take your money and not even have products to ship).",
"IIRC someone who made these ads answered a question on Reddit once and said quite simply that it is because those ads are the ones that get clicked on. Somehow.",
"Bonus answer: it doesn't come down to if you want to share porn on social media. If your computer or phone is set up to automatically log in to different social media, it'll automatically log in once you visit a site that has a ' post/share on ______ ' as your credentials are stored locally on the computer/phone. That plus the Terms and Conditions of the social media that you've agreed to will allow data mining on the site that has the post/share function."
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62ch7v | - What's the difference between a religion and a cult? - from a more objective perspective - assuming that a religion implies something benign and a cult implies something dangerous, how can one tell the difference? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A cult and a religion are basically the same thing. \"Cult\" specifically refers to something *non-mainstream* and therefore strange or bad, and typically with very few followers or more localized followings. So it is more like religion is just a cult that has become accepted into normal practice. Cult. Noun. A relatively small group of people having religious beliefs or practices regarded by others as strange or sinister.",
"There are a lot of varying broad definitions for the concepts of religion and cult. This means that they have a lot of similarities and differences at the same time, making it difficult to be clear on the subject. On top of that some common religions may exhibit cult like behaviours in their more extremists groups, and extremist cults will often have 'soft entry points' that make them seem like a regular religion. This can make it very easy to argue that that the definitions that make something a cult and the definitions that make something a religion are pretty much the same thing. For example, a religion is broadly defined as a 'cultural system to follow religious, spiritual or philosophical beliefs', whereas a cult is defined as 'a social group who follows a set of religious, spiritual or philosophical beliefs'. I could have switched those definitions around and they would both sound like they still apply. Furthermore there probably isn't a single characteristic we could come up with where one would distinctly apply to being a religion/cult and not the other. Level of devotion. Belief in a higher power. Ritual practice. The aim to recruit others. Good intentions. These can be present in both cults and religions. Even negative concepts, such as extremism, scam tactics and corruption can easily exist in each. I would say that probably the clearest defining characteristics between them is that cults feel less common among society and that being called a cult is seen as a negative. Overall, the idea that religion is something benign and a cult is something dangerous cannot apply here. Good and bad intentions can exist in both settings. With such blurry lines between distinctions i believe the question needs a little tweaking (i apologise if that's a little cheap of me). It should be more 'How can one tell the difference between a benign religious, spiritual or philosophical organisation and a malevolent one?'. With this i would say the answer is to look to both their words and their actions. * Are they saying one thing but doing another? Do they say to help their fellow man but don't provide any assistance to anyone outside their organisation or its close partners? * Do they refuse to associate with particular groups of people, dismissing them out of hand rather than for any clear reason? Do they actively persecute other groups of people, specifically of another such group or a minority? * Are they being vague and ambiguous, offering promises that don't appear to be deliverable, with reassurances that understanding will come the longer you stay with the organisation? * Does the group seek to isolate its members from the larger community, using pressure tactics such as shame and paranoia? * Are they expecting regular financial contributions, or participation in complex programs that only have purpose within their organisation that requires payment? Are its members shamed for not doing so? * Does leaving the organisation result in intense negative repercussions, such as shame, threats, being immediately cut off? Does leaving the group mean that you can no longer be friends with any of its members? * Are they regularly encouraging its members to recruit new members, with perks for doing so, and shaming those who don't make such an effort? * Do the organisation's members treat people outside the organisation as lessers/inferiors? * Does the organisation react badly to being asked difficult questions? * What type of assistance does the organisation provide its members? A benign organisation should offer forms of positive relief and friendly assistance, as opposed to blind adherence to rules and unnecessary self-sacrifice. * Are there group discussions where people are given a chance to debate with those running the organisation, or are there only sermons where people are just expected to listen and not participate? (just to note, i would say having sermons isn't a red flag in itself. It's when there are only sermons and no group participation that it should be considered suspect) By asking these questions of the organisation it should become clearer if their intentions are benign or malevolent. A lot of organisations may have a bit of a mix, which probably means there is a mix of good and bad intentions within the group. After that it's up to you to decide whether or not you want to stay or go.",
"Paraphrasing Joe Rogan here - A cult is a group that follow the teachings of one guy. A religion is when that guy is dead.",
"A cult is a specific type of religion. So, first, what is a religion? Well, a religion is more or less a worldview/community/belief system, characterised by both a specific mythology and specific rules for followers of that religion. For example, for Christianity, the mythology is the bible, and the rules are, depending on how strict your interpretation is, things such as going to church every sunday, celebrating the Christian holidays, don't eating meat on fridays or during lent, and so on. A cult is distinguished from a religion in general in that its rules are a lot more restrictive and dangerous. For example, cults will often seek to isolate members from society at large, discourage inquiry into the cult's mythology, and seek to manipulate members, and make them dependent on the cult, or at least feel that they are."
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62cu2i | What exactly happens to your brain and personality when you receive constant gratification about your looks or other things? | Well, as you can take from my title, I'm a guy who is average looking. My girlfriend is extremely beautiful, but grew up in a different country where it is not common to tell people openly that they are beautiful. I love her because she is still very self confident about other things than her apperance or character, down to earth and really focusses on success and accomplishing goals like me. However, as I grew up I saw a lot of people in my country (guys and girls from Germany) who were constantly told they were beautiful/perfect/good at something by everybody around them and that they are perfect. Today, after a decade has gone by, they are extremely hard to deal with and I wouldn't do business with most of them, since a lot of them have really wrong views on how the world is allowed to deal with them. There is one thing I personally know from not having this input: It made me work harder and not feel entitled to have anything but what I work for myself. However, what is the psychology behind it? What happens to the brain? I am asking for a simple reason: I want to have children in the future, and I want them to grow up different than me but also not in the way mentioned above. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You're asking a very deep, very difficult question to answer. Really, there is no one answer. Please take everything I say as an opinion. [Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs]( URL_0 ) is a great way to start seeing what drives us as humans. It theorizes that humans prioritize their needs in this order: Physiological (air, food, water) - > Safety (obvious) - > Love/Belonging - > Esteem - > Self-Actualization. As a culture, we live in a time where our physiological and safety needs are pretty much constantly met. So what does an attractive, budding young gal/lad focus on? Since their basic needs are met, they may focus much of their effort on fulfilling a sense of Love and Belonging with the world. Someone who is born beautiful may have their needs met very easily. Their view of the world is going to be much different that the ugly ducking-turned-beautiful-or-handsome. So let me ask you - what values were learned along the way? Chances are, the person who was NOT handed things due to their attractiveness may have had to pick up several more skills along the way so they could fulfill their needs. Assuming their physiological and safety needs are met, what would someone who couldn't use their look rely on? Maybe they became charismatic, charming, helpful, friendly, etc. This is just an opinion! I would love to hear others."
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62cxhi | Why is C placed before K in the English language? i.e. Jack and not Jakc? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Middle English orthography was unstable, but when the sound /k/ appeared at the end of a syllable, two spellings tended to be used: > 1. If /k/ was preceded by a long vowel, it was spelled \"k\" (today's \"like\" used to be spelled \"lik\"). Adding \"ke\" at the end (like) is alater development. > 2. If /k/ was preceded by a short vowel, it was spelled \"ck\" (today's \"lick\" was spelled \"lick\") [source]( URL_0 )",
"The thing I always wondered is why does 'c' exist at all? We have the 'k' to make the kuh sound and we have the 's' to make the ssssss sound. 'c' seems like a bastard hybrid that pretends to be one of those letters. The only unique thing about is is the \"ch\" combination sound, which seems like it should be one unique letter rather than two. I'd also say the same thing about \"qu\" since 'u'always follows 'q'"
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62e3nn | How did filler words such as "like", "um" and "ya know" originate in speech? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"These are called \"audible pauses\". They are common to all languages and cultures, although, the actual sound or phrase will vary. Most people feel very awkward in silence, especially when they know others are paying attention (for instance, giving a speech), so these audible pauses are a way to avoid that awkward moment. As for why those specific words are used, that's tied to the culture you're in and the language you speak. Basically, those are the sounds that caught on, and through interaction with others, TV, Radio, etc. we've all come to understand and accept the meaning."
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62e50f | How could they have not known beforehand that changing Flint's water would damage the pipes? | So as we all know, Flint changed their water from lake water to river water from the Flint River. As a result, the river water is more acidic, and corroded the pipes, leeching lead into the water. For the moment, nevermind that the event happened. My question is, how could they have not known beforehand, before changing the water that this was going go be a problem? It should be know by some people, that river water is more acidic than lake water. Nobody spoke up and raised the alarm that river water is more acidic? Did nobody in charge really know this? Did they know and just not care? Did they know and just think the high lead would not be discovered? This doesn't make sense to me. What is going on here? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Governor overrode the local elections and put an \"Emergency Manager\" by the name of Darnell Earley in charge. Basically he took away the power of the locally-elected officials. The idea is that this \"Emergency Manager\" would be able to cut through the red tape and get stuff done in order to fix whatever emergency the Governor dreamed up in order to justify his action. The problem is that bureaucracy and red tape exists for a reason. Rules get put into place because someone screwed up (or was corrupt) before. When you bypass those rules, you risk making the same mistake someone else made in the past. I'm all for efficiency, but when a business screws up, it folds and people go find jobs somewhere else. When a government screws up, people die (or in this case get neurologically damaged for life). This came from running the government like a business.",
"It seems nobody purposely got anyone sick. Flint was looking to get out of its water contract with Detroit Water and Sewage, where they were receiving treated, clean water for many years. Flint River was a backup water source already. It was presumed safe to use as a backup and thus safe to use as a go forward solution until they could get something more modernized in place. The water they got from the river had to be treated, so they built a water treatment facility. However, old pipes, poor planning, etc.. created issues and the water ended up bad. Some scary things that happened was that the EPA and government officials knew the water was bad and they didn't tell the public. While the mayor is on TV drinking tap water to calm the fears, the EPA had already measured high levels of lead in the water and didn't do anything.",
"From what I understand, the reason the pipes corroded was because the water from Detroit was treated with several chemicals (as is necessary and normal), one of which was there to protect the pipes from corrosion. However, when flint switched to the river as its main source of water, they left out this very important chemical, there for causing all of the pipes to begin erroding, releasing lead from the makeup of the pipes. This is also why even though we have switched back to Detroit water, the lead levels are still moderately high (though deemed \"safe\" now). The pipes' internal seal is now gone and they continue to release lead into the water.",
"They knew. They chose not to add a recommended additive that would have prevented all of this, whether do to bureaucratic error, laziness, or cheapness we don't know. What I do know is they've stopped giving out water at the bus terminal, and they won't give me water at the distribution center because I can't update my address on my ID until I can get mail where I live (so, never, because my parents could then find me and start shit again) so now I have to walk 6 miles twice a day to fill pitchers at my \"sister's\" well water apartment so my cats and carer have water.",
"There is a lot of pressure to not raise water and sewer rates. Since governing bodies have to determine these rates, the pressure is political. Historically water has been free (wells) or nearly free when a large local industry was paying a huge share of the cost (Canton NC sewer comes to mind). Modern wisdom is that combined water and sewer bills are deemed \"affordable\" when below about 1.5% of median household income. But even at this rate, most utilities are falling way behind on regular maintenance let alone keeping up with treating dirtier water, or complying with stricter wastewater pollution standards. There is indeed studying of the issue, but nobody really wants to admit that the real cost of clean water is much higher than this accepted threshold. 2%? 3% 5% of your income? We don't know really, and it's very basin specific. For some idea of the magnitude of such numbers, if your household income were 50,000 a year, that'd mean your combined water and sewer bill would be over $200 a month ($208). You're knee jerk thought that this is atrocious is exactly why elected officials won't ever consider such high rates, and exactly why even a minor cost savings as seen in Flint, can end up happening, despite the consequences. Rates as a percent of income is of course already a flawed measure, since for low income areas, food and housing eat up a much higher percent of incomes right off the bat so in a place like Flint, with a shrinking customer base to boot, any increase to rates is acutely felt by those paying it, especially on the low side of that median."
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62emro | What do they mean when they say Russia tampered in the US elections? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The CIA and FBI have high confidence and NSA moderate confidence that the Russian government spearheaded the efforts to hack Democratic email, resulting in the successful access of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Tony Podesta's emails. The emails acquired were then released via Wikileaks. Finally the state owned Russian media firms, RussiaToday (RT) and Sputnik, provided favorable coverage to Trump's campaign and unfavorable coverage to Clinton's campign. Those are the key items in the [declassified National Intelligence Assessment]( URL_0 ).",
"CIA/FBI & Co have reason to believe that the Russian Government hacked or otherwise gained access to the RNC and DNC emails and several other high-valued emails. With this information Russia could strategically leak damning stuff about any candidate they didn't find favorable. Their goal wasn't necessairly to put Trump in the White House, but to destablize the American government, and the people's faith in it. However, every time they use this information, they burn a source, alerting the 'targets' to what else they likely have, allowing them to pre-emptively mitigate damage, reducing the remaining information's value to Russia with each use. Trump was apparently doing a good enough job of destabilization on the RNC side to not warrant Russia leaking much from their RNC collection. Better to save that for later elections. Hillary was winning, and would not act in Putin's interests. That's why they leaked a whole pile of stuff to turn Bernie's supporters towards Trump. Again, it's all a moral grey area, as they were leaking *mostly* true things, but they were also prepared to push articles about these leaks to the top of every social media platform through a coordinated team of internet \"agents\". I highly recommend reading [The Agency]( URL_0 ). It outlines how Russia (and likely others) can craft literally fake news, but make it look real enough to generate facebook hype. This sets the stage to make high-profile real news like \"Hillary's latest email\" to be exactly what people want to hear, and reinforce their beliefs. Russia's internet team can coordinate fake news of literally made-up-but-believable stories like \"Clinton Foundation involved in Zimbabwe Election Fraud\", put it on a real-looking website, and then make it viral on Facebook. While discerning readers will be skeptical, many will happily parrot it along with a meme or two. This makes the \"real\" news of \"Hillary used personal email for state business\" even easier to parrot. It also gives credibility to the literally fake news that looks just like the actually real news, making it very hard for anyone to know what actually is or isn't true. For an even bigger impact, Russia's internet folks can make sure *everyone* sees how shit CNN/Fox/MSM is at their jobs, discrediting them even further so we rely more and more on our easier-to-manipulate online sources. The suspicions are that Trump and/or his team has colluded with Russia to make sure Trump's message of the day matches what Russia's internet team is leaking/fabricating/hyping. This is treason and could be extremely actionable IF they lawyers can make a solid case. However, that doesn't fix the other problem of Putin meddling with foreign news cycles to manipulate elections. That is akin to invasion, but we don't know who is on which team, because as we learned from the Trump \"pee-pee papers\", it's very likely Putin has a big bag of black mail for almost every world leader, senator, and decision maker in his space. This is how Putin has maintained control in Russia, and now he's realized that it can be done outside of Russia too."
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62eqg8 | Why do cities enforce federal immigration law but not other federal laws like tax review? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's not their job to enforce federal immigration law, it is their \"duty\" to assist federal law enforcement and assist with federal detainers. For example, let's say NYPD picks up someone who is wanted in NJ for murder. It's their responsibility to alert NJ and detain them until NJ makes a decision if they want to come get them since NJ put out detainer for that individual. Same thing is true with the federal government. If they have someone who is in violation of federal law it is their job to alert the federal law enforcement agency and give them a chance to come get them. Many cities, even if an illegal immigrant had been charged with a crime like rape, robbery, battery, etc and federal authorities say \"hold that person, we are coming for them\" many will say \"nah, no thanks. we're gonna let them go back into the public.\" That's what a sanctuary city does, they ignore federal requests such as that and keep criminal offenders from the federal criminal justice system. This is also why we've seen an increase in ICE activity at court houses picking up illegal immigrants wanted on criminal and/or immigration charges. Generally this is because the municipality or state refused to work with ICE when they had them in custody. So now ICE has to go get them where they know they'll be.",
"Local governments are not being asked to enforce federal immigration law but only cooperate and inform. An example that involves other federal laws would be like if a local police department arrested a local drug dealer, and as part of their investigation they found large quantities of drugs and large amounts of cash. The local police department then informs the IRS and the DEA so that federal charges can also be investigated. I'm either case the local government is just passing on information that was collected incidental to their typical duties. They are not actively policing federal laws"
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62f79o | Why do people in the United States still talk about slavery ? my country of Mexico was conquered and the people enslaved for hundreds of years by the Spanish and no one talks about it except in history classes | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because the Spanish went home, probably after you threw them out. Those white folk who killed the native Indians and imported the Africans are still there. Neither of them are original inhabitants of the land, only the (surprise) natives."
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62g13p | where do surnames come from? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Surnames are believed to have started among the common folk in medieval times, when larger towns became more common and epithets or bynames were needed to distinguish between, say, two Johns. If you had one John who was a blacksmith and one John who made bread, you would call them John Smith and John Baker, and you wouldn't be confused. Maybe one of them had a son named Harry - he could be called Harry Johnson. A whole bunch of last names in many languages come from common occupations (Miller, Fletcher, Wright, Baker, etc.) common descriptors (White, Black, Small, etc) or from other names (Johnson, Anderson, Williams, etc). And as families were an important thing and wealth, land, etc. tended to be passed down to surviving heirs, those names tended to stick around. So the Smiths would stay the Smiths even if the family were no longer blacksmiths, etc. Family names have been around the nobility for even longer, and those tended to be tied to a famous ancestor's name or a place of origin.",
"Long ago, people were called their profession. A Woods would have been a hunter or lumberjack, and a Thatcher would have fixed roofs. Names like Johnson and Thompson should be self-explanatory."
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62g508 | Why are some features of humans, like hands and skulls, so innately hard to draw? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Aside from their intrinsically complex shapes etc that others already mentioned, we are also more adept at detecting aberrations from the norm regarding human anatomy. If someone draws a weirdly warped car or chair for example it might not look as strange as a bizarrely drawn face or appendage, because our brains are fine-tuned to extract a lot of information from the former.",
"Our brains see faces and bodies all the time and can easily recognize where features like eyes, nose, mouth, arms, legs, etc. belong but we don't commit skull or hand details to memory as well. The spatial depth and proportion of them make it difficult to sketch.",
"Due to the depth and variety of each finger, and the complex curves and angles, hands are relatively difficult to master. It's tricky ensuring everything is totally proportionate. Similarly, heads/faces require attention to detail and proportion, as I'm sure no one wants their drawings' faces to look like a cow with down syndrome."
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62gcmu | Why does the Internet so commonly bring out the worst in people and become a breeding ground for cynicism and toxicity? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"here are number of reasons that I've regularly heard been given: * Anonymity - if nobody knows who you are you can act however you like without it affecting your standing with others. Online hidden away behind an anonymous username you can be a cocky twat that threatens anything you like and none will likely every know who you really are * Lack of consequences - if you threaten to do X or Y to someone in real life there can be very real consequences, but online a lot of those consequences disappear. * Lack of subtlety/harsh tone - it can be quite hard to write convincingly on subjects without sounding confrontational/adamant, and that friendliness of tone or stressing of the words to soften what is being said can often be entirely lost when written down. As a result there can be a lot of misunderstandings in written communications that, whilst still possible in verbal communication are often easier and quicker to over come. * A wall of strangers - in real life you probably have (like most) a relatively standard social circle - mostly people you know well or who are friends of friends (i.e. not entirely strangers); mostly people whose personalities you understand and whose individual quirks you perhaps learn how to handle and deal with to maintain harmonious relations. Meanwhile online you are likely to engage with different people every day, effectively a new set of strangers every day (hello stranger!) of varying ages, cultural backgrounds. And because it's not a physical relationship where a complete lack of tact/patience would regularly get you into difficult circumstances you can easily be dismissive or unkind, or overly blunt. You know nothing about them so it's easy not to try see their side of the view or to give them the benefit of the doubt when what they say sounds overly harsh All that said I contest the assertion. In my experience the internet is mostly full of helpful and friendly people - sure there's always some people being a twat, but that's kinda the same as real life too. I don't know, maybe I just see it that way but it doesn't feel like people online are any less helpful (proportionally) than real-life - if anything it feels like people are more open to sharing and engaging with strangers online than they are in real life.",
"Anonymity and lack of consequences allows people to do whatever they want, and for some that means being bad towards other people. The fact that you also don't see the other people you are engaging with means you are much more likely to treat them badly than if you would talk to them face to face. Basically, people forget there's a person on the other side with feelings as well. If you would have to watch people get hurt by your actions in real life, most people would feel highly uncomfortable and guilty. The internet also allows people to seek out their own communities and information, so this leads to highly polarized groups of people, and also to a lot of misinformation and groupthink. Finally, the lack of rules and authorities further allows people to act any way they would like.",
"\"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.\" Oscar Wilde",
"On a personal level, I think it's because we live in a society where we cannot be completely honest to ourselves. We are abide by laws and social norms that we have to be constantly \"good\" and put up with a \"positive attitude\". However, a part of me always want to be \"bad\" in a sense that I can just be, \"f**k this, I want to do what I want and say what I want to say\" Having said that, the internet is a perfect example to allow people to do/say what they want. As mentioned by others, the fact that you are anonymous, you can be exactly who you want to be without any consequences. You can express yourself to the fullest extent whether you are being toxic on purpose or as a joke.",
"Most of the replies tend to imply that people behave differently on the internet than they would otherwise. While that may be true, there are also likely some simple biases in play. [Sampling bias]( URL_1 ) comes into play here. The presence of people on the internet who are \"cynical\" and \"toxic\" may in fact fairly represent the actual percentage of the population who are like that. Just because we may come across a smaller percentage of such people in our everyday physical lives could just be a matter of having only a small sample of people in our contact sphere, whereas the internet literally reaches many many more people. [Availability Heuristic]( URL_0 ) refers to the mental shortcut people use to associate the frequency of examples that come to mind with the actual frequency of an event's occurrence. The simple classic example is that people tend to think driving is safer than flying, when in fact the odds of dying in a motor vehicle incident is much greater than dying in a airplane incident. The reason is that when something does happen on a flight, it's big news and is reported everywhere, while local traffic fatalities don't make national headlines. The combination of these two will lead to people overestimating and feeling that the internet is more of a breeding ground for hate, cynicism, and toxicity than is actually represented in their real physical life. For example, you may have 1 friend in 50 who acts like this. But when you count 200,000 users who may use a forum like reddit, that same 2% is now 4,000 people. And because these people are usually the loudest, they're more available and memorable to you, so you think that there's more of them when in fact it's the same percentage as real life."
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62ge32 | The three seashells, as referenced in the 1993 motion picture Demolition Man. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"it's a mcguffin. it's not explained, it's not speculated. it's just a thing that moves the plot forward. it gave the character something to complain about so he could show that you get a ticket for verbal offenses.",
"There is no explanation for the three sea shells. It was purposefully left unexplained in the movie, so no one ever invented an official explanation when writing the movie. It's supposed to be left up to your imagination.",
"I've thought long and hard about it and there's no way to use them without being woefully inferior to any kind of toilet paper. It's inflexible - you'd never be able to clean your taint. In theory, with the right kind of shape and some manual cheek-spreading, it could potentially provide superior surface-to-surface contact over a single run, but now it's dirty and non-reusable - toilet paper has the advantage of being able to make repeated runs with a clean surface."
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62gh6y | What happens if the president won the election due to foreign intervention? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Russia parties down and said president gets closer to his claimed level of wealth. Meanwhile the other two branches of our government being controlled by republicans means everyone gets away scott free.",
"The USA does not have a good mechanism in place for handling the case where the Presidential election's outcome is questionable. If the situation clearly showed that the outcome was reversed by fraud, then the outcome could be corrected (other candidate moves into the White House) by action of the Supreme Court. But this isn't such a case. So frankly no one knows if anything could be done."
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62hrka | Why do people like music that invokes negative emotion? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because when people hear about other people feeling and doing the same things they feel badly about, they feel better because they don't feel like they are the only person experiencing that negative emotion.",
"While I don't think there's necessarily an objective answer to this; it's cathartic. Listening to negative music serves as a means to let go of the negativity you carry with you.",
"What you perceive to be negative could just as easily be interpreted as positive by someone else. The flip side of this would be that any given song you feel to hold some manner of positive meaning could be interpreted as negative by others, who may or may not hold the same values/priorities/interests/etc as you. Super short version: people like different things.",
"It's like eating spicy food like hot peppers. It actually causes pain, but it makes the brain release chemicals that make it feel good.",
"I have no science to back this up, is purely what I've decided based off my own thoughts and feelings. I only listen to Minor or neutral keyed music, happy, peppy, or major music sounds terrible to me. It really irritates me. I figured it out that it was because I spend every hour of my life trying to be happy, my job making money so I'm not on the street, my hobbies trying to kill stress and time, media I consume trying to distract from negative feelings. It's all a LOT of work to be happy so when I decide to listen to music, I don't want to be forced to feel happy. Sometimes I just want to relax and feel sorrowful or sad because it's not going to negatively effect my life and it's not part of the exhausting effort that it is to be happy. I personally don't think happy even really exists in the form of complete content. I think it's that we all aim for %100 A+ but I don't think anyone will be super dissatisfied with %89, especially since that leaves room for improvement. Completely happy music isn't relatable because completely happy isn't realistically human (to me). Sad music is also relatable because we always put more weight to the negatives of life (it's something we should work against, but it's something we do by nature) so when I hear people sing about being sad or whatever I feel like I'm among company that understands the aforementioned stress. Perhaps more so than when I hear someone talk about all the good things going for them (and that can even lead to envy, like why are they happy and I'm not). So I listen to sad music because it doesn't force me to be something that I already struggle towards. Instead I can just relax and feel like I'm not the only one that feels this shit and It lets me not try for a little while. So in short, to me it's like all things in music: Really fucking complicated.",
"Another thing is, some of us find 'happy' music really kitsch. Listening to happy music as an adult gives me the same feeling as looking at something like [this.]( URL_0 ) Basically it feels saccharine and it disgusts me."
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62i1jp | What does the Patriots Act really do? | I get that it allows for the government to wiretap and monitor suspected terrorists. Why so much uproar about it, does it allow the government to monitor the common people? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"How do you suppose the government tells \"suspected terrorists\" from \"common people\"? They can't, unless they monitor everybody and see which people talk to ISIS Headquarters. If you talk to ISIS-HQ, then everybody you talk to are \"suspected terrorists\".",
"The Patriot act was enacted because the various intelligence agencies are limited in their power to monitor, detain and interrogate suspected terrorists. First it, this act first defines Terrorism and its actors , it also define their rights ( or should I say their lack of rights) and give the power to the president and a few people to declare an individual enemy of the state (which means hello Drone, goodbye life). It was voted on and signed as a result of the 9/11 shock. Most senator and congressman that voted for it didn't read it nor figure out that some extremely large loopholes were left open to facilitate intelligence (like the massive surveillance of the NSA on every telecommunications that are happening within the USA and abroad). Basically, This act is a law that enables to the government to bypass the constitution against foreign individuals and US citizens that have their communication crossing any borders."
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62jki1 | if art is subjective, why is Hitler's work always described as "average"? | Isn't that for me to decide? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I don't know about Hitler's stuff, I think he did some landscapes. But anyway, if it doesn't go beyond academic standards and there's no personal input into the artwork, then it's just average. The subjectivity goes both ways and if the author is just mechanically capturing his field of view without even trying to tell anything else, then there's simply not much else to it. A person can accurately and realistically paint a landscape but it's not much more than a practice painting if there is no personality to it, like capturing something the author particularly likes about the landscape at a very specific moment that just isn't there for the whole couple of hours he's gonna sit there painting it. If it's \"average\" then there's usually very little personality to it, or \"backstory\" to the painting. And also you can like it as much as you want, that won't really change anything about the artwork because again, the subjectivity goes both ways and if there isn't any from the author, then the audience's subjectivity won't make a difference because popularity and artistic value isn't exactly the same thing.",
"\"Art is subjective\" doesn't mean that everybody has just as much perspective as everybody else on the history of art and the mastery of technical skills and aesthetic sensibilities. Sure, if you think some landscape painting in the lobby of a dentist's office is better than the entirety of German expressionism, I might not be able to persuade you to believe otherwise but that doesn't change the fact that the landscape is derivative of a million landscape paintings which came before it whereas German expressionists were experimenting with light and linework in ways that were not mere carbon copies of other artists. Furthermore, if you have no criteria for liking something beyond some base instinct and you never interrogate *why* you like it and attempt to articulate what it is about it which brings you enjoyment, then you certainly can't describe yourself as anything more than a passive consumer of art. I think somebody who has nothing more than \"I just like it\" to say about a piece of art is somebody who is uninteresting exactly because they rely solely on subjective feelings and cannot communicate what they love about it to others.",
"Average, can be measured artistically, in terms of simple mechanical skill. Give thirty randos a set of watercolors and brushes, say \"Paint a tree and a blue house.\" You'll get some terrible, one or two great ones, and and 26 very similar houses with similar trees. Hiter's work was somewhat like that, in the world of art as a whole. Now, Hitler would stand out as excellent in our room full of randos, but if you put his work among other actual artist, it doesn't shine. The colors are very bland. The lines and perspective are passable, but, overall, it looks like something you'd find in a $10 rack in Walmart.",
"Subjective does not mean arbitrary. We might argue whether the Mona Lisa is better than Starry Night, but by any reasonable standard of art, they are both better than Dogs Playing Poker. There are also many objective measures of art. Creative expression might be subjective, but if you can draw a straight line or mix color properly, you are not making good art.",
"It's because no one in their right mind likes him, so no one is gonna say they like his work or that it has any merit to it. Also 'average' sounds even worse than saying it's bad. It's not even terrible, it's just average, it's a fart in the wind."
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62l0h4 | Why do rural communities consistently vote conservative? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That is a relatively new phenomena. Carter got a lot of the rural vote, and Clinton (Bill) didn't do too bad in the country either. Historically, the Dems were the party of farmers and laborers (in Minnesota, the Democratic party is still called the \"Democratic Farmer Labor Party\"), while the GOP were urban merchants, bankers, traders, etc. Now a days, I think it is more cultural than anything else. This is a severe oversimplification, but the Dems have a tendency to sell governing, while the Repubs sell culture. Its not just \"God and Guns\" but an entire narrative surrounding the illusion of \"self-sufficiency\" developed to appeal to rural voters.",
"Edit 2: please don't give me gold for this comment, give it to the original author I have linked below Edit: here's the link to the original comment: URL_0 Copy and pasting a gilded comment from a recent /r/politicaldiscussion thread, edited down to make it shorter but keep the relevant key points: > I would argue that at their heart, conservative beliefs are all about individual success and merit. I would posit that most conservatives would believe that your station in life comes directly from your work ethic and choices. This is the American Dream incarnate, the idea that anyone can be anything if they work hard enough. From this axiom, conservatives come to value corporation and business because they view money as a measure of success, and success comes from hard work. So, the more money you have, the harder you must have worked for it, and such hard work deserves respect. This is also why conservatives typically oppose welfare programs and handouts; the contrapositive of the above ideology is that if you have a terrible life, it must be because you made terrible choices or are lazy. Further, from this principle, you get the respect of authority and punishment favored by conservatives. If you are a criminal, it reflects on your individual nature exclusively, meaning you deserve every punishment that comes your way. This is why conservatives can be fine with systematic racism; if there are more black and Hispanic Americans being arrested and convicted, it must only mean that those Americans are making bad choices and not working hard enough, and if there is a racial factor, that only indicates that those races must be more susceptible to poor life choices. > Liberal core ideology could be considered opposite. They favor the idea of group and community success. They also tend to believe that the outcomes in your life are largely beyond your circumstances. If you are well off, it isn't because you are a hard worker or a smart person, but because you were born into privilege and that the system favors you. Whereas conservatives would be appalled at what would be considered theft of rightfully earned money, liberals believe that redistribution of wealth is needed to offset bad luck and unfair circumstances. This is why they favor social programs more. As such, liberals also don't view earnings as inherently property of an individual, but as the product of the society. If you got your wealth because of the community you were born into instead of your own actions, it only makes sense to argue that that wealth doesn't belong to you, but to the society. This is also where the \"identity politics\" come from. Where conservatives generally don't care about identity and its manifestation in society per se, liberals are attuned to how society views you can affect how you are treated. > The above core beliefs would also go to explain why there is a rural/urban divide. In a rural environment, you have to deal with problems all on your own. There is little infrastructure, government, or society that you can get help from if something goes wrong. The well pump is out? Unless you don't want water for three days, you better fix it yourselves. Rural living tends to be very independent, and as such hard work does usually relate to personal success. In urban environments, this isn't the case. If the water stops flowing, it is the city's job to fix it, because the water system in an urban environment can be very complex, and if one person tries to fix it only for themselves, they could end up ruining someone else's pipes. Urbanites are also more likely to experience situations when things are out of your control. For example, traffic doesn't exist in rural areas , but in urban ones, you may end up late for work on a bad morning and could get fired for it. With more people and more complex interaction comes more room for outcomes out of any one person's control. > Naturally, almost no one is at one extreme or the other in terms of personal beliefs. The real world exhibits a mix of both personal action and environmental circumstance as a predictor of your outcome, but whether you are liberal or conservative will be determined with how much of each you believe matters.",
"Everyone votes with their morals. This is from George Lakoff > All Politics Is Moral > > When a political leader proposes a policy, the assumption it that the policy is right, not wrong or morally irrelevant. > > No political leader says, “Do what I say because it’s evil. It’s the devil’s work, but do it!” Nor will a political leader say, “My policy proposal is morally irrelevant. It’s neither right nor wrong. It doesn’t really matter. Just do it.” > > When political leaders have opposing policies, that means they have opposing moral worldviews. > > Why do voters vote their values? > Everyone likes to think of himself or herself as a good person. That means that your moral system is a major part > of your identity — who you most deeply are. Voting against your moral identity would be a rejection of self. > > That is why poor conservatives vote against their material interests. They are voting for their moral worldviews to > dominate, and for public respect for their values. > [George Lakoff]( URL_0 )",
"Look at the vast seas of red with small islands of blue in every election map. Rural people live an entirely different life than city people, they have entirely different skillsets, entirely different experiences, and for the most part, entirely different career paths. People - no matter where they are - want minimal outside influence on their way of life. The idea that someone from an urban area on the east coast 'knows better' about issues in Nebraska rightfully rankles them. Right now the GOP is the party that speaks to them in regards to minimizing the change to their way of life, while the 'progressive' Dems are constantly trying to implement changes to forestry, farming, land management, religious observance, etc. The veracity of those changes don't matter, what matters is that those changes can severely affect rural lives. I own a couple hundred acres of semi-swampy forest in the midwest. If I wanted build a home on it (which, along with hunting and some hobby farming, was the point of buying it 30 years ago) I would be severely restricted - the government now considers it a 'wetland' (even though it's dry 80% of the year) which means that I would have to get countless permits, studies, etc done, and there is good odds that I would never be allowed to build on my own land. One 'ruling' or 'redefinition' by an unelected official in a government agency 1000 miles away made the value of my property drop by 80% and basically scuttled my family's long-term plans. And I'm just one of a million people who've had the same thing happen to them - but city folks don't care because they can't relate - they have no understanding of rural life.",
"The immediate thought reading your question was that most people in rural areas probably don't want to pay into a lot of the social services and infrastructure upgrades that liberal parties generally endorse from their platforms because they won't get the benefits of most of them anyway.",
"Rural workers tend to not be able to easily see the effects of social programs the left brings on. They also hold jobs that are often negatively affected by the left's stance on immigration and environmental protection (agriculture, residential construction, fossil fuels). Conversely people in big cities rarely see the hardships that people in rural communities have to experience as a result of the left's policy choices. They are affected negatively by the right's policy choices just as much, so it's really a life style difference that affects these voter trends",
"Recently, the culture wars in America have led to greater divisions between rural and urban voters. Many folks living in rural areas in places like you've described tend to be more religious and morally-focused in voting than their urban counterparts. As a result, Republicans can mobilize these voters by endorsing cultural positions that may be more in line with traditional White Protestant values (e.g. \"Pull yourself up by your bootstraps\" - meaning no entitlements, Pro-Life, pro-religion in public spaces, etc.). This is a relatively new thing. It's said in political science that the economy is the #1 deciding factor in whether or not someone votes for the party currently in office. Now, even though poor White folks in Appalachia might benefit from some reforms under Democrats, their morals align with Republicans. The media tends to focus on the culture wars, and so people have recently been voting based on those sorts of issues (which, of course, are intimately tied to economic issues - I'm not denying that. I'm just saying that social issues can be more salient to a community that doesn't see the government as working \"for them\"). This is a definite change from earlier in the 20th century, but we have also had something of a religious right revival during the Cold War era in response to \"atheist\" communism - see Reagan, the Bushes, and \"moral conservatism.\"",
"Liberal government spends most of its energy on entitlements and social programs for the poor. Poor rural people don't see much benefit from these, the impact is concentrated where the poor are more concentrated, in urban inner cities. Progressive government isn't very relevant to rural folks, by design, as demographics show strong trends from rural to urban living for most of the population.",
"People who live in more rural areas generally do so because they like the cheaper property costs, lower taxes, and being left alone by government. People in cities pay a huge premium for property, high taxes and want to see a return on their investment, even if it means everyone has to pay a little more.",
"Rural voter here. There's a lot of bad assumptions in this thread. Thought I might give the perspective of someone who lives there. **Rural voting patterns are not based on racism or bigotry.** My wife and I are the only Jews in our area, and we have been treated well, and made very welcome, by our neighbors. The only black family in the area has expressed similar feelings to us. **We do not lack empathy.** We have just as much empathy as any other human group. We do not grow up in isolation. We have communities, friendships, and loves, just like anyone else. **We are not suspicious of outsiders or or people with different sexual orientations.** We actually have a large gay population in the closest town. It's the kind of place with a gun store down the block from the LGBTQ center, and everyone gets along. **We are not uneducated.** Our local school district outperforms most districts in the US. I hold a Masters degree. The kid who cuts my lawn is working on a Bachelors degree in engineering. That's not uncommon here. **We do not vote against our interests.** The misunderstanding here is that some city folk believe they know our interests better than we do. The truth is, we have vastly different interests than those living in areas with high population density. **So, why do almost all of us vote Republican?** There are a few reasons: **Role of Government.** We don't get a lot of government services out here. There's no public garbage pickup, no street sweepers, no sewers, no municipal water supply, very few police. They don't even care enough to keep our roads maintained. When the government comes out here, they're usually looking for a fight... Fining people, that kind of thing. So, that creates an environment where people resent the government. We learn to avoid them. Democrats believe that government is a benevolent presence that helps and takes care of people. Out in the country, that isn't the case. So, it's hard for them to get votes out here with that message. **Gun rights.** Guns are a tool and a part of our lives. Many of us hunt to put food on the table for our kids. Many of us carry for protection. We have dangerous wildlife, we have junkies, and we do not have police patrols the way you do in the city. Since no one's giving up or registering their guns, gun control means that a large number of us would have potential felonies hanging over our heads. That adds more trouble to a life that's not easy to start with. **Economics & Taxes.** Less people means our economy isn't as resilient as that of the cities. A level of taxation that urban areas can easily withstand is absolutely crushing out here. Property taxes are also a big issue. If our land was taxed like city land, most of us would lose our homes within a year. **Immigration.** No one cares if people come here legally. Most of us support that. The problem some of us have with illegals is that they provide a way for businesses to get manual labor for less than minimum wage. That depresses wages and eliminates jobs for citizens and legal residents who would be happy to do manual labor, if they could get it. Manual labor is still a big part of our economy in the country, so this is a big issue out here. **Culture & Tolerance.** You know that stereotype of the racist hillbilly with no teeth who burns crosses, wears rags, and thinks Obama is a Kenyan Socialist Muslim? Yeah. We know about that stereotype too. That is how we think city folk see us. And, as intolerant as you may have been told we are... Many of us think city folk are just as intolerant. Truth is, people are the same all over, some tolerant, some intolerant. But when we hear a Democrat president describe rural culture as, \"They get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them,\" it makes it hard for us to support that party. **First Amendment, Political Correctness.** This is big. The freedom to speak your mind is important out here. When we hear about speakers being shouted down, or people losing their jobs or being attacked or mistreated for having the wrong opinions, it rubs us the wrong way. Part of that is, we're used to city folk assuming that we always have the wrong opinions. If people with those opinions cannot be tolerated... Where does that leave us? TL;DR: Country folk are just like you, but we have different interests based on where we live & lower population density. So we vote differently, based on those interests.",
"Living in rural area we can't rely on government to take care of our selves and we take pride in that. My truck is a 4x4 because when there's snow or the road washes out it's not going to get fixed or cleared any time soon. I keep tools and blankets in my truck too because if I break down or get stuck I have to get myself out. But we still have to pay taxes on services city folks get. The government takes from us and doesn't give back. For example there is one Sheriff on duty in the day and no one at night so having a 2nd amendment right is necessary. We hunt and fish, because we have the land to do that on. When you have to do everything yourself it makes you more grateful when times are good, so we say the pledge at meetings, and go to church on Sunday. We have to work hard and don't have time to pretend that a man dressed as a lady is anything other than that. All of us are able, unless we're not, so we don't treat people different because of their color. We can't think like victims, there are no feminist or people crying racism because the work needs to get done. Acting weak is luxury and complaining doesn't get the work done. Does that make me a conservative? I'm not sure, around here they think I'm liberal.",
"Another theory I haven't seen mentioned is that rural areas have much less government action around them - so they are much less dependent on the state.",
"Rural people are more independent. They are more likely to believe in being self-sufficient and what you make and earn is yours. Urban people are usually more interconnected. They tend to need each other more, each other's services. The usually do not feel receiving help is a bad thing. Rural people often do. Because of this, rural people do not want large government with high taxes and many services provided. Hence to tend to lean Republican as they are usually pushing for smaller government.",
"I'm from a small town and now live in Minneapolis. When I was growing up I didn't know any openly gay people. There was just one black family in my town (they were treated poorly) and racism against Native folk was standard. Now I live in a city and I know lots of black people, LGBTQ people, gays, hispanic, asians etc. Exposure tends to lead to acceptance. Democrats have taken the position on social issues that is at odds with the largely white, older, more religious group. In the US that demographic tends to align highly with the rural v urban split. URL_0",
"As someone who studies rural people in the United States, and as someone who grew up in the rural US, here are opinions: On the whole rural people are less educated than non-rural. As a result, they have a much more basic view of morality. Most people I knew growing up believed that there was an absolute black or white answer to every moral quandary. As a result, they accept logical fallacy arguments because they line up with their worldview. Second, rural people are susceptible to \"common sense\" and glorify it. My entire life growing up I remember teachers in my small rural school and classmates constantly making comments about how conservative, uneducated, hardworking men were superior to \"book smart\" people because they couldn't survive in the woods, can do \"manly\" things like car repairs etc. Finally, people in rural areas lost a significant number of jobs in the last 100 years. Consolidated farming corporations destroyed the \"small farmer,\" NAFTA legitimately decimated small communities ( mine included. Went from a population of 6000 to 2000 over the course of 20 years ) which shut down factories, and traditional jobs you could count on were replaced or reduced by technological innovation. Rural people desperately want to work. They don't want a hand-out. They also don't understand how significantly the world is changing. They think their jobs were stolen by Washington DC policy ( true in the case of NAFTA, but the influence of technology is just as important). And so they will vote \"pro business\" in hopes that they will get a job.",
"I read a book once that proposed it has to do with the relative diversity of cultures and rate of change that exist between rural and urban areas. When you live in an urban area you're constantly interacting with a diverse group of people - new immigrants, and generations-old descendants of immigrant families. Different languages, political views, worldviews. It's hard to maintain prejudice when you inevitably meet people who contradict those prejudices. You also constantly see change. Contrast that to a more steady-state environment, with a more homogeneous racial makeup and a much slower pace of cultural change. Change is something slow, rare, and scary. You fear the outsider that will bring change to your safe, pure, good way of life. The conservative philosophy is about resisting change, protecting a national identity, and the assumption that things were better in the past and should stay that way. Wish I could remember the name of the book! Though this may just be my interpretation :)",
"This is a recent phenomenon. In addition to what has already been posted, I would like to add a few things. As a former democrat who voted for Obama, I and most of white rural American feels abandoned by the democrat party and liberals in general who have identified themselves as the party of and for the minority, immigrants, LGBT, and against white privilege (which is made up). It's how we now identify the democratic party. It's no longer a party that fights for us but a party that fights against us. Most of us still align with some democratic positions, but why we would vote for a party that demonizes us?",
"[This Cracked article actually explains it perfectly.]( URL_0 ) We're all one USA, but looking at the difference between, say, rural Kentucky and New York City, we might as well be completely different countries in terms of way of life. Most of the time it makes sense to vote in your own best interests.",
"We live in a republic. First and for most you must understand why it was so important to our philosopher founders to structure a republic instead of a true democracy. Socrates also wrote at length about the down side of democracies. Democracies pit ideas of governance against each other until only one wins. As you can imagine this doesn't go over so well for freedom fighters. Democracies tend to try and solve problems by the enactment of more restrictions and maybe more punishments for living outside of the prescribed model. It is important to remember that our founders came here to escape state rule. We didn't want to be policed. States eventually started policing their citizens when they turned citizens into commodities and moved maritime law onto our shores. To blame ignorance for people living in rural communities not to prescribe to this historically railed against political philosophy is simply stupid. It is much more likely that people in big cities are comfortable living in a huge group think bubbles that not only promotes the enactment of new laws but also the shared acceptance of looking down on others that don't share their views. Btw a college degree doesn't make you smarter. It is a sign that you have received a lot of conditioning. All the worlds knowledge is in your pocket. It's not enough to just accept different skin colors and sexual preferences. You need to accept different ways of thinking and respect people that want small government oversight. This country is no longer free as our founders intended. And these group think liberal arts egotists looking down their noses at others while screening for acceptance are to blame for this countries divide. Ignorance can be taught, even in beautiful buildings. Wisdom must be gained independently.",
"Rural communities are typically farming areas. Support to farmers and agriculture has been a big part of the GOP for awhile. These are also people that don't directly see the impact of social programs and other things like that that are paid for by tax dollars. Lower taxes is also a big part of the GOP.",
"I'm speaking in generalities here..... Part of this has to do with the fact that rural people see themselves as very self-sufficient. They are able to take care of themselves and don't see the need for the government to do much in their lives. One could argue that programs like CRP or LDP's (loan deficiency payments....i.e. minimum payments/prices for crops) says that they are dependent on the government, but most of the people that I know don't really want the government \"distortion\" of pricing (of course, some do).",
"My guess would be that is due to aspects of life that are different based on environment. For instance (this is made up btw), farming requires gun ownership so you can keep your crops and livestock safe. Hunters use them for food. However, this is not an issue in the city. In the city guns are almost strictly utilized for murder/crimes. The Liberal/Democrat parties want to control guns for the sake of safety in the city (regardless of whether or not that will actually do that), which has the possibility of creating a slippery-slope to banning all guns, and therefore Farmers/hunters are like \"nope\". Now that's just a single issue, but I imagine it makes people take sides pretty quickly, and there may be many other issues like this that ultimately increase the divide. TL;DR - party platforms may align closely with issues that are determined by geography (or other issues) that are unrelated to a person's morals/views and therefore affect specific regions of voting rather than person-to-person.",
"The current globalist progressive trend that nations and borders are arbitrary. Look into Jonathon Haidts(leading psychologist ) talks on the incompatible moral foundations between progressives and conservatives.",
"A lot of it is culture, education, shared history, etc, but a lot of it actually has to do with gerrymandering. Those are the safe areas that the Republicans have carved out for themselves to win. Another part of it is that when you look at those maps they are very misleading, they might color a whole area red or blue, but in reality, the vote was 52 - 48, therefore it doesn't mean that everyone in an area thinks the same way.",
"It's pretty simple. The liberal party generally represents the interests of urban people and shits on the values that rural people tend to have: social conservatism, pro-gun rights, and so on. Guns are an integral part of survival in some rural areas and naturally people won't want to give up their source of food or defense against large mammals.",
"Part of it is the fact that rural communities tend to be more blue-collar, therefore their work consists more of hard/physical labor. People tend to base their belief systems around what they do in life (I believe Nietzche wrote about this), so more people in rural communities are going to have belief systems that revolve around hard work and no hand-outs. This pretty much mimics the party lines and philosophies that the conservatives carry around.",
"People typically vote politically the way they subjectively believe will help them. That's why DC voters vote almost 90% or more democratic - because they want more privileges. People in rural areas vote republican because they want more privileges. There's no difference between the two parties.",
"Rural people don't want big government. It takes things away from them, including money, power and control and distributes it to urban areas. They want to be able to have a say in how things are run around them. The perfect example of this is Illinois. Chicago votes and creates laws that are in many instances completely against the interest and good of the rest of the 90% or the state.",
"There's some good answers here, (there's also some smug ones as well) I would like to ad that Conservatives stand for how things traditionally have been done and they emphasized drawing on the past while liberals advocate progress. Right now we are progressing towards a more urban way of life, which of course means that rural America is becoming a relic of the past. Many would argue that the right hasn't been aggressive enough in preserving rural America. To that, I note that Paul Krugman once said that the welfare state exists to help people weather changes in the global economy, not to help them ignore it. I believe this is the standard position among the mainstream left, ergo it's wrong to suggest that rural America should preserve it's way of life by voting Democrat, because Democrats have no interest in preserving there way of life only in helping rural Americans transition to a new way of living.",
"As a non US-citizen, but someone who lives in a close-knit rural community, let me answer this from my PoV. 1. We do not care about the bigger cities, just like you do not care about us. My small region has almost 10% independence voters. 2. The majority of liberals as in the Murrifan version is annoying af. Be homosexual all you want, don't care. Don't parade it, there is no reason to parade your gender or sexuality. 3. Charity works in rural areas, so no one is interested in a lot of the left-wing stuff. 4. When you were born and raised in a rural area, and work in a city, there is a feeling of a huge cultural drift between you and the city-dwellers. Although this is probably a lot more nuanced in my case due to the local culture my region has, but still. 5. In my lower schools it was common to get the shit beaten out of you so when people cry because they were too lazy to work hard enough on an assignment, I can't take them serious anymore. Truth be told I actually develop a strong dislike for them. 6. Voting one party is more about local unity than actual conservatism, albeit the vote here is split between nationalist seperatists, conservatives and social-democrats ( who are more or less conservative too, in this region )",
"Comments are ridiculous.Dems have proposed policies that severely hurt farmers. They have weakened their support of the farm bill. They're against ethanol mandates. The WOTUS ruling alone switched voters over. People are voting in their own self interest. Follow the money for your answers.",
"Farmers believe work and money are connected. They see it every day. For modern progressives, they don't see the connection between work and money. Money, and all the power it brings, is a right. Free college, housing, food, medical care--that's all about free money. And farmers don't believe in that. Farmers work for their money and want others to join them.",
"Disclaimer at the start: I'm pretty left-leaning, but I'm a pragmatist, and I'm opposed to federal overreach, but by no means a libertarian or objectivist. I just think that rules should take into consideration the wellbeing of the people that they govern. Rural communities deal with bureaucracy and expense of programs that are directed towards big cities. Rural communities value relationships because relationships are possible in smaller communities. For instance, take some scenarios. The first scenario is a small business in a small town that provides services to small businesses in the town. Now the city's businesses are not really enough to support that business on its own, but together with the local government it can afford to operate. The business develops a relationship with the local government, and is able to provide its services to the government, and also to the rest of the town. This is generally a good thing. Now take that town and replace it with a large city. The business now has a relationship with the government and gets sole-source access to this government work. The city is large enough to support multiple businesses, but this sweet deal is only available to one business. The government is accused of favoritism or corruption and changes the rules and says that any business can compete to provide these services, and to ensure that it's fair, there's a national registry that each of these businesses need to sign up on, and have anti-corruption checks done on new staff, and obtain security clearance before offering service. The businesses in the city are happy with that because now they can compete and break in on the deal. The people are happy because the government is being held accountable and transparent. Now go back to the town again. The government makes these rules and regulations federal so that every government needs to to follow them. Now the small business can't make a relationship with the government. Now in order to compete they need to sign up with this national registry which takes time of admin staff that they don't have, they need to get security clearance, which has a cost and takes more admin time, they need to have their lawyers check contracts, they need to jump through a bunch of red tape. This costs them money and makes them need to charge more for their services. Then when they've done this, the local government instead issues a public tender for the services. A large company from outside the town wins the tender, because their scale makes it better able to bear the red tape, so their costs barely changed while the small business costs went up noticeably. Your small business goes out of business because it can't survive on just the small amount of work from the other small businesses. Other small businesses now feel additional pressure because they've lost that service that your business provides. The large company from outside that won the tender is not interested in providing services to those companies. They're just interested in the big contract. And no business that is interested in supporting companies on that scale can survive in the town because there are too few small businesses. Each action like this reduces the available services in the community. Now, prior to regulation, you were actually able to offer a competitive rate as the competition. You were local, so travel overhead was less, and you did good work at a good price, and were invested in the community. But the regulatory pressure affected you more drastically than the large business and made you no longer able to compete. Because of this you could no longer compete, but not because of lack of ability or integrity. Then you find out that it was actually the business that took over that work that spent millions of dollars lobbying the government to institute these regulations. After succeeding, it was able to take over work in your town as well as numerous others. You also discover that they have also lobbied for relaxing the restrictions on bringing over foreign workers, and that the way they were able to compete with you despite being non-local is that they were paying foreign workers half as much as the market dictated because they can hold the threat of deportation over their head if they complain. Then go back to the big city for a moment. The foreign worker thing at this point isn't the same impact, they're being used by all of the big companies, and smaller specialized businesses can hire out on expertise rather than cost to niche markets that don't exist in the rural community. The lobby for the regulations has increased transparency and reduced corruption within the big city, and people are happy with this, the playing field is more fair, city expenses go down, competitive businesses do better, things are generally better. --- This is sort of the issue. Democrats tend to side with the ideas that help the cities right now. These things tend to have probably unintended consequences for people in rural cities, but there's actually a lot of hostility towards rural people. Republicans pander to the rural areas. I'd argue that this is mostly demagoguery right now, and that there's no real honesty with their promises. But this is where the root of the ideas are. For instance, relaxing regulations and changing anti-corruption law sounds ridiculous, especially to someone working in a big city in a big corporation. To a small business in a small town it brings a promise of being a more fair fight against the big guys. Democrats promise services and programs, but many of those services and programs can't exist in rural areas because they're developed with cities in mind. But since they're federal initiatives, rural residents have to help pay for them. The rural areas are starting to rot, small businesses can't compete with large businesses, and some of that is technology, but some of it due to uneven regulatory pressures. Drug abuse is rising, but much of the facilities for assistance is concentrated in cities. --- There's certainly a cultural aspect to it. But people are really quick to latch on to the crazy and not see the bigger picture. People on the democrat voters' side see the republican voters and think \"those guys are ignorant racists\". People on the republican side see the democrat voter's side and think \"those guys are entitled professional victims\". But the reality is way more boring. Yeah, those stereotypes do exist on both sides, and yeah, even the more rational people can start to embody those stereotypes. But in many cases, the decision is more about what ideas people think will work for them. In general, Democrats make rules that are billed as helping cities. To rural people, that looks more like it helps corporations and people looking for handouts at their expense. Republicans pander to people in rural areas and cut regulation and protections. To people in the city, this looks like they're promoting corruption, cutting services, and promoting bigotry. My own feeling is that states should have a lot more freedom to set their own rules. The US is too big to have a single government dictate so much of its policy. Rules that help a very urbanized state aren't always the best rules for a very rural state. I mean, I'm in Canada, and we have 13 provinces and territories, and I'd argue that we have less federal regulation and control than the US does. For instance, even with our free health care, each province or territory manages their own health care program in a way that is decided by their provincial government. Despite this, we have the population of California across the entire country. The US is in the same order of magnitude as the population of the EU, yet so much of the power in the US is concentrated at the federal level, and in many cases, into the hands of a single person. I would find it frustrating because I can support certain democratic ideas, and I can support certain republican ideas, but I also feel that certain democratic ideas are good ideas for some places and bad ideas for other. It's really hard to come up with a set of specific rules for a third of a billion people across vastly different demographics, industries, and size of communities that works. Yet your federal government wants to make those very specific rules. At the state level, legislation can happen that is much more relevant to you locally, and the states should have that level of authority and responsibility far in excess of Washington. Washington should keep to very general rules, protecting the country, keeping the states playing nice with eachother, maintaining the rights of the people, ensuring states don't hurt eachother, and don't hurt their people, and then dealing with foreign governments. But trying to make one-size-fits-all rules leads to rural counties voting for rural idealogues, and urban counties voting for urban idealogues. And the amount of power that you give to your president leads to the kind of shitshow that's going on right now.",
"Rural people tend to value self-sufficiency more than urban people do. Conservatism is hugely about people living their lives and providing for themselves without interference.",
"URL_0 Short answer - It's highly cultural. Rural lifestyle is about self-reliance, manliness, and faith. The liberal cities represent a lot of the values they despise.",
"Conservatives own most of the media outlets they're exposed to. 'It's easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.' - Mark Twain",
"Source: Grew up in a farming economy (South Dakota) now live in an urban political economy (DC) Some people here have touched on moral differences which while important, are only part of the story. The rural/urban divide has always existed in some form or another due to the symbiotic relationship between them. In simplest terms, rural communities feed the urban ones, and the urban communities are economic centers providing funding back to rural areas. The reason urban areas need food is fairly obvious, without it people die fairly quickly. But I've noticed people are pretty fuzzy on why rural communities should get funding (in the form of subsidies or infrastructure) back from urban communities. Most people seem to think farm subsidies are for farmers to keep them afloat, and while that is an aspect of it, subsidies are actually primarily for the benefit of urban areas where food prices being prohibitively expensive will mean starvation for lower income residents. Crop subsidies allow farmers to continually produce a huge surplus which in effect causes food prices in urban areas to remain affordable. OK that makes sense but what about expensive infrastructure in remote places? Why build a highway through a community of 50 people? The answer is that transportation costs factor heavily into urban food prices, the harder it is to transport food out of rural communities the more urban ones have to pay for it. So now that you understand the economic dynamic a little better, why is the current political climate so split between urban centers and rural communities? Due to the economic dynamic rural communities have developed a culture of self-sustainability, they view themselves as able to support their communities without intervention. This is true in essence but not true in effect. Without cities they could survive, but they could never thrive. This is not true however of urban areas, without rural support urban centers can be starved off fairly quickly. You can see examples of this happening in many third world countries during famine or political upheaval. In effect, urban areas are literally dependent on not only rural areas but also on government utilities. If water doesn't come out of urban faucets for a few days, people die. This creates a reliance on strong structured government that is able to strong arm urban needs to prevent catastrophe. This is just the tip of the iceberg that is the urban/rural divide, I could talk about reasons for differences for hours and still not get to all of them. But I believe what I wrote above is the impartial core beyond \"gun/god loving hicks\" and \"snowflake libtards\".",
"Just spitballing but I think it has to do with a belief in small government and anti-paternalistic views",
"Rural communities want less government involvement which is something most conservatives push for. If something bad happens in our town, we want to take care of it. We don't need the big government to sweep in and take over. Example: A few weeks ago there was a deadly 12-family apartment fire. We came together to supply clothing, food, new housing, etc.. I guess we don't see 'the big picture' but most of us feel like whether it be a small town or a big city--we should take care of our own."
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62mu3j | Why do people hate Nickelback? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I read an article once (it was a while ago, so forgive me for not citing it) that said it has everything to do with inauthenticity, which made perfect sense. Nickelback doesn't quite live up to its purported labels—it's a rock band that doesn't have much connection to rock, and its members fail at being the definition of cool (as they aspire) because they're trying too hard. Many of its songs could simply be labelled as “generic rock song”, and they sound as if they were machine-produced with all of the typical elements one may see in the genre and none of the flair that makes a song likeable. Nickelback and their music fail because they try too hard to be something that they are not. No one has ever claimed to like an obvious poser, which is exactly what Nickelback is."
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62ncvw | Does immunity mean you can't get in trouble no matter what? Are there any exceptions? | Even for like treason for example... | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Yes, although only for past acts, not for future ones. And, because you don't want to let someone off the hook for things you might not know about, prosecutors will often be very careful when making an immunity deal, clarifying what it covers and what it doesn't."
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62o5lv | Why did circumcision become the norm in the US? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I heard this story on Adams Ruins Everything. Apparently, (if it can be believed) Mr. Kelloggs (the maker of Kelloggs cereal) thought that jerking off was evil so he thought that if people were circumsized they would jerk off less. He led a campaign to get more people circumsized and he was quite successful. After a while, so many people were getting circumsized that it became the norm.",
"1) Anti-masturbation mentality in religious and secular (scientific) groups in the late 1800s. Spearheaded by many, including Kellogg. 2) Medical reports from WWI stating that it was healthier. It was, in the horrid conditions of the trenches where people could not clean properly. It is not much of a difference in people who maintain hygiene. 3) People trusting their doctors to know better than them what should be done with infants.",
"It started with the theory it would stop the kids later from masturbating, so they don't go to hell or smth."
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62p7z5 | what is the purpose of the horizontal shutters on green traffic lights? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So you don't mistake a nearby traffic light that's green for the light that applies to you when there is one closer that's red. Around here they are common when there is a fire station just a few hundred feet from an intersection, the light in front of the fire station is [almost] always green, but there is a light at the corner of the fire station as well for an intersection. The blinds cover up the green light before you enter the intersection, so you can only see the light for the intersection when approaching it, when you enter the intersection and get near the fire station you can then see the green in front of the fire station. The red and yellow never has blinds so you can always see if the light is red. Also sometimes they use lenses on the green instead of blinds (they have the same effect)"
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62ptzl | how did english came to be the "universal language"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The UK is arguably the most dominant nation of the past 1000 years, the US over the past 100. On top of that, the US has been a leader in media, technology, and commerce during the first time in history it has been easy to for the general public to communicate with people around the globe. That has gone a long way towards making English the preferred international language.",
"Lots of trade, commerce, and influence from two powerful countries where that's the native language. Sometimes it is just that simple.",
"Colonialism and Media Dominance. \"The sun never sets on the English Empire\" was a popular saying back in the 1700-1800s when England controlled provinces in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. Seeds of the English language have been planted all across the world. More recently, popular media has grown from the USA. American TV networks have had decades of research with an audience able to afford tvs and movie tickets, as compared to less wealthy countries - they know what puts butts in the seats, American or otherwise.",
"Because it's the language of money. When the U.S. dollar became powerful, other countries had to learn English in order to do business with us.",
"The universal or \"trade\" language of a given period is generally dictated by the most power culture of that period. For several hundred years that was the British Empire, so English became the default trade language in much of the world. When the British Empire began to lose power it was the USA that took over the role of superpower and we also spoke English. The US also happened to be in power during most of the era of globalization where communication and international trade took off to never before seen heights, and the root of much of that development (inventing the internet and being the largest economy, etc).",
"Because those that spoke the English language were the most powerful during the time when countries were discovering each other."
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62q4ey | How are dogs able to return home after many years after running away/getting lost? | I saw this post on r/UpliftingNews earlier and have heard of this happening in other cases as well. Where was this dog for four years? How did he know how to get back home? URL_0 | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We tend to understimate animal minds. It is a proven fact that these animals can develop cognitive maps just like humans do plus they have stronger senses (hearing, smell) which may allow them to create associations to environments."
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62q9kd | at what point did humans come up with the concepts of first and last names? What was the purpose of last names, since many others shares the same last names as each other? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Last names were a method to distinguish between multiple people with the same name. They fall into several categories. 1) Occupational. Smith, Wright, Cooper, Fletcher, etc were all professions. So John the blacksmith eventually was shortened to John Smith. 2) Geographical. Names like Hill, Dale, etc are physical descriptions of locations. Hank from over on the Hill became Hank Hill. Some languages use the names of villages and cities as well. Any name in German that has \"van\" in it means someone from the city/village that follows. Similarly Spanish names with \"de\" in them mean the same thing. 3) Descriptive. Red, Black, Green, White, etc were names given to people referring to a physical characteristic that they had. Hair color, eye color, skin color, etc. There are also slightly more obscure names like longfellow that refer to height, and other similar descriptions. 4) Familial ties. Eric son of James became Eric Jameson. Irish names with \"Mc\" and Scottish names with \"Mac\" means \"son of\". Irish names with \"O'-\" like O'Riley means \"grandson\" or \"descendant of\". 5) Bestowed names. You also have names that were bestowed on someone by a religious figure or by a Monarch when they entered the ranks of nobility. The names that Monarchs take when they take the throne would also fall into this category.",
"A last name was originally more like a descriptive word. People attach a bit of information after your name when they talk about you, in order to better identify you. I was speaking to Tom yesterday Tom? Tom, Peter's son You could sell that to Tom Tom? Tom, the Miller She got married to Tom Tom? Tom, from Santos My guess would be that written history and language is what started to establish this as more of a hereditary surname. But it's only a guess.",
"In some cultures though, especially in several tribes in my country, last name/surname doesn't indicate any inheritance or family. Usually, surnames are inherited from the father's or mother's surname (in matriarchal cultures). For example, in Javanese culture, there's no such thing as surname, so Javanese people usually are mononymous (one word name). If they have more than one name, usually they're unrelated from their parents' name, so both the first name and last name are given. Although, some Muslim Javanese adopted Malay conventions of name giving (derived from Arab), which is 'given name' + 'bin'/'binti' (son of/daughter of, respectively) + 'name of father', kinda like Scandinavian naming conventions with their -son and -dottir.",
"I heard that for the English the surname thing got a push when the conquering Normans were compiling the Doomsday book. The Doomsday book was a census of England for taxation purposes. I also thought that Napoleon, much later of couse, also gave impetus to the custom of surnames. I hope someone knowledgeable writes to set the record straight.",
"You talkin bout Muhammad Muhammad Muhammad? Yeah Muhammad's kid .. his uncle Muhammad was a good guy",
"I'm going to add to this. Blacksmiths were not the only smiths, and they didn't necessarily get the name 'Smith'. Blacksmiths also got the name 'black ', and Brownsmiths got the name ' brown '. Silversmiths and goldsmiths and a host of other smiths probably got the same naming.",
"It's just a way of clarifying that became convention. \"You know John? Yeah, he's Peter's son... John Peter's son = John Peterson.\" \"If you want a really great cake, you should take to John the Baker.\" = \"John Baker.\" \"I know guy who can reshoe your horse, John the Smith.\" = \"John Smith\" or \"This is John from London\" becomes \"John London\" and so on.",
"It's also important to realise that there's a natural tendency for less common last names to disappear. So there may have been far more last names back when they became a thing. See this: [TIL that last names have a natural tendency to go extinct over time]( URL_0 )",
"Last names as we know them now originated in the Middle Ages from people's occupations, where they lived, their father's first name, or even their appearance or disposition. In the early years of the Middle Ages, most people in Europe lived in small farming villages. Everyone knew his neighbors, and there was little need for last names. But as the population expanded and the towns grew, a need arose to find ways to differentiate between two people who shared the same first name."
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62rbc9 | Why is it every time a monarch or a pope ascends the throne, they change their name? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're called Regnal names. Lots of monarchies do it for no other reason than tradition (the guy before them did it, the guy before that guy did it). In some, they keep their own too. Elizabeth, for example, was baptised as Elizabeth. Some do it because they want to honor their forebears in the same way that we name our kids after loved ones. Alternatively, they may want to AVOID certain connotations: when Charles ascends the throne of the UK, he may opt to not take Charles given that the previous two Charleses in English/British history aren't famous for good reasons. I know that some popes do it because they want to signal to the world the tone of their papacy. Benedict (the guy before the current pope) said he chose that name because of the turmoil the church found itself in (the sex scandals all over the world) and it was a Benedict who lead the church through another rough patch (WW1). Popes also do the \"take the name of someone dear to them\" thing too, like a mentor or whatever. If the Catholic church elects a man baptised as Peter to the papcy, he make take a different name because there's a tradition of making sure that Saint Peter, aka the founder of the church, is the only Peter."
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62svwj | Why did Titanic become famous? Isn't it just a shipwreck like the many others? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"She was billed as invincible, she was the biggest passenger liner built at the time and they had one of the most experienced crews of White Star Line at the helm. Unfortunately a chain of completely avoidable errors caused the accident, including the ship having the absolute legal minimum of life boats which was the start of the problem. A last minute reshuffle of senior crew meant that the holder of the key to the cupboard that contained the binoculars ended up not going with the ship, and he simply forgot to hand the key back over. Numerous warnings from ships nearby (notably the Californian which was close by and had stopped surrounded by icebergs) were pushed aside by overworked radio operators who were busy sending and receiving passenger messages. The iceberg was spotted very late due to a moonless night and eerily calm waters, meaning there were no waves crashing against the bottom of the icebergs. Once it was apparent the iceberg was there, First Officer Murdoch attempted a manoeuvre to swing the front of the ship round to the left, and then push the rear of the ship outwards using the propellers in a move called a port-about. However the delay involved in switching the engines to reverse caused the ship to adopt a slow sideways drift towards the berg. Many experts believe that if Murdoch had simply turned the ship at its current speed, it would avoided the collision by some feet. Once the collision had taken place, the Captain was roused and almost immediately told by the ships designer that sinking within 2 hours was a 'mathematical certainty'. The Captain became paralysed with indecision and gave no orders other than to rouse the passengers and put their life jackets on. Prompted by other officers onboard, he ordered the lifeboats to be loaded and lowered saying \"women and children first\". However the officer in charge of one side of the ships evacuation took it as \"women and children ONLY\" and therefore dramatically reduced the amount of passengers to be saved. It is believed the Captain never officially ordered to abandon ship, or even evacuate, with many officers and staff working on their own initiative. The Californian had shut its radios down for the night, and even though both radio operators on the Titanic worked tirelessly sending distress messages (even the yet to be introduced SOS signal), the closest ship was 4 hours away. The Carpathia made full steam through the minefield of icebergs towards the ship that had given its position as 15 nautical miles from where it actually was. The Captain of this ship was later credited with saving nearly every possible survivor. The Titanic shot rockets from the deck which was seen by the Californian, however the Captain elected to ignore them. The sinking of the Titanic was a major wake up call for the authorities to start tightening procedures and regulation, as well as the media attention it received. Imagine the inaugural flight of the Airbus A380 crashing - it would hit news big time. I'm probably missing out a few details as well as having forgotten the vast majority of the crew members' names, but I've given the just of what happened and hopefully it helps. I'm sure there are some redditors that are considerably more knowledgeable than I on the subject that can point out any mistakes.",
"It was one of the biggest disasters in naval history with 1500 deaths, a large amount of that could have been prevented if the owners didn't skimp out on lifeboats, communications, and life jackets. The boat only had enough safety equipment to save 50% of the people on board, and somehow they fucked that up and lost 68% of the people. Also after its sinking after supposedly being \"unsinkable\" it became something of a tragic tale of human arrogance. After the sinking there was a major push in ocean liner's safety regulations and procedures so that you wouldn't have more people than you have the capacity to save them.",
"The Titanic was sold as unskinkable and reports in Irish papers quickly got the myth going. The ship then sinks on its maiden voyage so I imagine the irony adds to its fame.",
"Hyped up to be unsinkable. Biggest and most glamorous ship of its time. Sunk on maiden voyage.",
"She's famous because she was the biggest and best ocean liner ever built at the time, and because she sank on her maiden voyage despite being billed and designed as “unsinkable.” Also, that was predicted in a way in [a book from 1898]( URL_0 )."
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62u1yd | Why are math, tech and science majors paid more than literature, art and social studies? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Basically, you should rarely think about pay as anything other than \"how much money can i likely make for my boss\" and secondly \"how hard would it be if i left.\" The idea of jobs being paid according to importance, or worthiness, or \"value to society\" is very rarely the case. It is \"how much is this work worth it to the bosses and customers who have the money to pay.\" Things like gatgets, computers, medicine, buildings, strategy power points on where to build your next store... these are things that right now a lot of people in society are willing to pay lots of money for, so there is money in the companies to pay people. More people want new iphones every year than want hand made art or than want season passes to a theater.",
"They occupy jobs that are more in demand, because they build/design things that are important to the development of humans as a species."
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62u305 | How do bands set their tour dates? | Who chooses the cities/venues? How are opening acts and touring partners decided on? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's something out of an LSAT analytical reasoning test. Typically they set a block of dates off they can tour. Dates they can do or can't do a show in between that for whatever reason. Say a band is going to do a US tour: August 14 -November 20, 2017 You have ________________ amount of money to accomplish this. - Drummer can't do a show August 12-15 because of a family engagement. - Bassist has some other engagement on September 9 and November 12-13. Wants to put in a preference to do a show in New Orleans, October 9. - Guitarist has an open schedule. Guitarist can't stand this venue owner in Austin Texas so you can't book there. Everybody wants to book there but there has to be another venue like it about the same size and aesthetic. Nobody has any idea what it is called or where it's at...but it has to exist. Your job is to go find it. - There are a few promotional things that were pre-sceduled in NY on August 17, one in LA August 30 and one in Vegas September 2. A tour manager's job is to schedule these dates and factor in preferences and accommodate everyone so the travel details are convenient, budget conscious and make practical sense. They'll plan an outline, get it approved by everyone, make contact with venues in different cities and work out the details of the show, any hotel accommodations they may need, flights from place to another, covering any other promo things they/want/need to do along the way. Radio interviews with local stations or meet and greets with fans. A tour managers job makes sure everybody is happy and stress free and everyone can do their job. I'm not even factoring in the schedules of everyone that goes with them and getting the equipment from place to place, either. The bigger the tour is the more people and stuff and schedules you have to account for. Hope that helps."
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62uiwi | Why did Switzerland stay neutral in major world conflicts, and why did other countries accept that? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Swiss lost a battle to France in 1515, at that point they decided enough was enough and took part in no more offensive wars. Unfortunately Switzerland bordered with several great powers of the early modern era: Holy Roman Empire, France and Spain, the only way to not be entangled in the affairs of the great powers was to remain completely neutral and enter no alliances. The great powers respected that decision because Switzerland is a tough nut to crack and its people were famed for military prowess (the Swiss Guard is the last remnant of the many Swiss mercenary companies) The neutrality was officially recognized by all the nations by the Congress of Vienna (the UN of the post Napoleonic wars)",
"A couple of reasons: - Switzerland has a history of being neutral and non-expansionist dating back to the 16th century. up until recently, it was mostly focused inward and didn't bother anyone, so it didn't have any enemies. - It made a number of economic concession the Axis powers in WWII so Hitler was ok with leaving them alone. - It has very mountainous terrain, and coupled with massive fortifications and a well trained and armed military, invading it would be murderous for the attacker. - It has little strategic importance in terms of natural resources, and while it's conveniently located, the above mentioned mountains undo any value of its strategic location."
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62wabp | Entitlement as commonly used today | I get that entitlement means to be entitled to something, but what is the something that's often implied in today's rhetoric? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"People often call someone entitled if their privileges/etc. prevent them from seeing the struggle of others and/or cause them to refuse to sympathize. It's basically being a jerk about how good you have it. At least, that's how I've seen it used in a social rhetoric context.",
"My understanding is that it refers to the belief that you \"deserve\" something without working for it or without actually deserving it. It's pretty subjective"
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62wm5d | Why did cloaks go out of favor? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They were well suited to wearing on horseback, and to a lesser degree sitting in an open carriage. They are not well suited to wearing inside a car or train, where the seats are low and the air is heated.",
"So here are my thoughts: Cloaks are incredibly versatile and depending on the material construction, can be tailored for a variety of uses in many different types of weather. In addition, I would imagine that they are cheaper to manufacture than regular coats because of the simple geometry and also easier to fit multiple body types. Sure, most people think that cloaks are somewhat archaic, but I am sure you can make them fashionable. So what gives? Why are coats so much more popular in modern times? Is it simply a fashion thing or are there a ton of practical benefits to modern coats that I am forgetting? You cannot even conceal a dagger easily with a modern coat... what gives?!",
"This is something I actually read up on a few weeks back. It has to do with textile technology of the times and the limitations of it with respect to rain. Basically it starts with water proof fabric, or the lack there of. I won't go into the various off shoots like the Innuit animal derived ones and stick to cloaks. During cloaks popularity in the Victorian era, they were usually made from something called [oilcloth]( URL_2 ) or oilskin fabric. It was very tightly woven and treated to make it water proof, but when they sewed it to make clothing, the seams were not water proof. So we had to have multiple layers of clothing so that the seems were never exposed. This is similar to how shingles on a roof work, each protecting it's neighbor. This resulted in the long duster type cloaks but with an additional material covering the shoulders and neckline like overcoats or [ulster coats]( URL_1 ). Think 'Sherlock Holmes' People were aware of rubbers natural water repellent properties but it was fragile and tore easily because natural rubber is quite soft. Eventually we discovered [vulcanized rubber]( URL_0 ), where it was treated with sulfur and heated and pressed to make it stiff, hard, and very tough. At that point we could make much lighter and simpler garments like rain coats and because we did not need to worry about the seams or needle holes, it was no longer necessary to layer the clothing and use of cloaks and ulster coats or [Iverness capes]( URL_3 ).",
"Cloaks are great for walking or riding horseback, particularly in rain or winter. Alas, in today's motor vehicles, sweeping your rain covered cloak into the seat as you sit down isn't quite so smooth a move as sweeping it with your leg as you mount your horse. Bring back the horse as transportation, and the cloak won't be far behind.",
"Cloaks *are* very warm... Unless you need your arms for anything. If you want to carry a backpack or shoulder bag, you have to wear it under your cloak, which just looks odd. Don't get me wrong, I wish cloaks were in fashion as well... But sleeves are nice for keeping your clothing from twisting around when you don't want it to.",
"I'm not sure why but I'd love for them to come back. I used to do medieval reenactment (the actual hitting each other kind not the foam and polyester one) and cloaks were great. Warm as fuck like wearing a thin duvet all day.",
"I can't under any circumstance understand why a cloak would be better than a jacket or any of the other upper body clothing options we have today. Can someone explain to me what's so superior about a cloak to a coat or jacket while riding a horse or walking around? It seems to me that cloaks were just easier to make and easier to be worn by people of different sizes, and the reason they aren't made anymore is because making jackets is not only incredibly easy but cheap now",
"Hmm, let's bring cloaks back. Who's with me?",
"Honestly cloaks can be made from any material just like jackets and can be made with a hood which, let's be honest looks fantastic. They can also double as a blanket unlike most jackets. Plus I'm pretty sure nobody would fuck with a person wearing a cloak...",
"We don't really ride horses any more and we've mastered the science behind making a room warm. Wearing a huge blanket makes sense if you're going to jump on a horse and ride around in the rain or sit in a badly sealed wooden building, but it's not super practical if you're climbing into a car or hanging out in a modern building. Plus they look ridiculous now."
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62x14t | How does cinemas work? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So movies nowadays are pretty much all digital. A few years ago Hollywood stopped wanting to ship any film out. They get it on an external hard drive which is delivered to the theatre a couple days before it is to premiere on the screens. They're very proprietary to they type of projector presenting it and actually to the specific projector that is to be used. So for example on Wednesday the theatre might receive the movie via a delivery then they have to \"ingest\" it into the hard drive of the projector of the screen they want to use (some may have upgraded to a centralized network so they don't have to re-ingest it every time they want to move the movie to a different screen). Once it is ingested they load it up like a playlist; ads, commercials, trailers, queues for when the lights turn on and off, it's very much like an iTunes playlist. The night before or the morning of when the movie actually premieres the theatre will receive a \"key\" that is an ecrypted password that will allow the certain projector to play the particular file (movie) that will have to be uploaded to the projector. At that point it's essentially just set to a timer for when the movie is supposed to play."
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62x9cd | How did the bunny become the mascot for Easter? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Easter is a celebration of resurrection and an echo of the fertility festivals of the prechristian era. Rabbits are prolific breeders and so are honored in this season. The easter bunny deposits eggs which are another symbol of new life and resurrection after a long winter. Source: i don't know, i am just a guy who reads stuff.",
"Okay so say that you had your religion, and I have my religion, and I'm in charge so I try to force you to follow my religion. How might I do that? I could make you go to my church every week, and get your churches shut down, but people are creatures of habit, and you would still have your religious holidays that you would practice on the side. So how can I get you to stop following your holidays, and start following mine? This was a question the Christian church asked itself as it converted pagans to christianity. No matter how they tried, the former pagans, would still celebrate their pagan holidays. So the church did something sneaky, they moved some christian holidays around and made them take place on the same day as the pagan holiday. Then the people didn't have a choice, they had to attend the christian holiday events or be called out for being pagans. A funny thing happened though, the former pagans, began celebrating both the Christian holiday AND the pagan holiday on the same day. The pagan fertility festival featured rabbits, eggs, and other symbols of spring and fertility (rabbits make a LOT of babies), eggs are symbolic of fertility etc. The Christians moved Easter to coincide with it, and what started as a remembrance of the crucifixion and rising from the dead of JC, started to incorporate eggs and bunnies becoming the Easter we all know. This also happened with Samhain (pronounced similar to sam when) which had the Christian All saints Day moved up and the night before became All Hallows Eve, or Halloween, and so you got the pagan scary masks to ward off bad spirits when they rise from the dead during Samhain, and we end up with trick or treaters. It happened again with the winter Solstice festivals which included yule logs, evergreen trees, mistletoe etc, and Christmas, the celebration of the birth of JC. Add in a touch of some Germanic folklore in the form of Saint Nicholas, and we get Santa Claus, gift giving, christmas trees, yule tide logs, and kissing under the mistletoe. When you look back on it, Christianity often co-mingled with peoples native beliefs and it led to some interesting and colorful new traditions. When it mixed with African folklore we got Santaria and Voodoo culture for instance. It worked both ways too. The Christian book of revelation plays pretty close to the even older Norse story of Ragnarok, Loki, and Norse traditions."
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62xipq | Why did Serbia and Austria-Hungary hate each other leading up to the assassination of the Archduke and the start of WW1? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Serbia at the time wasn't an independent nation. They were a subject nation (read: Vassal) of Austria-Hungary and many Serbians wanted that to change. Ironically, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was a supporter of Serbian independence."
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62zfdt | Why are different types of media released on different days? | Books and music are normally released on Tuesdays, comics are released on Wednesdays, and movies usually come out on Fridays. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Movie theaters make most of their money on weekends, so new releases timing with weekends tends to be the most profitable, what with the \"It's new\" factor, as well as potentially less reviews before the bulk of people get a chance to see it. (Bad review = less people wanting to see it. If people get there before they read reviews, studios make more money). As for the other media, I cannot say. Am personally irked that video game releases not only happen on school days, but the big releases always feel like they're during finals week or something like that."
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62zxv5 | Crime in the USA | I'm studying abroad and the people in this country have asked me why there is so much crime in the US especially related to children- like kidnappings and murders, and here children play in the streets and it would never occur to someone to harm someone else's child. Why is crime especially towards children higher in the States? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Crime in the US is **very well reported**. Particularly crimes involving children, they have high drama and that makes them good TV that gets a lot of clicks on the Internet. The kids in my neighborhood walk down to the park and play every day. It's not news, so it's not covered. You need to remember that the definition of \"news\" is \"stuff that almost never happens or has never happened before\"."
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631c3n | Why were there civil war marching bands, and what was their purpose? | I can't find any info on what role marching bands played in battle/while walking. Either I'm not googling right, or there's just very little information on the subject. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There weren't marching bands. Armies used drums and either bugles or fifes to regulate marching and communicate orders over the battlefield. The role was utilitarian. Two instruments does not a band make.",
"The other responses are half right. There were drummers and buglers who served important purposes during battle, and also bands who were not so useful during fighting. In the civil war, communication was difficult, so drummers and buglers were used to convey orders to a unit, they had specific \"songs\" that would tell people what to do. There were also larger bands, both official and unofficial, and they do what bands nowadays do- play music to add ceremony to an occasion, and pass time while there's no fighting. Especially during the Civil War, 99.99% of the time soldiers weren't actively fighting, so during time spent at camp, or on the march, bands would play music to entertain and distract the troops."
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631l10 | How do certain religions become more popular/practiced than others? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Ironically enough, via evolution by natural selection. Religions are examples of memes, in the original sense of the word. A \"meme\" is an idea that is transferred from person to person and evolves over time (religions, folk tales, urban legends, the weird middle school S, and the image memes on Imgur...All examples of memes). Just like anything that replicates and has an imperfect copying mechanism (be it gene transfer, protein folding, or word of mouth/writing), a meme is subject to evolutionary pressure. People hear the idea and, if they like it, pass it on, forgetting it if they don't. They don't copy it perfectly to the next person, so little errors creep in over time. If the error makes it more likeable to more people, that error is more likely to get replicated, and if it makes it less likeable to other people, that error is likely to get weeded out. Now, *why* some idea may be more likeable than another depends on the time and the place. When Christianity first got started, mystery religions from the eastern part of the Empire were, for lack of a better word, a fad. That gave it a leg up. The idea that the injustices Israel was facing would be avenged by God in the hereafter was enticing (given that the Romans subjugated them, and ended up destroying Jerusalem entirely about 40 years after Jesus). The promise of eternal life is appealing, especially given the dim view of the afterlife common in the Roman world at the time. Now, what people have found appealing varies from place to place and time to time. Traditional Christian denominations are shrinking in the United States, while non-denominational, charismatic, and Evangelical strains are booming. The doctrine of those traditional denominations hasn't changed (much), but they're shrinking because people's tastes have changed. Sometimes people find something appealing for much more obvious reasons: if you were a small town on the Arabian Peninsula in the eighth century, you became Muslim because that was more appealing than being invaded and killed (same went for non-Christian towns in the Byzantine domains a few hundred years earlier). If your local emperor or chief or whatever converted to some religion, it was often advantageous to follow along. In more recent times, if you disagree with a religion's stance on drinking or homosexuality or violence or whatever, a related but slightly different strain/denomination of your religion might win your heart.",
"Generally because of war. Catholisism spread via the Roman empire, which became the holy Roman empire. It was then spread by the Spanish, Portuguese, British, Dutch and Danish empires. Protestantism spread via the British empire. Same with Sunni, Shia and other Islamic denominations. A random tid bit is that gengis Khan was a \"Christian\" of sorts, he believed in all God's and wished to anger none. This eventually lead him to believe that he was given Devine Providence to rule the whole world. When the crusades started, the Christian soldiers heard of a Christian King from the East and sent a papal envoy to meet him. He told them to submit or he would destroy them."
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632oax | why do we, humans across the world, use "shh" to mean "quiet down" | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Right after I had my daughter I read that the \"sssshhh\" noise sounds very similar to the sound of blood rushing through your veins. The baby is comforted by the sound because it reminds baby of mothers womb. It could be something that is culturally shared because biologically we all hear the same sound in the womb regardless of spoken language.",
"It's often thought to be associated with the words \"hush\" and \"shush\". The origin of all these words is the Middle English word huisst (pronounced \"wheesht\"), which originated in 1350–1400A.D. Huisst as expected, meant \"silence, peace\".",
"I'm by no means qualified to answer this question but my best guess would be that \"shh\" -ing sounds very similar to whispering?"
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633d82 | The Dalai Lama and why China has a problem with him? | Wasn't sure if flair should be Culture or Other; went with culture. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Dalai Lama is the traditional head of the government of the region/country of Tibet. China declares itself to control and own Tibet as a part of China, although affording it regional autonomy. The Dalai Lama on the other hand refuses any official Chinese title and rejects China's control of the area, declaring Tibet as an independent country. China of course doesn't enjoy this sort of rebellion and generally sees the Dalai Lama as a criminal.",
"The Dalai Lama is tibeten. Tibet is controlled by China and their freedom and sovereignty is a very pressing political question for Tibetens and for the Dalai Lama. More importantly the Dalai Lama is a very important religious and human rights leader who has met with pretty much every world leader and many other important people spreading the importance of peace and respect as well as the struggles of people in Asia and specifically Tibet. So for China it's very inconvenient that a hugely important and respected figure goes around the world talking about the unpleasant things the Chinese government does."
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633lbc | Why does it seem like all Caribbean islands (Jamaica, Bahamas, Bermuda, Puerto Rico, etc.) seem to be third world countries, with terrible economies and infrastructure? | This is not meant to offend anyone from these countries, its just the impression I get being American. Someone I know just got back from a service trip to Jamaica to teach first aid and CPR to villagers and describes a place where everyone is poor, and there are no jobs and no place to go. Are there any particular reasons, historical or otherwise, for this trend? I have been to Bermuda and the Bahamas and even in the high traffic tourism areas you can tell how poor the people are and how sadly hopeless their situations seem. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Historical and geographical reasons. Most of those islands were colonized by Spain in the 16th and 17th century and used to produce sugar and tropical fruit crops. The colonial government had little interest in improving infrastructure, education, or standard of living and many of the residents were slaves. When the Spanish empire started to unravel those islands found themselves suddenly self-governing with little experience or resources. Since then they've struggled with corrupt governments, meddling from cold war superpowers, and the simple lack of resources on an island.",
"These countries have a highly polarized economy with tourism is the primary national product. Corruption is rampant within the Government. Tax evasion is commonplace. Lots of business is done with cash. Huge multinational corporations own most of the hotels and resorts. There is a small, powerful elite class of professionals and businessmen who control the service and support sectors. Everybody else pushes a broom, turns a wrench or hustles for a living.",
"Third world actually refers to the alignment of countries post ww2. First world were aligned with US, Second World were Soviet aligned and third world were everyone else.",
"It's a complicated question but i'll give it ago: Poor governance and an atmosphere of zero accountability permeates much of the Caribbean. Blatant corruption, often at the highest levels of government, frequently goes unaddressed. Small islands like the Caribbean certainly dont have it easy despite the year round sunshine. Aside from sunlight, most of these islands have little natural resources of their own, and are forced to import majority of goods which makes the cost of living higher. It would be unfair to say that a history of slavery and colonialism have not played a role in the Caribbean's current predicament, but as a person who lives here, it would be disingenuous to be blame anyone else but ourselves.",
"Jumping in as a Bermudian here...Bermuda is not a Caribbean island (it's really quite far away from the Caribbean...no where near it, in fact), and it is definitely not a 3rd world country...quite developed and wealthy, in fact. It's a tax haven and makes rather god use of the wealth it accumulates from that. There is some poverty (more in recent years), but...well...Bermuda is quite different from other places mentioned here.",
"Bermuda is not a third world country and is not part of the Caribbean. It's a commonwealth nation and quite well off. My parents lived there for a few years.",
"Historically? Colonialism, as many have said. Currently? Corporate colonialism. Most of these island nations' economies are dependent on tourism, but most western tourists are afraid of local businesses, so they stay at large resort hotels, whose corporations are based elsewhere. Because of this setup, they do provide jobs to locals, and draw tourists, which bolsters the economy somewhat (souvenirs, etc.), but a great deal of the revenue does not go directly to the local economy. So it's kind of a \"don't bite the hand that feeds\" situation, a \"we don't really have the capital/corporate experience to run this ourselves\" situation\", and a \"ugh, this sucks, but can we really expect better?\" Situation. Note that this does not include places like Haiti, which are just plane boned.",
"You know Puerto Rico is part of the US, right?"
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633nyl | Why do some people's personalities just rub us the wrong way? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's hard to say exactly what. I find I have the same problem with some people, they strike me as utterly toxic, while others don't seem to be upset by it. It's something like this: There are certain personality traits I find utterly abhorrent. For example, being excessively self-assured strikes me as unspeakably arrogant. I see shades of grey on everything, and I try to form my opinions and beliefs based of the notion that there are multiple viewpoints to consider, and I can't possibly have considered all of them, so my conclusions can only be a maximum of, say, 97% valid. When stating my beliefs, I tend to preface them with qualifiers like, \"in my experience\" or \"correct me if I'm wrong, but...\". To me, doing so conveys a decent sense of self-doubt, and a willingness to learn or be corrected. I think I do this because I don't want anyone to feel like their opinion is invalid. I have been made to feel that way on the past, as though my thoughts, opinions, and experiences are without value, and it's completely dehumanizing and degrading. So I try to avoid doing that when possible. People who don't have that hang up tend to strike me as arrogant, self-centered, and devoid of empathy. It's a trait that really rubs me the wrong way. More recently, I've come to understand that my reaction to such people is the result of me being overly sensitive to a certain extent, and that the assumption that my opinion is not valued is not necessarily true, I just perceive it that way. Moreover, my \"decent sense of self-doubt\" is often interpreted as a spineless indecisiveness, whereas I am trying to convey more of a cautious open-mindedness. I think the bottom line is that we are all the products of our past experiences, and that often, we are conditioned to react negatively to personality traits that we perceive as toxic, when perhaps they are not. I'll end this with the obligatory, \"of course, that's just my experience. \"",
"I once met another woman at the gym who I quickly decided I didn't like. But since we spent a lot of time working out together (we were part of a small club that met regularly) I started to think about why. I realized that everything I didn't like about her was related to qualities we shared, but she exhibited to a greater extent. After that I found a lot of respect for her and we became good friends. Edit: I just thought of another friend, who is a lot like me, who I also initially didn't like. I wonder if this is a common thing.",
"There is a relatively new guy at my work place that used to drive me nuts. He's never rude or mean. In fact, it's the very opposite. He apologizes for everything he says and does it to the point where I've realized he has zero self confidence. He also clearly sees me as a dominant personality. I am naturally drawn to other confident people, so this is a challenge for me. Anyways, now that better understand his quirks, I'm less judgemental and try to be more helpful by boosting his confidence. He's quite good at his job so I think he just needs some positive feedback.",
"I have known two people in my life who I just clash with for no specific reason that I can see. I still work with one as part of a very small staff so we've learned how to be around each other and communicate but I still fucking hate working with him. It's been four years. The other was my best friend's cousin. No idea why especially since he was very similar and good friends with my best. my only conclusion is just that some people are oil and water. Brains clashing. Chemical stuff. I don't know. Look at all these answers I'm giving you. All I can really say is I understand.",
"We all have things that are morally significant to us. Sometimes there's behavior that rubs us the wrong way because it stirs up subconscious memories of other times someone has rubbed us the wrong way or stepped over the bounds that we set up. Sometimes it's just as easy as simple expectations. When we're taught to do things a certain way, and we struggle physically, emotionally, or personally with conducting ourselves in the way that we believe society should act, it can be difficult. Then, you meet someone who knows the way they should act but completely disregards that all together, it can be irritating. Certain behavior can also take you back to a time where someone else acted in a similar fashion and it caused disorder*, chaos, or psychological discomfort.",
"I find that I can't stand people I share traits with that I hate about myself. Being an extremely sensitive person myself, I say it is really hard to get along with such people, because you always see in them the part of you that you would like to be different. But give it some time, more than often, after you've had a few good talks with them, you'll realise \"damn he/she's a really nice person\". To sum it up: nobody can read someone's character on first sight. A lot of people think they are very good at reading other people. That's fucking BS, you actually have to get to know somebody before judging their personality. EDIT: a word",
"I think it is you see a bit of yourself in that person. Maybe it's a part of yourself that you don't like or enjoy or trying to better. This gives you the idea that you don't like them, but really you don't like that personally trait that you don't like in yourself.",
"she probably has superficial, high-yield personality traits, like cookie-cutter make people like me traits: -laughs at everything people say -mimics body language -conveys a sense of certainty and security -conflict-averse only maybe 20% of people bother analyzing other people who they aren't jealous of or who haven't directly conflicted with them. 2 minutes of analysis can reveal how vapid the person is, but most people don't care - and rightfully, it's best to just \"do you\"",
"I find that in any workplace there are probably 10% of people I don't get along with. - likeability URL_0 - EQ URL_3 - lack of empathy/ lack of introspection/ mindblindness URL_2 - true self / false self URL_1 - the person behaves completely differently with different people These can interact in strange ways that make a person appear cold/distant/weird. If you every deal with people with schizophrenia, you will find some odd personalities but you can't explain exactly why. Personality research is in its infancy.",
"There are some good thoughts listed here. There probably isn't just one answer. There is a woman I know who is a terrific woman, kind generous, friendly, nice looking, etc - yet I cannot stand to be with her for more than 20 minutes no matter how hard I try. It is not due to some of the reasons I have seen listed here already. I am going to chalk it up to \"chemical\". I wonder if it is similar with dogs. For example we have a shih-poo, who is a very friendly unassuming dog and is mostly submissive. He is friendly or somewhat timid with every other dog we meet when out for a walk. Yet every once in a great while, he viciously barks at another dog who is seemingly friendly and not showing a threatening behavior. Not sure what to chalk this up to either - but makes me wonder if there are similarities and this is just \"chemical\".",
"I've heard that people hate people because of the qualities they share that we hate in ourselves",
"Reminds me of the saying \"Try everything on the menu and you're guaranteed to find something you don't like\".",
"I want to add a piece tk this even though i have no answer. There is one guy i work with who is popular at our job and gets along with many people. For whatever reason, him and I fucking hate each other. Everything about this guy rubs me the wrong way. It didnt help that i found out he was talking bad about a few people including me, very badly behind our backs. That is a trait a despise so much that I know we will never get along. Its weird because we got hired at the same time so youd think we would share comradery...but nope. I literally cant even stand his face and refer to it as \"punchable\"",
"Everyone has personality traits they don't like in other people. Sometimes they are reflections of our own shortcomings (as the saying goes \"if you can spot it, you've got it). That's not a hard and fast rule but you'd be surprised how often it holds true. Another factor is that sometimes people have qualities that remind us of other people in the past who we may have had a resentment against. This is over simplifying it, but say a red-headed kid with a Boston accent bullied you as a kid. As an adult, you might find yourself often forming an instant dislike of gingers or people with Boston accents. Most of the time you won't even be aware of why. People have different levels of intellect too. A charming liar might have a circle of friends who give him attention and admire him, while you might loathe the guy because you're smart enough to see through the facade while his little crew can't. Finally, some people are just not compatible for whatever reason. You are thinking correctly though in that it's best to look inward for the reasons why someone or something bothers you first. Not to say blame yourself, but it's a useful tool of self-discovery and you can often unburden yourself of a resentment or hurt feelings if you examine the root of your own thoughts and feeling rather than focusing on what's wrong with this other person. Try to remember that no one can *make* you feel anything. We can decide how to feel about people and situations. With a person that you don't like, I find it useful to put myself in their shoes and try to empathize. If you can truly imagine being the other person or at least give them the benefit of the doubt it helps. Super simple example. Some guy is driving too fast and cuts you off in traffic. First reaction might be to get angry and say \"what a jerk!\". You can choose not to be angry about it though. Maybe that guy just got a call that his wife is in labor at the hospital and something's gone wrong and he is in a rush to get there. Imagine how you might drive in the same circumstances. Stuff like that.",
"The problem isn't with you, she's probably a sociopath and you are the only one of your coworkers who has the instinct to recognize them.",
"One of the coworkers in my department laughs at *everything.* We hear it all the time. Whenever she says something... it's funny. Ughhhhh. But people still like talking to her. If that's not a paradox, I don't know what is.",
"I love this question, always felt like people don't like me at any job yet I'm fine with most people, maybe it's because I am quiet and people want me to speak up and when I don't, they subconsciously write me off yet I am totally fine with still talking to them like nothing happened and yet they look at me like \"do you not know that I don't like u\" and I'm just so oblivious to it",
"I used to work with a lady who wasn't my manager but more like a team lead. She was one of the most self centered persons I've ever met. She would run meetings and when I would ask a question, she'd claim that we didn't have time to address my question. More likely that she was pissed someone else was speaking. I find that I can't stand people who can't think of anyone but themselves. And even if they are talking to you, they are never really interested in what you are saying.",
"It's like im allergic to people who are really overly excited, overly positive because it's an alarm bell for me (from experience) that they go really really low and i dont want to be around it. I started a new job last year with 3 other girls and one of them is this type of personality. Always dancing around, screaming that she is high on life and every once in a while she thrashes around cursing and in an awful mood. Unfortunately the 4 of us are really close and we hang out all the time but she makes my skin crawl. I do appreciate that she seems to be a good person, also I highly doubt she would be as critical of me as I am of her. I would expect her never to do anything bad to me or anyone but I can't convince myself to like her. I cringe when she talks. It makes me feel like such an awful person but I really can't help it I dont know why"
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634gj0 | Are "Private armies" a possible thing? | I've been delving deep into MGS lore, and although it's definitely (science) fiction, cant help but wondering if private armies/forces funded and supported entirely by something private sector something could be something to look out for in the future. Is a thing like this possible? If it isn't, why not? Am I very uninformed and these things already exist somewhere? Thanks!! | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are numerous corporations called Private Military Contractors (PMCs) that provide advanced security services. A famous example was Blackwater, now called ACADEMI. Others have been Triple Canopy, Unity Resource Group, and the very famous Executive Outcomes. Generally, you cannot use these companies' services very well in their HQ countries, as Western governments are strong enough to crack down on extra-judicial military forces. However, in less well-run parts of the world, PMCs reign supreme as the ideal way to privately secure your own holdings and expansions. Executive Outcomes was famously contracted in Africa to put down a rebellion, which they did so successfully. In more recent times, Blackwater and smaller PMCs took part in the various Middle Eastern conflicts, contracted by governments to aid their militaries, and by private individuals who wanted the services to protect their territory and expand their fields of operation. Yes, private armies are a thing, and they have been growing stronger over the past twenty years, however they do not operate in the West besides training and office spaces.",
"They certainly were when Pinkerton was founded. And in countries where coups are relatively common, it may be possible for one person to own a small army. In addition, depending on the way you define an army, drug cartels may own small armies."
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634tkz | how is it that children of famous people, particularly politicians, are easily admitted into top tier and ivy league schools? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If the school wants to have the best outcomes, they likely want a mix of very wealthy kids and very smart kids. This breaks down the barriers so that when the very smart kid needs investment and connections, they now have friends that can provide it. It is not fair. But for those that get into ivy league in the very smart bucket, it actually enhances their opportunity rubbing shoulders with the less smart children of the very wealthy.",
"Quite apart from any potential ability to \"buy their way in\" - which may or may not be a real thing - children of famous people are more likely to have had advantages that make it easier for them to perform well academically. They may have had private tutors. They almost certainly will have been sent to schools with a strong reputation, whereas most people have to deal with what's available relatively nearby. Direct academic advantages aren't the only ones that are relevant, either: between those, access to extracurricular activities that look good on an application, and other such things, the children of wealthy and influential parents are disproportionately likely to gain admittance. *Then* there's the possibility of the parents exerting \"influence\" on the schools, as well, which exacerbates matters.",
"Money, they have a lot of it, and with money comes influence, its not what you know, its who you know is very applicable.",
"Private schools with tough curriculums, tutors when needed, if the parent is an alumni that can go in the kid's favor, the prestige of having that person's kid, the parent being able to pay the sticker price when the school says \"yes, but you're not getting any kind of financial aid\", parents either have pull with the school or know people that do..."
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635cn2 | in the U.K. at least, why are suspects in police interviews allowed to answer, "no comment?" Surely it defeats the object of questioning if they can evade questions | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I can't believe everyone is giving US-based answers. In the UK, if you are arrested, you are told \"you have the right to remain silent but **it may harm your defence if you do not mention now anything which you later rely on in court.** That's very different from the US situation. And since OP specifically asked about the UK, the answer to the question is that evading questions might harm your defence.",
"They're allowed to remain silent because they have a right to. You don't have to answer questions during a police interrogation, nor should you since it cannot help you in any way, shape or form, it can only gather evidence AGAINST you. You are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, what the police is trying to do is to get a confession out of you that can later be used against you in court."
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635nh1 | What's the difference between a language and a dialect? And when does this distinction occur? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A dialect is still mostly understood by other dialects within a language. When that stops being true they have diverged enough to be separate languages. So French and Spanish have both drifted far enough from Latin that they are different languages, but Spanish from Spain and Spanish from Mexico are still mostly understood by each other."
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636338 | Why does zodiac astrology work or not work? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because there is no scientific or medical theory that says everyone who is born the same time of the year over different years will display the same characteristics or have similar experiences. No theory even comes close to explaining why that would happen.",
"Astrology works from time to time due to the prediction being so general in scope that it ends up being true for most people. For example, I am a Pisces, which means I'm inherently a logical and curious person by nature. However, the same number of people in all other astrological signs are equally curious and logical. You can test this yourself. * 1) Take an astrological prediction from a magazine or a newspaper * 2) Cover over the astrological signs so they can't be seen * 3) Have your friends and family pick a random prediction from the list of 12 * 4) After they read the prediction ask them if they felt the prediction related to them or not (record these answers) Afterwards, look at the answers people gave. You'll likely find that most people said the prediction related to them, however they were reading from a sign at random, not specifically their sign. Astrology also **doesn't** work and is harmful for the same reasons above. Let's say someone reads this prediction and they also happen to have a serious, deadly condition. In these predictions there are often some which are health-related. These could direct that person away from handling their condition in a way that will harm the person more than help. Many lawsuits in the past have been due to this exact thing and have forced lawmakers in the US to enact laws stating that these predictions need to be labeled as \"for entertainment only\".",
"In Portugal last year, there was a stunning proof of astrology. In a series of freak accidents, several people were killed by donkey wagons in various parts of the country, all on the same morning. Investigators discovered that all of the victims had been born in the early afternoon of September 31, 1982."
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636g03 | How can someone who comes from nothing attain political power? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Work hard in school, go to an elite university, elite law school, work in an area of law that serves the public, parlay that into local elected office, then higher elected office, rinse and repeat. Read up on both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, who each did what you are asking about.",
"It would help to have some examples; unfortunately, the likelihood of it happening is very low. Most people who attain political power come from money or status already; others, like President Obama, come from earning many honors through education and hard work -- and hard work in the right area; Obama's expertise was in law and Constitutional understanding, which are important skills for a political career, as opposed to, let's say, a becoming a world-reknown architect. But, lots of famous people get political power through the public's affinity for them -- Ronald Reagan, Donald Trump, Al Franken, Jesse Ventura, Arnold Schwarzenegger. This has to do with getting the public to like you, along with understanding how laws work. So, the short answer is you either start out with it, or you start working very hard, very early, to build the status yourself."
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6380rc | Russia seems to be doing a lot of very shady things, and the world doesn't seem to be able/willing to do anything about it. Why? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They are a soverign country, who would have power over them? Maybe the UN, but asking a soverign power to submit to a world government sets a really dangerous precedent that diplomats know could backfire later. Consider what would happen if the UN ordered the US to immediately withdraw all of it's troops from the Middle East. Even then, that all assumes the soverign country is willing to submit to the authority in the first place. When a smaller country like North Korea starts saber rattling with South Korea and/or Japan, we can park [1000ft of freedom]( URL_1 ) off their coast, or have the entire pacific division host a [fireworks show]( URL_0 ) just outside their borders for \"training purposes\" to remind them that war with their neighbors means war with US and to show them what that looks like. However, that doesn't work on bigger countries like Russia or China. When you're rattling nuclear weapons instead of sabres, and would take more than a day to invade, actual diplomacy needs to prevail. If we ask Russia to stop being dicks, they could simply walk away from the table and militarize. That means the only way the UN can force them to stop is militarization, which largely means asking the US to start blockading Russian ports, which basically means kicking off World War III."
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638520 | Football/soccer hooliganism: why it exists, and why it's so much less common than with other sports even in the same geographic/cultural setting? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"On why it's less common in other sports: It's self-reinforcing. Hooligans do not go to a sports game to enjoy the spectacle. They go there to get into a fight. They know that there will be other people there looking for a fight, and so it's the sensible place for them to go. Those who have tried going to curling matches to pick fights have wound up discovering that nobody wants to fight them there, and so they have stopped going. But if you find the right football/soccer game, you can get your itch scratched. There were riots in Vancouver 2011 when the Canucks lost the Stanley cup. Thing is, this was not a reaction to the result. The word on the street and even in the media, damn them, was that there would probably be a riot after the game. And so all the worms came crawling out of the woodwork and there was a riot. Friend of mine told me about his teenage son coming down from his room dressed in very tattered clothes. Where are you going? Oh, he was going to go downtown to watch the game. Nuh-uh, you're grounded, young man."
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638fee | If the so-called "nuclear option" is something that can easily happen to overturn a tow-thirds majority vote, then why even go through the trouble of the attempt? | I understand why a two-thirds majority is preferred, but it seems like a waste of time if 50%+1 is all you REALLY need. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The reason the filibuster exists is to protect against the \"tyranny of the majority.\" Contrary to what people think these days, the government is supposed to represent everyone, not just the ones who have the majority vote. By using the nuclear option, they're enabling the tyranny of the majority. However, this works both ways, so short-sighted people (or those who don't care about the consequences, since few people seem to remember things from a year ago) will push for the nuclear option.",
"First, it is not a 2/3rds majority vote. It is a 3/5 vote to end debate and go to the actual vote. A filibuster occurs when one lacks the votes to defeat a measure but can prevent debate from ending. The \"nuclear option\" is risky, because most senators would prefer to stop things they oppose than pass things they support. Removing the filibuster might get what you want today, but in two years, you might wind up with a whole lot of things you don't want.",
"Mostly for political theater, with a few practical implications. 1) Party X can say \"Hey, Party Y, we're trying to work with you here and the American People can see you're not willing to compromise\" which can potentially make Party Y look bad to the public. 2) Party Y looks like they are doing whatever they want without considering what Party X wants. In the future for another issue when Party X is in power, Party X can say \"Hey Party Y, remember when you used the nuclear option against us? Now we can do the same back to you and you can't get mad.\" 3) Party X can stall and hope for the slimmest possible chance that Party Y will have some members switch to their side. 4) The realization that in the long run, the more time Party X spends fighting and wasting time, the less that Party Y will get done if they battle on every issue. The more time spent on one issue is less time that can be spent on the others that are in Party Y's agenda."
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638s6n | How can all cultures be equal if some cultures clearly have significant differences in women's rights, minority rights, religious rights, and freedom of expression? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1. Who is saying all cultures are \"equal\"? 2. How is this person/people defining \"equal\"? 3. Equal != Identical. Cultures and most things in this world are very complex and it's difficult to compare things apples to apples. If you have one culture that's really big on gender/religious rights and other freedoms but has issues with racism, that doesn't mean it's better/worse as a whole than say, a culture that has racial equality but women are treated like shit."
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638txv | Gorsuch Confirmation | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Neil Gorsuch is President Trump's supreme court nominee to fill the currently vacant seat. When a president nominates someone for a position (in this case the supreme court) the nomination must be confirmed by the Senate. In the case of the Gorsuch nomination there is a lot of politics at play. Democrats are upset, not particularly surrounding Gorsuch, who by most non-partisan measures is a fine SCOTUS nomination, but are still upset by how Merrick Garland (President Obama's nominee) was treated last year by Senate republicans who refused to even hold a hearing. Why is this a big deal? SCOTUS judge appointments are for life and therefore any judge confirmed is likely to have significant impact for years to come and in the case of Gorsuch who is very young in terms of judges may possibly serve on the Supreme Court for 30+ years before retirement. Because of this lifetime appointment and the fact that vacancies on the supreme court are relatively few and far between whenever there is one there is significant interest in the outcome. edit: replace - > fill"
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639c2p | If we know that movies and shows are fake, then why so we still get teary-eyed or scared during certain scenes? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One: because humans are storytelling creatures. Two: because humans possess empathy. Firstly, humans are evolutionarily accustomed to receiving important, even life-saving info, from other humans in the form of a story. Before the bard told us about the hero's fight with the werewolf, bob was telling us about how he got away from a bear. Stories are part of our past, thus we pay attention to ones that have a lot of emotional power. Secondly, humans can empathize with characters, because after suspension of disbelief the brain starts to think it's just watching an actual event unfold. We can put ourselves in characters' places and thus feel their emotions.",
"There's a concept called \"suspension of disbelief.\" So we know it's not real, but if the movie is good, it can bypass our disbelief (suspend it, if you will) so that it sits on our mental back burner. But then you could see the wire that is making the person fly through the air, and that ruins your suspension of disbelief.",
"The human brain cannot distinguish between reality and that which is vividly imagined. This is why visualization works so well for rehearsal or skill practice. Ever made a mistake and thought someone wronged you? You react to your beliefs as if they are reality. Movies are often so well made that they act like our vivid imagination. Ever seen a poorly made movie? It takes you out of the 'vivid imagination' realm and then you just laugh, cringe, or turn it off. And the empathy thing"
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63a5c1 | How is Jamiroquai's "Virtual Insanity" filmed? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The room he was in had wheels on the bottom. The floor stayed still and the walls and roof rolled around with the camera"
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63aevi | What's the story behind students putting an apple on the teacher's desk? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's how poor students would pay teachers many years ago. Before schools were publicly funded, families had to pay for their kids to attend school. This resulted more in a barter system where kids of farmers would pay with apples or frequently potatoes."
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63aovm | What are the actual differences if quality of education between the top tier colleges and the average or low quality ones? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"professors are more skilled, they are attracted to top tier colleges for their budget, their credibility, and their facilities. the coursework is indexed to the ability of the students. There will be a faster pace of more advanced subjects at MIT than nebraska CC. in line with that, the student body will be more educated and ambitious/committed which means the general atmosphere of group work and study groups will be more advanced. and lastly, for all of this, the alumni network will generally have greater connections to in turn pay it forward.",
"Faculty and Connections/Alumni Network/Prestige that helps you get in the door down the road."
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63avtd | why do the letters in English have an 'eee' sound when saying their names? B,C,D,G etc.. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The names of English letters are mostly derivative of their French, Latin, and Etruscan ancestors - see URL_0 for a quick reference to that. (Not terribly fond of Wikipedia as a source, but this ain't university, it's just Reddit, so it'll do.)"
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63bnod | Why are we STILL discovering Egyptian pyramids, shouldn't these giant structures all be discovered by now? | In the news today, a new pyramid was discovered. I can see new tombs being uncovered, but this thing is out in the open, why did it take so long to find? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Sand dunes buried most of them. All the ancient Egyptians were dead by then and the area wasn't that populated, so people lost track of where they all were. Sometimes the wind blows the sand away, and poof, there is the top of a pyramid.",
"The big, solid, well-built pyramids we tend to think of as pyramids were only built for a short period, probably because they were a big drain on the economy. For a while, later pharaohs who weren't as powerful but still wanted to emulate their predecessors resorted to piling up mounds of dirt and debris and then throwing a layer of bricks over that. Understandably, this didn't survive as well, and today it's not obvious what's the remains of one of these pyramids and what's a natural hill.",
"> In the news today Some links for the lazy... URL_0 URL_2 URL_1",
"I do not think you realize how vast some deserts are or how much is buried under all that sand...",
"Another thing to consider is Egypt is a single city country for the most part. 1/5 of their citizens live in the metro area of Cairo, and 1/2 of their total population live in the Nile Delta area which is only 15k square miles. There just aren't a ton of people making use of a lot of the land they have so nothing is just being stumbled on, especially outside of the cities and tourist areas."
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63d2yn | Why are book/movie/game titles sometimes different in different countries and not just literal translations of the original title? | I'm from Germany and I sometimes wonder why sometimes the German titles for books, movies etc. are so different from the original title, why not just use a literal translation. In case I didn't made it clear what I mean: For example "Pirates of the Caribbean" -- > the literal German translation would be "Piraten der Karibik" is called "Fluch der Karibik" which would be translated to "Curse of the Caribbean" Tess Gerritsen's novel "The silent girl" (lit. trans. "Das stille Mädchen") is called "Grabesstille" (trans. "silence of the grave" ( or "deathlike silence") The most strange ones for me are when for example another english title is used in Germany. For example Stephen King's "End of watch" is called "mind control" here in Germany. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are many different reasons this might happen. One is that the name might be a reference to an idiom - a phrase with a non-literal meaning. For example the English phrase \"Kick the bucket\" means \"to die\", but if you literally translated the phrase to other languages it would no longer have that meaning. (on that note, I wonder if the film \"The bucket list\" was renamed in other countries). Another possible reason is to avoid trademark disputes. The film Zootopia was renamed Zootropolis in the UK because there is a zoo in the UK called Zootopia. It's also the reason the Dragon Quest games used to be called Dragon Warrior in the US, there was already something called Dragon Quest. Another possible reason is to avoid being offensive. For example the film Laputa was called something else in Spanish speaking countries because it coincidentally sounds similar to an offensive word (I think La Puta means \"the whore\" or something?). And sometimes the people in charge of localisation in a particular country just thinks a different title will sound better to their target market than the original.",
"Usually, I assume it's because the literal translation doesn't \"sound right\" to a native. For example, it might be based on language-specific idioms, or it might be as simple as sounding a bit clumsy and unnatural (example: see literal translations of anime titles). Either way, someone's got the idea that a modified title will sell better, and it gets changed."
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63dtl0 | What's so great about the Mona Lisa? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Few Reasons - Taken from previous [thread]( URL_0 ) - Leonardo Da Vinci painted it. He is the foremost Renaissance artist. Artist's credibility adds to the paintings popularity. - Napoleon Bonaparte hung the painting in his master bedroom in 1800. This - I think - was the first tipping point of making the painting one of the most popular paintings in the world. - 1804, Mona Lisa is hung in the Louvre - and others can now glimpse at the painting that Napoleon slept with. - But the real tipping point for the paintings popularity only hit in August of 1911 - when Mona Lisa is stolen. Stolen from heavily secured Louvre which experts said was impossible. No one knows who stole it or how. Conspiracy theories abound. The painting is talked about in every newspaper. - After 2 weeks of much fan fare, Police arrest Guillaume Apollinaire on suspicion of theft. He is the only person they have arrested. Apollinaire implicates Pablo Picasso. The rumor of Picasso stealing the Mona Lisa adds in a lot more fuel in making Mona Lisa very very popular. - Picasso is questioned and released. Guillaume Apollinaire himself is released after 5 days. Everyone is still clueless as to who stole the painting. But conspiracy theories abound. - Two years after the theft, the Mona Lisa is finally found when an employee working at Louvre tries to sell it to an art gallery in Florence for $100,000. - When the Mona Lisa is returned to the Louvre, it draws massive crowds. People visit the Louvre only to see this one painting. - And then it hit the Paris Hilton effect. Its popularity added to its popularity. So much so that most people don't know why it is popular in the first place.",
"Leonardo's border-free painting that achieved depth and shading through many layers upon layers was a revolutionary technique that had previously been unheard of and quickly became used by other artists after the Mona Lisa was finished. Leonardo's existing fame plus the painting's innovative brilliance made it instantly famous, but it wouldn't become the \"most famous painting in world history\" until the painting's own history made it legendary. The painting was stolen and nobody knows how or by who so the rumors and suspicions around it gave it more and more attention, and then when it was finally recovered people from all over flocked to see it at the Louvre to see what was so special about this painting they'd heard about. Then people heard about massive crowds at the Louvre and decided they must see for themselves, so on and so forth. Da Vinci himself even continues to gain fame every few years or so when someone tries out one of his centuries-old sketches and makes it actually work, then the internet goes into a frenzy researching the man and inevitably comes across the painting.",
"From NPR: [The Theft That Made The 'Mona Lisa' A Masterpiece]( URL_0 ) > * \"The 'Mona Lisa' wasn't even the most famous painting in its gallery, let alone in the Louvre,\" Zug says. > * It was 28 hours, they say, until anyone even noticed the four bare hooks. > * All of a sudden, James Zug says, \"the 'Mona Lisa' becomes this incredibly famous painting — literally overnight.\" > * After the Louvre announced the theft, newspapers all over the world ran headlines about the missing masterpiece. > * After a weeklong shutdown, the Louvre re-opened to mobs of people, Franz Kafka among them, all rushing to see the empty spot that had become a \"mark of shame\" for Parisians. & nbsp; Nobody talked about the Mona Lisa before 1911; it was not popular. & nbsp; It was stolen in 1911, but not noticed the entire day (28 hours). Once the theft was reported all over the world (which shows what a big deal it was back then before the Internet or even television), overnight mobs of people became interested and wanted to see it. & nbsp; The heist put it into the public consciousness in a very dramatic way, lifted it out of obscurity and became immediately famous. & nbsp; **TLDR:** One day nobody knows anything about the Mona Lisa, the next day it's **stolen** and everyone has to see it. Over a hundred years later it's the most famous painting in the world, but nobody remembers why.",
"Or you could add that this portrait masterfully employed, amongst many other techniques, a technique known as 'sfumato' which essentially means blending and tricks the eye so you cannot perceive where one carefully layered detail ends and another begins, like how smoky eyeshadow can create visually pleasing and strangely captivating eye-candy. The big idea here is that the painting masterfully incorporates and utilizes numerous effects and styles and is representative of pretty much everything a good portrait painting of that period can or should possess. URL_0",
"I'm sure there are historical reasons, but from an artistic perspective, the Mona Lisa has a tremendous amount of subtle detail, from the hands to the scenic background. I think it's compelling for people because of her ambiguous expression and the unclear focus of her eyes. It makes you wonder what she was looking at and thinking about. The also looks realistic - her facial features are not drawn to look more beautiful or exaggerated. Historically, it's my understanding that the way the portrait is composed (seated; waist-up; folded arms; a window showing an outdoors background) was quite original at the time and tons of people started copying that composition. After that, it kinda snowballs. once something catches on and becomes a seminal work, it keeps getting referenced until it's lodged in our cultural rolodex.",
"Legitimate history and origins aside, the \"aura\" around the Mona Lisa reminds me of this excerpt from DeLillo's *White Noise*: > Several days later Murray asked me about a tourist attraction known as the most photographed barn in America. We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book. > \"No one sees the barn,\" he said finally. > A long silence followed. > \"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.\" > He fell silent once more. People with cameras left the elevated site, replaced by others. > We're not here to capture an image, we're here to maintain one. Every photograph reinforces the aura. Can you feel it, Jack? An accumulation of nameless energies.\" > There was an extended silence. The man in the booth sold postcards and slides. > \"Being here is a kind of spiritual surrender. We see only what the others see. The thousands who were here in the past, those who will come in the future. We've agreed to be part of a collective perception. It literally colors our vision. A religious experience in a way, like all tourism.\" > Another silence ensued. > \"They are taking pictures of taking pictures,\" he said. > He did not speak for a while. We listened to the incessant clicking of shutter release buttons, the rustling crank of levers that advanced the film. > \"What was the barn like before it was photographed?\" he said. > \"What did it look like, how was it different from the other barns, how was it similar to other barns?\"",
"There are many reasons, most are stated above which include the theft and Napoleons liking to it. For a purely art historical explanation there were a few important things Leonardo did; * firstly the rocky background, the first painting to ever contain a background as such. * Themes cross borders of the painting. For example her half smile is a nod towards the ambiguity of her mind, this is reflected in the background (if you will notice the background on the left is lower than on her right) not a mistake by Leonardo but a subtle reinforcing of his message. * Leonardo was the first to use colour in a revolutionary way, rather than paint with a blue with white added to it (for example) he created a tonal range for each colour running from white to black. This allowed him to create tone and shadow in a way that can theoretically get closest to the realism he was seeking. * Finally Leonardo himself, THE Renaissance Man, acknowledged it to be his masterpiece and refused to give it to the client he painted it for. Instead he took it with him wherever he went. Although this may have been because she embodied an ideal of beauty (she was at the time considered to be incredibly beautiful) and Leonardo didn't have access to any Playboy or Penthouse...",
"Most portraiture from the time was lifeless and more of a representational image than a proper portrait that captures life. Her enigmatic smile and the depth and vitality of the painting were truly remarkable and set a new bar for contemporary artists in the early 16th century.",
"Allow me to offer another perspective - perhaps the Mona Lisa is popular because the Mona Lisa is popular. That is the argument that Duncan Watts makes in his wonderful book [Everything is Obvious]( URL_1 ) ([NYT review here]( URL_0 )). The big idea is that you might start out with 100 different paintings that are all of about the same quality, and just by luck one of them becomes more popular than the others. Then, there are positive feedback loops - once something becomes a little bit more popular, then more people hear about it, and so it becomes even more popular, until the difference in popularity is far, far greater than the difference in quality. Watts's key argument is that popularity is mostly due to luck and feedback effects, and that our explanations (i.e., the reasons given ITT - it was a new technique, it was stolen, etc.) are given after the fact and while they may contribute to popularity, plain dumb luck is most of the reason that it's so famous. A grad student of Watts's, Matt Salganik, tested this in one of my favorite social science experiments of all time ([paper here]( URL_2 )). They randomly assigned incoming users to one of seven artificial \"worlds\" where participants could see a list of songs, and how many times each song had been downloaded. They could then choose which songs (if any) they wanted to download. They found that in each \"world\", a single song became much, much more popular than all of the rest (like the Mona Lisa), but *which song became most popular was different*, providing evidence that these feedback loops exist, and that popularity is a function of luck. **TL;DR: It's likely that the Mona Lisa is so well-known mostly due to luck- *some* painting has to be the most famous, and it happens to be this one**",
"ELI5 answer - It originally wasn't very important. A guy went to the louvre and wrote on paintings - it was his favourite painting, and wrote very nice things about it. After this, it was stolen, and there were no photos of it. Covered by tons of news agencies, and everybody wanted to know what it looked like. They could only go off the book - it had vivid descriptions, that amazed everybody - they were intrigued... It eventually turned up, and everybody went crazy, and went to the Louvre to see it. That was why it became so famous.",
"Only on reddit can you find the most cynical people claiming the Mona Lisa is only considered good art because it was stolen and \"it's like anything, because we randomly assign value to garbage.\" What happened to you people.",
"I've seen the painting. The louvre is an amazing museum and of all the things in there, the painting wasn't the most impressive. I walked in, looked at it and walked out. I made the mistake of saying \"It's just a painting\" to myself a little too loudly, offending some people but I found the other artifacts way more interesting; Especially the easter island head on the bottom floor. Either way, you should visit the Louvre if you ever get the chance, there's something there for everyone, even if you're a supposed \"uncultured swine\" like myself.",
"It's famous because Leonardo da Vinci is famous. The painting itself is stylistically similar to a lot of late 15th/early 16th century portraits so it's not really an artistic breakthrough, but it is representative of a popular style. It didn't really become world famous until 1911 when it was the target of a successful heist and vanished for two years.",
"Ive seen it in person, and it is disappointing. You walk down this hallway filled with unbelievable paintings in terms of scope and quality. Then you enter the room with the Mona Lisa and theres this little painting behind a few inches of glass. its about the size of a sheet of paper. It was hard to not be underwhelmed considering the popularity of it.",
"It's literally exactly just like trending videos. Somebody likes something about it. More people do. Someone famous says something about it and people heart that, picquing interest. Other interesting things are said and word catches on. Now you're cashing me ousside. Howbow dah?",
"I think what made Da Vinci famous was that he was more than an artist, he was a Renaissance man. He was also a great engineer and the Europeans and academics were looking for something to help explain the industrial revolution going on around them. As a result there was a lot of historiography going on at the time. In the 1850s Jules Michelet was the first to really identify the Renaissance movement as a distinct period. Then in the 1860s Jacob Burkhardt identified Italian Renaissance art during the 1400s as the break between the middle ages and modern era. and this is not fully settled scholarship, there are still reasonable counter arguments. It took a while for these ideas to enter the mainstream in an understandable way, especially given all the change people had to deal with at the time. But out of all of that Da Vinci's Mona Lisa emerged as the leading symbol of that period. (Personally I prefer Botticelli's Venus for particular reasons) [Zoomable Bottiecelli's Venus]( URL_0 ) [Zoomable Mona Lisa, I didn't know Mona Lisa had a veil on until I saw this version]( URL_1 )",
"It was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, and all of the news coverage made it more enticing. Also, Nat King Cole.",
"I love this sub and everything but this sub has gone from explain it like I'm five to \"write a dissertation on this question.\"",
"ELi5: People like it for different reasons. Scholars for it's history, artists for the techniques used, random folk for being the most known painting in the world. You won't find a single objective reason why it's so great / popular, and really, there is no need for one.",
"I'm no expert, but I think the fact that it is a Renaissance painting that is so intensely focused on the individual is part of its appeal. The cliche about Mona Lisa's gaze being ambiguous making you wonder what she is thinking about is important—a lot of art prior had drawn you in to landscapes, Biblical scenes, or contemplation of the sublime, but here you're really wondering what *this woman* is thinking. When you think about art that came after, like Impressionism and especially Modernism, with the former's depictions of and the latter's deep dive into everyday life and consciousness, this painting was ahead of its time.",
"Louvre curator and Priory of Sion grand master Jacques Saunière is fatally shot one night at the museum by an albino Catholic monk named Silas, who is working on behalf of someone he knows only as the Teacher, who wishes to discover the location of the \"keystone,\" an item crucial to the search for the Holy Grail. After Saunière's body is discovered in the pose of the Vitruvian Man, the police summon Harvard professor Robert Langdon, who is in town on business. Police captain Bezu Fache tells him that he was summoned to help the police decode the cryptic message Saunière left during the final minutes of his life. The message includes a Fibonacci sequence out of order. Langdon explains to Fache that Saunière was a leading authority on the subject of goddess artwork and that the pentacle Saunière drew on his chest in his own blood represents an allusion to the goddess and not devil worship, as Fache thinks.",
"Because people think it's great then other people think it's great because people thought it was great and other people think it's great because....",
"I'm sorry to be a pretentious ass, but I don't like the answers here. Look at it. She seems alive, you want to know her story. This dead woman from hundreds of years ago- she's looking right at you, daring you to guess what she was thinking. It's just a cool, surreal experience. IMO",
"As others have mentioned, and this plays into the larger understanding of why it is popular, it was stolen in the early 1900's. This coincided with the ability to wire photos between locations. That meant that the news of the theft including a photograph of what was stolen was much more widespread than at other times in history. People became much more familiar with the painting as a result of this timing. As we know, people like things they are familiar with and can relate to others on. The more people who see something, the more popular it becomes. The Mona Lisa became a cultural touchstone that transcended countries and cultures. I think that its an interesting painting, but the reasons people see it as \"great\" are subjective (as the variety of answers here demonstrates), but I think it became iconic due to timing of its theft and photographic technology spreading it over the world in a time when there was far less visual content than there is now. In my opinion, it's important not to underestimate the extent to which our interests are being lead not by what we want, but by what is offered to us. Few people seek out alternatives to what is at hand and choose a favorite among limited and easily available options. This tends to apply to all things, including art.",
"As Phantom Limb once said: \"The Mona Lisa isn't a better painting, it's simply a more famous one. And it was only made famous because it was stolen!\"",
"I have seen it at Le Musée du Louvre, and I was struck by its size. Its actually quite small its only 30 in × 21 in. I was expecting something much bigger.",
"The art world is famous for it's contradictions and inconsistencies. Vincent Van Gogh couldn't give his paintings away and died penniless. Today his paintings are worth millions. I guess they somehow got better with age.",
"Wasn't there a mystery with the women who was painted or if she was smiling or not? Here's more on her smile and the modal, more reason on why the painting is famous. [mystery smile]( URL_0 )",
"I've seen it irl It's small Dull People don't notice the other beautiful work around them The place is crowded a full of pickpockets And I am 80% sure it's a fake and they keep the real one hidden somewhere",
"Lisa, if I can use that name, herself has an inscrutable, lovely expression that captures some of the mystery of women. It is like she is holding in some amusing secret that men will never know. Also the eyes follow you around the room.",
"Its certainly a great painting, but it wasn't very well known until it was stolen from its museum and disappeared. The media (newspapers at the time, ~1910 or sth) hype following this incident made it as known as it is today. Also the many \"conspiracies\" and mysteries (about her smile etc.) might have contributed to that.",
"Also your forgetting the aspect of Freud. He really put the painting in the spotlight. Also the painting in my opinion is nothing special. A cool way to see the change from a pairing to something priceless is to look at google trends and search the title Mona Lisa. \" a bubble that will never pop\"",
"Part of it is the style. Part the mythos around it. The painting is a perfect example of Da Vincis saturation technique. The color is deep and very pure. Also, there's a reason why smiles in paintings look cartoonish. It's very difficult to paint a smile. That's why most paintings of portraits during that era were stone faced or brooding. Much easier to paint realistically. The small conserved smile is extremely difficult to paint accurately in that style. That's the biggest reason why it's adored by artists."
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63eal8 | Why is our brain hardwired to enjoy symmetry, patterns and complementary colors? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is a question that is still up in the air. A lot of studies that suggest those things were frequently helpful for our caveman ancestors. As some random examples: Symmetry is often a good indication of health, which is useful if you're trying to have kids that will survive. Complementary colors are something of a byproduct of the way our eyes work, but they're also a good way of tracking down nutritionally rich foods (e.g. fruits and young leaves are generally more red than the surrounding foliage).",
"Our brains are hard wired for pattern matching. I think the other two; symmetry and colors, are a subset of effective pattern matching. Generic pattern matching is useful as both prey and hunter. For instance as prey spotting movement from afar of a potential hunter, in other words something that is breaking the pattern of the background view."
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63eq39 | What does this quote mean, “The whole principle (censorship) is wrong; it's like demanding that grown men live on skim milk because the baby can't eat steak.”― Robert A. Heinlein | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I believe that it means that just because something is inappropriate for one person or group, does not mean that it should be abandoned for all. Just because children should not be watching extremely violent shows or playing violent games, does not mean that they are bad games. It is similar to the short story where society handicaps everyone to the lowest performing person instead of helping them to achieve more. The strongest, fastest, most beautiful people are weighted down and made ugly so nobody can feel lessened by those that are stronger, faster or more beautiful.",
"it's basically saying that people (adults) should be capable of making their own choices and not forcibly restricted becasue others do not like the content or should be not have access to it (children). blanket restrictions to protect an subset of people is bad.",
"Babies choke on solid food (especially before they have teeth to properly chew food). Adults can easily chew and digest solid food. It would be preposterous to require adults to live on milk or pureed baby food just because babies need to do so. Heinlein is making the case that some people can safely handle knowing a dangerous truth (say how to make heroin from poppies), others cannot (this wouldn't be good knowledge to share at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting), but since censorship covers everyone in society, it's akin to forcing everyone to live off baby food just because some people can't handle knowing a dangerous truth.",
"Adults don't get to enjoy adult stuff because 14 year olds can't just act cool for 5 seconds."
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63fgwp | Why was Michael Jackson so popular and acclaimed? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"He was a child star in the 1960's in one of the most popular groups of the day (The Jackson Five), and as the world watched him grow up, he stayed popular by releasing popular songs. Some he wrote, some he did not. Thriller is consistently labeled as the greatest music video ever made. The Thriller album is the most sold album of all time. It happened to be my first cassette I got as a kid (I was 7 when Thriller came out). He was rarely controversial, his songs were a little bit racy, but under the radar compared to other artists around at the same time (see: Madonna)",
"His (not so) private life was a huge mess, but his music was (is!) vibrant, original, catchy, and lyrically and visually superb. The music video for Thriller is second to none, especially if you consider when it was made. The man was a master of his art. New artists *still* name him as an influence even now.",
"Other answers are good. I would just add that he was also an excellent performer and fantastic dancer.",
"Without internet, media dictated who was famous. Despite his enormous talent, he was chosen to be the king. Every thing he did was reported. His releases were given worldwide attention. He was so hot right then",
"I'll add to all the comments here by saying that Michael definitely had a sound all his own. Nobody at the time sounded like Michael and if they did, everyone compared them to Michael. Also the dancing. Today, pop stars incorporate dance into their stage performance but it usually feels like an afterthought (because it is). Michael was a brilliant dancer, amazing singer and had an iconic look.",
"Artistically, he tended to always be just slightly ahead of his time. Michael Jackson didn't follow the trend: he was the trend. He would set it, time and time again. He was also around long enough that he was one of the few that was considered \"hip\" by several generations. And I do mean generations: when I was an early teen and he released his last real album (Invincible), the single would be played by all the radios that catered to teens. He was still very much hip and edgy. At the same time, he was also an artist our own parents (including my own mom) had grown with and loved. How many artists of 2017 do you know who can cater both to 13 years old and 50 years old? There's not a lot of them. He was also very good at finding the right people to work with, which allowed him to stay relevant on not just music, but also video clips, live performance, etc. His shows were always the state of the art of what can be done live, he and his crew were the Michael Bay of live performances. In other words: he was a great singer/songwriter, but also a huge performer and, perhaps above all thing, a clever businessman (clever enough that people didn't even realize he was actually kind of a businessman) who just knew in advance what move to do and whom he needed in his crew to stay on top. By leveraging synergies between the three aspects, he was able to set the trend and get the critical and commercial success he is known for. While I adore Michael Jackson as an artist, I think people really underestimate how much of a businessman he was. You see how Sony or Universal launch a new artist and \"format\" it with the aim of making him or her a new superstar and cater to a large audience and be hip and bring tons of cash? Like, how they launched the career of Bruno Mars, Justin Timberlake, Rihanna and whatnot? Well, Jackson basically did the same job, except he did it by and for himself, with that \"new artist\" always being him."
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63fh1a | What's so great about Pulp Fiction (1994)? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What *isn't* great about it? Story? Check. Action-packed, humorous, and multiple separate story threads all tie together seamlessly and the non-traditional story structure keeps the viewer on his toes about how the separate story lines relate to one another. Tarantino won best original screenplay for the script. Directing? Tarantino is known for action movies with a touche of kitsch and pastiche. He's an \"homage\" director, so his style and many of the blocking/scenes are direct homages to earlier films, so it's particularly entertaining for film buffs to identify the influences. Tarantino was nominated for Best Director. Cinematography? Andrzej Sekuła (who also worked with Tarantino on _Resevoir Dogs_) is fantastic. Pulp Fiction involves a lot of creative, non-traditional framing, particularly when two characters are talking to each other, e.g. Butch and Marcellus. On the other hand, look at a lot of the shots with Jules and Vincent and how frequently they are framed side by side, with equal weight, almost as if they're siamese twins. Just the framing of those two tells you a lot about their relationship -- they're a team that act as one. Editing? Impeccable. Sally Menke edited most of Tarantino's films until her death and the two have a tight working relationship. Like the directing, the editing is frequently an homage to influential films. A good example is the dance scene with Travolta and Uma Thurman -- watch how the shots vary between long shots, medium shots, close ups of the face, and especially of the hands, all to build tension and flirtation in the scene, without feeling like any of it is out of place with the Chuck Berry song they're dancing too. That's hard to do. Menke was nominated for an Academy Award for her editing. Acting? This film basically put Samuel L. Jackson on the map and it kick-started John Travolta's nearly-dead career. Those two performances in particular are memorable, and, in the case of Travolta, totally against type ... at least what his type had been prior to _Pulp Fiction_. Travolta, Jackson, and Uma Thurman were all nominated for Academy Awards for their performances. All that said, _Pulp Fiction_ is not an \"easy\" film. This is not an eat-a-bucket-of-popcorn-and-forget-the-world-for-two-hours film (I'm looking at you, Michael Bay). Tarantino is a film afficionado, and _Pulp Fiction_ is, in many ways, a tribute to his influences and a demonstration of his abilities. It's heavily stylized. Tarantino sticks the techniques of cinema in your face non-stop, from the narrative to the cinematography. You can't help but be _aware_ of the fact that this is a film and the director is intentionally trying to *not* let you forget the artifice of it. It is a class in narrative film-making. It's a show-off film. It's an _auteur_ film. That sort of style is *definitely* not everyone's cup of tea.",
"It has a fairly captivating story with good acting. Lots of memorable moments. It has a lot of meme-type moments, but they add to the effect of the movie. I love it for Samuel L. Jackson's role, and how the script writing creates for very real reactions to situation, and some over dramatics on others."
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63fjwq | Can the 4th Amendment be used to challenge the new FCC regulations? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"new FCC regulations? If you're referring to the repeal that just took place regarding an ISP's ability to sell customer information then no. First, what was repealed was not some long standing regulation, it was regulation that had been passed that hadn't even gone into affect yet. The end result of the decision last week by Congress is nothing changes, the status quo continues. ISPs have always been able to sell your data without direct consent and now will be able to continue this practice. Regarding your 4th amendment rights; You willingly choose to do business with your ISP and you have the ability to choose which ISP you do business with (well...you should but thats another debate for ISP monopolies) so no, you don't really have a standing that would result in a successful lawsuit. You've signed a contract and willingly send your information to your ISP and you have made no amendments to that contract that states the ISP may not distribute your information as they see fit.",
"No. The 4th amendment protects you from search and seizure *by the government*. It doesn't protect you from entering into an agreement with an ISP that involves selling your data. (The fact that you don't really have much choice in ISP is not something the law is really designed to care about, as silly as it may be). As far as the law is concerned, if you don't want to be tracked, don't sign up for internet. If you don't like it, the ISPs are not obligated (anymore) to offer you a service if you don't agree to that clause."
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63fmf5 | how does the album remastering process work? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A song is made up of several \"tracks\". Generally, each instrument is assigned to its own track - guitar is track 1, vocals are track 2, drums are track 3, etc. Those tracks are then mixed & mastered. That means adding all sorts of dynamic effects (equalization, compression, panning, and so on) and then mixing those individual tracks together to create a song. Nowadays, music can be stored digitally, which allows distribution to occur much more effectively (in terms of cost and speed). Combine that with the huge technological leaps that have been made in the last 20 or so years, and studios now have the ability to store much more detailed copies of songs at a much lower cost. So when an engineer \"remasters\" a song, he is essentially taking the original tracks (individual instruments) and using more modern techniques to blend the tracks together into the final song. The end result can then be stored in high quality digital formats and re-distributed with better audio quality than was previously available. It's important to understand, though, that the original \"tracks\" are usually already high quality because they are physical recordings done in a professional setting using professional musicians. The improvements being made in the re-master are in mixing process and in the distribution of the audio. Hope this answers your question. Let me know if anything is still unclear."
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63fryq | Why do people still watch and follow professional wrestling? | I'm not bashing anyone for doing so, I am just genuinely curious as to why this is still a thing? We all know that it's "fake" and frankly doesn't do it for myself like it used to when I was a kid. I do know plenty of people that still watch it, that seemingly shouldn't be for their age. I just believe that the idea of following something that doesn't have the unpredictability of say MMA, isn't entertaining. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Instead of thinking of wrestling as a sporting event like basketball or MMA, think of it as an entertainment event, like a kung fu movie, a ballet, or a soap opera. You're not watching to see who can beat who in a competition, you're watching a cheesy story with some choreographed action sequences. Once you look at it that way, it's easy to see the draw. There's good guys and bad guys, they talk a lot of smack, and then they throw down and finish off with a big dramatic takedown. Everything is cheesy and overdone, because they want people to get hyped for the fight coming up. Some of these characters have storylines that have gone on for years - rivalries, alliances, grudges, whatever. Does watching Jackie Chan fight in a movie become less entertaining because it's choreographed, and he's not really fighting for his life? Hopefully not, because the stunt team got to work out some really cool tricks that you'd never get to see in a real-life fight. And it's still unpredictable, because you don't know what they worked out - any good wrestling match will have some twists or reversals to make things dramatic, just like a good movie fight scene. If you don't think of wrestling as a sporting match and more like a action-packed soap opera, it makes much more sense.",
"We all know movies and cartoons are fake, too. Nobody is acting like wrasslin is really real, but it's a *narrative* and a *spectacle*. The wrestlers are also very athletic, you need to be in good shape to do the moves and generally a good performer to put on the show. Basically a soap opera of machismo.",
"> I'm not bashing anyone for doing so, I am just genuinely curious as to why this is still a thing? We all know that it's \"fake\" and frankly doesn't do it for myself like it used to when I was a kid. So to pick two answers from your posting history: Star Wars and Rick & Morty are 'fake', why do you still seem interested in them? I mean they're all scripted entertainment products. Why is it odd for people to be interested in one but not the others?",
"I don't watch it, but here's how it's been explained to me. Why do you watch movies? It's all fake. The people in it are just pretending and the ending is decided before you even start watching, so why bother? It's entertaining. People enjoy watching WWE for the same reason people like watching movies. It's entertaining, fun, suspenseful, etc all with it being \"fake\". WWE is designed to be as entertaining as possible with its storylines and subplots. Compared to MMA, it's designed to be attention grabbing. How many UFC fights have you turned into and watch a horrible fight? I've seen countless fights turn into cage fighting where one fighter is trying to take down the other, just to have them be stuck up against the fence for most of the round with few punches or entertaining actions occurring. That's boring, but the outcome is not predetermined at least so it's better? That does not make a lot of sense from an entertainment perspective."
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63giso | What is the difference between Ashkenazi Jewish and other Jewish people? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are two branches of Jewish origin following the diaspora from Israel - Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jews. Ashkenazi Jews are the ones who ended up in Northern and Eastern Europe... places like Germany, Poland, and Russia, and comprise about 80% of Jews today. Sephardic Jews are the ones who remained in the Mediterranean, such as Spain/Portugal, North Africa, and across the Middle East (there were even Jewish communities in Yemen and Iraq until a few decades ago). There are some differences is practice that developed over the centuries, but those have greatly diminished over the past century as Jews of both branches have ended up intermingling in the U.S. and Israel.",
"While the other poster here has it kind of right, I'll go into further detail on the ethnic divisions of Jews as it's a bit confusing to understand. There are three main divisions: Ashkenazim, Mizrahim, and Sephardim. Other divisions exist, such as Ethiopian and Indian Jews, but I won't get into them right now. Regarding the three main groups, they're classified based on migratory routes either during the expulsion of Jews from Israel, or much later. In the ancient past when the Jews were living in today's Israel, these divisions didn't exist since they were all living in the same area. When the Babylonians invaded ancient Israel and deported the Jews, they brought most of them to other areas in the middle east. It wasn't until the Persian Empire under Cyrus that most returned. Those who didn't stayed in modern Iraq, Iran, etc. and many even migrated outwards from there, into central Asia and the Caucasus, or westward towards Egypt or Arabia. Much later under the Romans, Judea became a province. After waves of revolts and rebellions, the Romans expelled the Jews from their province and were prohibited from returning. So now you have Jews who migrated and settled elsewhere in the Roman empire (or possibly east too). Many who migrated towards Europe landed in Spain and became the Sephardim, noted for their much later developed spoken language of Ladino, a derivative of Spanish. Other Jews migrated to Germanic areas, under Frankish and other Germanic kingdoms and later became the Askhenazim, also noted for Yiddish, a derivative of German. When the Spanish reconquered the peninsula back from the Moors, they also expelled Sephardic Jews with them. Many of them either migrated south into North Africa, or east into the then Ottoman Empire. At the same time, many of the Ashkenazim also migrated towards eastern Europe into the Slavic realm, where the settled in Poland, Russia, etc. Yiddish was still spoken, but mostly died out in the last century. Nowadays, since most Jews live in Israel or the US and come from any of these backgrounds, these divisions aren't prominent as they used to be since people started mixing. But as a tldr to your question, to define someone's background, you would have to understand where they came from historically through what paths and what language they spoke."
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63gxax | Is there a difference between the Reese's Eggs and the regular peanut butter cups? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The eggs have a higher peanut butter to chocolate ratio. All the holiday themed Reese's snacks do.",
"The shape and more importantly the size as well as peanut butter filling to chocolate ratio. You see op,",
"The chocolate coating is thinner and there's a higher PB to chocolate ratio. Personally, I like them more than the peanut butter cups.",
"Yes. There is a difference. Eggs taste better. Eggs > Pumpkins > Trees > Hearts > Cups. URL_1 URL_0",
"Yes. Reese eggs are eggs while peanut butter cups are cups. They also have different ratios of ingredients and likely different ingredients to begin with.",
"It's all about them Reese's pieces, Rastas pastas, Racers Pacers, reezies peezies, or whatever you choose to call them.",
"The chocolate coating is thinner and there's a higher PB to chocolate ratio. Personally, I like them more than the peanut butter cups."
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63h5j9 | What are the main reasons for why dating/relationships have changed so much over the last 100 years? | From arranged marriages in the early 1900s to quick courtships in the 30s-60s and high divorce rates in the 21st century, what are the main factors that cause such a substantial change in how humans have romantic relationships? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"By *far* the biggest reasons are (1) birth control, and (2) women's rights. Birth control means that casual dating, and even casual sex, is not very likely to lead to a pregnancy. That makes it much less important to avoid. Women's rights mean that a woman doesn't *have to* get married in order to have a good life. That hugely reduces the pressure to either \"marry this one or move along\".",
"It's gotten increasingly informal, and also more equal for the woman. Before, men and women never encountered each other except at formal gatherings like balls and dances. Families decided if the couple should marry or not. Then, incomes rose, but women still stayed at home. Men asked women on dates and payed for them, because women didn't have an income for themselves. Then women entered the workforce. Now dating is extremely informal, and you have tinder and online dating, as well as 'traditional' dates. Now it's more equal for both parties however.",
"Legal emancipation and chemical emancipation. At the end of the 19th century, many women did not have property rights. They couldn't open bank accounts or take out mortgages - not without a husband or father to sign for them. The could not vote. They could not serve on juries. So they waged a struggle to start getting some fundamental rights, and a byproduct put an end to arranged marriages dictated by those who had legal control over you (if your father is no longer your legal guardian, he can't exert so much pressure on marriage). The continuing advancement of legal rights also led to more divorce, as a women wasn't forced to stay with a man that mistreated her. Sex, however, remained very dangerous and could lead to pregnancy. So even if it did happen before marriage, there was a certain pressure to either get married before sex started, before sex resulted in a pregnancy, or get married after a pregnancy happened. Then the pill came. Women could have sex without getting pregnant. And abortion became a safer procedure. The idea of free love, drugs, disco, and sexual inhibitions kicked off. There was no AIDS yet. After AIDS things tightened up some. But now with social media, the pool of potential dates (for urbanites) dramatically expanded. However, your question is wrong as to divorce rates; they jumped up in the 60s and 70s and have stayed fairly level since then. The 21st Century doesn't have any significant difference with the late 20th Century in that regard."
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63hz4n | Positions and Payouts in The Big Short | I've seen this film half a dozen times and am still unsure of everyone's final position and how much they sold for. Everywhere else I looked doesn't answer this fully. Also what is the dilemma at the end between Mark Baum and Morgan Stanley and why is he so reluctant to sell? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Michael Burrey ended up walking away with $100 million personally and $700 million for his investors ($800 million total) which worked out to a 490% return on their investment. The small guys, Geller and Shipley, turned $15 million into $120 million. Mark Baum (real name is Steve Eisman) and his crew turned $100 million into $1.5 billion. At the end, Mark Baum discovers that Morgan Stanley had been issuing Credit Default Swaps, the investment vehicle he was using to short the housing market. Essentially, Morgan was on the losing side of the bet. Mark was mad because his firm was a subsidiary of Morgan and now Morgan was going to lose billions and ironically could cause his firm to collapse as well as many of the banks who issued him credit default swaps were collapsing and might not be able to pay out what they owed Baum. In the final scene, where Baum finally gives his guys to ok selling the position, he has a financial and a moral dilemma. On one hand he is mad that the banks are only able to offer a fraction of what they owe him, but ends up settling for what they offer, still making over $1 billion. The moral dilemma is that he was becoming what he had always hated, a Wall Street fat cat making billions off the suffering of the general population."
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63j662 | Is there a real difference (besides membership) between the KKK and Westboro Baptist Church? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The KKK is a white supremacist group that in its heyday sought to achieve political goals, mainly the exclusion of blacks from participating meaningfully in Southern society. To achieve this goal they used terror, killing blacks and burning their homes in the dead of night. Westboro is very different. Rather than a political group, they are a religious cult. They believe that God's message is hate, and that he expresses his hate for our sins by bringing disaster upon us. Their most prominent belief is that God kills American soldiers as punishment for America's tolerance of homosexuality, which they publicized by picketing military funerals with anti-gay signs. But they only ever protested, they never actually committed violent acts - they were content to let God take care of that. So yeah, very different groups. Both based on hate, but the similarity stops there. KKK: * mainly racist * political group * operated through violent acts of terror * large and widespread in their heyday Westboro: * mainly(?) anti-gay * religious group * operated through peaceful protest * small cult, just a single church's congregation EDIT: Fun bonus fact - Westboro founder and leader Fred Phelps was a civil rights lawyer in the 60s before starting a hate cult a couple decades later. Interesting life story.",
"While the WBC may be racists, that doesn't appear to be their primary mission statement. They're real life trolls. The KKK is a terrorist organization, that advocates white supremacy,, and in the past attempted to burrow itself into various levels of Government.",
"There is a significant difference between the two. KKK is a racially motivated group with the goal of highlighting and advancing white supremacy. The WBC is a group of religious fanatics who leverage their significant knowledge of the law to piss people off with the hopes that someone will cross the line and they will be able to profit from it."
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