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72espf | why did America put a term limit in place after such a successful president | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well it's important to realize that the 2 term limit had been enshrined in the American Consciousness since George Washington, so the fact that FDR broke that centuries old precedent (for good reasons, but still) was alarming so there was an impetus to make the unwritten rule a written one. The whole point of a term limit is to stop popular presidents from holding onto power for too long, as it doesn't take a lot for a FDR to turn into a Caesar or a Napoleon.",
"Out of fear that a bad President could come to power and end democratic rule. Remember, Roosevelt *was* effectively President for Life. Having Presidents be elected for extremely long terms could undermine the democratic traditions the American people held, and when you consider the fact that the only President to serve more than two terms also unconstitutionally tried to go around the Supreme Court, it makes sense a limit was added.",
"> It seems like the exact opposite of what to do. Roosevelt was such a popular president who's actions speak for themselves. It seems counter intuitive for the government to prevent that ever happening again The US government is set up in a way which reflects the concerns of its founders who were rebelling from an oppressive monarchy. Most of the structure of the government involves various checks and balances to prevent any one person or group from attaining too much power and becoming a despot. If you look at the oppressive regimes around the world there tends to be a common theme: The leader started out being really popular. Being really good at your job and being very popular isn't a problem, but it *is* a problem to be so loved that you cannot be opposed. So the idea behind term limits is to ensure that no single person became so entrenched that they couldn't be removed. What the US started out doing was revolutionary at the time; for a vote to take place and a leader to gracefully and peacefully step aside for an opponent with contrary views was basically unheard of in that era. The \"Grand Experiment\" of the USA was going well and the success of Roosevelt exposed a flaw in the design which allowed the popular vote to effectively install their own dictator, encouraging populism as a bid for total control. Instead with term limits an ideology can remain in effect without instilling excessive or enduring power into any individual person. Someone else with Roosevelt's ideals could step up to the plate but Roosevelt himself was no longer eligible.",
"The only Roosevelt was \"permitted\" to serve that many terms was the political establishment's consensus that ushering in a new Presidential administration in the middle of WWII was a Very Bad Idea. In the absence of the war, FDR may well not even have *run* for a third term. Pressure from both his own party and the Republicans to step aside after two would have been *overwhelming*."
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72jueo | Why is almost all delivery food in the US either pizza or Chinese? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"demand. there is a demand for those types of food. also, pizza and chinese hold up well. burgers and fries won't deliver well because fries are only good for so long, then they get cold and soggy. same for mexican food. pizza and chinese withstand the 20-30 min delivery time very well and will be delicious by the time it gets to your door.",
"I always suspected that pizza delivery is a popular business model because pizza is very cheap and easy to make, requires very few ingredients and delivers pretty easily as well.",
"Jimmy Johns would like to have a word with you. It depends entirely on where you are. You have a lot more delivery options in big cities and densely populated areas, and in places with few people, sometimes even the pizza places don't deliver (in the South very few Chinese places deliver)."
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72kcls | Why is it that so many countries use "First Past the Post" voting when Preferential Voting is so much better? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The same reasons that a lot of better ideas die in politics, those who believe they have more to lose from the change are motivated to oppose it, but it is difficult to find people who can be motivated to care about vague promises of improvement. These are compounded by the fact that the public is generally wary of change, understanding the proposal requires actual thinking, and there are multiple competing proposals which fragment support for change even further."
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72mrts | Why does the US not have large military parades like North Korea or the Soviet Union? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Driving tanks and missile launchers down the street isn't about being proud of your military. Driving tanks and missile launchers down the street is saying \"This is my big stick. See how big my stick is? It'd be a shame if I had to hit you with it\" The countries parading tanks through the street are generally run by the military, or the military is tightly integrated into the ruling party. These States would have no problem with driving tanks through the street if an opposing faction wanted to have a parade, if ya know what I mean The US does show off it's military, but not it's brute strength. There are airshows to show off the Air Force and Navy, the Blue Angels are a Navy flying team that pull off difficult formations. Veterans take part in Memorial Day parades which are about the soldiers, not the institution. There are also tons of military museums It's important to consider the message you want to send, tanks in the street send a very specific message",
"For most of American history, a large standing army was something to be feared and avoided, not celebrated. For that reason, traditions like military parades that celebrated military might never became part of our traditions. The military didn't become the awe-inspiring force it is today until WWII, fairly recently in historical terms."
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72p7cy | How did the great composers like Bach or Mozart were able to write great pieces of music without hearing it? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I believe your thinking about Bach, who went blind, and Beethoven, who went deaf. The answer is they both became disabled later in life, albeit Bach lost his vision just a few months before his death so it didnt impact him much. Beethoven, on the other hand, was totally deaf for the last few years of this life, including when he composed his masterpiece: The 9th Symphony. He was just THAT good. FUN FACT: when the 9th was first performed publicly, the song finished and Beethoven was several measures behind, furiously gestulating to a silent orchestra. A flute player had to get up and turn him around to see the biggest standing ovation in his life. :)",
"When you know how to read and write music, it is possible. Obviously they were amazing at their craft. And they were not always deaf. Think of it how a deaf person can read and write without hearing the words.",
"they were musical geniuses, so they could probably hear it in their head and know what it will sound like. (i'm assuming when you say 'without hearing' you mean beforehand while they are writing)"
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72rvp5 | What defines a wonder, and why aren't there more then 7? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A \"wonder\" is anything that fills you with wonder and awe. 7 was (and still is) a popular number, which in some ancient civilisations stood for completion or perfection -- there are seven days in a week, seven colours of the rainbow, seven deadly sins and seven virtues, and so on. Back in ancient times, many different writers compiled lists of \"Seven Wonders of the World\". If they were alive today, they would be writing for Buzzfeed and calling their articles \"Seven Awesome Sights That Will Blow Your Mind\".",
"First of all, seven is a typological number, which is a kind of number which holds a special meaning and tends to appear in many places. There are other typological numbers such as 3, 10, 12 and 40. Nothing defines a \"wonder\". The \"seven wonders of the world\" were just lists of unique and wondrous structures, compiled by various people. None of them are \"official\" in any capacity. URL_0 > The first reference to a list of seven such monuments was given by Diodorus Siculus.[5][6] The epigrammist Antipater of Sidon[7] who lived around or before 100 BC,[8] gave a list of seven such monuments, including six of the present list (substituting the walls of Babylon for the lighthouse):[9] > > I have gazed on the walls of impregnable Babylon along which chariots may race, and on the Zeus by the banks of the Alpheus, I have seen the hanging gardens, and the Colossus of the Helios, the great man-made mountains of the lofty pyramids, and the gigantic tomb of Mausolus; but when I saw the sacred house of Artemis that towers to the clouds, the others were placed in the shade, for the sun himself has never looked upon its equal outside Olympus. – Greek Anthology IX.58"
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72v0vu | Why do colleges stick with the NCAA, instead of starting a new association that allows them to pay their athletes? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't want to pay athletes. First, that would reduce their profits. But more importantly, it would break the (arguably fake) social bond between athletes and the rest of the student body, alumni, etc. Very few people watch spectator sports without rooting for a team. That notion of \"*we* won\" is what makes spectator sports interesting and therefore a social institution/wildly profitable business. Paying \"student athletes\" would weaken that strong identification/fandom that is the hallmark of American college sports.",
"I'm sorry, are you honestly trying to say that colleges want to pay people for jobs they currently get for free? I don't think you thought this through.",
"Let's see, the NCAA brings them millions of dollars in TV revenue, and this new league would take years to get those ratings. Plus, paying players would cost money. Less income + Higher costs = bad idea",
"Putting aside the argument over if schools even *want* to pay their athletes (I'd say they'd like to be able to pay the very best athletes in their most profitable programs, but not have to pay anyone else), leaving the NCAA is a non-starter as long as there are no viable alternatives. If a school leaves the NCAA, I assume they would not be allowed to stay in their NCAA athletic conference: there goes revenue-sharing, TV deals, big games that sell tickets, etc. They wouldn't be eligible for NCAA championships, bowl games, etc., either. It'd be like a pro-team trying to drop out of the league. If an NFL/NBA/whatever team just left the league, who are they going to play? Who wants to watch that? Going back to the \"do schools want to pay players?\" issue, the main reason they would want to is for recruiting (and only for certain athletes in certain sports). But there's no way the cost of leaving the NCAA (all the reasons above) would be worth that. *And* most five-star recruits would not want to go somewhere with no NCAA affiliation. They'd get no exposure to scouts and such at the next level, have no chance to compete for a national championship (that matters anyway). Like the schools, they would get none of the benefits of being affiliated with the NCAA. That may not matter to some, but for athletes aiming to go pro it wouldn't be worth it. It would kill their chances (except in baseball where going professional right away is actually an option)."
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72vx5o | What's the appeal of lowering the number of tax brackets? | I studied economics in school, but I can't understand this. Tax brackets don't disincentivize productivity, since they only apply to income earned after a certain point. I can't see any possible benefits from this. Also, I'm hoping that this stays apolitical to the greatest extent possible. I'm not interested in the merits of cutting or raising taxes. Thanks! | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because most people higher a professional to do their taxes because it's thought that our tax system is too complex. Now, because they don't actually do their own taxes, they believe having more tax brackets increases the complexity. Obviously, this is mistaken, but I believe that's the general mis-perception at work here."
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72x8jz | Rappers and other celebs often record themselves doing illegal things, like smoking weed, doing drugs, and having large amounts of guns. Why are they not arrested when the cops see the videos? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Prove they smoked an actually illegal substance and not tobacco. Weed is legal in several states. Further, you are usually charged with possession or distribution of the substance, not just having consumed it. You generally cannot be forced to take a drug test, in America, so they would have to catch you with the drug. The police don't typically conduct raids, because someone posted on Snapchat with a joint. I don't know that I've seen celebs showing off other illegal things like cocaine. Typically you'd have to his someone with actual possession of the drug, which if they're smart, they only have a small amount or are not carrying. I believe 50 cent was recently in trouble, after declaring bankruptcy he was seen on IG with piles of cash. His defense? They were 'fake bills'. It would be up to the court to prove the money was real. Owning guns in America is rarely illegal. Exceptions include while on probation. Sometimes celebs are charged. Soulja boy recently was charged for possession of a stolen firearm. And then finally the most important point, it comes down to money. Life is easier if you can afford to pay a lawyer. Something you and I would struggle to fight in court with a legal defender, a well paid attorney can shake off or plea down with ease.",
"Because it's fairly easy for a person with a lot of money who makes lots more money 'being bad' to win a court case. There's no proof it was cocaine rather than flour, or weed rather than a home-made herbal cig. And they have very good legal consul who will tell them what to say and make sure to make the prosecutor's life a bitch. To top that off the rappers who do drugs usually have a paid 'fall guy' who carries them around. Cops pull them over and find pot in the car the fall guy says \"That's mine, blame me.\" and he goes to jail and rehab and all of that and still gets paid his salary. The NFL gives seminars advising young recruits to hire a fall guy. But it does happen. There have been a handful of successful prosecutions of rappers and rock stars for drugs. Willie Nelson got busted in Texas for pot and got probation, mostly because he was honest and thought they wouldn't care.",
"Because you can testify it's all an act, a gimmick, a ruse - like the WWE, it's \"fake drugs\". The burden of proof is on the state to prove you're guilty of a crime. You don't have to say anything."
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72zk29 | Why do we say we get on a train but get in a cab? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We use \"on\" for any vehicle where you can walk around after boarding, \"in\" for a smaller vehicle that you enter but are then unable to walk around. On a bus, but in a car. On an airliner, but in a fighter plane."
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732uck | Why do programmers create Opensource Softwares? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The really short answer that it either boils down to is that Open Source programmers value the dissemination of information over profiting from their code, or they think that it could potentially be useful to someone, somewhere, but don't think it would be worth it to try and monetize it. For some people, it is an ideology that this information should be kept free, and that people should be able to read the source code and know for sure exactly what any software on their computer is doing. And for that reason, they keep their source code freely available to all. Some open source software can be bought, as well; Many Linux distributions are sold for various prices, while all Linux distributions are, as part of the GNU/Linux license, available for free.",
"There are millions of reasons. Mine are: * I take a lot from OS community. Literally, my entire career is built on it because I do all my work using OS software. I want to give something back. * When I make something that I'm even a little bit proud of, I like when other people can also enjoy using it. * Free code review and bugfixes."
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733jpf | Why do (most) Americans reject cars with a manual shift stick? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There used to be good reasons to drive a manual shift car (regarding getting good gas mileage), but that's really not an issue these days. The margin is so small that people would rather not have to deal with it. So if you are given a choice of manual or automatic, it becomes \"why not automatic?\" And the only legit answer to that question is price (it adds about $1500 to the price on most cars). Most automatic cars made in the last 10 years can also still manually shift, without the use of a clutch.",
"1. Automatic transmissions are price-competitive here (and in many models the auto is actually cheaper). 2. Gas prices in the US have historically been very low by European standards. So the gas-saving nature of a manual wasn't as big a selling point in the US. 3. We drive big cars on busy roads, and we drive them *a lot*. Commuting 3+ hours a day is not unusual in America. That much time on a stick shift in traffic is no fun at all."
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7345ei | What happens if an pornographic actress stops consenting mid-shoot? Do they have to sign a contract where they say that they consent to a full "session"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If they retract consent (sometimes via use of a safe word depending on the type of porn being made) then the filming stops. If the actor or actress has contracted to do the pornography and their dropping of the scene can be counted as breach of contract, there will be terms in the contract for how breach of contract is to be handled. For instance, I may agree to pay an actress $1000 for a shoot in one scene. The terms of the contract will include what sort of performance is needed and what the expectations are. If she cannot meet those expectations in the middle of the shoot, she may need to pay me reparations for the cost of organizing the set in the worst case, or I may forgo this and opt not to hire her further, and tell other producers. In practice it is very expensive to let a shoot go to waste so as a producer I have an incentive to keep my actors happy. Contracts are for the worst case, when we're going to have to go to court. It's unlikely I'm going to put in a penalty for breach of contract unless it's a very big production with well established reputations, because if a porn actor/actress is unhappy enough about stage conditions to break contract and risk such a payment, that likely means word is going to get around that my productions are unsafe/terrible to work on and I go after actors/actresses I don't like. It is more likely I will factor the cost of potentially having to cancel the shoot into the prices/fee schedules I'm willing to pay the actors and whatever insurance I might have. But again, it all depends on the individuals and the contracts involved.",
"Generally, if they vocally retract consent the scene and filming stops. legally you can't sign away your right to retract consent at anytime. That said, the person retracting consent may be at risk of not being paid as a part of the contract. This is because porn isn't legal if it isn't 100% consenting. If there's any evidence it was not the producers can get into a lot of trouble, so retracting consent will make it less likely for the porno to be finished.",
"A contract doesn't matter as far as forcing her to finish. You can't compel specific performance on a personal service contract, sexual or otherwise. The fact that it's for a sex act doesn't matter, it would be the same for a magician's assistant getting sawed in half or a stage actor suspended in the air on a harness or anything else. Even if you could, that would be for a court to order and not for the director or other actor or whomever to physically force. If she doesn't want to continue, they can't force her.",
"You can leave, it's a free country. Imagine if you worked at mcdonalds, and you had enough so you yell out \"I quit\" and walk out. Can they physically imprison you and force you to complete your shift? Of course not. What would happen is a breach of contract and they could sue you for damages in a court, maybe win maybe not. But no, no human on the planet can force you to perform a job for them. (cept the military of course and things of that nature)."
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734nx6 | Why do people associate eye patches with being evil? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's lots of reasons and many of them have been mentioned here, but in English class, you should at some point discuss how in plays, movies, and books villains often have some sort of defect. This serves several purposes. 1) It identifies them as bad. Cursed by god, outcast of society, or simply unsavory. People can't be a traditional hero if they limp, lose an eye, or have a handicap, they're no longer perfect at that point. 2) It places them below the hero - comparatively in underlying social structures. We as society generally want healthy, beautiful people to succeed, and you can see this in all aspects of society. We buy more from beautiful sales people, we promote young, healthy people more often and earlier than out of shape, older counterparts of equivalent skill, we let beautiful people cheat social structures like standing in line or deadlines on classwork etc. just enough to help them succeed a bit more than those who aren't as notably good looking. The important part here is that you innately want the hero to win BECAUSE he is young, beautiful, and heroic while the villain is often bitter and betrayed by society, even if they can't help how they look, society already tells us who the good guy is just based on looks when it comes to classical works. This is part of why things that shrug off the standards are fun. How far can you push the envelope with your hero being fat, lazy, and unsavory before you innately turn the audience against them? Modern Anime as a genre specifically plays with this a LOT, most of their heroes are HEAVILY flawed, and the aspect that sucks people in is watching these characters develop and overcome their flaws. The best stories never completely erase the problem, but show us over and over how the hero comes to deal with this eternal struggle, making their heroism even better. The same applies to villains. How beautiful and good can you make them before it makes people feel bad when they lose? Are we supposed to ultimately have SOME regret as the audience when the villain finally loses? Was there SOME virtue in what they were trying to accomplish? Villains that are attempting to overcome an underlying social injustice - often in the wrong way - generally look better and have more palatable personalities than those who are purely out to corrupt and destroy society as a whole. Specifically so we DO like them at least a little bit, and while we ultimately still want them to lose, it's not a complete victory when they do. These are things you should be looking for in any book/movie/show you watch. It helps you to understand your culture better and enjoy these stories on a deeper level. Watch for when people are following the tropes or shrugging them off, and what the writers can do with the character to make them interesting and unique in a world where EVERYTHING means SOMETHING, or, at least it should in good writing.",
"Asymmetry often makes us uncomfortable. When designing movie characters, editors will purposefully make the villains slightly asymmetrical, just enough to make us uncomfortable. Similarly, you almost never see someone with two eyepatches, cause... At that point eyepatches are kinda pointless. So while it's not the entirety of why, our lack of comfort for ajar or non-symmetrical things is a part.",
"Because people don't lose an eye doing nice things like helping old ladies cross the street or handing out puppies to orphans. People lose an eye doing naughty things like using power tools without safety goggles or getting in bar fights. It's also not nice to judge people based on how they look. Plenty of people with eye patches are decent folks. But plenty more are homicidal meth head bikers.",
"Disabled people are largely targeted in fiction as evil. People are frightened of body deformities because for a large period of time they weren't medically understood. It was seen as punishment in some time periods. If you were a sinner or a criminal your children would be punished.",
"A few posts have mentioned pirates, outlaws, or other people outside of acceptable society. The exact opposite: people on top of the social hierarchy, villains who abuse their aristocratic power and privilege, can also be evoked with eye patches. The European upper class engaged in dueling and other forms of ritualized combat. Facial scars and injuries even became signifiers of prestige and high status, but also implied a more sinister official violence. [The practice of elite dueling and honorary scarification continues, underground, to this day]( URL_0 ).",
"Pirates. Pirates wore eye patches so when boarding a vessel they could go below deck and switch eyes instead of waiting for eyes to adjust from bright sun light to darkness. Pirates were never \"good\". Ergo, eye patch became part of the evildoer ensemble.",
"Think of it from an artistic standpoint. Scott Mccloud has a great points on icongraphy, basically its hard for you to empathize with characters who look/feel different than you. Imagine seeing a panel from a Batman comic and he's beating up a criminal, how have you identified hes a criminal other than the caped crusaders proximity? Easy he had a scruffy beard, maybe a buzzed head or beanie, add some rough facial features andddd boom! You already distrust him",
"Uncanny valley. It is disturbing when something is slightly off, it's more disturbing than when something is radically wrong. Same as a limp or a hookhand.",
"I've literally never thought or heard of this stereotype before? But if I have to hazard a guess, maybe because pirates?",
"Neurologically, we are hard wired to recognize faces. It's a valuable evolutionary skull to see and immediately recognize the faces of our allies and enemies. So any time a face does not fit the prototype for a face, it gets flagged as suspicious. Even just faces that deviate from symmetrical are seen as less attractive, but when an important part is missing, we see it as bad. I would argue that this too is evolutionary, because facial disfigurement could come from pathogens or behaviors that reduce chances of survival, so we assign disfigurement a \"bad\" label automatically. Someone with an eye patch, at least to our instincts, is a bad person one should avoid. This is then reflected in our cultures and literature. Good people are rarely disfigured in the media, so they would have no need for prosthetics or aesthetic aids. We internalize the implicit associations of disfigurement and badness, then project them later in conversation, interpersonal behaviors, and our own creative endeavors"
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735jmo | Did Bob Marley actually promote peace and love? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"He wasn't advocating violence, rather speaking on his surroundings. Burnin and Looting was about the extreme taxation and it's effect on the people. War was a speech written by Haile Selassie the 1st. And it pretty much explains the world we live in. \"Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is War\""
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737h3v | why do different countries drive on different sides of the road? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"URL_0 So that right hands have the advantage. Ancient custom was to walk on the left so you had your dominant arm toward oncoming foot traffic. When cars became the norm, seats moved to the left to accommodate right handed people. driving on the right made more sense. Some countries disagreed.",
"Basically it depends what the dominant force in your country was: military or trade (and - if military - how posh your military was). Knights in the UK, and Samurai in Japan, want to walk/ride on the left so that their sword arm is the same side as oncoming traffic, in case they feel the need to chop oncoming traffic's head off. Meanwhile wagoners in France and Germany want to sit on the left hand side of their wagon so they can use their right hand to use the whip over the centre of their set of draught animals. And since you're sitting on the left you're going to want to pass oncoming traffic to its right, so you'll want to drive on the right. So basically it boils down to if your roads were built by the military or for commerce."
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737lxs | What is the meaning of the different types of hats that the queen's guards wear, and the color of their "robe" | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The ones wearing helmets are the Household Cavalry: URL_0 One of the Household Cavalry regiments, the Blues and Royals, wears, you guessed it, blue uniforms. The Foot Guards consist of several regiments from Scotland, Wales and Ireland - and their uniforms have distinctive elements to reflect where they came from. The Queen's Guards are also not a static force, but various units will rotate through guard duty, including from time to time units from elsewhere in the Commonwealth (Canada, Jamaica, Australia, etc.), so you will have a variety of uniforms on display. British ceremonial uniforms tend to differ from regiment to regiment because they date back to a time where the army was not so unified and locally-raised units would reflect local traditions (kilts, uniform colours chosen by their commanding officer, etc.). EDIT: Example of uniform variations (plumes, buttons, badges, etc.) for UK and Canadian Guards Regiments: URL_1"
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737sjo | why Jehovah’s Witnesses have no online presence? So instead of going door to door they can get involved in people’s Facebook, Twitter, IG etc? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A person belongs to a Kingdom Hall in a certain locale, and they are assigned territory locally to call upon others in their ministry. This person would not be asked to do this globally {think Facebook etc.}, And anything on that level is handled by the organization. Further, the ministry is somewhat patterned after the first-century Christians who, I think, were scripturally told to witness, in effect, door to door, in person. It is important to connect with your neighborhood directly as opposed to global citizens worldwide. I am sure a JW could tell many more reasons for this approach and cite scriptures etc. I have only a simple knowledge of these things.",
"Dude. What are trying to do? Don't give em ideas.",
"Door to door recruitment isn't about getting new people, it's about reinforcing ingoup/outgroup mentalities. It's true for both JWs and Mormons.",
"The running headline for many years (i grew up on the inside) was that internet was evil and only used for porn. The later years they have backed a little off from that story. Since they use old school sales techniques when they show up at your door i reckon sending PMs and beeing active on social media is not the most effective way to lure people into their brainwashing. And they are advised to not have contact with anyone on the \"outside\" except for possible recruits because EVERYONE that is not with them, are against them (according to the \"elders\").",
"They have [ URL_0 ] (https://www. URL_0 /), that's their online presence. You're asking specifically about social media, they don't seem to do a lot of that. But they have an online presence.",
"Because they would get mercilessly trolled by ex dubs. Which they deserve. Source: am apostate",
"It’s because they (formerly we) believe that social media is harmful to your spirituality and should be limited as much as possible. There are lots of snares online, such as being in too much contact with non Witnesses, pornography, and apostate material. Most witnesses will only have Facebook and instagram to keep in touch with fellow witnesses, and those who choose to add non witness relatives definitely feel a moral obligation to preach to them by leaving comments with scriptural messages, or posting their own similarly themed statuses. Other sites just aren’t as popular, like twitter and tumblr, and some are seriously frowned upon, like snapchat. The organization is building an online presence through URL_0 though, just not through social media.",
"It is a pyramid scheme and cult. They don't want to recruit everybody, only the gullible. Having a social media presence would allow outsiders to make comments about them. They don't want their sheep to get any logical ideas.",
"Also \"independent thought\" is specifically denounced as a tactic of Satan. And the wicked wicked internet is full of opinions. God I would really enjoy trolling them.",
"The JWs are a very high control group. They control all aspects of their members lives including dictating who they can and can't associate with. They do have a website which they run, and they tell their members that all other websites are \"worldly\" which means they are likely under the control of Satan and his forces of evil. This is why JWs are scared to post or even look at many websites. This high control group also snoops on what its members are doing on FB and social media and JWs can get in trouble for posting pictures of parties and similar normal events. For example if a JW posted pictures of them celebrating their birthday or Christmas they would be shunned (totally ignored and not even talked to) by all members, including close family.",
"Well with only \"144,000\" spots in heaven available - why would they voluntarily reduce their own chances?",
"Jehovah's witnesses are not encouraged to seek a higher education. In fact their organizations approach to communications with their members discourages critical thinking of basically any kind. The members willing to go proselytize are very likely not able to use computers well enough to do what your suggesting. Also due to the internet being a source for open dialogue most Jehovah's witnesses would spend all their time defending one of their numerous irrational and unhealthy church policies like their aversion to blood transfusions and such which really are not defendable. In an open dialogue Jehovah's witnesses just won't fair well. But in ooerson where the doctrine doesn't Matt er much and where friendships do they can possibly succeed in their proselytizing...But any group willing to hold to irrational and dangerous beliefs without good reason will be actively criticized online.",
"One of the most important reasons that the Watchtower organization does not Advocate using social media or the internet to preach, is that they don't want people Googling Jehovah's Witnesses. They don't want Jehovah's Witnesses on the internet at all really, except for the use of URL_0 ... it's far too risky, and the internet is already drastically cutting into their numbers. After decades of a fairly regular growth, Jehovah's Witnesses are now in much the same situation as Scientology... the ease with which you can obtain information on the group makes it all but impossible to maintain a stranglehold on people's minds, which has been their practice for over 100 years. Jehovah's Witnesses are told that anyone who speaks against the organisation is mentally diseased, anyone that leaves the organization is an apostate and not to be trusted, and any secular authorities that challenge the organisation is driven by Satan.",
"Now why on earth would you give them an idea like that?",
"Don't give them ideas it's bad enough they come to my door now I have to ignore them on social media too",
"Please don't give them that idea! I hardly ever use it because of MLM and stay at home moms trying to sell me stuff!",
"Strictly speaking the actual organisation (the Watchtower Bible and Tract Society) does have an online presence, at URL_0 . Potential converts met face to face in the real world are often directed there for further info. Individual JWs aren't encouraged (it's \"frowned upon\") to get involved in online discussions. The big difference with private online discourse is that there is no second group member present to police the other group member's reactions to any alternative ideas encountered, whereas in their real-world \"Ministry\" JWs (and Mormons) almost always travel in pairs. This means that the information and communication within that particular environment (\"milieu control\") is as controlled as it can be by the group. Sending individual members off into the realms of Facebook and Twitter unchaperoned would risk the group's milieu control failing, which in turn could (and often does) lead to a drop in membership."
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73fiu6 | Why is it considered taboo and disrespectful to call your parents by their first name? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It ignores the unique relationship of parent-child and reduces the parent to just another person.",
"My husband calls his parents by their first names. I find it weird to do the same for mine - feels...uncomfortable. I've been calling my parents Mom and Dad all of my life. It's just how I know them - I don't know them as Janet and Bob. It also feels mildly weird in that - I only have one mom and one dad so it kind of highlights the uniqueness of that relationship.",
"It isn't global. And many families in the US for example have sons or daughters that call their parents by their first name in some settings. I've personally heard it in high school many times. I've also heard kids do it jokingly and the parents didn't take it as disrespect."
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73g6ip | Why, with the exception of Spanish cultures, isn’t “Jesus” a common given name in majority Christian countries? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Jesus isn't the name he probably went by. In Hebrew it was Yeshua, and that name in North America and European countries would be Joshua. So if you see someone named Joshua, he may not have been named after Jesus, but he carries the same name.",
"Most cultures consider it disrespectful to name someone \"Jesus\", considering that name is holy to the majority faith of those cultures. Hispanic cultures, on the other hand, *do* consider it a sign of respect to name someone after Jesus."
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73gdvt | Why does it seem that in some places people don't really have a culture of "hanging out"? | I watched a documentary where immigrants commented on the differences between life in Vancouver and urban China. One person said something along the lines of "Vancouver is so much more relaxed because people like to hang out in nature. But in Shanghai, adults meet to discuss business. If you hang out people will think you are a loser." Is it true that in some places, people don't have a culture of hanging out? or if it exists it is seen as something negative? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"In China, for example, people work hard crazily to be successful and the competition rate is crazily high due to the population size (at least it is one big factor). Students have also to study until 5 \"pm\" or later everyday when the National Test (or something like that) which must be taken to be accepted into university with high enough score is coming. Please note, like adults, there are a big number of students in China. They have to stay overnight at school sometimes too, not to waste time travelling to school. While the West stress on balancing between work life and personal life, some/many Chinese tend to stress on doing anything and sacrifice your life to be rich or a millionaire. And when you are a millionaire, you can rest all the time you want. But in reality so many Chinese millionaires are also concerned about their businesses because they built theirs with \"overloaded pains\" and can't get them fucked-up. So that might by why you saw them discussing business. Like, they can never rest all their lifetime.",
"As for Shanghai, and I feel, China in general: it's not that uncommon for people to hang out. I spent some months there and people were always happy to meet up and do something. And if you go downtown in the evening, you'll see lots of people hanging out, talking about many different subjects, and enjoying their day I'm not saying that the documentary is wrong, maybe just a different perspective. Perhaps the west has a more relaxed view of hanging out?"
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73h2yy | Why is "W" pronounced "Double U" and not "Wee"? | English consonants are generally sounded out by adding "ee" after the letter, e.g., "Bee" for "B", "Dee" for "D," and so on. So why does W stand out, the only letter that is described using an adjective with another letter of the alphabet? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because historically it was a ligature (single graphics shape combining two or more letters) of two U/V. And U and V was the same letter in ancient Latin. Let's start with the classical Latin alphabet: ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVXYZ There are no J as I and J were just graphical variants of the same letter. There is also no U or W as U was just different graphical variant of V and W is just double U. Then in middle ages the Latin alphabet started being used to write other European languages. It was needed to somehow distinguish sound \"U\" from \"V\" and therefore latin U/V evolved into three separate letters \"U\", \"V\" and \"W\" (\"I\" and \"J\" separated too). Also some of the other ligatures eventually became letters on their own. Following ones made it to present times: * V + V = W * E + T = & *(\"et\" is latin for \"and\")* * A + D = @ *(\"ad\" is latin for \"at\")* * /100 = % * S + S = § *(also: ſ + s = ß in german; where \"ſ\" is the long s, a letter not used nowadays)* And many other not used in english, like \"Œ\" or \"IJ\" (this one may render as \"IJ\" or as non-continuous \"U\" depending on font).",
"At a very basic level, it's because W literally came from two Us, hence \"double U\". Hundreds of years ago, there was no distinction between U and V. U was written as a V and so two Vs made W. Later, when the distinction between U and V came about, the name for W still carried over, despite V now not being a U anymore. Also, this may be why writing W with a curly bottom (so literally two Us) is also acceptable handwriting.",
"U and V used to be pronounced similarly and were used depending on where it was in the word Us being in word and Vs at the beginning of the word. Sort of like V was a capital u. Likewise uu /VV were used similarly. They started to become distinct sounds in 1300s but wasn't fully accepted as separate for a few hundred years."
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73hg10 | Why are fragrance commercials (usually women's perfume) so incredibly strange? It seems like it's always attractive people doing weird things. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Well, we can't transmit smells yet. So how do you sell a smell to someone who can't sample it? You create an image of the smell, be it dreamy or sporty or sexy. And that's the direction a lot of designers and ad companies go with it."
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73i2vv | How did it come that husband and wife should sleep together on the same bed? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"I believe it goes something like this: Grog has a cave. He sleeps in his cave on a comfy pile of leaves and reeds. Grog finds a woman he likes, and brings her back to his cave. They both make a comfortable nest in the pile of leaves. Safer to sleep together, and less work. Grogette eventually has little groglings... they too share the family bed. Eventually, the Grog family upgrades to a house; they can afford to keep the animals in one room while they sleep in the other back room. Now anything that attacks has to get past the animals first. Then they realize that while the ground is cold and hard, an air gap is a good insulator and so build a frame to sleep on to get them off the ground. Grog's animals multiply, and he begins to become wealthy. He hires neighbors to build him a bigger house, and now all his children sleep in one room, providing him and his wife more room on their bed. Eventually, he's able to build himself a castle. Each child gets their own room, the animals get their own outbuildings, and he and his wife each get their own room. They make them connected by a door so that Groggette can drag Grog by his hair to her bed whenever she pleases. Eventually, they realize that castles are draughty and sleeping alone is cold and lonely. So they still make their kids do it, but they move back into the same bed and downsize to a McMansion. I think that about sums up the history of beds in western society.",
"Sleeping in the same bed together, but away from everyone else makes private sex really easy...",
"It's more that other people were kicked out of the bed. It wasn't uncommon for families to all sleep together in one room/bed"
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7negwe | Catalan Independence Movement | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Catalonia is culturally distinct from the rest of Spain. They have their own language and their own cultural traditions. Their culture was suppressed during Franco's reign, so even though that's no longer going on, the memory of it still makes some people want to split from Spain. Catalonia is also one of the richest regions of Spain, so some people aren't happy that their taxes are being sent elsewhere instead of directly benefiting Catalonia. There isn't really a process for gaining independence. The Spanish constitution forbids any part of Spain seceding. So the constitution would have to be changed to allow Catalonia to legally gain independence. The referendum they held was not endorsed by the Spanish government. It was declared illegal which is why Spanish police tried to stop people voting. That also means the result had no direct legal effect. Compare that to the independence referendum Scotland had in 2014. That was allowed by the UK government, who agreed Scotland could be independent if more than 50% of voters chose independence. However, as I mentioned before, secession is not allowed under the Spanish constitution so even the Spanish government wouldn't be able to authorise an independence referendum without first changing the constitution."
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7nel6p | How are late night TV infomercials beneficial to companies? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It’s cheap airtime compared to most of the day, and allows product or brand exposure for much longer time segments."
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7ng6ns | Where and why did tipping become mainstream in the USA? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Back in the early 20th century, people bribed waiters to get better service. During the Great Depression, most restaurants were unable to pay their employees and encouraged them to take any money from customers."
],
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7nqokz | Why is the color purple never used on the flags of countries? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"ds3rsys"
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"text": [
"Purple dye used to be unbelievably expensive. Only royalty could afford it. So it wasn't a good choice for an item that needed to produced in quantity."
],
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7nt1z0 | IF hot peppers originated in North America, how did they become such crucial parts of so many nation's cuisines? How long would it have taken? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"They were brought by the Spanish and Portuguese to their homelands and trading partners. And not just hot peppers: potatoes and tomatoes, too. Indian food was very, very different before.",
"In many areas they were introduced to people found that they aided in preservation of foods (think spicy kimchi) which reduced the need for salt in preservation, and that the spice covered up unwanted flavors in addition to providing an interesting new flavor. It was predominately the Portuguese who are responsible for the spread of hot peppers (although the Spanish certainly played a role as well) and [in only about 50 years of being introduced to them the Portuguese were growing them in every port and colony they had around the world.]( URL_0 ) From there the adoption by local people in those areas was very rapid. It's worth mentioning that chilies (Capsicum) may have originated in South America and spread across the Americas from there. It was a long time ago that they entered the diet of natives of the Americas so it's difficult to pin point an exact location for the origin of the domesticated varieties, but at the time of Europeans reaching the Americas the plants were spread from the US Southwest all the way down into large portions of South America. EDIT: that link also includes a map of the spread of hot peppers and the dates."
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7nv9md | The difference between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"\"Age of Enlightenment. noun. an intellectual and scientific movement of 18th century Europe which was characterized by a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues.\" \"Renaissance definition. The cultural rebirth that occurred in Europe from roughly the fourteenth through the middle of the seventeenth centuries, based on the rediscovery of the literature of Greece and Rome. ... Renaissance means 'rebirth' or 'reawakening.' \" Google provides a very coherent definition if both tbh. But if you want it in simpler terms, the enlightenment was a movement of science and reason which coincided with the beginning of industrialization. The renaissance was a movement which heavily influenced art and writing and was before and up to the bulk of industrialization."
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7nym2k | Success of Scandinavian countries. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Adequate social welfare programs, like universal healthcare, paid leave for new parents, subsidized childcare, low cost university, etc. provides people with the tools to succeed and safety net for when issues arise. Simply giving people tools and support and taking away risk and anxiety can do a lot to promote widespread prosperity and happiness."
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7o0qfe | Why aren't washer/dryer combos more mainstream? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Do you mean a single appliance that washes and then dries the clothes inside? One reason is that they slow down how quickly you can do laundry. With an all-in-one unit, you can only work on a single load of laundry at once. But with a separate washer and drier, you can wash a second load of laundry while the first one is drying. Also, the more complex you make an appliance, the more likely it is for something to go wrong with it. And if either the washer or dryer portion of the unit stops working, you have to pay for repairs that are more expensive than for a stand-alone washer or dryer, or replace the whole thing.",
"For a few reasons: 1. they tend to suck. it's a much more complicated apparatus that is only a savings in terms of _space utilized_, not in terms of cost, ease of design, longevity. 2. you get less laundry done in the same amount of time. While it's nice to not have to switch, you can't start another load until the entire cycle is done. So..it's maximum capacity is that of separates minus the cycle time of the dryer. 3. lots of people don't want a dryer at all - not worth the money.",
"I have one of these because it was the only option for my condo. It was expensive, over $1800. I could’ve gotten a washer and dryer set for $1300. The dryer works nowhere near as well as a regular dryer and takes forever to dry a load. Plus there’s no vent, so no lint trap, which means I have to use a wet cloth to wipe the lint bits out. It’s a pain in the ass.",
"Yarr! Yer not alone in askin', and kind strangers have explained: 1. [ELI5: why don't we have a combination washer and dryer? It's seems like a waste of space and time to have two separate machines. I'd love to only have to put my laundry in one time and be done with it. ]( URL_3 ) ^(_ > 100 comments_) 1. [ELI5:Why aren't washer/dryers (one machine, two uses) more mainstream? ]( URL_2 ) ^(_40 comments_) 1. [Eli5: Why do we have 2 machines for washing and drying clothes? Why isn't it 1 machine like for dishes? ]( URL_0 ) ^(_15 comments_) 1. [ELI5: It's 2015, why can't we still have a single machine to both wash and dry my clothes? ]( URL_1 ) ^(_20 comments_)"
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7o6s3h | How bad is it for the United States when countries like Pakistan stop trading with the US Dollar? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Pakistan is only using the Yuan for [bilateral trade with China]( URL_0 ), not all trade.",
"On the grand scheme of things it can reduce the worldwide demand for the US dollar which can have the effect that of causing its value to fluctuate compared to other countries. Realistically I don't think it would have that much effect."
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7o7khg | How are the singles of a music album chosen by its label and artist? How do they determine which songs that can be hits? | The first part of my question(s) is pretty straightforward. For the second part, I’ll use this example: Spinnin’ Records, a big EDM label, sometimes (not often) release singles where the title has a name, but the artist behind the song is anonymous, for a while, following the song’s release. Coincidentally, those songs usually reach higher up on the music charts than most of the label’s other singles. Why do they release songs with the artist unknown? And since those particular songs become hits, they must beforehand know about their potential – but how? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"1. There is some luck attached to choosing a single of course, but it's not hard for a record label + artist + producer to quickly identify what song of the 20 they just recorded is the \"best\". 2. Unknown artist trick is basically removing the bias from listeners. For example, there are many people that detest Justin Bieber so much that whatever he releases they will hate it. Removing the knowledge of who performs the song results in listeners with no bias, and so they can be more honest with their upvoting/ratings/etc. Obviously doesn't work very well with vocalists since you can *hear* it's Justin Bieber, but works extremely well in instrumental music like EDM."
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7o8az0 | Why do creole languages always use phonetic spelling? | This is a pattern I've noticed with every single creole I've heard of. Is there something in the creole development process that leads to purely phonetic spelling? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They use phonetic spelling because there isn't time for irregularities to arise. If you look at the complexities in English spelling, for example, most of them are either remnants of older English (e.g. \"knight\" was originally pronounced as it was spelt) or copied from other languages. Tracing back far enough, almost all irregularities arise this way (though the occasional mistake is present). They are retained due to the influence of tradition and sense of social status they provided to the writing \"elite\" in times of lower literacy. In a creole, by contrast, these forces are not generally present. Given that most creoles emerged only in the past few centuries, pronounciation has not shifted sufficiently to override \"phonetic spelling\". Compounding this is the fact that any such shifts would largely have been smoothed over- any \"social status\" to be sourced from writing is generally expressed through writing in the parent language(s) of the creole.",
"Creoles start out as hybrid languages with no official vocabulary or grammar, which lends itself to simplification, especially of words with odd pronunciations. Also, creoles usually started with the largely uneducated working class in locations with two prevalent languages. The upper classes world learn both languages and knowing both would be an entry barrier into high society. The lower classes would make due with a combination of both, and often having reduced literacy, would resort to the simplest phonetic spellings."
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7oa15a | Why were English sentences, in philosophical writing before 1900, much lengthier? | Shortening and sundering sentences like the following (without changing their meaning) markedly improve readability for me: 1. [a 309-word sentence by John Locke.]( URL_0 ) 2. [a 161-word sentence by J.S. Mill]( URL_1 ). So why didn't philosophers write shorter sentences as I did? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"For one they learned from their predecessors and what was taught at school. Being able to read wasn't nearly as common and was more high class and as such reflects that. And because of that they would often not be written to be read in silence but to be read outloud and capture the minds of the less educated or those who couldn't afford papers. This would often happen in coffee houses. URL_0",
"Honestly? Because while *printing* using movable type was invented in the fifteenth century, it wasn't until the late nineteenth and even mid-twentieth century that *publishing* looked much like it does now. And a critical part of the modern publishing process is the *editorial* process. These days, when an academic wants to publish a new monograph (what Locke or Mill would have called a \"treatise\"), he finds a publisher willing to put out the book, and that publisher assigns an editor to the project. The academic editorial process is markedly different from the fiction or non-academic non-fiction process, but it's still no joke. And that's going to involve, among other things, the editor say \"Yeah, no, that sentence just doesn't work.\" Maybe the author has a specific reason for phrasing something the way he did, in which case he and the editor can go back and forth on that issue. But maybe he says \"You know what? You're right. How's this?\" The end result is, ideally, a far more polished and well-written book. [Here]( URL_0 ) is a link to a dedicated academic editing services company. The major academic presses have in-house editorial services (I think), but what they do is going to be similar to the services described on that site. But when Mill and Locke were writing, the editorial process wasn't anything remotely like what it is today. For one thing, a gentleman like Mill or Locke would never have agreed to have his words changed by someone of lesser social status. For another, authors were far closer to the actual *printing* process than they are today, and would sometimes be directly involved in proofing the presses as individual pages were laid out. Or, sometimes, they'd have no involvement at *all*, and the printer would use his own editorial judgment in trying to decipher hand-written texts (because that's all they had back then). In short, the distinction between publishing and *self*-publishing was a lot fuzzier than it is today. All of which to say that these days, the practice of editing has developed to the point that authors who work with any kind of established third-party publisher simply can't get a text into print without *someone* saying *something* along the lines of \"Look, Kant, I know you're a genius, and this is amazing stuff, but you simply cannot have a single sentence take up more than an entire page. It doesn't scan. Figure it out.\""
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7oft62 | Why is a mans white undershirt called a wife beater? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In the USA, higher-class men don't usually wear sleeveless undershirts, and if they do, it's under a proper shirt. So a man wearing just one of these is considered a low-class person who doesn't care what anyone thinks of him -- the same sort of person who perhaps would beat his wife.",
"Basically, there's a common belief that lower class men who are more likely to be abusive to their wives wear white undershirts, and thus many people call the outfit a \"wife beater\" because there's a stereotype of men wearing white undershirts beating their wives.",
"It was a common trope in movies etc. for abusive husbands to sit around in a \"wife beater\" asking their wives to get them another beers,etc. Think Stanley Kowalski although I'm not sure if he actually beat his wife.",
"After a certain episode of The Simpsons, my husband now call his “wife blessers.” Thanks, Ned Flanders",
"The syndicated reality show \"Cops\". It became a popular theme noticed in many domestic violence investigations.",
"Abusive husbands in popular culture are frequently portrayed as wearing white sleeveless undershirts with nothing over them. A classic example is Marlon Brando's character Stanley Kowalski in the play/movie *A Streetcar Named Desire.*"
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7ootg1 | Why are states like Indiana considered to be in the midwest, while clearly being on the eastern side of the United States? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When the United States was founded, all of the states were along the Atlantic coast. All the unsettled territories were in the west--and the admission of new states was provided for by laws like the \"Northwest Ordinance,\" which covered areas like Ohio. As the United States acquired more land in the Lousiana Purchase, and then in the Mexican-American War, \"west\" came to be further and further away. So the states that were formerly the western frontier were now the Midwest, in contrast to those far west of the Mississippi."
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7p60kn | Why does your passport require X amount of months left before expiry to fly to some places? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"To ensure that your passport doesn't expire while you're in that country, since most countries limit the amount of time tourists are allowed to stay there."
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7p9sqf | Why is the gold standard for song length 180 seconds? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Back in the stone age, records could only fit about 3 minutes of music on each side. As technology evolved, it was capable of holding more, but by then the audience was comfortable with that length and there hasn't been a huge consumer demand to change."
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7pauxe | how did most teachers come to be female when historically women got less education than men? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Traditionally, up until the middle of the 19th century most teachers were male. That's because most formalized teaching was for older students. Around that time, the concept of elementary aged education grew. Because it was for younger children, there was a perspective that it was considered women's work, as it was child rearing. On top of that, much of the teaching of young children was already being performed by mothers. In some countries this has grown to go all through high school. Two other factors come in to play here. Being \"women's work\", it wasn't originally taken as seriously, resulting in lower pay and a poor reputation, both of which have lingered on in some ways, some subtle, some overt. Also, as women were entering the work force, it was a place where they *could* get a job, which hasn't always been the easiest for women.",
"Primary schooling was often seen as a part of child rearing, something a mother, nanny, or governess would be responsible for. More formal education was taken more seriously, usually taught by men, and reserved for the wealthy. After universal education, primary schooling moved out of the home and into the schoolyard, yet was still seen as child rearing, and thus a suitable job for a woman. Also note that early primary school teachers were not particularly well educated, often not anymore than primary school. It was often a job for young women to do to help out their families until they got properly married."
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7ph70c | What is Putin's and Russia's ultimate goal in undermining foreign democracies? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is basic geo-politics. Most powerful regimes don't really care about the nature of other regimes. For example, the United States supports an Islamic monarchy in Saudi Arabia, a strange semi-theocratic/ethno-centric liberal democracy in Israel, and a highly confessionalist republic in Lebanon. The US supports these regimes because they are friendly to the US (generally) and are important economic and political partners in the region. The countries toward which the US has been very hostile are also \"all over the place\" politically (Iraq was a dictatorship, Nicaragua was a semi-socialist democracy, etc). Russia supports whoever supports its regional interests. Putin probably doesn't care how Americans choose to live their political lives, but the US is really at Russia's doorstep. The US has allies near Russia that impede Russia's plans. Turkey, for instance, is a barrier to warm water ports, so they are America's friend even though American kind of hates that regime. So Putin wants to destabilize Western democracies because Western democracies impede his plans for the region. It's very boring actually, when you think about it.",
"Russia competes with other countries for economic power and for military dominance of nearby areas. For the past 20 years or so they've been doing rather poorly. Weakening other countries' governments gives them a better chance."
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7pisr5 | Why is it scary when kids sing or laugh or say nursery rhymes in horror movies/games? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Generally, it's done in a minor key where the tune is altered, so anything can be spoopy when done that way (Have you seen the Teletubby episode in black and white that plays a Joy Division Song over it?). Also, one of the early films to do this was Nightmare on Elm Street where kids are jumping rope and singing 1-2 Freddy's coming for you, 3-4, better lock your door. In this case, it's contextual. Freddy Kruger was a child molester and murderer, so it's about dead kids, and the context makes it spoopier.",
"It's the incongruity of horror and innocence. Vsauce did a good video on [creepiness]( URL_0 ). It' similar to humor, where two seemingly exclusive ideas are justaposed. But in humor, they are resolved harmlessly. When something is creepy, your brain keeps you wary because it senses a potentially dangerous signal, but also has a conflicting signal that something may be safe.",
"I'm speaking with no actual knowledge on the matter, but I would guess that it's mostly context. There is almost always extremely creepy sounding atmospheric music and/or visuals accompanying the children's voices. I think it's partially just the tone of the scene, and partially the juxtaposition of the sounds of children saying/singing things that would normally be joyful while at the same time, very disconcerting notes and sounds are playing behind it, often accompanied by suspenseful/scary/unnerving events occurring on-screen. There very likely is a defined psychological reason that it bothers us, but I don't know what it is.",
"Children like animals are the harbingers of doom. They are apparently ignorant, yet in their ignorance their minds are open to the bizarre such as the supernatural. Children being weird. Dogs acting up. Sudden flock of birds.... Ghosts are coming!",
"Honestly, kids are just fukin creepy. And when they are used for actual creepy purposes, they turn up to 11",
"For me kids general don’t have a moral compass or at least it’s not fully developed. So there is no telling what they are capable of even playing or something. Mix that with atmosphere and the kids having other worldly abilities. Nope nope nope!",
"its a really old trope people used to think you could give birth to demon babies, and obviously that terrified people. that fear was used in art, and that art influenced more art, which in turn influenced more art. the fact is, anything can be made scary. you are probably scared of sharks, or at least know someone who is. however, you've probably never heard of anyone who is scared of catfish? why is that? they are about as dangerous as sharks, don't look too much different than sharks (just a big ol fish), and have razor sharp teeth. but art has made sharks scary - despite the fact that only about 1 person in the us gets killed by one ever two years. for the record, 10 americans die every day in the us from drowning - meaning that the water itself is far more deadly than the sharks within it. so once people got the idea that it made sense that kids should be scary, it was pretty easy to make them scary."
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7pm0vs | Why is swearing/cussing/cursing considered "bad"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are generally two kinds of profane expressions, those that are religious and those that describe private body parts or functions. Religious profanity is \"bad\" because it is blasphemous. You are either belittling the religion or using it in a frivolous manner. Private body parts and functions are typically not discussed in polite company, and when they are, euphemism or medical detachment is employed. Using terms that describe these things bluntly and graphically is \"bad\" because it is impolite and vulgar. It is particularly bad for children who are too young to understand what they are talking about."
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7pooaj | What do formations in soccer/football mean? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It dictates the structure of the attack or defense for the team. In a 4-4-2 formation, for example, there are 4 players that cover the area (loosely) nearest the goal and play defense, 4 players in the midfield area, and 2 that play forward and are attacking. Of course, they are not restricted to these areas, but it let's the players know their responsibility on the field. Strategically, formations can be changed by the coach if the team is losing and he wants more of his players to go on the attack, or if they're winning, he can move more players to defend."
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7pxblx | How did some neighborhoods in America came to be known as 'black neighborhoods'? Is it mainly because of segregation? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Housing segregation enforced by redlining and blockbusting and white flight. So, you take a neighborhood, and you line it. Red lines are where black people are able to live. Banks would (and still do) deny black people loans to live outside of the red lines, and designate the loans inside of the red lines high risk. Certain towns would also have housing contracts that said that black people weren't able to live there and that no one would sell their houses to a black family. At the same time, one white family moves out of a white neighborhood, and the house is sold to a black family. The other families then leave because black people bring down property values, thus making that neighborhood a red lined one. There's a good article about Chicago here: URL_0",
"Part segregation, part economic, part social. In housing, segregation was very real, but usually could not be enforced by laws. Instead, banks and realtors would strongly discourage black families from moving into the \"wrong\" neighborhood, and white neighbors would be less than welcoming. Even if you weren't a racist, the fact other racists wouldn't want to live in a mixed neighborhood meant your property values went down, so you might not be thrilled at the prospect either. At the same time, working and middle-class blacks were often able to build decent communities in the neighborhoods that already were mixed. A new black family might not be terribly interested in the hassle around living in a white neighborhood, especially if it were more expensive. You also have cultural affinities. Even if segregation was not present, you would expect certain neighborhoods to develop cultural trappings, like food and music, that made it more desirable to people of that culture.",
"Both official and unofficial segregation, yes, and some of it still ongoing. Travel in, say, Texas. You'll see lots of little towns that are directly adjacent to or even entirely surrounded by bigger towns and don't seem to have much reason to exist as separate entities. They were often created to either be white- or black-only (usually white-only). This was enforced by things like deed restrictions (you agree not to sell your property to a non-white family), and unofficially by threats of violence or what-have-you. Read deed restrictions or HOA documents from the 40's and 50's. They often have explicit restrictions on the race of the property owner. Alabama went all the way to the Supreme Court for the right to re-draw city boundaries so that in a given city there were mostly white people or whatever, and the way Alabama's government works, city boundaries can be redrawn from the state government almost arbitrarily and cities are very limited in what laws they can pass themselves. This centralization of power in the state government was done immediately after the Civil War for the explicit purpose of making sure the state could divide itself into white and black cities and then deny black cities the power to pass their own laws. Before various pieces of legislation (the Civil Rights Acts, the Fair Housing Act, and so on), it was more-or-less legal for banks to deny mortgages to black families who wanted to buy houses in white neighborhoods -- and banks would do so to keep their white customers happy. Even after it was made illegal, Realtors would intentionally not show houses in white neighborhoods to black families, and discourage white families from buying in black neighborhoods. When that was made illegal, Realtors would make sure to include photos of the family or photos of family photos, when photographing the house for sale, to be sure people knew that they were looking at houses in black neighborhoods. Now that sort of thing is illegal too, and it is getting better, but there's an immense amount of inertia in things like that. Houses aren't movable, and because of their inherent value tend to stay in families for more than one generation more so than other kinds of property. Because the older generation lives where they do and children often want to live near their families when they buy a house, the network effect acts as pressure to keep neighborhood demographics more stable than they might otherwise be. (Of course that doesn't mean that they *always* stay that way, just that they're slower to change than the demographics of other things like, say, Universities or apartment complexes, which are more flexible.) Because of the relative demographic stability of neighborhoods, they're often a pathway to other unofficial racism. School district lines are drawn such that schools are tilted more heavily towards one ethnicity or another, and schools in black neighborhoods are often underfunded. Other city services are often neglected, and so on. (In 2018 there are still hundreds of court-mandated desegregation orders for school districts, some renewed as recently as 2017, because of cities and school districts maintaining de facto segregation by drawing boundary lines in certain ways. I remember growing up in small-town Texas. We had two high schools for a town of only 12,000 people. Even though the city was 40% black, one high school was 99% white, less than a mile away from the other. I graduated in 1998.) (Speaking from personal experience, there was a neighborhood here in Austin, in the middle of town, that was still on septic systems. The demographics were mostly black and Hispanic. The city promised to get sewer service to them by 2009. It took until 2016. They promised sidewalks back in 2008...still very few sidewalks. This was all explained as \"not enough money in the budget\" -- but whiter parts of town got new bicycle paths, city-owned bicycle repair stations, covered bus stops, etc, etc, during the same time period when people in this neighborhood were getting their homes condemned because their septic systems were failing and they didn't want to spend $20,000 to fix it just to have to pay more to hook up to the sewer when it finally came in.)",
"Covenants were a biggy. There'd be covenants on houses saying you can't sell the house to a non-white person. Those were made illegal (or invalidated) but if you look at some older homes the covenant is still there, it just can't be enforced. So black people and other minorities (California is one of the most segregated states if you count in Hispanic, just black and white and NY is the most segregated. The south was actually forced to integrate while the north just got to be racist) couldn't buy homes in certain neighborhoods leading them to find homes where they could buy. Overtime it becomes cultural and people like to stay close to home."
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7pzrjw | What is the United States Merchant Marines? | How do they differ from private shipping companies, as they seem to fulfill the same purpose? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In peacetime, the Merchant Marine transports cargo and passengers no differently than any other shipping company. In wartime, the Merchant Marine transports soldiers and material for the military. The Department of Defense can also commission Merchant Marine officers as military officers."
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7q4gf4 | When a singer / rapper has more 'bars' than someone else. | Probably a really noob question but what does it mean if one singer/rapper has more bars than another one? EDIT: Thanks for all the answers :) | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Bars\" is a quantitative and qualititative term, signifying either the measure of an individual line (that's a bar) or emphasized for how damn hot it was (that's a *bar*).",
"I can't speak about this perfectly but the other answers don't answer this in the way it is used in my experience. As the other guy said. A bar is a unit of measurement for music. This generally lines up with a single line in a rap. Saying that someone has more bars than someone else means that the person is able to create more unique lines of content in their raps. If the raps are of equal quality in terms of word play, rhyme etc then they have produced a 'better' rap as they have shown more content.",
"They mean they have more written material committed to memory. Good question for r/rapbattles. Cannibus has a whole book of rhymes written, used to cripple to enemies.",
"It technically means more material but it actually means you have more quality material. The other person could rap for 10 minutes with less \"quality bars\" than someone rapping for 5.",
"It means the rapper has more clever/witty punchlines than the other guy. Those punchlines could be straight forward disses or in the form of wordplay.",
"Bars are material, ammunition. If someone has more bars than you, they have more creative lines than you.",
"16 bars in a verse. Spit a hot 16 and that’s a full verse. Having bars means you can lay verses over any track. On YouTube watch Joey Badass drop bars over Future’s Mask Off.",
"A bar (or measure) is a group of musical beats. The most common grouping (called a time signature) is 4:4 (four notes per beat, four beats per bar/measure), but groupings can be used. Rap, especially, uses bars to signal how fast and how long each section of rapping is. A 10,000 bar song (which is very large) would have 40,000 beats scrunched up into the length of the song, which would then tell you how fast and fluidly the rapper is performing. If the rapper did a 5 minute song with 1,000 bars, it would generally mean he did 4,000 beats in 5 minutes, or 800 beats per minute. This would be a very fast rapper with a lot of content in that song. You could compare this to a rapper with only 500 bars (2,000 beats) in his 5-minute song, which would be half the speed of the previous example. If you're interested in really fast rapping, you generally want to look for a higher number of bars in a shorter amount of time."
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7q4krd | Why did the first world war start and indirectly influence the start of the second world war? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"After World War One ended in 1918, Germany had to give up land and was banned from having armed forces. They also had to make large financial payments to the victors of WW1 There was a lot of unease, unhappiness and Germany being in a position where they just couldn’t get going because of all these penalties. Everyone was upset and needed a spark. Along cake a leader who was charismatic, tapped into this anger and promised to deliver greatness and a return to their empire. In 1933 the German people voted for a leader named Adolf Hitler, who led a political party in Germany called the National Socialists or Nazis. Hitler promised to make his country great again and quickly began to arm Germany again and to seize land from other countries. Shortly before 5am on Friday 1st September, 1939, German forces stormed the Polish frontier. Tanks and motorised troops raced into the country over ground, supported by Stuka dive bombers overhead. A total of 1.25 million Germans soldiers swept into Poland So had WW1 and it’s direct results lead to the rebubbling up of ww2"
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7q5jat | What exactly is a dependent triad or "devil's tritone" in music and how does it work? | I started to read the [wiki article]( URL_0 ) on it, but got very confused very quickly. Thanks! | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When tones are played at the same time, their waves combine to form a [complex wave]( URL_0 ). When the frequencies of those notes are in small ratios, like 2:1, 3:2, etc., the resulting wave is fairly simple and sounds pleasing. When the notes are in ratios involving larger numbers, like 16:15, the complex wave is more complicated and the sound is jarring and unpleasant. An independent tritone is one that sounds pleasant and it suitable for ending a ~~people~~ piece. A dependant tritone is jarring and requires addition notes after it to \"resolve\" the music for the audience. They are often used to show alarm or distress. The diminished fifth, or the devil's triad, is an example of a dependant tritone.",
"Harmony is sourced from (closeness to) small close-integer ratios of frequency, where close-integers are only distanced by 1. A perfect fifth is nearly 3/2, a perfect fourth is nearly 4/3, a major third is nearly 5/4, and they all have consonance. A major second is close to 9/8, which isn't all that small of integer. A minor second is not close to anything nicer than 16/15, but it is still useful in music. A tritone is the square root of two, 1.414213... That's not close to anything! It transcends dissonance, it is \"ambiguous\" because there is no closeness to any small close-integer ratio on which to evaluate it. If you use a tritone, a diminished fifth, an augmented fourth, it will make the listener uncomfortable. You'd better be going for that.",
"In music, the “pitch” of a note refers to how “high” or “low” it sounds. Pitch corresponds to the frequency of a note (although the exact relationship has a couple of caveats). We say that two pitches are “consonant” if the ratio of their frequencies is a simple fraction, and “dissonant” if the ratio is not a simple fraction. We care about this because our *brains* do — consonance might sound nice, stable, or pleasant, while dissonance may sound tense, unstable, or grating. In music, we use both of these effects. In music, we call the ratio between the frequencies of two pitches the “interval” between the pitches. The simplest fraction (other than 1/1) is 1/2. We call the interval corresponding to this ratio the “octave”. Our brain likes octaves so much that two pitches separated by an octave sound very similar, though we can tell that one is higher and the other is lower. In music, we say that pitches separated by octaves are in the same “pitch class”. In Western music, we use twelve different pitch classes. (The reason for this is interesting, but it's outside the scope of this answer.) In modern times, we consider all twelve of these pitch classes to be equally spaced. With twelve pitch classes, we can form twelve different intervals. The smallest (other than the unison) is the “semitone”. An example of a semitone is the interval from C to C♯ (or, equivalently, to D♭. Another example is the interval from E to F. Other intervals can be represented as multiples of a semitone: from zero semitones (a unison) to twelve semitones (a full octave, which is equivalent to a unison when talking about pitch classes). Some of these intervals are very consonant. The most consonant is the unison/octave, followed by the “perfect fourth” (five semitones) and “perfect fifth” (seven semitones). Other intervals are very dissonant, including the semitone itself (also called the “minor second”) and the “tritone” (six semitones, also called an “augmented fourth” or “diminished fifth” based on context). Because the tritone is so dissonant, it often sticks out to the listener. It should be used judiciously (which does not always mean sparingly!). If you ever take a course in music theory, you'll hear about many “rules” to obey when writing music. These rules, prohibiting things like “parallel fifths”, are really practical guidelines; breaking them thoughtlessly will likely sound bad. The tritone itself has sometimes been fancifully called “the devil's interval”, although what was surely a hyperbolic description of its dissonance has taken a life of its own over the years. There is no evidence that this moniker was ever taken seriously in a religious sense, or that use of the interval was outlawed. It is, on the other hand, absolutely true that our standards of consonance and dissonance have mellowed over the years and that a listener from the year 1600 would likely have found the tritone interval much more grating than we do today — and that, therefore, a composer from that time would have used many fewer of them. An important counterexample illustrates the point. One of the most important chords in common practice western music is the “dominant seventh chord”. This chord contains four notes, and two of them are separated by a tritone. The dissonance of this interval gives the chord a certain “tension”, and this tension is “resolved” when the dominant seventh chord is followed by a more consonant “tonic” chord. The most traditional, conservative way of ending a piece of music is with an “authentic cadence”, which often includes a dominant seventh chord. The lesson here is that even early composers did not avoid the tritone or dissonance in general; rather, they respected and often relied upon them. Now, the disclaimer: I'm not an expert on early music (especially pre-Renaissance), so I'm open to input from someone with more specific expertise in that subject. Maybe there is some priest somewhere who once forbid the tritone in his church or something. Stranger things have happened.",
"Devil triton is just a flatted 5th on any major chord. So for example a Cmaj chord (C-E-G) with a flatted 5th is C-E-F#. For a true Devils Tritone I believe you only play the 3rd+5th(E-F#) and no root(C) with sometimes a dominant 7th for more dissonance (C-E-F#-A#) That’s using Cmaj as an example"
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7q98q6 | How do movie producers decide when to release their movie? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is a huge strategic card game, where you have to take into account the seasonal behavior of moviegoers, the type of movie, the award cycle, they competitors, and how good they think their movie is. For example, action blockbusters tend to make the most money, and people are more likely to watch movies in the summer. So you release your blockbuster in the summer, right? Not so fast. Most of the other blockbusters will likely be released at the same time. So do you put your unproven movie up against the next *Avengers*, or wait for a slower time when there is less competition? There is no clear answer, and movie executives live and die by these choices."
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7qay03 | What is the difference between a magistrate and a judge? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That depends entirely on the country you're asking about. Can you be specific?"
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7qbw2u | Gender of words | What does it mean for a word to be feminine or masculine or neutral? Why is it important? How did it come about? In fact, what does a word's gender even mean/represent? I know for people It's a physical quality, but how does that apply to words? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"***TLDR: Genders are just word classes. Words that follow similar rules and demand a certain declenation or grammatical use are grouped together. Sometimes this grouping is meaningful to the definition of the word, most of the time it's arbitrary and based on what is natural and sounds good, and how the word fits into the language*** \"Gendered languages\" are languages where some subclass of words (most commonly nouns) are assigned a gender. Gender is a bit of a misleading term, because it's completely unrelated to gender as people perceive it, i.e a key being a male word in a language isn't supposed to imply that keys are somehow manly or better represented by men instead of women. Grammatical genders are instead just *classes* words fit into. These classes mean that the words decline or behave similar to other words in the same class, and adjectives, verbs or other word-types behave in some similar sense when paired with the gendered object. It's not all that different to saying some words are nouns, and some are verbs. Some words are in the past tense, and the language changes accordingly, and some words are present tense. You know that if you have a past tense word you probably cannot use \"I am < word > \", because 'Am' implies present. in a similar way a male word might not fit where a female word would without changing the grammar of the sentence (changing 'am' into 'was' in our tense- example). For instance, Icelandic is gendered. barring exceptions: * all definite male nouns end with the suffix \"inn\". * All definite female nouns end with \"in\" * All definite neuter nouns end with \"ið\". Similarly adjectives decline according to gender, so all blue, indefinite male nouns are \"blár\", blue female nouns are \"blá\", and neuter things are \"blátt\". \"Blái lykilinn\" means \"the blue key\", while \"bláa tölvan\" is \"the blue computer\". \"Blár hestur\" mean \"a blue horse\". Most of the time the meaning of the word doesn't affect the gender of the word. How the word sounds, inflects, declines, and naturally fits into a language is usually the determining factors in what gender it has. Gendered languages usually use gender to clear up ambiguity, distinguish homophones should their gender differ, often correlate with the natural gender of the living thing they are describing, and give a regular order to nouns that act similarly. In culture gendered languages usually use the grammatical gender as a jump-off point when personifying things but with the unexpected side effect that when people describe the noun they tend to use words often associated with the stereotype of the natural gender (ie. spanish speakers might describe a key as beautiful, small, golden; while Icelandic speakers might mention rough, strong, metallic)."
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7qg2p2 | Why do TV networks advertise new episodes in EST/CST but not in other US based time zones? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Eastern/Central thing happens because the stations in both time zones use the same feed. It's a lot easier than programming the two zones separately. The Pacific time zone gets it's own programming feed because it is big enough to make it worth the effort. The Mountain time zone is so small that most stations record the East coast feed and then re-broadcast when they feel appropriate. The networks let the local affiliates deal with it.",
"For most national TV broadcasts, Eastern and Central air simultaneously, meaning the local times are different, i.e. 9PM eastern = 8PM central. Mountain airs on a two-hour delay, and Pacific airs on a three-hour delay, so the clock times end up synchronized back with Eastern. So the Eastern/Central simultaneous airing happens first (this is where the 9PM / 8PM Central comes from), then two hours later the Mountain airing happens (9PM local time), then one hour after that the Pacific airing happens (9PM local time). So it's 9PM local time everywhere except Central, which gets in an hour \"early\" by virtue of airing simultaneously with Eastern. So \"prime time\" is actually 7PM - 9PM for Central, but 8PM - 10PM for Eastern, Mountain, and Pacific. Living in Central has a big advantage of getting to go to bed an hour earlier, at least in the days when people actually stayed up to watch TV.",
"In the West they advertise in Pacific/Mountain time. Depends on where you're watching the show."
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7qi76m | Is the birthday of an egg the day it is laid or the day it hatches? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The day it hatches. When it’s in the egg it is still forming but when it hatches is when it’s fully formed.",
"why are you arguing with people telling you the answer? laying of the egg is part of the embryo development process thus the birth day of animals that lay eggs is the egg hatching day since that is when the animal breaks free of the life sustaining mechanisms and becomes a full organism that needs to ingest and expel on its own. unless you think a birthday should be another part of a human or other similar birthing animals development process? we don't celebrate conception day or 3rd trimester day we celebrate birth day and the equivalent in egg laying creatures is hatching day.",
"Well, comparing it to humans Is the birthday of a child the day a woman got pregnant, or the day the child was born? There you have it, basically",
"eggs are just a hard version of the soft \"sack\" babies grow in. Getting out of that sack is the moment we consider birth. So if a chick hatches from the egg, you start counting from there.",
"Just like in humans we consider the birthday to be the day we are actually born and no longer forming in our mothers womb. The same would be considered true for an egg, the day it hatches would be considered it's birthday."
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7qmnn3 | What do governments do when an undocumented person literally cannot be identified? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They’re in a pickle. Hopefully their actual government has a system in place to process people clearly born in that country, but as-yet undocumented. Google “stateless person”. There are ways to become somebody that no country will claim as their own. The ramifications can be severe, so rules about giving up citizenship often have rules (like proving you have other citizenship) to avoid these situations."
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7qnigw | Why do car commercials so often follow a format of “normal people” being shown a car and giving their “candid” opinions? They’re so obviously scripted and you could make such cooler commercials. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I love telling my actor friends that, according to Chevy, they are not real people. But these stupid commercials are nothing compared to those 30 minute infomercials about some mop or wacky cooking device. Do they work? Yes. People are gullible.",
"What if the car's main feature is that it's pretty average? In that case, you don't want to draw attention to the features, or lack of them. Instead, you can try to convince everyone that a normal person would rather have that car than any other.",
"Because they have been tested and shown to sell more cars. Many companies don't care if their ads artistically suck, they just want to sell more.",
"That just means your not responsive to that type of marketing. Cleary there are enough people that respond to it. Despite how much we hate advertisements, they're that way because it works."
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7qtzrc | How do we know how the Romans pronounced Latin words? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"we dont, it's all heavily disputed guesswork. most people have agreed to one model of spoken latin for convenience, but there's no way to tell if it matches how real romans pronounced it",
"A huge amount of it is guesswork, and lots of it is disputed between scholars of Latin (and any other dead language). However, there are many useful tricks we can use to have a pretty good idea: * Misspellings. This is pretty handy in examples of older versions of modern languages, too. If someone misspells a word as \"thru,\" you can figure out that they meant the word \"through\" by context AND figure out how to pronounce it, even though it's irregular. Similar examples exist in antiquity. * Poetry is a big one, because if verses were supposed to rhyme (which not all do, admittedly) or share features like consonance or assonance (matching consonant/vowel sounds), then we can use one known word to match another. * Comparison to modern languages that come from the dead language. This one's big as well - if a particular word sounds similar in, say, French and Italian, and it came from Latin and not another source, then it's a decent bet that it sounded similar in Latin. So putting all of this together with a few other linguistic tricks, we can get a pretty good idea of what things sounded like, or at least come to a consensus on \"This is the most likely answer, so let's agree on this until we find something better.\"",
"We can estimate based on how French, Spanish and Italian are spoken since they all come from Latin."
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7r4cpr | What is the difference between a tort and a crime? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"a tort is a civil action between two parties in a civil court a crime is defined by the criminal statues, and is prosecuted by the state in a criminal courtroom",
"A crime is when you do something the state has forbidden, the state hauls you into court and prosecutes you to prove it, and the state punishes you for it, even when you haven't harmed anyone. A tort is when your action harms a private individual, the person sues you in court to prove it, and the person gets back what they lost because of you, and if they can't show some kind of harm, they can't get anything.",
"A crime is something that is against our society’s law. Our society is harmed from a crime, and therefore our government prosecutes you for breaking a law on behalf of society. The punishment for a crime is usually a fine or jail time, “paid back” to society. Depending on the law broken (state, federal, etc.) a criminal action may be titled something like “the People v. [Defendant Name]” or “State v. [Defendant Name].” This is because the government (aka “the People” or “society”) is bringing the action to court. We call the government in a criminal case “the prosecution.” The prosecutor is usually a district attorney or U.S. attorney depending on what law was broken and what court you are appearing in. An example of a crime is murder or larceny. While there is a traditional victim of a crime (the person murdered or the person whose property was taken), the real victim of a crime is society. All crimes have the same “standard of proof,” that is, what must be established in order to be found guilty of a crime. The prosecution must prove guilt “beyond a reasonable doubt.” You are either guilty or not guilty of a crime (note you are never found “innocent” of a crime, just “not guilty”). While a crime is a public matter (society is harmed), a tort is a private matter. The family of a murdered person can sue for wrongful death in a civil court and have money rewarded for being personally harmed. A theft victim can sue in civil court for damages for the tort of “conversion.” These are just examples. Not all torts have a corresponding crime associated with them. For example, your doctor could leave surgical tools in you during surgery. You could sue for the torts of negligence and malpractice, but it’s unlikely this is a crime. Tort cases are typically titled in the fashion of “Person v. Person.” The person bringing the action is called the Plaintiff, and the person being sued is called the Defendant. Torts do not have to be between humans; corporations and even the government (sometimes) can commit a tort. The standards of proof used in a tort case vary depending on the tort claim. Most use something like “preponderance of the evidence,” which is a much lower standard than “beyond a reasonable doubt.”"
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7rb3nl | What happens in a civilized country when an underage woman applies goes to a hospital to give birth? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I'm not sure that I really understand your question, but in the US at least, a girl is no longer considered a minor (at least for some things) once she is pregnant. For example: I'm an EMT, and normally parents get the final say about medical decisions for their under 18 children. However, if a 16 year old is pregnant, she now has the right to make all of her own decisions. I'm not sure how this translates into hospital records or other legal matters, but I hope that helps!",
"It varies by jurisdiction, with two kinds of competing laws. There are laws that require medical providers to report signs of abuse. Pregnancy in a 12-year-old is usually going to be considered abusive. But there are also medical privacy laws aimed to protect underaged women who might face reprisals for reproductive care from intolerant or abusive parents. In the US, at least, there is also the matter of who pays for it. In some cases, parents have been billed for and required to pay for services, but are not allowed to know what they are."
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7rcngm | Why is Lloyd spelled with two L's? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As the others said, the double L is counted as its own letter in Welsh. It's a voiceless lateral alveolar fricative. I'll explain what that is in parts. A fricative is a sound that is caused by you letting air pass around an obstruction or constriction in your mouth (for example, 'f' 'v' 'th' or 'sh' sounds in English). \"Alveolar\" is used to describe where that obstruction or constriction is (it's the \"place of articulation\" - where your tongue/lips/whatever is doing something interesting) - in this case, the \"alveolar ridge\" is the ridge just behind your upper teeth. It's the place of articulation for, say, the 't' and 'd' sounds. \"Lateral\" here means that your fricative noise is made by letting air flow to the sides of your tongue. You would place the tip of your tongue to the alveolar ridge and hold it there while you blow air around the sides of it. \"Voiceless\" means that you don't use your vocal cords/folds (for an example, 'f' or 't' would be voiceless where 'v' and 'd' would be voiced for the same places of articulation). Put that all together and you get [sounds like this]( URL_0 ).",
"Lloyd is a Welsh name, and in Welsh, \"Ll\" is a separate letter, much like Spanish regards it as a separate letter. The spelling stuck.",
"It's derived from a Welsh word meaning grey iirc, 'llwyd.' As people have said, Welsh treats the double L as a separate letter, like Spanish or the like",
"Why does \"fridge\" have a \"d\" in it when \"refrigerator\" doesn't?",
"No one here is gonna make a Lego ninjia reference? Laloyd?"
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7rf5to | Why do kids' shows frequently have an "ask and response" component (ie Dora the Explorer)? Do the kids believe the characters understand them? | I've recently found myself watching TV with preschoolers. Several of the shows have parts where the characters ask the viewer questions, then wait for an answer. The kids I was with would respond to the questions like Dora could really hear them. Why is this such a common aspect of kids' TV? Do they know it's part of the show, or do they think the characters can understand them? Culture | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Very young children have an under-developed model of how the world works. In some cases they may literally believe they are heard. In other cases they may simply enjoy playing along *as if* they are being heard -- a game.",
"Very young kids do think they are interacting. As they get a bit older they realize that isn't the case but they still enjoy the Interactive nature of it.",
"Its also so if parents/caregivers are with them, the child and caregiver can interact thlse scenes together while the show introduces them to the new concepts. Let the child absorb it from more than one angle. inb4 \"why have the show on when parents should interacting with their kid?\" Sometimes a toddler doesnt particularly want to be shown a picture book and would rather act out the show's adventure while their beloved character does. Also not all parents are repositories of information on all subjects or experts on how to introduce children to foreign concepts or locations that these characters take them to. Also parents might be trying to keep the kid involved in another activity while trying to accomplish some chores like folding laundry or loading the dishwasher, but the show's interactivity still lets the parents be partially present by talking through it with their kid who is watching it.",
"There are many theories in early childhood development. One theory is that interaction helps with development, especially in language. This is possibly why this is done.",
"I was watching Go Diego Go with my toddler once and when he asked for help rescuing something I asked her if she was going to help him rescue the creatures she said \"No, he in da teebee Mummy. I no can do it.\" She is little miss literal."
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7rgjin | How do young-earth creationists explain 7000-year-old mummies? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They don't believe radioactive dating is reliable beyond a few thousand years, so they wouldn't believe the mummy is actually 7000 years old."
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7ri2ns | How do private ambulance companies work? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"In many places, the government doesn't run emergency ambulances, they contact it out to private companies. They make money by being the only one running emergency services. There's also a whole world of non-emergency transports. Lots of people take ambulances home from the hospital or between hospitals and retirement home or other hospitals. Scheduled calls after big business.",
"911 is for emergency dispatch. if you need ambulance, then the dispatch center will call the ambulance. if you need a private ambulance for non emergency, then you call their regular number and schedule the appointment time."
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7rijvt | How does Netflix get away with calling a show such as Death Note a "Netflix original"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Original airing rights for the US. Also production originality for the live action remake (which was awful). Its actually kind of annoying how they do that, and I'm not sure why they do.",
"Networks almost never come up with the ideas for their content, people pitch them ideas and they decide what to fund. A \"Netflix Original\" just means Netflix decided to fund this series/adaptation/incarnation and gets airing rights. They aren't claiming they came up with the idea they are claiming that this version is something they funded and have exclusive rights to.",
"Because they either paid to make the thing that says that or they paid the person who did for the right to say they did. Companies own the things they pay money to create. What's the issue here?"
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7rmwsm | Why are mugshots public record and available to the press? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> Are all DUI arrests public record? All arrests period are public record. This is very important because if they were secret people could just disappear without the public being able to know what happened to them. Police action therefore must be transparent so that abuse can be stopped."
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7rnfwu | Why do so many people watch other people playing video games? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Why do people watch other people playing sports? its pretty much the same thing People like watching people who are better at them in things they're interested in do that thing. Or, for some streamers, its less about the game and more about the personality of the person playing the game",
"I can speak a bit on this topic because my fiancee is one of those people who enjoys watching people play. She has a ton of fond memories from childhood hanging out with her cousins just watching them play games, or taking turns playing games. It's a pastime that resonates with her past experiences and brings her joy. She's thankful to live in a day and age where she can just pull up youtube and watch people play. (Note that she also plays herself, but I'd say at least 50% of her gaming time is strictly watching, if not more)."
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7rrtzo | Why is the Roman Empire still relevant in this current age even though it ceased to exist long ago? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Every single western nation that has representative government has copied elements from the Roman Government in their structure. A fair amount of western law has principles that are derived from Roman Law (though it has morphed a lot over the centuries). And militaries still study the Roman Army to learn how to conduct battle.",
"Because that is how history works. When you are the dominant power in a region for a thousand years you leave a mark. When two thousand years later, a billion people, some on continents you didn't even know existed, are still speaking your language, that is an enduring legacy. Also, the Roman Empire didn't cease to exist as recently as you might think. The Fall of Rome in 476 often marks the end of the Roman Empire, but the Eastern Roman Empire, aka Byzantium, persisted until the Fall of Constantinople in 1452. By then, the Holy Roman Empire was up and going, and while its holy, romantic, and empiric qualities can be disputed, they did consider themselves successors to Rome and derived some authority from that legacy. Napolean ended the Holy Roman Empire in 1806, but its remnants soon formed both the Austro-Hungarian empire and the German Confederation. Austria-Hungary was dissolved in 1918 after WWI, but much of it was rejoined with the Third Riech. They considered the First Reich to be the Holy Roman Empire, so Germany clearly saw itself as the successor to Rome. Soon after, we had NATO and today we have Germany as the keystone of the Eurozone. So depending on how you count, the Roman Empire ended 1500, 500, 200, 100, or 70 years ago...or it hasn't ended at all."
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7rv2be | Why were there several young popes in their teens and 20s over 1000 years ago but recent popes have all been old? | URL_0 Why hasn't there been a youthful pope recently? Did policies change? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"From the wikipedia page you link to in the section \"Youngest popes\": > All four were members of the Theophylacti family that dominated Roman politics during the 10th century. This period is known to historians as the saeculum obscurum. That was very much an anomaly, the section also shows that the average where people become pope was already over 60 between 1500 and 1700 and has increased little since then.",
"The Pope had power and it was important to keep someone who was a member of your faction as the Pope. You'll notice that there are also a lot of Popes during that timeframe who had *very* short terms in office and not all died due to natural causes The 4 youngest popes were all members of the same powerful family who backed a lot of different popes through the years. From 904 to 963 there were 12 popes with an average reign of slightly less than 5 years. When you're chewing through a pope every 5 years you're going to have some interesting picks. Modern popes only have power over the church and the church only has power over itself so it isn't a hotly contested position. In the past 80 years we have only had 5 popes.",
"It's right there on the WIKI bud. > Benedict was the nephew of his immediate predecessor, Pope John XIX. In October 1032, his father obtained his election through bribery. That shit doesn't fly anymo.... well... less, I suppose."
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7s3b5a | Why are police lights sometimes only visible from behind the vehicle? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This configuration is used to warn cars that the police car is on the shoulder, without distracting the cars driving the other direction. Police cars can be very disruptive to traffic flow, and that causes accidents which make more work for the police officers (and ruin someone's day).",
"Cop here: Most control boxes have different settings. One of those settings is rear-only. Sometimes it's just not necessary to have every light on. It can also be a legal thing, as blue lighting someone may be telling them they're not free to leave.",
"Former cop here: Sometimes cops only turn the rear lights on when theyre backing up another officer. First car makes the stop, second unit pulls in behind him, shuts off headlights and activates rear emergency lights. That way, your fellow officer is extra blinded. We'd also turn off the front lights when performing field sobriety tests."
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7s5fm4 | How do countries like Micronesia, which are made up of hundreds of small islands, actually govern? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Does it matter if there is water instead of roads between a number of small towns? We have boats and bridges.",
"You run it in a decentralized way. In case of Micronesia, it's a federation: you have a national government, but most of day-to-day governance is done by each of the four states in their own territory. (Just like how the U.S. could be governed in the early 19th century while spanning a huge territory.) And the individual states will be decentralized, too. Instead of having all the government offices in the capital, for instance, the important agencies might have local offices on each of the major islands. Services are more likely to be the responsibility of small entities (e.g. the municipality) than big ones. There will always be a problem with access to government services in the most remote parts, though."
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7s6bx8 | Why does most popular music have a "Verse, Chorus, Verse, Chorus" predictable format? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well since the Chorus doesn't change, it'd be pretty odd to have the Chorus appear twice in a row without a verse in between without some variation. Your only two options are Verse/Chorus/Verse/Chorus or Chorus/Verse/Verse/Chorus. But I don't know many songs that use the latter (some do).",
"> Or are most artists too worried/lazy to innovate so they just copy and paste 'what works' from previous famous artists? So for starters, many (if not most) artists don't write their own songs, for the most part you have a different song writer that sells the song to the artist. The artist might add their flair to it, but the majority of creativity isn't from the artist. In terms of why it's the standard format. If you had to guarantee a return on investment for your record label you'd aim to have a song that can please the most amount of people. That means you aim for a song people can hear once and then want to hear it again. For the average person having the easily repeatable format makes it easier to get it stuck in their head forcing them to seek it out again. You could also feasibly have a song without a chorus, but the chorus is the most memorable (probably because it's constantly played). If you remove the most memorable part, your song is most likely not that \"re-memorable\" and would be considered less than a success.",
"It has nothing to do with artists being too lazy to innovate. I'm a writer whose had record deals and worked with Grammy award-winning producers. They innovate all the time, and they're certainly not lazy. The problem is that we're talking about *popular* music, not innovative music. Popular music, by definition, is consumed by a large audience, so it has to primarily have the basic building blocks the public is familiar with. This applies to almost anything that people consume. Regardless of actual quality, people rarely like cuisine that is completely foreign to their taste buds, they hate technology that doesn't work similarly to what they're used to (Windows 8, anyone?), they usually don't like movies that deviate too far from traditional storytelling archetypes, etc. We humans like consistency, predictability, and being right. The pop song format that's been around for at least 75 years feeds into all of these. The verse provides the story and background, the chorus provides the catchy and predictable portion, then we repeat the process, then we add a bridge because people don't like for the song to be *too* stale, and then finish with a big bang of chorus that usually adds elements from earlier in the song. We also see the predictability within the elements of songs. For most pop songs, it's going to be one of maybe 5 chord progressions that people just seem to like, and it's going to be either in your basic major or minor key, not something like a phrygian scale (which has a flat 2) or harmonic minor scale (which has a major 7. These basic elements are easy for people without extensive music backgrounds to follow. Yep, you can find songs in 19/16 time signature and with keys that change from weird scale to weird scale, but it's too much to process most of the time."
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7sj3pr | Why do some cultures have a lot of spicy food and others dont? Europe and european rooted cultures seem to have very little spice while india and central america (also mexico) have lots. Is it just about availability of peppers in the environment? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most of it has to do with the fact that spices, including peppers, do not grow well outside of tropical and subtropical climates. Europe did not have any access to spices for most of its history (thus a cultural use of herbs instead) and did not have easy access to spices till modern transportation.",
"Closer to equator : hotter Hotter : need to sweat more to cool down Spicy food makes you sweat Spicy food also spoilers slower, which is helpful because food will spoil quickly in high heat /humidity",
"Because till Europeans started exploring the equatorial regions the spices weren't available to them except in very limited quantities that land travels like Marco Polo would bring back in his trading with China. Since they were introduced and could only be afforded by the obscenely wealthy they didnt become part of the main diets or dishes."
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7smiok | What are people in the stock exchange buildings shouting about? | You always see videos of people holding several phones, in a circle screaming at each other, but what are they actually achieving? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Imagine you had a business selling lollipops at school. Since you can buy a bag of 100 for $10, you can sell them for 25¢ a piece for a profit. But you don't have $10. But there is profit to be made for all if people give you the money. So you ask your friends to **invest**. They each give you $1 and you give them (and yourself) some **stock** in the **venture** - a promise to split the profit. You guys buy a bag, and in one week, you sell all your lollipops for 25¢ each. So now you have 0 lollipops and 25¢ x 100 = $25 Awesome! Maybe you pay yourself a market rate for your job in the venture as salesman (you're also an employee since you sold the pops) - say $5 So you have $20 to split 10 ways. Everybody makes $2 from their $1 investment - everybody wins. you could pay them back their $1 investment and another $1 profit - this extra is called a **dividend**. Now, would your investors go in again next week? Sure! You're doubling their money. And you ran out of lollipops right? So maybe get everyone together to vote and we all agree at a **shareholder meeting** to skip the dividend and turn the venture into a **business** that reinvests the profit into 2 bags of lollipops and make money even faster. Next week you sell out again. Since you're just one sales guy, you still only cost $5 and your **profit margin** has risen. You can now buy 4.5 bags of lollipops each week. Your business is growing! Now the new kid in school has noticed your business and he wants to buy a share. You **sold** a share to your friends for $1. But now each week, thay share grew in the potential value of its dividend. So how much should a share cost today? Even though the investors haven't actually gotten money back on the business, the share they own has grown in value as the business has grown. Well one of your old friends wants to buy a comic book that costs $5 and he has no allowance because he spent all his money buying his share the first week. He's ready to start making money back but the stockholders want to keep reinvesting the dividends. So some of the shareholders and the new kid, Martin get together on the playground and start talking. Comic book kid says is willing to sell his share. So he **asks** for $5 from Martin. But Martin doesn't want to pay that. So Martin **bids** $4.50. There is now a **bid-ask spread of .50¢** - meaning it's less likely for a sale to happen then if that spread was $0 and more likely than if the spread was $1. The stock might not actually sell today because the market is slow and sticky rather than **liquid**. The stock in the company is **illiquid**. Some more kids gather around. They're hip. They want to grow their lunch money. So they **bid** $4.75.,$4.85, $4.95 - **sold** comic book kid thinks this is close enough and a transaction happens. The market is gaining **liquidity** as more buyers and sellers gain interest. But now Martin's got hella-bad FOMO (fear of missing out). He offers $5.10 to buy it from the new owner. Seeing the **stock price** rise, other owners consider selling. They consider **holding**. They consider buying more. All start negotiating. Some kids call their parents and ask for an advance on their allowance. Some parent hear about this crazy business that doubles each week and they tell the kid to act as a **broker** on the trading floor and do the deal on the parent's behalf. Baby, you've got yourself a stock pit. ## Waaaaaaahhhh!!! Okay, okay Part II **Market, Limit, Stop orders; Futures contracts; Options; Shorting; Insider trading, and market manipulation** None of this stuff affects the **profit** of the company. The stock was sold in the **initial public (school) offering** (IPO). And since then, the company itself has just sold lollipops and reinvested in growth. But if they want to grow more they can get all the shareholders together and vote to sell more shares. This **dilutes** the existing shareholders, but if it helps grow the company, the stock price will go up and it means a smaller slice of a bigger pie - so they decide to do it. They **issue more shares**. So Lollipop Co. (ticker: LOLI) is booming. I mean, it basically doubles every week so people want more stock. And neighborhood adults and local business owners want to grow their money. So they head over to the playground and ask the teachers if they can get in to buy some stock. The teacher are like, \"Um... no you can't go on the playground, you don't go to this school and you're an adult, perv. So the local adults pass notes to the kids to buy stock on their behalf and have the kids **broker** a deal. But the price different people will sell for keeps moving so the kid asks, \"what price are you willing to buy it at?\" And the parent (client) can say: - place a **limit order** - I'll only pay up to $6.50 and if it moves past that before you can find a seller, cancel it - place a **market order** - I'll buy it at any price you can get it for over the next hour or so. - place a **stop order** - for some reason I only want to buy above a certain price. Probably because if it is moving down in price I think it will keep moving down. These purchases are getting complicated and kids don't want to work for free. Adults (institutional investors) have *a lot* of money compared to kids. Each aggressive purchase makes the stock price move up. The broker kids get paid a fee - maybe 25¢. But the adults are buying like $1000 in stock at a time. So a really clever kid, Max, decides to start buying LOLI when his adult does. Since the stock price was like $7, if an adult wants to buy 1000 shares, the price has to move up as he asks kid after kid after kid to sell all his shares. He knows this means the stock price will get higher and higher - so he personally buys as much as he can before he starts trading for his adult. He has invented **frontrunning**. Teachers see this and get upset because frontrunning drives the price of the stock up for neighborhood adults unfairly and those adults are the tax payers that pay the teacher's salary. So they declare frontrunning against the rules. Meanwhile, as the CEO and sole employee (I guess) of Lollico. you know the weekly sales figures before anyone else. You could **manipulate** the market price by leaking information about it. You can say the sales are low, then buy up stock and say - \"psych\" (do kids still say psych?) and watch the price rise. Teachers hate this too because again it makes the taxpaying adults mad. So they say its against the rules and call it **market manipulation** - specifically it is **misreporting financials** and **insider trading**. The opposite is **pump and dump**. So now you need to file a record of your sales and expenses with the Special Educational Council or **SEC** (securities and exchange commission - a stock is also called a security for some reason) that ensures everybody is following the rules. Max - recently released from timeout - has another brilliant idea. LOLI is now at $4,555 because of all the adults who have bought in. This time, he thinks that this whole LOLI thing is way oversold. He thinks the stock isn't worth what the market says because Max actually read my ELI5 and understands that fundamentally, the stock is worth what **dividends** it can pay you and there aren't enough kids at this school to buy millions of dollars of lollipops. Max wants to bet against the price of the stock going up. He can do this a few ways. One way is to \"borrow\" a stock from some adults. So Max, while he doesn't own the stock, has borrowed it from an adult (as a loan for a small interest rate called **security lending**) and sold it for less (**short**) than what it might be worth at the immediate current price. He now has a bunch of borrowed cash - $4,555 and owes one share of LOLI in 30 days back to the lender. If the price moves up, he will owe a lot of money to those adults in order to buy back the stock at a higher price. Potentially infinite money if the price keeps climbing and he can't buy it. Shorting is dangerous - but Max likes to live dangerously. He shorts the stock and then goes around asking kids if they've ever gotten a dividend. No one seems to understand what a dividend is - it has been like a whole month since LOLI went public (school) and everyone forgot. Max explains why stocks have value and all of a sudden everyone freaks out and starts selling before their stock is worthless. The stock tumbles down to $15 where he is easily able to buy it before paying back his adult lender and Max pockets the $4,540 difference. He's basically the only one who made mad lunch money at this point. But the company is fine - they're still selling lollipops.",
"It's basically a massive auction house where people are throwing out numbers that they want to sell \"stuff\" ~~commodities~~ ~~stock~~ for. Now, they mostly use computers to do all the transactions. But there are still some places that have trading pits.",
"They are trying to negotiate prices for buying or selling stock. If you shout out to a group of people that you are selling 100 apple stocks for $10 a piece then some of them might take you up on that offer and you write down each others names so the deal is finalized when the exchange closes for the day. The reason they are constantly on their phones is because they get information from their clients or other helpers about what stocks to buy or sell.",
"Ex 30 year treasury bond option broker here. Some basics of the yelling or \"Open outcry\" system. When you want to buy something, they're yelling \"I'll pay X for Y quanities of the product (Corn, soymeal, bonds)\". If you're selling, the opposite...\"I'll sell you Y for X dollars\". When they're waving their hands, palms out, selling, palms in, buying. Hope this helps a bit.",
"They are achieving a process called [Open Outcry]( URL_0 ) which is where a price for a trade is set based on willing participants. If there is one seller and two buyers (for the same amount of some stock), the price will have to go up a little bit so that the one willing to pay more wins and gets the purchase. If there are two sellers and one buyer, the price goes down a little bit as the seller willing to drop his price gets the sale. To your exact question, they are on phones because they are getting orders from their customers or management from within their company. They are representatives of larger investment firms like Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan, etc. so they have clients looking to buy/sell and they have to figure out how to do that and keep their clients happy (without making a shitty buy or sell at a regrettable price.) Traditionally it was common to see lots of shouting as there would be multiple buyers AND sellers trying to get in on a given trade since theres often not an exact match for buying/selling quantities. You might be shouting to find 5 different buyers if you have to sell a big lump of some stock, or the reverse if your client orders up a big buy. This has mostly been replaced by computers but there are still several markets that allow this method for trades such as huge amounts of some high priced stock (think, a sale worth hundreds of millions of dollars). Going into a trading pit can keep the price stable, as a computer algorithm would generally not deal well with a huge lopsided buy/sell volume and the price would become erratic.",
"They are advertising their stock prices or ordering a purchase in order to get rid of stocks they don't see a future profit or to buy promising ones",
"They are negotiating prices and placing orders, that is all. It's just that a stock trading can involve huge sums of money over things (the stocks) whose value can change quickly, so the negotiations can get very intense and fast-paced. The people are brokers with clients they buy stocks for and/or clients they sell stocks for. It's a physical market where a whole bunch of people give and receive orders (to by and sell) verbally, person to person, that's what the shouting and raising fingers is about. The phones are connected to the clients that the brokers are buying and selling for. The brokers are relaying all the quickly changing information they see on the trading floor to their client so the clients can make a decision to place an order.",
"Before the rise of the internet, stock transactions were primarily done between brokers face-to-face on trading floors. IIRC, the trading floor scene in the movie Trading Places, is the most accurate film depiction of what this was like. During trading hours, brokers would come in with a bunch of partially filled in trade receipts for their clients with the info about what they want to buy/sell, and at what price. If they didn’t already have a transaction agreement with another stockholder, the quickest way to advertise their client’s offer was to literally shout it out to the other brokers on the trading floor. Additionally, there were brokers on phones on the trading floor taking phone in offers from other exchanges, foreign markets, and clients not near the exchange. “Runners” would then take these offers and run them to the brokers in “the pit”. To an outsider, this all looked like chaos, but in reality was pretty efficient. A single broker complete a couple hundred tickets a in the pit before closing bell. Nowadays, almost all transactions are done over the internet.",
"A long time ago, before computers did it more efficiently, people would do the trading. How? Well there was a pit, where a bunch of traders stand around in. This is so they can see each other. The pits would usually be for one type of commodity, like bacon. Someone would call in to a desk on the side, owned by a trading company, the message would be taken to the trader in the pit, the trader in the pit would yell at another trader in the pit, and employ hand signals (because noise and distance, there are actually a fairly large amount of hand signals), to make the trade with another trader, and they would both record the details (500 bacons at 30 from PACKMAN at 12:21), hand off those details to another runner that would take it back to the desk. At the end of the day, someone would go through and make sure everyone had matching trades. If they didn't then the companies the worked for were in big trouble. So - they are the ones actually doing the trading, and due to the quantity of trading going on, it's very hectic.",
"Nowadays this is less of a thing, but it still happens - usually for a category of stock market trade called, \"over the counter\" trades. This is where, instead of going through a third party platform that trades on your behalf (like a trading website) , you cut out the middle man and make very direct deals with someone on the end of a phone. The advantage of this is that you can make much more complex (or shady) trades with people, at prices you both agree on the fly. For deals that aren't part of the regular soup of ways you can bet on the market, this is sometimes the only way you can actually make a trade at all. Finally, there are also some accounting loopholes (although this is being clamped down significantly in Europe), which means that trades of this nature don't always have to be declared in the same way as other transactions. This is important because governments usually require institutions that trade to hold a certain amount of money in their bank account, or provide a set of counter trades to make sure that a declared transactions are safe to place on the market. No declarations? No need to bother with providing a safety net should it go wrong!"
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7so3et | Explain these common music terms used on mozart compositions. | For example: This is a piece by Mozart used in the 1984 film Amadeus, titled "Mass in C minor KV. 427: Kyrie (1785)" What is KV.427? What does KV mean? and what does the numbers following it represent? What is a Kyrie? What is a Mass? Or this other piece: "Flute and Harp Concerto, K. 299; 2nd Movement " This time its a K, not a KV, and why 299? And what is a "movement"? Thanks, i am a music noob who'd love to have further understanding. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Both K and KV mean the same thing: Köchel-Verzeichnis. It is a catalogue for Mozart’s entire works. A lot of composers have their own catalogues (created by someone other than them), and I believe in Mozart’s case they are chronological, AKA K 453 was written around the time of K 454. Useful for when referencing a specific piece that doesn’t have an actual name. A Kyrie is 1 of 5 parts of a Mass. A Mass is a religious piece of music, sung by a choir. Edit: missed the last part. A movement is a different, mostly separated section of the same musical piece. Think of a book. Different but related chapters.",
"KV = Köchel Verzeichnis i.e. Köchel Catalogue. Is the catalogue of mozart works made by Ludwig von Köchel. (K is the same thing). the number is a progressive number. a movement is a part, with its own coherence, of a bigger composition kyrie and mass are not strictly musical terms. they are in fact religious terms. A mass is the main religious ritual in christianity while a \"Kyrie\" is an abbreviation for \"kyrie eleison\" which means \"Lord, have mercy\" from greek. It is a christian invocation. since much of the classical music has been composed to be played and sung in churches during masses, you can easily understand why a christian invocation is the title of a mozart composition."
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7soowt | First TVs | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Here in Belgium at least, some 15000 TVs were sold in the months leading up to the start of regular TV broadcasts in 1953. So, some TVs were sold first.",
"For the first decade or so for the first decade or so, with many competing and incompatible standards that varied from city to city. If you happened to live in a large city close enough to a transmitter, you were in luck, otherwise you stuck with radio. It was not unlike the evolution of satellite TV. In the 1980s, you had huge $5,000 systems that only people really interested in it bought. By the 1990s, there were $1000 systems with the small dishes, and today pretty much give them away with service. In the US in 1939, the two biggest competitors, RCA and Farnsworth, merged their technologies and by 1941, the ~~FAA~~ FCC adopted the 525-line standard that would be used for the next 70 years."
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7spj2y | Why do businesses such as grocery stores have cheaper prices for "members" when membership is free? How do they benefit from that? | Most retail locations have a membership program that is free, giving them access to cheaper prices. How does the store gain from that? It seems like all they're getting is my phone number and e-mail address. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Customer Loyalty programs ensure that customers keep coming back to your store. It's like a sandwich shop that has a \"buy 10 get 1 free\" deal. These days, it also helps them collect data about who is purchasing what. Getting your phone number gives them a single unique identifier so they track your purchases and get better information about what people are buying. Beyond that, grocery stores used to offer sales *all the time* without a rewards/loyalty number. These days, they just require a membership to get the sales they used to have *without them*. It's not costing them anything extra.",
"Basically they give you a discount so they can track everything you buy by your phone number. They use this tracking information to sell to other companies or for their own marketing purposes.",
"Being able to track what you buy and build profiles is huge for them. There was a court case (scotus i think?) That ruled they couldnt make it mandatory for customers to allow them to be tracked,but its fine if you opt in (and lower prices is pretty tempting for most people). There are other side benefits in getting you locked in,and price discrimination,like other posters mentioned. But from my understanding the tracking is the big lucrative one.",
"Also I guess it's incentive for people to come back to the store instead of shopping elsewhere."
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7sqsxl | Withdrawing sexual consent. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's the first one. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't seem to get things that should be obvious such as \"if you're married that doesn't mean that you're not allowed to say no to sex\", \"People are allowed to say no during an otherwise consensual encounter and the other person should from that point forward respect that\", \"Yes, if you're drunk/high/really horny you're still capable of controlling yourself and it's not an excuse for doing something stupid/raping someone\".",
"You are correct. A person does *not* have the ability to withdraw consent after the event, if consent was given during the event.",
"They probably meant the first one and worded it poorly, but you aren't going to find any good answers from Redditors who know less about this person than you do."
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7syy69 | please explain the video game industry's shift to pre-order? Why had this occurred? When did it start? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Preordering enables you to get money sooner, which is always nice. People also may PLAN to buy, but then forget when the game comes out, or they balk on buying if reviews aren't great. But if you get people to pre-order, then people will end up paying for the game unless they go out of their way for a refund. This results in more sales."
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7t5rej | Why do preachers talk the way they do? | Is it something akin to auctioneer's speech, where it is a learned thing among the subculture, or is it unique to the individual preacher? They all sound the same. Is there a reason behind it? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It likely comes from the days before microphones. Short sentences, projected voice, and this instilled a style of speaking which has continued due to the organic nature of it.",
"That loud, quick manner of speech is usually found in evangelical preachers (Methodists, Baptists, etc), and serves a similar purpose to the voice of an auctioneer: to create a sense of urgency and excitement in the listener. A big part of the Evangelical belief is conversion of outsiders and spreading the faith, so those speech patterns are intended to evoke powerful emotional and excitement responses in the listener. To those already part of the faith, their belief is reinforced by these feelings and they feel a personal connection; those outside are meant to be compelled into the faith by these powerful emotions and by the reactions of the people surrounding them. If you look at the older or more conservative sects of Christianity like the Anglican, Lutheran, or Catholic churches, for example (and most other religions, in my experience), the speech patterns are slower and more oratory. A sermon is meant to reinforce a value or explain a part of the belief, to give the congregation something to think about or to reflect on. Conversion (if it's an important doctrine) is meant to be a slower process involving study and devotion rather than a spur-of-the-moment reaction or \"salvation.\" So you don't find those speech patterns nearly as much outside of the Evangelical community.",
"It's generally a \"learned thing among the subculture\" -- different types of church have different styles of preaching. The more evangelical denominations encourage their preachers to talk with a sense of urgency, to provoke more of an emotional response. The more traditional denominations are more likely to use intellectual arguments; in very old churches, which are usually big and echo-y, they will talk slowly and clearly at a fairly even volume so that people can understand what they're saying. In short, depending on which you church you go to, you're either going to be harangued into petrified submission, or bored to death."
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7t6uzz | How do people develop different laughs? | Slight chuckles... Boastful laughs.. awkward ones...etc. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I definitely won't provide the scientific answer you may be looking for, but a personal experience. Growing up I HATED my laugh, it was obnoxious and made people uncomfortable. Over time I would practice what I wanted my laugh to sound like. Training myself, at first, by myself just watching tv/movies that made me laugh. Eventually around close friends and... Well I can't place an exact pinpoint on when the full 'transformation' occurred but it felt like maybe over a year later. I had my desired laugh down to muscle memory. The only time the original laugh slips out is when I'm right there on the fence of blacking out drunk. By that point though I don't care and this doesn't occur enough to cause concern."
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7te4gi | How do people go about translating their name into a different alphabet? | Specifically, when travelling/migrating into a foreign country with a different alphabet, what process do people go through to get their name translated? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Names are never translated officially (though they might be translated for fun between friends, in the case of names that are also just regular words). Names are *transliterated* based on internationally accepted transliteration systems - even for one language (such as Russian) to English there are multiple systems with minor variations. For instance, an й can be transliterated as a y or j or omitted in some cases depending on the system being used. For travel purposes, typically whatever organization is doing your documents will transliterate the name for you. For instance, if you're applying for a visa to Ukraine, the Ukrainian government will be the ones figuring it out for you. This helps keep transliterations uniform within one country at least.",
"In general official practice is that you do not translate ever. Translation is not changing the letters, it is finding the name with the same meaning and using it. Instead you will transliterate name (most times). Transliteration is done in two way. You take a letter for letter exchange into the new Alphabet. For example: The greek word λύω would transliterate Luo. λ (Lamda) is an L, ύ (upsilon) is a U, ω (omega) is an O. Translating this word would be λύω writing the meaning of the word which is \"to loose/release\" or \"to destroy\". Transliteration generally tries to match the sounds of letters with the new alphabet, but some models do syllable instead. This model often works better for pictographic written languages such as those used in Asia. Now you will sometimes have languages that have names that share the same roots. So English and Spanish: Charles/Carlos, Christopher/Cristobal, James/Jaime, etc. In these situations people will often translate their names if they are in a language class or are in said country for a long time, but rarely if they are just visiting."
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7tenvh | if some english words like hit, put, etc, have no different version of past tense, why every other word has to? | if its understandable to talk about having put something in the past, without a different word than the present tense, isnt any other past tense useless, since they all can be understood anyways? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"English is legendary for its tendency to \"acquire\" words from other languages, and the rules that apply to some do not always apply to others. English is an inconsistent, bizarre, organic mutant of a language, flexible and creative, and indifferent to your arbitrary \"rules\", man."
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7thuxk | Why is the head of a company labeled President and CEO why not just CEO or President? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They're different roles. There are many companies where the CEO is not the President of the company. For example, the CEO of Microsoft is Satya Nadella while the President of Microsoft is Bradford L. Smith. Larry Page is the CEO of Google while Sergey Brin serves as President. The split between the roles of the President and the CEO varies by company, but many large companies have them as separate positions"
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7ti4iz | Why does the influence of certain sports spread across the world while others online exist in one country | For example gridiron/NFL is only in America, it isn't even in any of the two bordering nations. While on the other hand football/soccer is known all around the world. Then there are some in between such as cricket or rugby where it is only in a few countries. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Football/soccer is a sport that has very simple rules and minimal equipment to play. All you really need to play at a recreational level is a ball and something to mark off the goal area (some cones or sticks). This makes it popular with children because if its accessibility, and allows it to spread worldwide.",
"Gridiron football is played in Canada too, though with different rules from NFL football and only eight teams. Also, for the past few seasons the NFL has been playing a few games in London, and apparently there's a small movement to establish a UK branch of the NFL, rather like the former NFL Europe."
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7ti5yy | 4 points on a compass | I realize that it's a cultural construct, but it seems to be a very common one. In Asian, Native American, European, and a few others, there always seems to be North, South, East and West. Why? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's the simplest way yo give absolute directions. If you need to tell someone what way to go you need reference point and direction. A flat surface is 2 dimensional, you need at least two directions in your system to fix an arbitrary direction, and a way of saying backwards in each one. That gets you a miniumn of four points on a compass to define direction. Then you name them, the direction the sun sets and the direction the sun rises are opposite, and then you add left and right of that to get the other two. Those are the easiest to figure out if your lost."
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7tinlb | How did autographs get their value? Why did we one day declare that someone touching a ball makes it worth more? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As the old axiom says, \"everything is worth what the purchaser will pay for it.\" Nothing, not even money, has an inherent value. Its value is only what someone would trade for it. Since people like autographed baseballs (it makes the baseball feel more unique and concretely related to the autographer and less like a generic baseball you buy for four dollars at Dick's), they're willing to pay more for them. But, remember they aren't worth anything unless someone is willing to pay an amount for them. You could list your autographed baseball for $10,000 on eBay; that doesn't make it worth $10,000 unless someone pays you that amount for it.",
"Autographs of famous people has been a collectors item for several centuries. It is not limited to balls and did not start with them. It started with autograph books where one collected the signatures of famous people in a notebook or the like. It was a natural extension to have the idea that an object associated with the person would increase in value to collectors with a signature.",
"Rarity or uniqueness create their own value. A pristine new ball is worth a few bucks because there are millions of them. A ball signed by any moderately popular or talented player might be worth 10 bucks to somebody who likes that player. There are thousands of these though. A ball that was signed by a legendary figure like Babe Ruth is worth a lot more, he's one of the most renowned people who ever played the sport. Plus he's dead so there won't be any new ones. There's probably dozens of these left in the world but they are worth a lot more because of their rarity and pedigree. THE ball that went into the bleachers at the bottom of the 10th inning of game 7 of the 193X World Series scoring a four run grand slam when the team was 3 runs behind and saving the game and was subsequently signed by the entire team… well that's a piece of history there and that ball is unlike any other in the world. A real collector's item like that would be the centerpiece of any collection it was part of. I imagine if it was at an auction of sports memorabilia it would go for tens or even hundreds of thousands. To the right collector."
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7trvmw | Why was salt so valuable in the past? | Why was salt so valuable in the past if people already knew that salt came from the ocean and could be extracted via evaporating sea water? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There's not a lot of real estate that's suitable for extracting salt from seawater with ancient methods. You need clay soil (so the sea water doesn't seep out of your evaporation pond). You need a long dry season (so the rain doesn't keep filling up your evaporation pond), ideally with a lot of wind. You need to be on the coast, so you can get seawater.",
"It simply takes a lot of energy to evaporate enough sea water to get a large amount of salt. In cold climates in particular it meant that they had to burn large amounts of wood to produce sea salt, since evaporating sea water in open pools would simply take far too long. Meanwhile, saline salt was extremely cheap to produce. All they had to do was to put water into a salt mine, wait until it's saturated and then evaporate that over a wood fire. For example even in Sweden and Norway, where both salt water and wood are hardly scarce resources, it was cheaper for people to buy saline salt from northern Germany, in spite of the high costs to transport it there. Since they needed so much of it for the preservation of fish, this trade became immensely profitable.",
"Salt does a lot of things desirable in the past. First, it's a preservative. In the past, people didn't have refridgerators so meat would spoil. Salt would prevent spoiling and keep it tasting good. Second, Salt made food taste good. The availability of spices was much more limited than today. There weren't a lot of ways to flavor food so salt would not only preserve your food, but make it taste better.",
"Salt was valuable because it was one of the only ways to preserve meat prior to refrigeration. That combined with sea salt refining requiring substantial energy and other salt rwquiring substantial transport costs made it valuable.",
"Gaining salt from evaporation is a long and hard process. You need space with clay basins that can be filled with sea water, you need an adequate climate with a lot of sunshine. Then, the basins will slowly dry out, and a lot of red algae will grow in the basins. You end up with a salty gray slick that needs to be further processed and purified to gain actual salt. This can not be done everywhere. Then there is transportation. You need to bring the salt from the coast via trading routes. Imagine twice a year some merchant visits your tiny remote village and brings some salt. So what people did is that they tried other sources where they could mine salt. Like dried salt-lakes in the desert or salt that is underground (if they were lucky, they would find salt deposits after landslides, for example), but things like these don't exist everywhere - so there are still only a few places where the salt comes from. Then there is something else. Salt in the past was used for many things, not only pouring on food. It was used to preserve food too. There was no plastic packaging nor freezers so people dried and salted a lot of things to preserve them. And then you need a whole barrel of salt to preserve a good catch of fish."
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7tu49j | Colombia still produces hundreds of tons of cocaine each year, why aren't there cartels in the country like when the Cali and Medellin were big in the 80's and 90's? And if there aren't big cartels, who is moving all those drugs out of the country? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"I know that the US gives Colombia a lot of money to shut down cartels before they become powerful...and they are pushed out of major cities and into the jungle. Its kind of like a win win. They get major cities back for tourism and the production of drugs is out of sight out of mind in the jungle somewhere. Also a lot of cartels moved to neighboring countries...ie Peru..",
"Drug trafficking in Colombia is a complex theme that has greatly shifted and modernized over the last ten years. A cartel is a large, unified power structure that controls all aspects of the particular drug trafficking activity within its territory. This activity changes depending on where the country is in relation to the target market. In Mexico, cartels work to move drugs from the southern regions where they are imported or manufactured, across the border into the US, and into the hands of distributors, and then facilitating the movement of the profit back down south. Their organization has a hand in all facets of this activity, and any particular member is subject to the influence and decisions of the leadership. Colombia has changed largely due to the method of transport and the target market. Colombian traffickers are less concerned with sending loads directly to the United States. Rather, they’re mainly concerned with getting as much product as possible to Central America or Mexico. The further north, the higher the profit margin per kilogram, but the greater the risk and operational cost. So how do you get large amounts of cocaine to Panama or Guatemala? Small boats. In essence, a three-man fishing boat with two 75HP outboard engines transporting between 500 and 1,000kgs of cocaine through the open ocean, coordinating refuel points with rogue fishing vessels, and ultimately making an at-sea delivery at a pre-determined arrival point. Without going in to too much detail, planning this kind of venture requires people with different skill sets. Rather than bring the various involved parties under one organized umbrella of leadership, these coordinators operate largely as independent contractos, providing services to different groups who have production and land-based transportation capabilities. Backing these production groups are wealthy investors who finance the purchase of maritime equipment and often coordinate directly with the receiving parties in the corresponding Central American country. In brief, rather than a large, centralized command structure as is indicative of a cartel, the current landscape in Colombian drug trafficking is best described as loosely affiliated groups of specialists backed by rich, shadowy traffickers paying for their services.",
"As a Colombian, here my thoughts: New drug lords go to the top universities, study logistic, do MBA and learn about inventory and production management. You don’t see them with big cars and killing each other like before. They have suits, do sports and go to meetings. People plan drugs in the forest and by ordinary people. They earn good money for that, in comparison of planting potatoes or something similar. Transport is done by the Mexicans to the world. That’s their strength. Government and local police receive a part of the deal. It is full of corruption. They “plan” to get caught. So if on one side they are caught with x tons of cocain, on the other side they are move 100 times more. You noticed the power they have over the country in 2008, when the economic crisis didn’t affect much of the Colombian economy back then. Personal opinion: I think government US and Colombian are directly involved in this. The world need to do produce drugs. Because if nobody creates drugs, some people, specially people in government positions, would go crazy. Edit: Gramma & Spelling",
"You don't need cartels to move inventory. Cartels are when competitors cooperate, which as you might imagine is an unstable relationship. Competitors competing with one another will still get their goods delivered, just not by cooperative means.",
"Colombian here: Cartels would never again exist in Colomnia in the same the were in the 80s with the Cartel de Medellin and Cartel de Cali. There have been a lot of follow up cartels, like the Cartel del Norte del Valle and a lot of organized crime that have also been very powerful but never like the Cartel from escobar. 2014 the guerrilla group FARC dismantled (at least that is what we are told) and signed a peace treathy. To that point (2014) they were the biggest cocaine cartel in the world and one of the most powerful and organized terrorist organizations. You don't see the same amount of deaths as in the 80s, when Medellin was the most dangerous city im the world but the is still a lot of crime around cocain and other hard drugs. Most of the cocaine produced in Colombia goes to the states trough Mexico. That is were the most powerful cartels are right now. Sadly for my mexican fellows here. Pablo Escobar was killet on 1993 and almost 25 years later, Colombia is still the biggest producer of Cocaine. There is a lot of corruption in my country and a lot of fredom for crime organizations. And there will always be cocaine as long as it is bought at absurd prices in the USA or Europe. Sadly, the narco culture left by Escobar still is present in all parts of society and it shaped our way to see the world. It fucked up Medellind and it fucked up Colombia. That guy was cancer and the worst thing that happened to us. I also have to say that things are much much better now and we have accepted our past. There is a lot of good people and you are encouraged to visit us :)",
"They are still there, you just don't see them or hear them anymore. They were the first of their kind back in the 1900s, they each had different styles of operation and each eventually died out for one reason or another, but they all had a large public presence. Now things have moved behind closed doors where they can move silently and without drawing the attention of the masses/government. If the people don't know about you, they can't get mad at the government for your existence, and everyone ignores it.",
"Thousands of people grow on federal Forrest lands in America. Illegal as hell, but they manage to get away with it for the most part. I think people don't realize how fucking big a continent is. We have massive voids of nothing in the US, and it's far far bigger in South America.",
"Quite simply: The Colombian gov't realized that it was better to co-opt drug traffickers rather than fight them. Now the drug trade proceeds much like it did before, but without the violence. Since the violence is gone, so is much of the problem. But the drug trade never stops.",
"I believe there is a vice documentary on this. Basically the production / shipment is ran by a bunch of smaller entities (think American trap houses) instead of cartels.",
"Pretty sure Columbian cartels were at the height of their power when they were transporting product themselves. They started having Mexicans transport, and the power shifted after a while.",
"There still are and they are just as big or bigger. The difference is that they are mandated to keep as low key as possible. Because now its not the cartels running the show. Instead they work for their distributors... the US government. Barry Seals was not the end of the road. Its just gotten more sophisticated over time. Now likely using regular commercial airports and shipping industries. The crackdown of Pablo Escobar was, for the big players at least, more about regaining leverage in a cash rich market and the removal of true competition in said market. Its important to remember that regardless of what individual low level employees of involved government agencies think. The truth of the matter is that the war on drugs is nothing but a fugazi. If the goal was to stop dangerous drugs, any half competent government would have realized the force approach isn't working. The next logical step being to stop unnecessary incarcerations and drug related deaths by legalizing the sale and possession of all drugs. Possibly even legitimizing their production so that quality can be reliably and safely maintained. And then additionally providing proper education and resources so that as a whole people find benefit from drugs and to minimize the downsides. A few lines of cocaine now and then is not a problem. Hell maybe its better than a limitless aderall prescription. Coffee and cigarettes are widely accepted as helping writers... why not a bump of blow? Perhaps some THC to get over the writers block. Sure people buying things like meth would not be good. But with outright legalization I really don't see meth having this appeal and allure. Likely new users would decline heavily and those still going for it are likely in need of help. But clearly that's not what the western governments want. What they want is a blank check and near limitless power over people. To maintain this atmosphere of violence, the endless competition among gangs and the collateral damage they produce. Keeping people in fear, paranoid and working as informants against each other, constantly spying and surveying.",
"In the 1980s and 1990s, Colombia was destabilized by a protracted armed rebellion. Cartels often supported the rebels, because it kept the authorities out of their hair, and the rebels allowed the cartels to operate freely within their territory. Also, through corruption and threats of violence, Colombian officials themselves were reluctant to act. By the mid-2000s, the tide had turned in the Colombian government's favor. Helped by post 9/11 anti-terrorism sentiments, the power of the rebels wanted, and with it that of the cartels. Colombia still produced cocaine, just like the pre-legalization US still produced cannabis, but now it is run by smaller, less ostentatious operations. EDIT: Corrected spelling of Colombia",
"Mexican Gov. is the cartel now. Cartels took over in bloody, bloody coup in the last 15 years. Look into it.",
"Clan del Golfo. ELN. Bacrim. Those are the cancer. As well as corruption in all levels. Cali and Medellin cartels were big, but there are thousands of carterls now, as the Cartel de los togados, Cartel de la hemofilia, cartel del VIH, Cartel of the underwear, shit the list is huge.",
"Read up on [BACRIM]( URL_0 ) groups. The Mexican cartels are more powerful because they control the supply chain in Central Mexico into the US.",
"They're still big cartels. Cartels are the networks that controls certain routes to export the drugs to certain destinations. They just have learned from other's mistakes and try to keep a low profile. Everybody in cartel has learned to keep a low profile if they want to survive in that business. But Cartels are still powerful. They control congressmen, presidents, politicians, the police and they are capable of buying any citizen they need.. And if not using money by bullets. Also drug lords are not the what they used to be. They're educated, know that they don't have to show off. Some belong to powerful and traditional families. They're now more difficult to track. Besides of keeping a low profile they got better at money laundry now, They don't spend lot of money in Colombia buying big luxury condos, amazing cars, hippos and throwing big parties etc.they invest in foreign countries and keep their money in fiscal paradises making difficult to track them. The drug problem will exist until something is done to reduce the demand for drugs. As long there is demand for something and people willing to pay the price there will be people ready to provide. Plus Colombia has an enormous inequality problem spiked with a corrupted culture thirsty for \"easy money\", the traffic of drugs has twisted the Colombian morals and people without opportunities will take what's available for them.",
"As the US Navy and Coast Guard became more adept at interdiction, and the caribbean routes started to become too difficult, then logistics changed to routes through Mexico. So it is the Mexican cartels which are taking the risk and getting the huge markup in the US, Europe and Australia for cocaine, not the Colombians. There have been reports of some cartels trying to get closer and closer to actual production - whether sourcing coca in Colombia/Chile and processing, to some reports of cultivation in Mexico (not very successful, coca is very temperamental). What they have been more successful at is dominating the transport from Colombia and distribution lines into/within the retail markets. Controlling the distribution is where the money's really at.",
"\"government\" agencies trying to make black money to fund world projects (arming rebels, ISIS, foreign overthrows, etc)",
"> And if there aren't big cartels, who is moving all those drugs out of the country? The CIA and Hezbollah protected by the CIA URL_0 Black market cocaine and heroin funds are one of the main ways the CIA funds their black budget projects.",
"FARC is movin all the drug out of the country. They buyed the country to President Santos and they can do everithing they want, they control the routes, the suppliers (farmers), and move the drug trough Venezuela with the authorization of President Maduro. I know soldiers and policemen who has to hide when the drug convoy of FARC is going to pass though or FARC kill them and the President's orders is letting them go away, Colombia is no more a democratic country is a dictatorship country like Cuba, but nobody even has notice this, and people is going to notice too far late.",
"So the CIA pushed out all the South American cartels and let the Mexican cartels take it all over. The Mexican Cartels work with the CIA and ex CIA that work as private contractors that over see and facilitate the shipping. The system is set up like a pyramid leaving the kingpins and CIA at the top. The majority have zero clue whose running things. This is allowed because it keeps Mexico and South America from developing as a world power, keeps the prisons in the US full and the cartels get to use them as recruitment centers and anyone that gets busted has a safe haven. Also if anyone gets greedy or out of line wether it’s a cop, narc, cartels worker and so on they can get “busted” sent to prison and killed. The prison industry lobbyists make money bribing politicians to keep up the contracts to the prisons draining our tax dollars. The drugs keep the minorities and poor in the prisons. This also gives job security to the police. The private contractors get paid by the cartels. The cartels have enough money to pay off and corrupt their governments to do whatever they want and the cycle continues on. The US/Mexico border is purposely kept in chaos to keep the smuggling operations going. The push for the wall isn’t to stop any of this. The multi billion price tag equals “lost” money and a decade of “construction” as a cover to make the smuggling easier. When you see stories of border busts in pineapples and whatnot it’s because they have that much of an overflow they are trying to get here that lower level cartel members try anything and I’m convinced they would build smuggling points into the wall.",
"Colombian here. Cocaine production has been monopolized mostly. monopoly=no illegal competition = no drug wars amongs cartels. Also the government doesent really pressure much into the issue because they know it brings money to the country, they just do enough to get good PR, but Drugs have become a high class bussiness...just underground where everyone pretends it doesent exist.",
"seriously. is there ANY sincere doubt that the United States Government is the major main number one facilitator and importer and customer of these \"illicit\" drugs??",
"I wouldn't listen to a lot of what's been said here. The reality is the Bush jr. Admin partnered with Colombia's president Uribe to engage in a severe military crackdown. The largest organized group, FARC, was forced into a protracted military surrender. Over the years of dismantling itself, there were people that formed splinter groups and other small groups like right-wing death squads that were divying up the territory, so none of them are as big and powerful as the groups of the 80's and 90's right now. The general consensus in America's foreign policy circles is that [plan colombia deserves the credit.]( URL_0 )",
"[Vice just did a short documentary on this last week]( URL_0 ) Long story short the citizens of Colombia make their money from the drug trade. They have a system where some folks grow it, the next folks process it, the next turn it into pure cocaine, and the next group transfers it. The cartels get it at the coast and ship it to the USA.",
"Try watching the documentary “Kill the Messenger.” It’s about a journalist that uncovered CIA involvement in the drug trade to fund black ops programs during the early 90s.",
"I believe the C.I.A and other entities are profiting off of the trafficking of drugs. URL_0 And I believe the episodes can be streamed on The History Channel website.",
"Venezuela at very high ranking levels moves a lot of those drugs through the Caribbean, to Europe, etc. Google \"Narcosobrinos\" or simply research how many government officials and/or military people are accused of drug trafficking in Venezuela.",
"Mexico is the new Colombia. Right now Colombia is dealing only with cocaine crops and production. But the real money is moving the final product to USA and Europe. That was the Cartel's job. After all the Colombian big druglords were dead or imprisoned, a new generation started in Mexico (like El Chapo). These recent cartels are as deadly and fierce as the Colombians were, with less concentrated power and more internal wars. Also, these new cartels are corrupting all the Mexican society, same as the Medellin and Cali cartels did in the 80s and 90s. Short: Colombia is still producing but Mexico is selling worldwide."
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7tvgxd | More people learn French as a 2nd language than Chinese, Spanish and German combined; why is French so popular? | According to [this article]( URL_0 ) (see chart #7), 82 million people learn French as a ~~2nd~~ learned (as opposed to native) language, far more than any other language, except for English. Why are so many attempting to learn French? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The thing with Spanish and Chinese (I'm assuming Mandarin, mostly) is that they're very common as *native* languages, so they'll be the first language learned. China has a billion native Chinese speakers, Spanish has half a billion native Spanish speakers, with most of South America using Spanish as the primary language. In those countries you might learn lots of languages second (including English), but your native tongue and the language spoken at home is most likely Spanish. French, on the other hand, is much less common as a *first* language, but incredibly common as a secondary language around the world. Most of Canada will learn English first and use it at home primarily, and learn French second, unless you're in Quebec where it's much more common. And the same with a good chunk of the Caribbean - English first, then French. Most of northern and western Africa will learn Swahili first, or Amharic, or Yoruba, or Arabic, as those are the official languages of many countries - but they'll learn French second, because it's a useful common tongue between many of those countries. In Vietnam you'll learn Vietnamese, then French. So all of those countries inflate the number of people learning French second. It's not nearly as widely spoken as Spanish or Chinese, but because it's the secondary language of so many countries, it's incredibly common to learn right after learning your country or region's native tongue.",
"Where do you find the information that the chart with 82 million French is as a 2nd language? Is only says learned language. In Europe it is common to study English as the 2nd language and most students also study a third language. France also had a large colonial empire in Africa with countries with multiple first languages. So French is used as the national language because it was used before Independence and selecting a language from one of many ethnic groups will result in problems. French is a good compromise. That is the same way English is used in many former colonies.",
"Worldwide, there are a lot of countries that are former French colonies, or are otherwise influenced by the French language (e.g. much of North and West Africa, many Caribbean countries, Vietnam and some countries in Asia). My husband is from Algeria, for example, and French is the most widely spoken second language there. They start learning it in elementary school. Some older people who went to school before independence only ever learned to read and write in French, and not at all in Arabic. Germany and China didn't have as many colonies, and Spanish is widely spoken as a first language.",
"French is learned as a second language so much because of colonization. France, Spain, Germany, Belgium and America had colonies however, so why French? When William the conquerer came over from Normandy in 1066 he more or less imposed Norman (French) as the language for the nobles or rulers of England. It was what the learned and powerful spoke, and it wasn’t until a few hundred years later that England actually spoke English at court. Fast forward to the early 1900’s. French is the language of diplomacy due mostly to England and France being the two largest colonial forces. Even Americans would learn French as a second language if they wanted to do international business or be diplomats. Treaty that ended WWI? The Treaty of Versailles was in French in France. The League of Nations? Spoke French. It wasn’t until very recently (70s) that UN added other ‘official’ languages to its charter. Long story short, the two largest colonial powers, France and England, agreed that French would be the international language of diplomacy. Through tradition, this was kept up until after WWII when America and Russia emerged as largest international powers. They would try and switch most countries to speak English or Russian(Chinese actually learned Russian as a second language until the fall of USSR in Communist solidarity). So, although the impression many people have today is that English is the international language, this has only been a recent development. Most of the Rwanda war trials took place in French eg. Easiest answer:tradition."
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7txcae | What is Anti-Design? And its importance in society? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Anti-design was a reaction to modernism in the art community during the 1970s. Some artists felt that modernism and \"form follows function\" would make the world oversimplified and boring. So they made things that were outrageous and amazing. \"Importance to society\" depends on your opinion of the importance of art."
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7tzvmt | How can the President choose not to enforce the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA) he signed into law? | I'm not totally familiar with the situation, and I don't enjoy the knee-jerk hyperbole that Reddit tends to respond with anything regarding this administration, but I am curious about how it's possible. Are there provisions of the law people are overlooking that the president has a choice to not impose sanctions, or is this a power inherent with the Executive branch not commonly used? Or did the law only specify the President can't remove these sanctions without congressional approval, thereby if he never imposes them, he has followed the letter of the bill? Or is this actually a Constitutional Crisis (as people keep throwing around) in that a situation has never happened before where the President just refused to enforce a law and now the branches must find a solution to move forward? Edit: Heres the bill Itself if someone would like to also parse through it: URL_0 | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There are a bunch of different issues here. The first and easiest to dismiss is that the sections of CAATSA in question read \"the President shall impose the sanctions described in... with respect to any with respect to any person that the President determines...\" So the President can just say that he has not determined that those individuals have acted in the described manner. But even if Congress rewords the legislation that doesn't solve the problem because this is a deeper and reasonably common separation of powers issue. Congress has the power to legislate, but it has no authority to enforce its own laws. The President has the opposite power - he can enforce laws but can't create them. This is complicated by the fact that the President does have powers that are exclusive to him - for example, most of the power to conduct foreign relations is exclusive to the President and so he doesn't *generally* need congressional authorization to carry out his foreign policy. If this case went to court the delineation of presidential vs congressional power would be important, because Trump is claiming that the provisions in question also infringe on his exclusive constitutional powers - a claim that isn't clearly with or without merit. Which gets into how someone forces the President to enforce the law. A private citizen who is harmed due to the President refusing to enforce the law can file for what is called a \"Writ of Mandamus\" in Federal Court. If the court finds that the citizen is, in fact, harmed by the President's refusal to enforce the law then the court can order that the law be enforced, regardless of whether the President wants to do so or not. Congress is not an entity capable of filing for a writ of mandamus, but individual Representatives can - and in the past have. But the Supreme Court has been very clear that even though the granting of a writ of mandamus may otherwise be appropriate, the Federal Courts will not grant one when the only Plaintiff with standing for the writ is a Representative acting in their legislative capacity. This is due to the separation of powers issues raised as well as the fact that Congress has other, internal mechanisms to compel the President to enforce the law, such as conditioning funding for other programs on the law in question being enforced. See Riegle v. Federal Open Market Committee, 656 F.2d 873 (1981) for a more complete discussion on this. So the situation with CAATSA is this: Congress can't go to court to force the President to enforce the law and there is no way that a private citizen could ever have standing for a writ of mandamus here. And more broadly, no this isn't a constitutional crisis. Its just how the system works - *generally speaking* Congress has the power to make laws; but it can't enforce them. Conversely, the President can choose to enforce all, some, or none of the laws that Congress passes - but *generally speaking* he can't do anything unless Congress authorizes him to.",
"The law won't stop you from murdering someone. It can't stop you in advance. But it's a very bad idea to murder someone because the law will deliver consequences to you if you do. Same thing applies to the president. If the president has the ability to violate law, he can. The law can't prevent it. If a law is passed, the president is supposed to execute it. The president can refuse. Congress and the courts have the power to deliver consequences, so it's a very bad idea for the president to not enforce the laws, so they usually do. The president has some choice in which laws they enforce and how they do it. The only times that it's a good idea when there is some sort of legal cause. The courts can't punish a president for refusing to enforce a unconstitutional law. If the president has a good legal case that makes not enforcing the law justifiable, then he can do that. This is probably not the case with the CAATSA, if so, it'd now it's up to congress and the courts to deliver consequences, or threats of those consequences to bring the president back in line, or out of a job."
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7u5vtf | Why is corporate whistleblowing bad? I thought if you see something wrong you're supposed to speak up. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"It's not bad. The issue is that people confuse whistleblowing (typically a legally protected act) with unauthorized, illegal disclosure of information to the public."
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7u7b1r | Why is it that problems regarding Natives are talked about much more in Canada than in the U.S? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
"dti8s55"
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"text": [
"The native population of Canada is about 5%, whereas the native population of the United States is around 2%. Additionally, since Canada has a total population of about 36 million in comparison to 330 million in the US, native people in Canada have a lot more visibility. This visibility also manifests in policy."
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7u9kcm | In oil paintings, if you look closely, sometimes there are colors that not actually belong there, but still look good from the distance. | What I'm talking about can be seen here: URL_0 It's the fact that human skin is mostly in the warmer part of the color spectrum, so I don't get how do artists achieve this look, how do they decide "green and blue will also fit!"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"From far away the colors blur together and look like a more solid form. If you pulled apart every color on a flesh tone, well, you'd have quite a few colors that you probably wouldn't expect. Look up some pointalism photos on google. They are made in such a way that from far away, they look like a cohesive painting, but the closer you get you can see all the tiny dots and different colors. It's just a style of painting, I guess."
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9kdoro | Why are there so many contrasting and varying definitions of race around the world? Is there no universally accepted race category? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"There is no universally accepted category, because race is a social construct made up by the members of a society. Like... over a hundred years ago Irish people weren't considered \"white\" in America. The idea of who belongs to a race, how many races there are, has nothing to do with science. It's just what people think, and different people think differently about it.",
"We all belong to one species: Homo sapiens. The concept of race is built upon how humans from different world regions look. It’s a ridiculous concept, of course."
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9kjisn | What is the difference between race, ethnicity, and nationality? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Race is physical, genetic characteristics. Ethnicity is cultural, language, ancestry and social grouping. Nationality is being a part of a nation and therefore can be changed.",
"Races are arbitrary divisions of humans into different categories. They're pseudo-scientific at best, as racial categories are usually based on stereotypes and tend to change with the political will of a given culture (like how the Irish and the Italians weren't considered to be white when they first immigrated to the USA) Ethnic groups are groups of people who identify with each other over a common ancestry. They might have descended from the same people, speak the same language, have similar cultural practices, etc. Nationality refers to what country a person currently lives in. As an example, I'm Canadian. That's my nationality. It's not my ethnicity, because my ancestors aren't First Nations. My ethnicity is northern European, because that's where my ancestors are from. My race is white, but that's kind of a meaningless term because lots of people disagree on what \"white\" really means."
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9kkn8a | what is structuralism and post-structuralism and how are they different from each other | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Structuralism, in the words of Simon Blackburn, and by proxy, Wikipedia, is the idea that human behavior can only really be understood in relation to other humans. Like how, if there was no sentence, the word \"of\" really means nothing without a sentence around it. It says that a human is nothing without context. It shows up most commonly in Linguistics, Sociology, Anthropology, and fields close to those three, like literary criticism or economics, but those are the big three. Post-Structuralism says that gaining knowledge by structures and experience is impossible- and that this is a good thing. There are many different types of Post-Structuralism, but this is the basic idea-you can't get knowledge from structures. You need to study both the knowledge and the system that produced it to truly understand the nature of that knowledge. It's really much more complicated and esoteric than that, but I hope that this helps."
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9kmtu1 | What is the meaning of our existence in the context of the physical universe? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"We are the apex predator on the third planet from a minor star. Meaning comes from how we treat each other and care for our planet."
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9kud8h | Why are so many books/movies formatted as trilogies (as opposed to 2 or 4-part series)? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A three-act structure provides a very simple, very effective ebb and flow of action. This is true of single movies and books, and it's true of a three-part series. Act One usually sets up a story, handles worldbuilding, introduces the major characters, and typically ends with a small victory for the hero. The interesting thing about this is that if I were to write a single film without the plan to have sequels, this is basically the structure it would take - set up, exposition, and a problem resolved in victory for the hero. So it's very often the case that a movie or book written as a single work can be easily expanded into a series, because the first act tends to wrap up with a satisfying ending. Think of The Matrix, Back to the Future, or the original Star Wars. The stories wrap up nicely themselves and would have been classics whether or not a sequel were ever made. Act Two introduces a bigger problem or expands the problem from Act One. Notably, Act Two usually doesn't end in a satisfying way. It'll end with a tragedy, a loss for the hero, or a cliffhanger that needs resolution. This is standard structure - there has to be a big fall in order to set up a big rise. So the \"high\" ending of the first act gets turned on its head for the second, leaving the audience clamoring for a resolution or a turnaround. Act Three resolves the losses of Act Two and sets up the final, biggest confrontation and resolution. Its climax climbs higher than Act One as the stakes are greater. Side plots can be wrapped up nicely or fold into the main plot. This tends to end with a total resolution - the world is saved, the lovers are united, evil is punished, etc. And because it's wrapping things up, there's not usually a need for a cliffhanger to keep you looking forward to a new one. All of this structure can totally be fiddled with, augmented, or flipped totally around. But the three-act structure exists because it works really well and it tends to make for an exciting story.",
"It's just an easy way to split a story up. You can dedicate the first book to exposition and world building. The second book is built around a rising action and can end with a good cliffhanger. The third book contains the climax and resolution. It's just a natural way to split a story up.",
"A very common story structure is known as the Three Act Structure. The acts are Setup, Confrontation, and Resolution. Or a pretty famous description: Act 1: Put the hero in a tree Act 2: Throw rocks at the hero Act 3: Take the hero out of the tree Trilogies are common because they fall into this structure so easily. Your first book/movie sets up the universe and the situation. The second book/movie has the villains winning and the heroes on the ropes. The third book/movie has the heroes win. Star Wars: we meet the characters learn, learn about the force, and establish the war between the Empire and Rebels Empire Strikes Back: The Empire has the Rebels on the run, the heroes are injured and captured. Return of the Jedi: The Emperor and Darth Vader are defeated, the heroes are reunited, and the Rebels are winning the war. Fellowship of the ring: The Fellowship is founded, the goal is established, and the journey gets off to a rough start. Two Towers: The fellowship has lost a couple members, they are all separated and alone, Sauron has armies capturing lots of countries. Return of the King: Sauron is defeated, the ring is destroyed, everyone makes it home and the world is saved."
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