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87249g | Why do Americans use "Sir" or "Madam" when referring to people that they don't know personally? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It’s respectful, what else would you call them?",
"It’s a sign of respect. In some cases it’s an acknowledgement that the person being addressed is of a higher social status (they’re older, in a position of authority, etc). When the person’s social status is unknown, it is assumed that they are someone of a higher status and are addressed as such. Sir and Ma’am are also used with people one does know personally, again as a sign of deference or respect. When my mother asks something of me, I either reply “yes ma’am” (if it’s a more important request, or if we are in front of people we don’t know very well) or “yes mama” if it’s something less important or we’re at home. It’s all about respect. It should be noted that I am from the south and haven’t ever lived anywhere else, so things may be a bit different up north.",
"We never use these words when *referring to* someone. Do you mean when *speaking to* a stranger? It is considered a polite term of respect, to avoid pretending we are their friend when we're not.",
"It's not...it's just a polite moniker. It's actually considered bad manners not to call someone sir or ma'am in some places (especially the south), even if you know the person well.",
"I'm not sure why you think it's sarcastic or demeaning. I lived in the UK for many years and people used \"sir\" and \"ma'am\" in the exact same situations with the exact same frequency as in the US."
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874l3h | why is monogamy the norm in most modern western societies? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Polygamy creates highly unstable societies. This is often referred to as the 'surplus male' problem. Essentially, everyone has an impulse to procreate - even if you don't recognize that impulse as such. Women rarely have an issue with this - they can easily procreate simply by being flexible in terms of how they offer their sexual favors. The concern for women is less the ability to procreate than how they'll support the offspring. For men, the issue is access to women willing to procreate with them. In the absence of this access, there is a tendency for men to become violent and disruptive. On the national scale, this plays out in terms of situations such as \"Islam's Bloody Borders\" where entire societies have to engage in external conflict simply to eliminate the 'surplus males'. On a more personal level, it plays out in terms of events like school shootings where young men react to rejection from the sexual marketplace by engaging in irrational violence. Overall, it means that societies which favor polygamy - or encourage mechanisms such as 'serial polygamy' - tend to be forced into acting in ways that are contrary to the best interests of that society. Long-term, this tends to lead to the fall of such societies while their more mundane, strongly monogamous counterparts keep plugging along.",
"Monogamy is the norm in all human societies. Even those that currently allow polygamy tend to only have a small segment of society participate in it. As a species we evolved to be monogamous or at least serially monogamous as a strategy to rearing children. This is due to the amount of care a child needs and the duration that they need said care. It requires for the parents to be well bonded and to get a male to stay and care for young there has to be some modicum of assurance that the offspring is theirs. Thus monogamy. This biological reproductive strategy is then reinforced by social and religious practices."
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87cci3 | What does it mean when people talk about 'spaghetti falling out of pockets' ? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's an old meme that was popular on 4chan from like 2010 to 2013 or so. \"Spilling your spaghetti\" can be thought of as acting awkward out of embarrassment. You can read more here. URL_0",
"URL_0 Like many memes, it seems to have started on 4chan and spread through the rest of the internet in the usual way. It's a way to describe being terribly awkward or doing something incredibly embarrassing, something that resonates with many internet forum users.",
"Way back in the wayback, there was a trend of people talking about their really awkward social interactions, on 4chan as someone else pointed out. Then someone made a story where, instead of the usual \"I peed myself\" or whatever other awkward thing that happened in those stories at that point, they put in \"spaghetti starts falling out of my pockets\". It was a joke, at the time, as the expectation was something like \"I farted and she looked at me like I was gross\" or \"I burped right as I was about to ask her out\", and the completely random interjection of spaghetti was amusing. It gained traction and then people made copycat stories, and it became a meme, and now \"spaghetti falling out of pockets\" is a shorthand for \"whatever socially unacceptable and vaguely disgusting thing happened to make a social interaction awkward\""
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87ep89 | why are bombs in cartoons always stylised to be the big, round black ones with a fuse and the word "BOMB" written on them? | You always see these in all sorts of pop culture references, but why are they like that? Did something like that ever exist? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"That's what old-timey artillery shells and grenades looked like. Black iron sphere with a fuse in one end. Light, launch, and hope it explodes near where you want it to explode.",
"Yes, that's pretty much exactly like what premodern grenades looked like. A roughly-spherical hollow shell made of ceramic or metal, with a fuse coming out of one end. Those kinds of weapons weren't in use when cartoons like that were made, but contemporary explosives don't look very distinct and probably wouldn't be appropriate for the whimsical nature of kid's cartoons.",
"Because big black round balls with the word \"BOMB\" is funny, while a thing looking like a cardboard box is just confusing",
"Funny, I recently watched [this game theory]( URL_0 ) video on bob-ombs. starting at just before 2 minutes he explains pretty much what you're asking",
"If they pictured real looking bombs ( shoe boxes, rucksacks) in cartoons children could grow up scared and confused every time they went shoe shopping, Plus that’s how bombs looked when they were invented by the Chinese all those years ago."
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87g0tk | Why is lethal injection considered so humane? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It doesn't look like they're suffering. That's pretty much it. Personally I'd change it to a dosage of morphine twenty times higher than required to kill an addict.",
"The short answer is, from the outside, they’re dead without a violent looking death. Anesthesiologists and medical professionals invented the process, and prison advocates at the time lethal injection was introduced were satisfied that the process was medicalized and not as psychologically terrifying as hangings or the chair. In theory, everything works as it’s supposed to, and I mean it’s not like the dead can come back and say “hey, that was horrible, don’t do this to other people.” It looks like they fall asleep and don’t wake up. It’s only been recently that the public and prison advocates have gotten wind from the extremely small amount of survivors of the process, where the injection failed or the process was somehow interrupted. It’s very difficult to get people to investigate the welfare of inmates in the general prison population, much less death row inmates. It’s hard to convince doctors and wardens to care, or think that they deserve better when these people have killed others in much more painful and horrible ways. It’s a sociological and psychological dilemma stemming from a fundamental disconnect and a moral dilemma surrounding justice and retribution, and I think the “humane” aspect doesn’t come from the fact that it’s the least painful way or the best way, seeing as assisted suicide isn’t performed this way at all. The “humane” thing is that it isn’t a lynch mob."
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87o2yd | Who has the authority to rewrite the constitution? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If you’re not referring to the US Constitution at all, please disregard this entire post. If you mean “Who has the authority to amend the US Constitution,” then it can be done by either a convention of the states, requiring three fourths of the states to vote in favor of the amendment, or by three quarters approval of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. If you mean, “Who has the authority to chuck the US Constitution and start over,” nobody has that authority.",
"Article 5 of the Constitution: The Congress, whenever two thirds of both Houses shall deem it necessary, shall propose Amendments to this Constitution, or, on the Application of the Legislatures of two thirds of the several States, shall call a Convention for proposing Amendments, which, in either Case, shall be valid to all Intents and Purposes, as part of this Constitution, when ratified by the Legislatures of three fourths of the several States, or by Conventions in three fourths thereof, as the one or the other Mode of Ratification may be proposed by the Congress; Provided that no Amendment which may be made prior to the Year One thousand eight hundred and eight shall in any Manner affect the first and fourth Clauses in the Ninth Section of the first Article; and that no State, without its Consent, shall be deprived of its equal Suffrage in the Senate.",
"Assuming you're talking about American politics... Amending the Constitution **is** rewriting it. While most amendments are small & limited in scope, there's nothing requiring them to be so. You could conceivably have an amendment that replaced whole sections or even the entirety of the text, assuming you could get it passed. Passing an amendment requires 2/3 of the House & 2/3 of the Senate and it needs to be ratified by 3/4 of the states to go into effect. There's another method involving a \"constitutional convention\" of the states but that's never been done & nobody's entirely sure what it would mean.",
"Alterations to the US Constitution occurs in two manners. 1) Congress creates an amendment proposal then approves it by a 2/3rds majority. That amendment then goes the the Legislatures of each and every State and when 3/4ths of them have approved it then it becomes a part of the Constitution. 2) The States can choose to hold a Constitutional Convention, effectively bypassing the federal Congress. If 2/3rd of the States call for a convention then they send representative and draft as many changes as they wish to the constitution. Then they vote on said changes and if 3/4ths of them pass them it becomes a part of the Constitution. Other countries have alterations in different manners."
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87seiv | How exactly did languages start? How is it that someone could create and explain languages to other humans without a base language to go off of? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As with many \"origin of something\" answers, we are not sure. The main two theories on the origin of human languages are the generative view and the functionalist view. Functionalists consider language to be such a complex thing, that it is impossible that it would have just \"appeared\" out of nothing. The concequence of this idea is that ther must be some sort of proto-language that our ancestors used, that then evolved into more complex languages over long periods of time. The generative view (such as the one proposed by Noam Chomsky) states that speech and language are such unique things, such \"human\" things, that they must be encoded in our brains or our dna. The idea here is that language is so human that it must have appeared with humans."
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87xk1i | Why is Easter typically represented by a Bunny giving eggs? Whats the connection of a Rabbit to Christianity? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fertility. Bunnies and eggs are both fertility symbols, associated with spring. The Christian holiday is planted on top of a pagan holiday.",
"Christianity had a habit of incorporating pagan symbolism in an effort to convert those people to Christianity. So, it was a little bit of heresy for the greater good. God understands."
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88c1if | Why do prestigious brands allow discount supermarkets to copy them | More and more I notice discount supermarkets in the UK imitating brands to such an extent they are almost indistinguishable from the brand they try to copy. Does this not infringe on any copyright? Essentially the original is paying for branding and marketing for the copycat. Why do i not notice this so much in regular supermarkets? Do they have higher ethical standards or perhaps they are in cahoots with the big brands? Please, explain like I'm five! | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"In some cases the Main company might actually own the \"fake\" company and sell bad batches/same product under a new name so that they get alot more profit",
"I can't speak for the UK, but in the US, food and fashion are two things that aren't patentable or copyrightable. You can copyright or trademark a label or brand name, respectively, but not the contents or appearance of the food stuff itself, even if it's a picture on a box (which you'd argue, if you could, would be part of copyright for the label).",
"The appearance of a product is not covered by copyright, it is covered by trademark. A trademark is violated when consumers would be confused about which brand they are buying. Over the years, various lawsuits have established how similar a knockoff can be without violating copyright, and knockoff manufacturers are adept at dancing on the edges of those principles. And even when they step over the edge, it may not be worth the trouble of suing them over it.",
"Because the items being sold aren't patented or cannot be patented. Remember when Tempur Pedic's patent expired a little while ago? Every mattress company jumped on making those type of mattresses.",
"You can't copyright food. You may have noticed that every restaurant in the world sells something called a \"hamburger\" that is pretty similar to every other hamburger in the world. You can trademark the name - \"Whopper\" or \"Big Mac\" but the food product itself is a free for all. This is also why brands like Coke and KFC protect their specific formulas with such secrecy."
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88eihd | What's the connection between grapes and decadence | Specifically, the image where gluttonous ruler is being served grapes by some poor unfortunate soul. As far as I know, grapes have been pretty common in a lot of the world (esp. the western world where the image comes from), so what's the connection? Or is it just an image used once in a movie somewhere and everybodie has copied it? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fruits of all kinds tended to be prioritized for the wealthy and for alcohol production. But you are correct that virtually everyone had fruit sometimes. As for grapes specifically. They were limited to southern Europe for the most part because they did not grow well farther north, and most were also fairly bitter as they were intended for wine. Table grapes were not super common but they did exist. But the part of decadence was not so much grapes, but was being fed by someone else by hand.",
"The Greek god Dionysus was the god of wine, wine-making, and religious ecstasy. When the Romans supplanted the Greeks and adopted their mythology, Dionysus became Bacchus. A cult to the Bacchus sprang up at some point and they had festivals and large parties/orgies called Bacchanalia (extremely lavish and over the top parties being called Bacchanalia is still something used today). Wine, and grapes were a large part of these parties, and the god Bacchus was the one they were worshiping and thus, treating like a god with luxury. The figure of Bacchus laying around on a couch/bed being served wine or grapes became a common theme in art throughout the Roman period and beyond into the medieval and the Renascence. It's even lasted to this day and has been used in Disney's Fantasia, with a fat little Bacchus cartoon laying around in luxury and eating grapes. Over the past couple thousand years the general theme of wine/grapes/Bacchus/partying/luxury sort of just stuck in western culture, even after the Greek and Romany mythology faded."
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88htp6 | How does Feng Shui work? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It doesnt. A bowl of goldfish by your northeast entrance isnt going to improve your relationship problems. Good interior design *does* however improve your quality of life in general and has been shown to increase work productivity.",
"From what I've absorbed through osmosis after ten years in asia, feng shui is all about placement of stuff (the stuff in your house, outside your house, and even your house itself), in order to retain good luck/energy, release the bad, and help it flow. Some examples are: - not having your front and back doors in a straight line so luck can't pass right through your house without stopping, and - putting a small mirror over your front door to reflect bad luck away (but not good luck, i guess?) Now admittedly i might be completely wrong. Whenever my mother-in-law starts telling us how to arrange the baby room for maximum luck, I tend to tune out and ignore her."
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88jt7g | Why are fish and other seafoods not considered meat by Catholicism? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because like many words, meat can have more than one meaning. If you talk to a vegetarian, meat is the flesh of any animal. If you talk to a butcher, meat is beef, pork, or mutton. Chicken and turkey is poultry and fish is fish.",
"The theological reasons are because the words used for meat in Greek and Hebrew were different for land, sea, and \"air\" animals. So when they were inventing the traditions of Lent and other dietary rules (which do not exist in the bible) including the practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays the decided to follow the same model as the Greek and Hebrew languages where the word meat only applied to land animals.",
"This goes extremely deep into tradition, and it is not just Catholicism, but most Christians and Jewish (especially during Passover) traditions. First, the \"no meat on Friday\" is kind of a misnomer, it is actually no meat from a land animal, e.g. mammal or fowl/muscly meat. Fish is of the sea and thus considered a different type of flesh, because most of fish meat is not very dense. Second, for Christians, fish is traditionally considered a symbol for Jesus, and thus eating fish on Friday, which is also the day Jesus gave himself up for sacrifice, is the same and accepting the sacrifice Jesus made for humanity. Truth be told there is no reason other than tradition, the Christians got the tradition from Jewish Passover, which is when Christ gave himself up for trial, and the Christians associate it with the martyrdom of Christ.",
"Found a decent article for you on NPR that addresses the actual political and economic reasons on top of the theological perspective: URL_0"
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88ky3x | How is it possible that water is dangerous for tourists to drink, but perfectly potable for locals, in places like Guatemala and India? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If the locals are able to drink the water safely, it's because they have adapted to the water source. This can be done either through gaining immunity to common germs or illnesses that might be found in that specific water source, or through specialized gut bacteria that helps in the digestion of water impurities. When you travel to another country, it's often recommended to eat local yogurt as soon as you can. This is because local yogurt often contains area-specific bacteria that your body can use to help digest food and drinks in the area.",
"I lived in India for several years. My experience is: the locals don't drink the water. You only drink the water of you're homeless or living on the street, and those people have very tough lives and often die of easily cured diseases. Otherwise, you either buy pre-filtered water (with slightly different prices depending on quality), you buy water from a water truck and either filter or boil that, or, as a last resort, you boil water from the tap at home. You also drink lots of well-boiled chai. The pre-filtered is like culligan and ranges from 40 rupees to the more decadent 80 rupee brands. When I was getting sick often, the doctor told me I should book these, too, just in case. My roommate bought the cheap stuff for a while and I started getting sick again. Interestingly, you could get \"filter water\" at restaurants in Bangalore which was put through a filter, but the filtered water in Delhi still wasn't trust worthy and you had to drink bottled water or chai. In some places, there are water fountains which are filtered. These aren't recommended if you're not a local as there will not totally pure, but people from the area are more immune. Jodhpur and other places in Rajasthan have these all over the city, especially in the summer. (Italy has something similar! Fountains on the street that people drink from or fill water bottles from). I overheard a conversation once -- a university student was telling his friend about traveling to Europe, and he absurd it was that, in Europe, they actually use drinking water in the shower! Just goes to show that normal tap water is NOT drinking water. If you have a drinking water tap, it's because it connects to the tank where you keep the water you buy by truck. Why is the water so bad in India? One explanation I heard was that there's not enough pressure in the clean water lines to keep duty water or if a sewer line leaks. Normally, the pressure would push water out and not let dirty water in. Since the lines aren't well maintained and there isn't consistent pressure throughout the day, the clean water gets contaminated. One reason houses have water tanks on the roof is that water in many places only runs a few hours a day so you can fill the tank.",
"They build an immunity to it. If you lived there and drank it long enough you would get used to it and there would be no trouble.",
"They are able to adjust to it. Drinking the water for their entire lives makes them okay. If you were able to live your entire life drinking cleaner water with different bacteria’s and minerals, then you don’t have to be immune to those specific characteristics of the water."
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88o97z | What are the consequences of Sinclair Broadcasting Group controlling so many stations? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Democracy only works if the electorate is informed. If all sources of information are actually a single source, that source could be corrupted and it would be very difficult to actually have an informed electorate. The freedom of the press is an illusion if all of our \"trusted, local\" news sources are actually the tentacles of a national or multinational media conglomerate."
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88thsr | Why do ancient Roman and Grecian sculptures have small penises? | Always wondered if there was some reason for this, maybe penises were shorter back then, or maybe it was seen as objectively more beautiful back then. I’d really like to understand why. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As far as I know during Greek and Roman times, small penises were considered more appealing and larger penises were saved for barbarians and other undesirables.",
"Not all did. There are some, specifically of the god Pan or Priapus that had enormous penises. But in general and partially because of those gods in the culture having a large penis was seen as being uncivilized and barbaric so unless the subject of the statue was specifically involving those themes or focused on fertility it would have a small penis. Some were also defaced by later generations and then repaired as best they could be. At one point a Pope even ordered every statue in Rome to have leafs crafted and effectively glued over the genitals.",
"I would also like to not that most redditors do not get to see manhood without some marked increase in circulation due to the nature of our society and when it is currently acceptable to have the male genitalia presented. In roman and greek times was very common to have male genitalia present in mundane activities and even honorable to appear naked during sport. In doing so, the male body restricts blood flow and a penis that averages 5-8 inches erect can shrivel to .5-1 inches which is what is depicted.",
"I might add that a small penis was considered more asthetically pleasing and also a sign of modesty. Many statues featured a \"child like\" set of genitals, undistended testicles and prepubescent penis as well as no labia portrayed on female statues. An art teacher of mine also thought it was a way minimalize the fact that it was a nude in the first place. The Greeks preformed the Olympics nude and many Roman statues that were considered art and not publuc Icons followed the Greek style. Mythological characters were often portrayed nude, where senators and publuc figures were often robed. I'm not an expert and hope that an expert can correct or add to this discussion."
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88u558 | Why is it that Switzerland has millions of guns, but barely any gun crime, yet America seems to be teeming with gun related violence. What's the difference? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Switzerland has mandatory military service, mental health screenings, and strict control about where you place your gun and ammunition. Every gun is registered, and ammo is heavily regulated"
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88vef2 | How do all politicians become filthy rich while in office? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Very few do. Most were wealthy before they started politics. But they do get paid fairly high salaries so that helps to maintain their wealth. They also tend to make a lot of connections and when they get out of office they often make a lot of money on the private sector."
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88vz62 | what is music theory? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Remember language arts class? Where you learned about grammar, phonics, spelling, and parts of speech? Aka all the underlying mechanics of the English language? Music theory is like that. It explains what is happening in a given piece of music, such as tempo, time signature, key, etc. Something called the circle of fifths explains how different notes relate to each other. It’s a way of understanding music from a technical point of view."
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88wc5c | How did building from Ancient Rome get "buried" underground? | I am watching a documentary on Rome and the host is walking through Nero's old palace that was recently excavated underneath modern Rome. It appears that much of Ancient Rome and Greece still exist under their modern counterparts. What is the process that leads to this? It cant be cities sinking, right? Is it just a gradual accumulation of dirt and stuff? That seems hard to imagine a whole building getting covered, even gradually. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Dirt and mud build up gradually over time carried by wind, water, and people. It can happen very quickly. A volcanic eruption or flood can bury a city under 20 feet of ash or mud in an afternoon. People often take apart old buildings to build new ones. Why spend a ton of time and effort tearing up sturdy Roman foundation when you can more easily just build on top of it?"
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88xfod | Why is it in languages where there is no alphabet but rather characters, such as Mandarin, Cantonese and Japanese Kanji, why can people understand the meaning of a word but not know how to say it? | In this video: URL_0 It states, "Everybody knows what it means but they can't read it." Why exactly is this, surely if you know what it means then you know the word. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"How do you pronounce [this symbol]( URL_0 )? You know what it means, but can't pronounce it. Also Chinese has characters pronounced similarly look similar. For example all these characters are pronounced with some tone of \"Ma\":马妈骂码. Though they all have wildly different meanings. There used to be more overlap, but the language evolved while the writing stayed the same.",
"Spoken and written language are learned separately. You learned to say cow when you saw a cow. It just so happens that in English with letters tied to sounds you learnt to write it as c o w to represent the sound the word makes. Italians learn that a cow is called mucca. And they learnt to write that with a subset of the same alphabet used in English that represents the sounds needed for mucca. So they have a different word for the same thing to English speakers, but common characters for the sounds. With Cantonese, mandarin and japanese speakers they also learnt the word for cow (Ngau, niu, and ushi respectively) in their own language, but they happen to have a common symbol for cow, not a phonetic spelling and an alphabet. So naturally when they see the cow **or the symbol for cow**, they say the word in their own language... But they don’t know how to say that word in the other languages.",
"This video is a bit of a unique case for Japanese as well. In Japan there are three alphabets: hiragana, katakana, kanji and technically romanji as well. The real problem lies with kanji. Kanji means Chinese character and is the alphabet Japan adopted from China. They also brought with them the Chinese reading of the character, but applied it to Japanese words that already existed. This made it so each kanji has multiple ways to read it. For example, 大 is the kanji for \"big\" but it can be read as \"oo\" as in Osaka (大阪) or dai as in daigaku (大学). Sometimes there are more than two readings and there are sometimes unusual readings as well. So the problem becomes when you see compound kanji that you can be unsure which reading to go with. That's problem one. Problem two is that there are thousands of kanji. So you can be presented with a word but either a) never learned that character, b) forgot that character and/or c) not sure of the different reading of the character. So a combination of all of those can lead someone being unable to read a kanji compound. The same word if written in either of the other two alphabets would be instantly readable however. Or even simpler, think of an English word written verses hearing a word spoken. You can read a word but sometimes when you say it you pronounce it wrong because it has a different or unique pronunciation. It doesn't mean you don't know the word it just means you don't know how to say the word.",
"I speak Japanese and this happens to me,especially with compound words. In compound words you might know the meaning and pronunciation of the individual characters, but when they are placed together you can only figure out the meaning based upon what you know the two of them mean separately. Each Japanese kanji can have many different pronunciations depending upon the circumstances so it's not always easy to look at a compound that you're unfamiliar with and know the pronunciation of it."
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895oj3 | Why do people with Mc in their names (McDonald’s, McCallister’s, etc.) get to have two capitol letters. Where did this come from? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The \"Mc\" in \"McDonald,\" for example, is short for the Gaelic word \"Mac,\" which means \"son.\" So \"McDonald\" means \"Son of Donald,\" etc. EDIT: Originally I only posted the article on Irish naming conventions. The rules apply across the Gaelic languages, but I've added the Scottish article for clarity. [Irish Naming Conventions]( URL_1 ) [Scottish Naming Conventions]( URL_0 )"
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89alzi | Why election days aren't public holidays in the US. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Two words - voter disenfranchisement One way to ensure your preferred version of democracy keeps the people you want to be in power is to make sure you limit the vote of people who might vote against your preference"
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89crbv | The history between China and Taiwan | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Taiwan was long a part of China (except for periods of Dutch and Spanish colonial rule) until the First Sino-Japanese War, when the victorious Japanese annexed it in 1895. It remained under Japanese occupation until 1945, when Japan lost WWII, and it was returned to China. When the Communist Party of China won the Chinese Civil War in 1949, the government of the Republic of China, led by Chiang Kai Shek, evacuated to Taiwan. the PROC (People's Republic of China) was poised to invade Taiwan and defeat the ROC (Republic of China) for good had it not been for the outbreak of the Korean War. Mao was forced to divert troops and resources to help North Korea and heavy U.S. presence in the area prevented any further invasion from taking place. Eventually in 1971, the ROC was kicked out of the UN Security Council and the PROC took it's place. Cut to the present day, and not much has changed. Mainland China (PROC) considers Taiwan to be a wayward province in a state of rebellion, and Taiwan (ROC) considers itself to be the real China in exile. Both claim to be the sole legitimate government of all of China, so there's quite a bit of tension, and there have been a number of skirmishes between the two over the years."
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89ldrj | What’s the Sunni/Shiite divide? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Very simply (and maybe too simplisticly): When the prophet of Islam died, there was a split in opinion as to who should succeed him as the leader of the nascent Islamic nation. A vast majority rallied behind one of his companions, Abu Bakr, while a minority supported the dead's prophet's cousin, Ali, who because of the blood relationship thought he was in line for succession. Abu Bakr's followers are the Sunnis. Ali's followers are the Shia."
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89pr71 | Why do people fall for obvious risky challenge like salt and ice, tide pod, and snorting condom? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's really not \"people\" that are doing this, in general. It's mostly \"young people\" by which I mean under 30 and looking to show off to gain fame. It's not the \"Ice Bucket Challenge\" to raise money any more, it's just plain stupid stuff. Stupid stuff has been a teen problem since long before YouTube spread these ideas internationally.",
"To some extent I think people also like to think they're special and there's a certain amount of feeling like they can do things others can't. \"Surely it won't hurt if _I_ do it!\""
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89qi0k | why do people still worship god in the 21st century? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Higher meaning to life's existence. Spiritual experiences they've had. Faith is explicitly believing in something that you cannot see that is true. A sense of community and shared morals. The list goes on.",
"Belief is linked to emotion, not to common sense. You can feel the urge to \"believe\" without being convinced there is a deity. I'm firmly atheist because i dont feel this urge and when i view religion in my personal view, it doesnt make sense to me. But plenty of scientists have practiced religion even though they couldnt \"prove\" there was a god. There is also the social aspect of religion. If you get certain bennefits by joining in the rituals of a religion, like a sense of community you get by attending church, then plenty of people choose not to think about the religion part too much and just \"go with it\". Personaly I agree with a lot of the values a lot of religions promote, like respect, love and patience. But i dont feel the need to engage in rituals or to worship a deity in order to live by those values."
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89u7xq | how and why did eggs, pancakes, cereal etc become staple "breakfast food"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Let's go through all this. Eggs: Your typical American either raised chickens or had eggs delivered (along with milk--see more below). If one is collecting eggs, it's often one of the first tasks of the morning, meaning they are fresh and ready when it's time for breakfast. They also cook extremely quickly. Likewise, the milkman was a regular \"morning\" delivery for most people. Pancakes/Waffles/etc.: This has more to do with large organizations where food was provided to the working men. A breakfast was needed that was quick, inexpensive, and easy (remember, the cooks were just waking up as well). Enter the flapjack. Already known from Johnny cakes and the like, it's a simple mixture of grain and water, perhaps with some leavening and sugar, cooked up quickly and served in big stacks. Just the thing for when the lumberjacks are about to go out and cut wood. Bacon/Sausage/Etc. (cured meat products): Cured meat is a wonderful thing in general, as it is largely shelf-stable when kept cool and dry. As such, it can be bought in bulk and quickly fried in a hot skillet to provide much-needed proteins and fat. Here the benefit is that the meat is at least partially \"cooked\" to begin with (smoking and curing effectively helps to prevent contamination) and is usually portioned to cook very quickly. Porridge/Pottage: Here, I'm talking more about oatmeal and grits, but I'll also get onto some more old-fashioned breakfasts. Porridges are extremely quick to cook--boil some water and throw in the grains. In the case of some, soaking overnight is preferable, but still, oats and corn cook up quick enough. Pottages are another beast, being basically a one-pot meal with meat, legumes, grain, etc. all mixed together (check out Ful Medames for an example). In this case, they became popular breakfast foods because they took so long to cook. You could fill your little pot up, cover it, and put it next to a low fire overnight while you slept and in the morning, breakfast was ready. Cold Cereal: This one is more of a marketing thing than anything else, really. Cold cereal was at least partly designed as a \"health\" product and to curb the more carnal appetites of young men and women. However, it's now primarily eaten out of convenience--grab some Atomic Sugar Puffs, pour in some milk, and you've spent less time cooking than it takes for microwave ramen. Hope this helped out.",
"Dry cereal was dreamed up as a health food and became \"standard\" entirely by very thorough corporate advertising.",
"Unlike lunch and dinner foods, they're not heavily seasoned, which means that somebody with a slightly delicate stomach in the AM won't be put off by them. They're also easy to fix, and can be prepared in a few minutes as people arrive for breakfast (just put the pancake/waffle batter in a jug and you're ready to go. Finally, they're a combination of carbs, fats, and protein that tend to \"stick with\" you for hours."
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89u9ty | "The king is dead; long live the king!" What's that mean? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"> \"The King is dead\" is the announcement of a monarch who has just died. \"Long live The King!\" refers to the heir who immediately succeeds to a throne upon the death of the preceding monarch. [ URL_0 !]( URL_0 !)",
"It's two different points. \"The (old) king is dead.\" Meaning the monarch who rules the country has died. \"Long live the (new) king.\" Meaning that the new king has been crowned and is officially the ruler of the country. The point here is that power transitions instantly. The exact moment that Queen Elizabeth dies her son Charles will become King. The coronation is just the formal ceremony acknowledging that this happened.",
"When the king dies he is replaced by another person next in line to the throne. It is sort of a cynical commentary on the impossibility of the king being dead; the king is always alive because the death of one king just brings about the reign of another. So the two parts of the phrase refer to two different people. \"The king is dead\" is the first king, \"Long live the king\" refers to the second person."
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89uzjq | Why does "Anarchy" have a universally standardized symbol? Doesn't that go against the idea of anarchy? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Anarchy doesn't require that people avoid using well-understood words or symbols. It just requires that things aren't forced on people by rules or governance."
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89ylwl | Why are Japanese fan content creators so much more strict about their activities in order to avoid copyright issues than Western fan creators? | I know a few Japanese fan-content creators, and it seems there's a much larger fear among them about legal action being taken against them than there is for Western creators. Is just a result of stricter Japanese copyright law, Japanese culture, or something else? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
"a_id": [
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"text": [
"Social responsibility. In general, Japanese culture has a bit more sense of morality in respect to the original creators. They don't want to hurt the creators. Theres also this sense in Japan of following the order of things just for the sake of the law. A lot of westerners will do things they know they aren't supposed to, if they think they can get away with it. Japanese I think are more likely to take the \"safe\" road. Lots of generalizations here, but I think it mostly holds true."
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8a14ab | Where did the expression "hind sight is 20-20" come from? | As a non-english native, I have always found this expression quite odd because i can't seem to link it to anything i know. edit: thanks guys, i now know where it came from! | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"20/20 is slang for perfect vision. It is based of of the eyecharts that doctors use to test your sight - if you can read letters at 20 feet that a person with perfect vision can read at 20 feet, you too have perfect vision. That is where 20/20 comes from (if your vision is worse, you could have 20/40 or 20/200 vision, meaning you can read at 20 feet what a person with perfect vision can read at 40/200). The expression just means that when you look at past events, you can view them \"perfectly\" because you have context for the event and knowledge of how well decisions worked out. This allows you to be critical of the decisions that were made in a way you couldn't at the time. Your \"vision\" of the past is \"perfect\"."
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8a2s9a | Why is polygamy still illegal in the West? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"One of the biggest reasons is it isn't just a matter of making it legal, it is creating a whole new legal framework. With gay marriage, the framework was just a matter of changing a few pronouns. Plural marriage is much, much more complicated. If a man has two wives, are they married just to him, or to each other? Are two of them the legal parents of any children, or all three? How is the property divided in a divorce? Equally, or is seniority an issue? How would child custody work? How does child and spousal support work if all three divorce? Can an existing spouse veto a plural marriage? Who gets power of attorney if one spouse is incapacitated? Who inherits if one spouse dies without a will? The questions are endless and can be answered in several ways. Cohesive plural marriage legislation would require a lot of forethought and would be a massive undertaking. And consider very few people are asking for it, there is no political reason to make it happen.",
"Well it's essentially *de facto* legal within the US. There have been plenty of famous Mormon polygamists that have not been arrested, hell some of them even have tv shows."
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8a2vvl | Why do some religions such as Judaism and Islam believe in circumcision? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"because if you spend 3000 years in a desert with poor hygiene then getting sand under sensitive skin flaps can cause infection.",
"Judaism practices circumcision because it is believed to have been directly mandated by God since the time of Abraham. I'm not familiar with the Islamic beliefs, but I imagine that they also believe that God said something to Abraham about it as well."
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8a4day | Why are many Arenas named after banks? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"The banks aren't going to sponsor them just out of the kindness of the CEO's heart. It's a giant ad.",
"It’s not for the fans. It’s for the company. They pay for naming rights, and the get brand recognition out if it. It’s just final boss level advertisement.",
"It makes them a household name. Their name gets associated with relaxing and having fun and excelling at a sport instead of being associated with home foreclosures, service fees and data breaches."
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8a5lfl | Why are Latin words so commonly used in medicine, law, and taxonomy? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Some good answers here already, but another reason is because Latin no longer changes. It's not a \"dead\" language because it's still in use, but it doesn't change because it's not used colloquially or in general conversation. This inflexibility in the language makes it ideal for descriptive and diagnostic purposes. It's a tool that stays sharp.",
"Two reasons. 1. Medicine is old, and a lot of its history needs Latin to understand the root words, which helps understand the general function 2. Latin is a good novel language which is highly descriptive in many cases. The way it is structured allows for very quick assessment, sometimes faster than English. You are learning both Latin and the different way it describes things. If i say Neocortical dorsal parietal hemorrhage, a surgeon will know exactly what i mean, regardless of where he is from. It is faster than saying \"External bleed, on the top of the parietal lobe, in the newer formed area (from an evolutionary point of view)\". Sure you could say \"bleed on top of the head\" but not all cases are this simple. Latin allows you to be specific because of its affix (word-structure) nature. There does exist situations when English is faster or more descriptive, but not always, so why not have both?",
"It's because of the way science and knowledge developed in Europe. Latin was the language of all scholars, dating back from the time of the Roman empire. Even when the Roman empire collapsed, Latin was the language of the Church. All education in Europe began with religion. The first universities were founded by monks and priests, with religion as the central subject to study. Other subjects were also studied, but with religion as an important component. People from all over Europe came to such institutions to study... but what they all had in common was that they were all educated through the Church, and the language they were educated in was Latin. Back then (the Middle Ages), they did not yet have established Romance languages such as French, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese. The languages spoken in the areas we now call Spain, Italy, France, etc., were all considered to be dialects of Latin, and scholars were taught Latin as the proper language for educated men, even though in their daily life they might speak a language quite different from Latin, an early version of French or Italian or some other language. Through the centuries, there were a lot of changes in what people studied, in ways of looking at the world, in educational institutions, but what stayed stable was that all scholars had to study Latin. It was a language that scholars of all nations had in common. To not write their findings in Latin was to cut oneself off from a large percentage of the educated community, as well as to write in a way that would sound crude and strange to most scholars. Thus, it was only natural that as scholars began to coin new words in medicine, law, science, etc., they created words that were in the language they wrote in--Latin (and sometimes Greek, which all scholars also had to learn). This was, after all, the language that all of their readers and fellow scientists had in common and were communicating in. It's also important to remember that when books started to be written, they were valuable luxury items. They were expensive to print and relatively few copies were produced. They weren't going to be making multiple editions in multiple languages for different nations. There was one printing, and that was in Latin, the language all scholars and educated men would be fluent in. The practice of naming things in Latin and Greek continued even as scholars started using their own languages to write in and to educate in. This is partly because it just makes sense--if you're already referring to things related to the heart with the prefix \"cardio\", it's just consistent to continue to coin new worlds related with the heart by using existing language, like \"cardio\". It's also jarring to use multiple languages to refer to the same thing. There are many examples of this, though the only one I can think of right now is that there's a newish specialty for doctors, and it's called \"hospitalist\". It just sounds a bit funny to my ear to name a specialty after an English word (and yes I know \"hospital\" comes from the French, but it's not a Latin word at base like \"cardiologist\" or \"pulmonologist\" is). A note about legal terms: for many centuries, the language of law in England was no specific single language at all. It was its own unique combination of terms, called \"Law French\". In 1066, the Norman French conquered England and the French of that day became the daily language of the ruling class and educated people in England. They all still also learned Latin. So a combination of Latin and French, plus common English combined to become the language used in English legal textbooks for centuries."
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8a69l1 | Why are they called stairs inside, but steps outside? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"I think it all comes down to whether it's a stairwell like in a house or building or a stepping stone to something. The Stone typically being concrete.",
"Stairs is the collective term while steps are the individual components. Stairs are made out of steps. It has nothing to do with if they are inside or outside."
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8a9mkg | Why are there so many fake movie trailers trending on YouTube? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"Majority of them are getting tricked, it's like people watching those GTA 6 videos. The people posting them do it on purpose for views, this one guy had practically made a living by making videos like \"Rockstar accidentally sent me GTA 6!\" If you throw some ads on you can make some pretty easy money"
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8aakq9 | How do cities located in two different states function? | For example, Bristol, Tennessee, and Bristol, Virginia, share a common downtown. How does this work? Aren't there tons of issues with police, courts, medical care, taxes, and other things? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"There is some red tape for this kind of situation, but there is not much problems. The border is known exactly (and even marked at times). Some will have two mayors who cooperate, some will have negotiated to have a single city government. If it is split there will be two police forces who cooperate (not unlike major cities with multiple precincts like NYC). If it is a single city government then there will be one police force. Taxes are collected based on where you live and there are standing laws regarding how to handle out of state work. Sales tax will be applied based on the location of the Store. Both sides of the city will likely have a hospital (or several depending on size), or the States may share insurance networks. Courts will be based on the State that you commit the crime in.",
"They are separate cities that encompass a metro area, but each municipality runs its own government services and taxes to cover the costs. There might be some regionally planning commissions for some things that do need to be regional, like transit.",
"They’re two different cities that happen to be very close to each other. Nothing really different here except maybe some more cooperate between the two governments.",
"Pretty much the same way any two cities right next to each other operate. Kansas City KS and Kansas City MO aren't that different from Minneapolis and St. Paul, or Dallas and Ft. Worth, or even Omaha NE and Council Bluffs IA. They just happen to have the same name. Usually, there are some sort of intercity organizations that help coordinate these things."
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8ac4ih | Churches, chapels, cathedrals and basillicas- what's the difference between them all? Is it denominational? Architectural? Size based? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"A church is a place of Christian worship. A cathedral is a type of important church where you'll find a bishop, who is in charge of many priests. A basilica is a Catholic church which has been granted that title by the Pope because it has some special historical or architectural significance. A chapel is a smaller place of prayer which is either part of a larger church, or which is attached to some non-religious institution: for example, a place of worship on a military base is a chapel, and the cleric in charge of it is called a chaplin."
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8aduie | when did goldfish become the fish pet? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The ancient Egyptians kept fish both as a source of food and for entertainment. Their hieroglyphics depict Tilapia species and Mormyrids. The Chinese began to breed goldfish from carp in the 10th century. Goldfish were introduced to Europe at the end of the 18th century.",
"Goldfish (basically tiny pretty carp) started to be bred for decoration in around the 6th century AD in China. They had been farmed for food previously to that, but they eventually became fancy decorative pond-fish, and then brought inside to be displayed. As to the why, goldfish are super easy to keep alive indoors now because they have been selectively bred so long. They are the teacup Chihuahua of fish. Also, humans love shiny things so they spread in popularity in Europe pretty quickly after getting there in the 1600s."
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8afcjg | Why is the beginning of every box of tissues two tissues stuck together, instead of just one? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"text": [
"To make sure the tissues that follow are pulled halfway out, making it easier to grab them"
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8ahoyw | Why is Japan still reyling on so much analogue technology? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Japan got its reputation for being technologically advanced from the post-WW2 period when its economy surged forward and leapt ahead of the world in technology, and from the many ways that it uses technology in daily life that people of other countries don't bother with (e.g., in toilets). But Japan is generally very conservative in its approach to change. It leapt ahead in technology only temporarily when its economy was being rebuilt after the War, but after it built up and stabilized, it \"rested on its laurels\" and its rate of progress is much more modest today. Culturally, it sees no reason to abandon things that work. Very likely the same thing will happen to both Korea and China eventually, but they're still in the mode of pursuing rapid technological advancement because they started later than Japan. Korea started in the '80s, China more in the '90s. Technology as an insatiable hunger - as a pursuit in itself whose social disruptions are proof of its value (as in the culture of Silicon Valley) - is more of a Western thing, sometimes remarked on as pathological by critics. The current rapid advancement of China by contrast is just inertia, because it was starting from so far behind, and is being pushed by political forces. Once their economy reaches technological saturation, as Japan's did in the '90s, further disruptions will be seen as dangerous and increasingly discouraged in favor of incremental changes."
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8ai4gs | What's the difference between ethnicity, nationality, and race? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Race is a made up social construct born of the scientific ideas originally meant to define origins based on skin tone but we now know there's no scientific difference that makes sense to classify us this way. Nationality is your country of origin. Ethnicity is your culture of origin. An ethnic group is not necessarily limited by geographical borders but refers to the people themselves and their shared culture and customs.",
"ethnicity is what culture you're from. nationality is what legal citizen you're from. race is what.....a fuzzy term that's used to try to seperate some people from other people. you can be ethnic hispanic because you grew up in a hispanic culture. while at the same time be german nationality because you hold a german citizenship and passport. while at the same time, you're actually filipino by bloodline, making you asian race."
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8aj9mr | Why is self-plagiarism a concept (outside of academia)? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"in publishing, if you're (for example) paid to write an editorial for a newspaper, there is an assumption that what you're writing is an original work. If you copy from a past work, not only are there legal issues because someone else may own the publishing rights to that work, you are also not delivering the **original** content that you were paid for. I'm not familiar with the specific MLK case you reference - but I think most people who do a lot of public speaking (paid or otherwise) tend to deliver the same content repeatedly (with some minor variations).",
"The author might not own their own work. If King had written those words in an essay and sold or given publication rights to a magazine, it would be self-plagiarization. Also, the audience generally has the right to know whether they are hearing an original work. A lot depends on what a reasonable expectation of originality would be. No one goes to an Elton John concert to hear his new stuff, but if you hired someone to be a keynote speaker, you'd expect they will write a new speech tailored to your event. Self-plagiarism in this sense is a more hazy concept and is usually in the real of ethics rather than law."
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8ajyl0 | What’s the difference between the words “further” and “farther?” | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Further = degree/magnitude. She told him that she did not want to take their friendship any further. Farther = distance. Drive 2 kms farther down the road."
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8ak60a | Why is silver considered healthy and even holy? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Silver has natural antibacterial properties which gives it some medical uses. I wouldn't recommend trying to eat any though. As for silver being holy im not sure. Do you take this from needing silver to kill a werewolf?",
"Silver, along with gold, is one of the few metals that is found pure in nature, and they both can be removed from ore fairly easily using mercury. Silver is also the most reflective metal. It is soft enough to be easily worked or used for plating, but is stronger than gold and more suitable to everyday use. Giving their unique properties, it is not surprising that gold and silver are often associated with spiritual or other supernatural qualities."
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8ancbj | What is SESTA and FOSTA? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"These are bills which hold online websites liable for any discussions on sex trafficking or prostitution. Prostitution is known to be harmless, however, for the females involved it is important that they stay alert and aware on basic knowledge pertaining to their safety. Online discussions on sites like craigslist would allow them to openly share self-defense tactics and safety information to prevent the spread of STD's, rape, or other terrible things which happen to sex workers on a daily basis. SESTA and FOSTA would hold these websites, for example, liable of anything that the users post on these sites pertaining to prostitution or sex trafficking. It holds companies liable for the content which their users produce. Although sex trafficking is disgusting, it targets the platform rather than those who are actually producing the content. Although prostitution is illegal, there should be safe places online which help out those in need and those who are victims of abuse; SESSA and FOSTA will help eliminate sex traffickers, but force sites to remove \"help\" posts from sex workers who are just trying to stay safe; and it places the blame on the companies, rather than prosecuting the individual who directly partakes in such activities. (Please note, I am against human trafficking, while my views on prostitution is reserved. However, I do believe that all victims should have the right to discuss their personal experiences with the world.)"
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8av3yp | Why was New Orleans spared during the Civil War? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Spared how? The US Navy ran the forts and seized the city. The South never mounted a serious effort to retake it. However, maybe you should look up Benjamin “Beast” Butler.",
"As an European I would love to know and read more about the US civil war. Any suggestions? Some good books, websites,...? Thank you"
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8av9n9 | Gen-X gave birth to rap/hip-hop, hardcore/punkrock, and metal bands like Rage Against the Machine, yet they are known politically as the 'silent' 'apathetic' generation. Why is these things? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Can you give some examples of how gen-xers gave birth to punk? The oldest gen-xers were pubescent when punk was starting to coalesce.",
"I don't think Gen X is politically apathetic at all. They drove the anti-apartheid movement, the anti-globalization protests, the anti-Iraq war movement, swept Bill Clinton into office on a huge wave of optimism born out of seeing the end of Communism, etc. But Gen X is sandwiched in between two much larger generations in the Boomers and Millennials so they have frequently felt like their voices weren't heard or their opinions sought. I'm right in that age where my friends, coworkers, classmates have been split between Gen X and Millennials and the average Millennial is way more politically apathetic in my experience."
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8azqho | Why is it that most people feel a general sense of cringe when watching themselves on video or hearing recordings of themselves | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"You sound different because the acoustics of a voice coming from inside your body are quite different than one coming from across the room. What's more, we do things when we speak, like ums and ers, we often are not aware of. We look different, because we are used to seeing ourselves only in the mirror. That is a single view with very specific lighting, and we often unconsciously pose when looking in the mirror. Combine those, and we see ourselves on video, we are quite different than how we imagine ourselves, with unrefutable evidence of things we often ignore."
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8b1mbx | Why do most people consider hobbies like reading or knitting to be healthy but gaming and television to be wastes of time? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Similar things were said about reading. There was a time when parents considered reading to be a degenerate activity and that it would lead to all sorts of physical and behavioral issues. It is all subjective.",
"Watching television at least is largely mindless; you burn more calories [while asleep.]( URL_0 ) Quiz shows such as *Jeopardy* (in the US) provide something for the brain to do, but shows like those with the Kardashians or other reality TV really don't do as much. Better to exercise while you watch such a show. Video games provide good stimulation for the brain, strengthening skills such as creative thinking and teamwork, and before they came along activities such as reading and knitting were the best we had for strengthening creativity and imagination. People who say they don't probably just don't get it.",
"I migrated to US when I was starting high school, and if it wasn't for playing video games in English when I was younger, I would have entered US with very limited vocabulary. It's amazing how many words you can learn from playing a game in a foreign language. Sure, my mother would have preferred me to read books over video games, but how else are you going to keep a kid entertained while learning English?",
"If your hobby doesn’t involve exercise, it should be something that engages your brain and forces you to learn or to think critically or creatively. Most television does none of the above. A good hobby will involve you accomplishing or creating something, or bettering yourself. Watching documentaries is a good hobby. Watching reality TV is not.",
"As time goes on people will always bash the newest form of entertainment regardless of how \"healthy\" it seems to be. In ancient Greece, scholars and philosophers would write down their knowledge in books. Socrates a famous philosopher, was against the idea because he believed that it would lead to people getting dumber because now they will rely on the books instead of the brain to hold knowledge. in the early 1900's many adults were against their kids reading because it was \"just entertainment\"; for today's parents that would be watching TV and playing video games. There is a negative stigma to being a \"couch potato\" and since sitting on the couch is physically unhealthy, although playing video games exercises certain parts of the brain. The point is that whatever \"looks\" like a healthy activity is considered to be healthy. Reading makes you look smart and like you are gaining knowledge, therefore giving it a good reputation. Knitting looks hard so it seems like you are also exercising your mind, therefore appearing to be an engaging activity. -- Edit: replaced \"Plato\" with \"Socrates\".",
"Far as television is concerned, it’s because it’s considered a largely passive, low-engagement activity. Whereas reading is just the opposite. You use more of your mental faculties when reading. I’m not sure about gaming. I suppose it depends on the game you’re playing. Chess is considered a high-engagement game.",
"Reading has the ability to improve your linguist ability, even if the reading is done just for pleasure. Knitting is productive (depending on what you're making), keeps the arms in movement, and keeps the mind strong in regards to figuring out sizes and the pattern. Gaming also uses the hands, but is done for pleasure and it depends on the game if there's any difficulty. Watching television is an extremely passive activity. Those that are active watchers are also the annoying ones that point out incongruities, bad special effects, and plot holes. I think it's because we do not feel as challenged to watch as we do to digest reading or for the activity of knitting.",
"Because they’ve been around for longer. Seriously, that’s it. Every generation’s time wasters are seen as worse than the previous. Reading is considered wholesome now, but 100 years ago reading novels was considered a horrible wasteful antisocial activity for “young people” that was going to destroy society by tearing apart our social fabric.",
"Because most people are stupid. Life is short, do whatever the fuck you want. There are always going to be naysayers, there are always going to be people who have some sort of problem or negative comment to say about who you are/ what you like to do. Take my word for it, just smile, say okay, and pay no attention to them.",
"I like gaming... ...but anything to do with video screens removes you from the moment and your surroundings in ways very different from knitting (which I've done a little bit of). Both are \"time wasters\", but I feel like I've been active and functional when doing something like knitting in ways that I don't after gaming, even with puzzle games. There's research showing that screen time changes your sleep patterns where other hobbies don't, and I really don't know much about it, but suffice to say that I'm in agreement that there's something going on beyond just a different hobby wasting the same amount of time. Whatever it is, I consider it negative. I don't consider it a huge thing but removing screen time often eliminates my depression for a significant period of time. It may have something to do with the way in which entertainment on screen is designed around constant stimulation or the screen emissions themselves...no idea.",
"Do you think it's a waste of time? That's all that matters",
"Reading is definitely not universally loved, it’s just preferred over tv watching. The answer is not that hard to guess. Consuming does not improve you very much, not produce goods you can trade. There aren’t many jobs for ppl who are good at reading, watching tv or playing computer games. Those that do exist are often hard to get or don’t offer much in the way of careers. The exception is where the consumption drives another activity- A reader becoming a writer, a gamer becoming a programmer, a tv watcher becoming almost anything in the media world. Consumption can be bad for us in excess. Some of us never develop our programming or writing abilities because we spend too much time consuming everyone else’s writing and programming. The introduction of binge tv will probably have an effect as well. Between my various game libraries (steam, gog, blizzard, that EA one) and my various streaming services (Netflix etc) I really never have to look for a way to spend my brief time on this planet- I could be distracted my whole life. Some of it is just generational differences but I think part of it is just being older and thinking it is sad a young person isn’t developing themselves in any meaningful (to the observer) way.",
"With Tv it's because it's so passive. You just sit there and it washes over you. My guess is video games get tied in because old people that that because it's on the TV it's the same passive activity. Thankfully the atttitude towards games is changing",
"Hi I am one of those people that has trouble considering these things constructive hobbies. I apologize to you who do, and I try to be understanding that we are just under different beliefs and I hope you can agree to disagree with me This is my N=1 as someone who doesn't \"get\" TV and video games. I admit my own hobbies seems really weird to most so I always take my distaste of tv and video games as to each their own. I don't \"get\" TV because I can't turn my brain off to watch them. So I don't find it relaxing and mindless. I get it as a possible occasional thing, and have netflix binged a few things but for the most part I find it hard to do it myself. The other thing is that I know from being with three people that glorified the tv, that, it also can be use to pacify problems in connection in friendships and relationships. For video games, I love and respect those that do the video games that have a beginning, middle, and end. For instance, CoD, etc. The problem I had was with things like rocket league, overwatch, etc. These ended up being games that since there are no check points, and endings, that I have seen people spend countless hours on. They will learn team work, etc, but also tend to trick you to spend un real hours and money for features, and I found they host the verbally abusive when I tried my hand at games I think neither of them are bad in moderation, but actually lived with multiple people that took these two things to extremes and I just never understood it I guess",
"You use the words \"healthy\" and \"waste of time\" as polar opposite concepts, so the question isnt really answerable",
"I think the main difference here is production vs consumption. Knitting produces a product whereas video games consumes a product already made. Of course this isn’t a hard and fast rule: e.g. rock climbing and reading are both consuming things, but it’s a decent guideline i guess.",
"Consider this: being well versed in the specifics of a video game (a.k.a the metagame) is inherently worthless. If that game were to somehow disappear, change or just fall out of popularity it's like your skills disappeared overnight. There are a lot of exceptions like improving hand eye coordination, critical thinking or decision making but games don't specifically train those skills, they train you to be good at the game first and foremost. Other activities can train those skills better.",
"I guess it’s because playing a game or watching a show is easier and instantly rewarding for the brain, while reading takes a lot of concentration and dedication. But of course it all depends on what; you could read shit and learn nothing and play an amazing game and be richer in experiences."
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8b2cmu | How and why does a specific language get established as a country’s second language? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Usually because of either a historical tradition - like if your country's official language was French for the 300 years you were a French colony, and now you're not, it's likely to continue being one of the official languages - or because there exists a significant population of speakers of that language in your country."
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8b4ili | the anti-abortion movement in America | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The idea is that there is a life growing inside the woman and some people don't think it's right to take away that life, since it is a potential human. The dissagremment people have is when life begins. Some people think it begins the moment the egg and sperm meet. Some people think it is when the brain is fully formed, and some think life doesn't begin until the baby is out of the woman. It's not all black and white either. Some people might be ok with abortions for the first month or two until the brain forms, and others might not be ok with it at any stage of development and conversely some people would even support 8 or 9 month abortions.",
"Some people think that fetuses are cute babies, and that killing them for your own convenience or social/financial station in life is unacceptable. They literally see themselves as protecting innocent cute babies from murderous selfish short-sighted slut monsters. (Whether this idea is true or not is irrelevant. They believe it.) Consider how you would feel if there was a medical procedure to kill a 2 year old if parents decide that raising a child is too hard, and that it's happening 600,000 times per year all across America. You might feel horror, and confusion as to how this is being allowed to happen. If so, that's how the people in the anti-abortion movement feel."
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8b4iy0 | what exactly is "Identity Politics" and how is it a bad thing for American Government? | I know that there was a post about this around a year ago, but I am curious for another take on it. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Identity Politics is the idea that different groups of people should band together because the group will all have similar interests. Race, Social, class, gender, sexual orientation, religion, rural/urban, whatever. Pick a group and pick a cause. The problem with Identity Politics is that it focuses on the group, instead of the issue. This is counter productive, because the group loses power if their problems go away, so the people in charge have reasons to not want solutions found. The people in charge lose their social and political power if the issue goes away, and the people in the group lose their influence as well. It also is just another brand of tribalism. Humans are really good at us vs them mentalities, we fall into it very easily, and this is just another way to divide us. You'll notice it really easily when you find a group that's got a list of problems a mile long, and no suggestions for solutions, having a problem empowers them. Having a solution risks somebody agreeing and solving the problem.",
"As it has been used commonly on the right, 'identity politics' refers to efforts to combat racism, sexism, and religious bigotry like islamophobia and antisemitism. According to radio and web personalities that use the term frequently to describe the left, 'identity politics' is an effort by Democrats to convince African Americans that racism is holding them back and to convince women that sexism is holding them back, so that they will vote for the Democrats. They contrast this with their belief that racism was solved once and for all by the civil rights movement. They would say that since everyone now has legal equality, that's equality, and do not recognize the legitimacy of the contention from the left that if we were more equal, there wouldn't be such broadly unequal statistical outcomes for some groups. If you believe in this assertion, that racism has been over for decades and that the failing race relations of the past decade is because of Obama and the left, then you are likely to feel that things like Black Lives Matter or the broad number of Hispanics voting against Trump are little more than 'identity politics', something to convince black people that being black means being Democrats. If you do believe that racism still exists in America today, you likely view the argument against 'identity politics' as an argument against a straw man.",
"People feel like focusing on a person's appearance confuses folks and obscures the substance of their arguments. i.e While we worried if the thief was a man or woman, they took our cake.",
"Identity politics is substituting identity for individual responsibility. As an example, if I'm a white male person operating on IP, I can show some white homeless man, and use that as an example to say that white people are victimized by society, because why else would a white man be homeless? I can point to a charismatic white male who I agree with and say he's a 'white symbol'. If I find a white male I disagree with, then I can say he's 'not a white ally'. Primarily, IP is a form of collectivism, wherein the needs of the individual are brushed over in favor of the group. If I'm into IP, then I'm mostly worried about my group, which represents my identity as a white male. Therefore, in favor of this 'greater good' (the furtherance of the group's goals), I would have to sacrifice my own individual rights when they get in the way. Similarly though, there's also a trade off, because I won't have to admit responsibility for myself - I don't have to up my game to help foster the group image, if the group already has symbols (eg. charismatic white guys on youtube) that make it look good. I can skip my job, drink beer and do drugs all day, and not worry about myself, so long as my group is doing well. If I ruin my life, it doesn't matter, so long as the group is still furthering its goals and so long as I don't get in the way of it. This is why, despite losing individual rights, I also don't have to care about myself. If the group is doing well, then it feels like fate is being decided for me. I can just sit back, and have faith in the goodness of the collective will. --------- That's basically all that it comes down to. It's not having to worry about myself, because the govt only sees me as part of a larger group. I can hug my identity, and say \"I may be a failure, but at least I'm white.\" The far left and the far right are very similar in this respect. Although I operate more with triangles and cones than horseshoes.",
"While others have done a good job of ELI5, I would add that what is referred to as identity politics also always has a scapegoat group. The scapegoat is the cause of all the problems of the identity group in question; if it wasn't for the [insert scapegoat], then we [identity group] would live in the most perfectest utopia ever! The singular focus on a scapegoat is what distinguishes identity politics. In the current context of identity politics, the means and goal are seemingly paradoxical: total focus on group identity now will lead to a future where my group identity won't matter at all."
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8baj5b | why is English considered a Germanic language | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Because as you go back in time, English loses more and more of its French and Latin words and becomes closer and closer to old German languages. After William the Conqueror took over England in 1066, English got a huge injection of French words through the next several centuries. Most basic English words are of Germanic origin.",
"Because it shares its grammar, word position, and conjugation with German (and the other germanic languages)",
"Anglo-Saxons! They lived on British isles since the 5th century and were basically Germanic tribes.",
"If you go back to Old English, it barely looks like modern English. Take a look at [Beowulf,]( URL_0 ) one of the most well-known pieces of Old English writing we have today. This was written sometime between 700-1000 CE and it looks much more like the other Germanic languages - German, Dutch, Norwegian, etc. In 1066, England was taken over in the Norman Conquest by people from mainland Europe - what's now French. So Old English changed a lot with the addition of these new rulers and started to accumulate French and Latin influences and lose some of the old Germanic feel, becoming Middle English and eventually Modern English. But we group languages from their origin point and track their development from there - English definitely started out coming from the Germanic family of languages and picked up the French and Latin influences later.",
"English is descended from the Proto-Germanic language, which also have us German, Dutch and the Scandinavian language. The conventional wisdom is that English is a weird mixture of many different languages, but this is very misleading. First, most languages have different languages mixed in (even German has a very large number of Latin-based words -- for example, the word for \"window\" in German is \"Fenster\", from Latin \"fenestra\"), so English isn't unusual here; second, the influence of other languages on English is usually overstated. The Norman French, who arrived in the 11th century, are usually blamed for \"bastardizing\" the English language, but that's not what happened. They gave us words for things that the Norman French were in charge of -- government, royalty, the military, the courts -- and a few random things like \"pork\" and \"chair\", but little else. And the Norman lords ended up speaking English, not the other way around. Much later, Europe went through a period of admiring the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, and about the same time science really took off: at this stage, English imported lots of Latin and Greek words to describe inventions (including \"television\", which is a hybrid of Greek -- \"tele\" = \"far\" -- and Latin -- \"visio\" = \"I see\") and scientific concepts, but also to show off the speaker's intelligence and education (saying things like \"he applied the Promethian spark to his tube\" -- an actual line in a novel that simply means, \"he lit his pipe\"). There are meaningless statistics, such as the fact that 70% or 75% (or whatever) of words in the English language are not Germanic, but these are misleading: you get that sort of figure if you just count the number of words listed in a dictionary. But if you take an **ordinary sentence**, highlighting all the words that are not **Germanic** in **origin**, things start to look very **different**: it becomes **obvious** that most of the words we **use** in everyday life are Anglo-Saxon. Most importantly, *all* of the words that serve a grammatical purpose -- words like \"and\" and \"have\" and \"whether\" -- are Germanic."
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8bf4hs | Why do car manufacturers pay to have their cars included in films, but charge licenses for their cars to be included in racing video games? | Dirt 3 and GRID were two video games taken off the shelves because their licenses for cars expired. Why did the car manufacturers require them to license their cars when they not only allow movie studios to include their cars but actively pay through the nose for it? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It would be logical if we assume the following facts: * Movie placements drive sales * Video game placements do not, or not as profitably as the licensing revenue would be. From those, we could see that the movie placement is something the manufacturer would want more than the producer wants to have the car in the movie, and the movie producers would know that, and be able to charge through the nose for it. If we assume, above, that video game placements do not drive sales, then along with the following two assumptions: * Movies can pick one or two vehicles to be featured and exclude all others * Video games tend to include many vehicles and are disincentivized from excluding others. We can see that the video game placement is something the video game developer wants more than the car manufacturer does, which allows the manufacturer to charge the developer. Like most things in economics, it's explainable by whoever wants something more than the other is at a disadvantage.",
"As well as the legal aspects, there's also simple demand at stake. Driving games: consumers come for the cars - they want to drive the Ferrari, not some knock off. The game developers need the cars to sell the game. Hence the car makers can charge for it. Movies: Generally one car is just as good as any other for the movie maker, but if it makes the car look good the car makers want it to be their car. Especially if it associates their brand with something cool and desirable. Even if the movie makers want something specific, eg: a high end luxury performance car in James Bond, that's normally exactly when the car makers are most willing to pay because having the same car as James Bond sells cars.",
"If you buy a car, you can legally do whatever the hell you want with it. The company can't *stop* you from using one in a movie. If you want to put a car in a game, however, it falls under a different aspect of IP law. Now you're \"copying\" the car & need to get permission from the designers to do so for trademarks & whatnot. Now, 95% of the cars in movies *aren't* involved in any sort of product placement or licensing deal. When a car manufacturer pays to place a car in a movie, it's a *very high profile* use of a car that's guaranteed to be shown in a positive light."
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8bk5s0 | Why do almost always eat lamb instead of sheep? (Mutton) | Mutton seems to be a lot popular in older stories, but nearly any time I hear the word roast, it refers to roast lamb/chicken. Why is this? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"People are giving you all kinds of economic reasons. I think the answer is a lot simpler than that. Mutton has a very strong flavor. You know the \"lamb\" flavor that tells you that you aren't eating a piece of beef? Mutton has that same \"lamb\" flavor, but many times stronger. In the US, most people are used to eating relatively bland domesticated grain-fed beef, chicken, pork, etc., and many would find the strong flavor of mutton offensive.",
"Here in Texas roast normally refers to beef. The region that you live in greatly determines cooking trends. As for why mutton is not as common anymore? It is tougher meat, and unlike beef you do not get much additional marbilization by allowing the animal to grow up and fatten up. So for a meat that is in low demand (in the US) it is not worth trying to sell it to humans. You also have the fact that most adult sheep have been living a life as a part of wool production. This means they are rarely slaughtered for meat (as you are killing your money maker) and die from natural causes rendering them unfit for human or animal consumption. Though you do get some mutton used for pet foods.",
"Mutton is older animals, lamb is younger ones. You get more meat off an older, larger, animal but it's less tender. Young animals, OTOH, are a bit wasteful so they're seen as a luxury. In most of the world, there's pretty well-defined laws for what can be sold as lamb, mutton and hogget (an in-between age). Since sheep meat isn't particularly popular in the US, our laws aren't as specific, allowing you to sell pretty much anything by using the more desirable label of \"lamb\". The only place you're likely to find \"mutton\" labeled as such is ethnic markets. TL;DR - American \"lamb\" is probably from an older animal than British \"lamb\"."
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8blwl9 | Why when people either mess up or witness something bad happen they put their hands on their head? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"it's part of curling up into a fetal position, a natural response to attack. your hands and arms go to protect your brain, eyes, ears, nose",
"Ah, the surrender cobra maneuver. I believe it's because of a conflict in the moment; you want to possibly fight (or somehow contribute), but can't. You instinctively bring your hands up, but can do nothing. So you show your helplessness by placing your hands on your head. It is literally what you are told to do when being approached to be arrested.",
"I believe it is just a cultural thing. Kind of like saying \"ouch\". When I went to Portugal, whenever I saw someone get hurt, instead of saying \"ouch\", they would instead say \"ayee\" really loudly. In India, instead of putting their hands on their head, they put four fingers on their forehead and move it around. I thought this was kind of weird because my parents never do this (I am Indian), but my dad said that when he came to America and got used to the mannerisms here, he picked up the whole putting hands on the head thing. It came naturally after witnessing others do it so often. I do not believe it is an evolutionary trait, however, I believe that it is more of a \"monkey-see, monkey-do\" effect on humans. When we spend a lot of time with others who behave a certain way, we pick up those behaviors.",
"It's comforting/a form of self control. Think of it like having a headache, holding your head might not make it feel better, but we're drawn to comfort it. In the case of self control, if you ~~fucked~~ h*cked up (forgot about 5 yr old) real bad sometimes hurting yourself makes the person feel in control and relaxes them. When they hold their head in that instance, it's more like pushing against their head/pulling hair to give that pain-control feeling.",
"There was a video under popular where a bus drove off a cliff and a person put there hands on their head recently. Is this what prompted this thought because I thought the same thing?"
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8bmkdq | why are FortNite BR and PUBG so popular? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Battle royale games are fun and just really popular at the moment, and in fortnite's case, it's free and available on consoles, so lots of people can play it.",
"Personal opinion, but I think it dates back all the way to DayZ. The idea of PvP without limits in an open world was an amazing development that not everyone has the computer power to experience. Of course, then came H1Z1 and PUBG and Fortnite which are all way more accessible than even the original Battle Royale mod for ArmA."
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8bo6dy | Why is it 'okay' for parents to complain to their friends about their children, but 'not okay' for children to complain to their friends about their parents? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Really, it’s because parents are the ultimate authority on what’s okay for a kid to do and they don’t like being complained about. Kids don’t like being complained about either, they just can’t do anything about it.",
"I always complain to my friends things my father wont let me do. My friends also complain and do it. Also, Its okay. You should complain. There is just a limit to what you can complain."
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8bwh0v | What does "meta" mean in popular culture? I see people saying "this is meta" and never understand what it means. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"\"Meta\" essentially means \"referring to itself\", or \"self referential\". In popular culture, it's usually used in situations where a joke is \"taken to the next level\" by being a joke about another, earlier joke. Another common usage when referring to games would be to talk about the game's \"meta\". That is, not how to play the game, but how to play \"playing the game\" by adopting strategies that are designed to take advantage of how other people currently play in order to give yourself an advantage. It's not just responding to how your opponents are playing in the middle of a game, but rather examining the whole spectrum of what's popular across all players, and finding a strategy that counteracts what's currently popular. At that point, you've turned \"finding a good strategy to use\" into a sort of game unto itself: the metagame. ***** Bonus metajoke: > I'm So Meta Even This Acronym",
"Meta literally means “referring to itself” It is a way of describing and studying itself/oneself. To talk about something to a higher degree within itself, or approach the subject is “meta”. It is a self-reference. Example: I create movie (which is shown in theaters) about how movies are made. That is meta. I make a documentary about how documentaries are made. Example: metastudies are those that gather data ABOUT data. Meta-analysis of scientific studies is basically studying all the scientific studies already out there. Let’s say there are 20 studies about a certain cardiac disease. Someone may take ALL the data of those 20 studies and do a meta-analysis. Meaning they assess all the data as a whole and make a conclusion about cardiac disease (ex: this drug does this thing) and compare it to the individual study results (some studies says the drug does the thing, while some say it doesn’t). Metaphysics: trying to get a grasp on why physics exists at all. We know many physical laws, but further depth and inquiry on those laws is “meta”. In older times (ex: Greeks) their concepts of physical nature included the soul and more mystical ideas. It basically became philosophy because of their limited perspective. Most basically, the action being performed consciously references its own subject. It is a form of further study and introspection into a particular subject. The purpose of meta is to further define and understand things. You cannot do that without further inquiry."
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8c1bw7 | Constitutional Crisis | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"A constitutional crisis is a situation where the Constitution (which is the document that sets out the guiding principles for a country) does not have a mechanism to solve a problem. For instance in 1841 when William Henry Harrison died, and John Tyler (his Vice President) ascended to the Presidency, the US Constitution at the time was somewhat vague as to whether Tyler remained Vice President but assumed the duties of President, or whether he became President. There were a few other issues regarding VP succession, or VP \"acting\" as President, and they were eventually clarified with the passage of the 25th Amendment.",
"The Constitution is the set of laws & rules for how government works. A constitutional crisis is when you have a situation where the rules don't provide a clear way to move forward from the current situation. Let's look at the US Civil War. A bunch of states got together and decided they didn't want to be part of the USA anymore. The Constitution provides no rules for how a state can separate itself. You could argue that states *should* be able to leave because there weren't rules against it just as easily as you can argue that they *shouldn't* be able to leave because no rules allowed it. The end result here was a bloody war to resolve the debate. That's a bit of an extreme example. You're hearing it now because people are talking about suspicious dealings of the president. The potential crisis is caused by the fact that the very person responsible for investigating the president is one of the president's indirect subordinates and the president has the power to have them fired and replaced. How do you deal with a potentially criminal chief executive when that same chief executive has power over the investigation and can have it terminated if he fears it will reveal his criminal actions?"
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8c1xai | Why do Chinese "Lions" not look anything like actual lions? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mostly because lions are not native to China. Imagine this: one person saw it, and tries to describe it in text, and the artisans tries to create something from the text, pretty much what Chinese lions looks now is what we get. Then newer generations simply copy and add their own interpretations, similar to Burrito is kinda of American food instead of Mexican food. This compares to how tigers, which is native to China, are accurately depicted.",
"Here's what I remember from my art history days... In Chinese art there is a \"right\" way to do pretty much everything from holding the brush to applying ink to paper. This is easily controlled because artists were all from guilds(forget the Chinese word for it) and the artists that made the most well known lions were all part of the royal artists guild. This leads to highly uniform stylized art. That's why all \"foo dogs\" look the same. They are all emulating the work of an agreed upon master. Also many sculptures are not made by one person so having standards made it a lot easier. The Chinese are by no means unique in this respect."
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8c2k42 | Why do men have a higher insurance rate, and why is that not considered discrimination? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Men have higher auto insurance rates because they are more likely to be the cause of automobile accidents than women are. And insurance is, at it's core, a numbers game. And it is discrimination. It's just not *illegal* discrimination. Remember, discrimination is legal except in a few, narrowly defined categories and circumstances.",
"It is discrimination, but it is not illegal discrimination because it is based on a legitimate increase in risk. Men are more likely to be in a dangerous automobile accident, are more likely to work at a dangerous job, and are more likely to participate in dangerous behaviors and so are a greater risk of the insurance company paying out.",
"Empirical evidence, i.e. years of automotive insurance claim data, clearly shows that men are involved in more accidents, costing more money.",
"People are saying it's legal descrimination, but I'm sure if women were paying higher, there would be a huge uproar",
"For the same reason men have lower health insurance rates (usually): the cost of claims raised by men and women differ significantly. Men tend to make more auto-insurance claims (and higher cost claims) than women. This can be due to driving more expensive/faster cars, or getting into more crashes. But the net result is the same: men are \"riskier\" to the insurance company, so they get charged a premium. With life insurance, men tend to go to the doctor less (or \"later\") than women. Which means any chronic condition tends to be found in a more advanced (and less survivable) state. So men cost healthcare companies *less* on average than women. So they get cheaper insurance - where it's still legal to charge men less than women. The reason this is (or will soon be) illegal is that birth is something that only affects women and is expensive (at least in the USA). Charging women extra because they are the only sex that gives birth is considered a no-no."
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8c3p3p | If the great wall of china was built to stop Mongals, how did it work if it took so long to build? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The thing that made the Mongols fearsome was their mobility. You gather a big army against them, they just ride off and attack somewhere else. But if you needed to protect just one place, like where the wall was currently being built, parking a big army there would do the trick.",
"Firstly, the wall existed as hundreds of separate walls surrounding the various fiefdoms, cities and forts. These were built over a thousand years. Qin ShiHuang only merged the walls together to create the Great Wall. Secondly, the wall “finished construction” in ~220BC. The mongol empire did not exist until 1400 years later. The wall defended against the Xiongnu people, who were a bunch of tribes which frequently raided the wealthier Chinese empire. In 215BC Chinese general Meng Tian marched north of the wall and defeated the tribes, making the construction of the wall pretty pointless for its initial purpose. Thirdly, the wall was reportedly built in 3 years, which seems impossible without modern equipment. Convicts and peasant slave labour were used as replaceable workers and worked to death. Those who died were buried either in mass graves or in the wall itself. Fourthly, the Qin dynasty had just unified the entirety of China and had a massive massive army. The numbers fluctuate but the empire had around half a million soldiers at the end of the unification war (the Roman Empire at this time had 4 million citizens). With nobody to fight, the military was stationed at the borders to defend against barbarians. This was an insanely powerful defence against the xiongnu raiders who had no chance against the might of the Qin.",
"Mongol attacks were a recurring threat but not a constant danger. It wasn't pitched battled at all times, but every year they might expect raids. Building the wall bit by bit over a long period of time was possible because workers were not being attacked.",
"It was a combination of power and by the end tradition, it was built over the course of a LONG time. During war or potential war it was heavily armed. Mongals favored horses as main travel and by building the wall in certain places it made the logistics of getting them resupplied incredibly difficult. They'd need 10s of thousands of soldiers to make a play, and China is huge, the wall had a ton of outposts and direct routes to be resupplied. 400 archers could take out 4,000 Mongals from the wall's section that was completed. It really just made it not worthwhile. Mongols also had other directions to go in, and had a lot of inner conflict. And there was a lot of time to build the thing. Mongols also liked raids in pocket groups. It made them redirect their attention to other places."
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8c68cb | How does an entire civilisation deplete? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Honestly it's normally a combination of factors and it can take long periods of time to happen. Entire civilisations don't disappear overnight. The main reasons are generally things like war, famine, disease or close proximity to a more \"advanced\" or prosperous civilisation. It could be a combination of all or just some of these things."
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8caawz | Why is judaism considered a race? (But other religions not) | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Judaism itself is a religion, but there's a distinction between a Jew (believer in the religion) and a Jew (someone who identifies ethnically as a... well, ethnic Jew). An ethnic Jew does not necessarily have to be someone who believes in Judaism, it's just someone who identifies with the culture and perhaps the languages of Yiddish or Hebrew. It's \"different\" because historically this was viewed as one branch of ethnicities, as opposed to religions such as Christianity or Islam which were spread throughout multiple cultures through Crusades, colonization, etc."
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8cdf0o | Why, with most english words being a mixture of French, Latin and German, are almost all medical words pure latin? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Even long after English was spoken, Latin was still used as a lingua franca in academic circles. That's why you see them in older academic professions like medicine.",
"[Latin, and Greek actually]( URL_1 ) are used in a lot of the sciences because Latin especially, and Greek to a lesser extent, were the \"languages of high class and sophistication\" during the [periods]( URL_2 ) of scientific progress. For [medicine]( URL_0 ), the Greeks came up with the concepts of diagnosis, prognosis, and ethics (the Hippocratic Oath). Progress continued during the [Renaissance]( URL_2 ), when the [printing press]( URL_3 ) was invented, and thus scientific books and papers could be published, using the official \"high class\" language at the time (Latin).",
"Most English words are *not* a \"mixture of French, Latin and German\". The first version of English we actually call English is Old English, a West Germanic language. That doesn't mean it's \"German\": it means that English and German have a common ancestor (a language that has completely disappeared, but which linguists call Proto-Germanic). The Romans did very little to influence the English language except to start writing it with their own alphabet instead of the original runes (an alphabet called \"futhark\", because its first six letters were \"f\", \"u\", \"th\", \"a\", \"r\" and \"k\"). In the 11th century the Norman French arrived, bringing with them their own language, Old French or Norman French -- not Latin, but a language descended *from* Latin with some Celtic and Frankish (another Germanic language) mixed in. Contrary to popular belief, Norman French didn't affect our language that much, but it did give us a lot of new words for things that the Normans took charge of: the monarchy (\"royal\", \"prince\", etc -- but oddly, not \"king\" or \"queen\", which are Germanic), the justice system (\"court\", \"law\", \"judge\", etc), the military (\"army\", \"command\", etc). Other migrations and invasions added a small number of other words; e.g., the Vikings gave us \"skull\". Fast forward another few centuries, though, and a few interesting things happened. The first was university education. Originally, this was to train people to become priests and other members of the clergy, and the language of the church at the time was Mediaeval Latin. Why? Well, Christianity had been the religion of the Roman civilization in its last days -- so much so that in many respects, the Catholic Church can be said to be all that's left of the old Roman Empire. So clergy from all over Europe were expected to be able to read, use and study in Latin. Consequently, this became the language of higher education, and thus the language of highly educated people. The second was how educated Europeans suddenly developed an appreciation for the Ancient Greek and Roman civilizations, and held them up to be The Greatest Things Ever. And so, as well as Latin, they decided they wanted to learn Greek. For good measure, they would show off how well-educated they were by using lots of fancy Latin and Greek words all the time. The third was how science suddenly took off in Europe. Among wealthy families, the tradition came about that younger sons would be encouraged to take up a career in the Church. All of a sudden, the Church was filled with clergymen who weren't really all that interested in religion -- they were only in the Church because their fathers had insisted on it -- but had been very well educated. So to stave off the boredom, they decided to read up on the sciences and set about trying to discover how the cosmos actually worked. There were expeditions to, for example, measure all the mountains in the Andes. And that's why so many of the very earliest scientists were clergymen. They had the necessary education and the necessary boredom. Of course, Europe is a continent with many languages; but since all educated Europeans at the time could speak Latin and Greek, that was the language they communicated to each other in, and that's why so many words relating to the sciences and technology are Greek or Latin in origin (or, in the case of \"television\", a Frankenstein-like monster which is half Greek, half Latin). Latin and Greek were the \"lingua francas\" of the day. A lingua franca is a language that can be used as a way for people to communicate even if they have different native languages. Today, the lingua franca of trade, business and technology is English. If you look at other languages, you'll find many of them have words for new technologies borrowed directly from English: German, for example, has \"Smartphone\", \"Software\", \"Router\", \"Website\", \"Download\" and many, many more."
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8cijx4 | Why can Illegal Immigrants in America get Driver's Licenses, go to Public Schools, etc. if they are illegal? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Immigration laws are federal laws & enforced by the federal government. Drivers licenses & schools are run by the states. It's neither their job nor responsibility to enforce immigration law. The states just want to ensure that drivers are qualified & you don't have uneducated children running around causing havoc. These people are still going to exist. If you don't give them licenses, they're still going to drive.",
"Supreme Court ruled in the 40s any child from anywhere has the right to education. If you’re here illegally it’s better to know how to drive, and pay for car insurance.",
"Typically, people who leave all that they knew and had, to travel to another country, in search of a better life, work hard and as already pointed out, it is much better to give humans education and a driving license than it is to deprive them of access to education and driving. Especially in a country with a high reliance on driving.",
"If I packed a bag and moved to the UK, Germany, France, Austria, Brazil, Japan, China, Korea, Russia, would I get the same treatment illegal immigrants get in the US? Serious question.",
"Fundamentally, forcing someone to prove they are legal residents means forcing them to provide identifying documents. Having to provide identifying documents is limiting the freedom of an individual. As a generality, the US government is founded on the idea of taking absolutely as few of the freedoms a person has away from them as is necessary to run a peaceful society. For one reason or another we have decided that the benefits gained from restricting those public services and rights to only those people that can prove their status is not worth the cost of the decreased liberty of all involved. Note that this cost/benefit analysis is different for different services (There are a LOT of services that requires a SSN, for example, which is one identifying document people may have) and also different for different people (Some value freedom higher, some value protection from abuse higher).",
"Broadly, because we would rather have people be able to participate in society than be stuck living on the edges of it it's safer for all drivers for example if all are tested/licensed; we would rather have all children attend school than have a bunch running around during school hours doing who knows what. We would rather have illegal immigrants have access to ERs (to mention another common talking point) than deal with the public health hazard created if they had to go without. And so on."
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8ck9s5 | What’s the reasoning behind the existence of school uniforms? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Kids don’t have to worry about looking cool and having their socioeconomic status on display. People will have to get to know you to judge you instead of what you wear.",
"Uniforms are an equalizer- kids already have a nasty habit of self segregating based on erroneous things- i imagine its to prevent these from happening",
"When I was in school it was to keep kids from getting picked on for not being able to buy trendy clothes",
"School uniforms can be used for a variety of reasons: In larger gang-filled-towns uniforms can be used to make members of gangs less clear (in a previous school they were so against uniforms but afraid of gangs that you couldnt even wear pants that were not of Blue, Black or Kahki color.) Decreasing bullying because of different clothes in schools. And not worrying about dress codes. There could be a variety of different reasons, the last two are the most brought up ones but I have personal experience with the first scenario."
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8cl5fv | "Race is a social construct" | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Race is a social construct. People are loosely grouped by mostly melanin levels for no other reason than to sort people arbitrarily. Italians and irish are both “white”, north and south africans are both “black”, inuits and aztecs are are both “red”, mongolians and philipinos are both “yellow” (sorry for some derogatory terms in there). They dont look anything alike, share nearly 0 functional common ancestry, and are almost entirely ethnically separate, but each pair would be considered the same race. Thats why race is a social construct, because it creates arbitrary groupings of people based on vague resemblance/useless characteristics to create “teams” within society for usually not great reasons.",
"It’s a term society created to describe biological differences (that make people distinct from one another) between individuals."
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8clljw | What is the purpose/meaning of the extra bit of stairs at the top of some British/Irish staircases? | I remember seeing these stairs in Fawlty Towers where at the top of the stairs, they had a bit where it went back down 3-4 steps. Here's a clip that shows it clearly: URL_0 I thought originally maybe it was some inside joke on behalf of the set designers, but then I saw it again in Father Ted: URL_1 Is there any purpose for these? Are they common, or they just some set designer's joke? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Fawlty Towers was set in a seaside hotel, which are often large houses or terraces that have been 'knocked through' rather than purpose built. Because of this, you often encounter odd corridors and staircases to work around the original layout. This [article]( URL_0 ) is a review of a book about Fawlty Towers, which contains this useful snippet: > I had always wondered, for instance, about that strange, superfluous little staircase on the hotel’s first floor: it was put there deliberately by the director, who recalled such an absurd device in a real Edinburgh hotel. It also helped to exacerbate the sense of frantic movement. So, the director encountered just such a strange layout and incorporated it into the set design.",
"My grandmother's house has something like this towards a bedroom, the bedroom was a new addition and with all the piping this was the cheeper and quicker way in the early 1900's to get around that problem. Made it easier to hire a chippy to do the work rather than a carpenter and a plumber",
"> I had always wondered, for instance, about that strange, superfluous little staircase on the hotel’s first floor: it was put there deliberately by the director, who recalled such an absurd device in a real Edinburgh hotel. It also helped to exacerbate the sense of frantic movement. URL_0 No they are not common as the interview points out even the set designer found it absurd. It's also not uniquely British/Irish [just really poor]( URL_2 ) design work or a result of [stairs being a later]( URL_1 ) edition.",
"As someone who goes in hundreds of houses every year for work, I have never seen anything like that. I'd guess it was made that way for the show, seems like something that you'd find at that hotel. But I'm in America, maybe the Brits do if differently"
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8clqq8 | Why is it by law to wear seatbelts in the car, but on the bus it isn’t? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Buses are safer than cars. They are much heavier, so they'll suffer less impact in collisions with other vehicles. Passengers are seated farther away from other traffic (higher and further back), which also helps reduce damage from impacts. The rows of chairs act as protective barriers that stop passengers and luggage being hurled forwards in the event of a head-on collision. Public transport buses also tend to spend more time on low-speed roads (although not exclusively). Ultimately it's a trade-off. Objectively, you would be (a little) safer on a bus wearing a seat belt than not wearing one. But seat belts also cost money to install and may be inconvenient to use in a crowded bus with people needing to get on and off at short intervals. And if seated passengers have to wear seat belts, what do you do with those who are standing? Are they exempt? And if they are, is that a fair and enforceable policy? Tour buses and long distance buses are a bit different. They tend to make fewer stops, travel at higher speeds and don't have any standing room, so the convenience/safety trade-off leans more towards the latter. So you'll more often see them equipped with seat belts, and in some countries they may be mandatory."
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8cnb8b | Why did empires colonize other lands that were not originally their own? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"To own more land and have more things. Its kinda tough to expand your empire if you never take any land that isn’t yours already..."
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8cnbov | Classical music is still relevant es ever. Nevertheless how come there are no longer super star composers like in earlier times and how do you actually transcend undying music of genius composers to be relevant today? | Yes, I am aware of world star performers like David Garret, Lang Lang but they still perform old repertoires 90% of the time. The closest star composer I know is Ludovico Einaudi but the music still sounds very modern and different. Is it because classical music no longer has a monopoly and because the world has become more diverse? TL;DR where is the next Beethoven or Vivaldi? Thank you Edit: „as ever“ as opposed to „es ever“ | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Well, the landscape of classical music changed a lot over the course of the last hundred and fifty years because there are other means of entertainment. It used to be that classical music was the music of the common man, but now it has the appearance of an aristocratic activity. Composers writing academic art music aren’t necessarily writing for a wider audience, rather they’re writing for academically trained composers like themselves. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t composers that everyone knows these days, take John Williams or Hans Zimmer for example. They’re writing for the most popular media of today just like how Puccini, Verdi or Wagner wrote for opera, which was the most popular media in the 19th century.",
"I like to listen to the musical scores nominated for the Oscars every year. John Williams work is amazing - the Star Wars series, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Harry Potter. James Newton Howard: the Fugitive, Prince of Tides, the Dark Knight. John Barry - Dances with Wolves (my favourite movie score).",
"It’s in film. John Williams is a great example of a symphonic composer. Old classical symphonies and ballets and operas were the entertainment of the day. Now we see movies, and amazing music is written for them. We might think it’s “just” a movie soundtrack, but the music can be held to the same standard as classical operas etc.",
"John Adams and Philip Glass are probably the two biggest art music composers today. Interestingly, they both practice their own unique take on the minimalist style, perfected by Steve Reich. My sense is that we are in a transition phase culturally. Our world society is changing and music is changing along with it. Where things will land is hard to say. The Internet is transforming so many paradigms. I find out about new, good music from people who send me links almost instantly. But it still takes years of effort and study to create anything of high quality. So society is moving much faster, but composers still have to woodshed their work. It’s possible the ‘slow & steady’ efforts of composers are, in a sense, time capsules that bypass faster societal development. So a piece is completed for a society that has changed from when they began. The Rip Van Winkle school of composing, if you will. Not a deliberate decision, just a by-product of living in a fast, changing society.",
"I studied music composition in college, and there are a couple other points I think might help understand. Pretty much everything said so far is spot on, but the market for New art music is also very limited. You can make some money writing for commercials and tv if you are lucky/good enough to get in but it is highly competitive and like most fields now they want you to start off working for free and doing more than writing the music. I quit altogether because I couldn't find lucrative work even with a master's degree. Of all the people I knew, I can only think of maybe one who is making a living at it. The other problem with modern art music is that it is kind of hard to get performers to play it. There are people and groups that specialize in modern music but a performer 's bread and butter is still going to be in playing the classic repertoire. Most concert goers don't like new music (sounds like shit or it's scary) and just want to hear the old music. As a performer who needs to pay the bills you have to spend as much time as you can at being the best at what makes money in a very competitive field. Not much time left over to work out new music. It's just like any other art. In today's economy with the abundance of talent and lack of real demand it makes the skills almost worthless.",
"It only really seems like there are comparatively tons of old superstar composers because we've had hundreds of years to cement them as superstars. Gershwin, Stravinsky, Shastakovich, Cage were all active until the late (or late-ish) 20th century, and they're incredibly well-known composers. Their style of music might be different, but so are the styles of Tchaikovsky, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Handel. I guarantee you that in another fifty years, someone will ask this same question, and someone else will respond with another fifty years' worth of similar work that has become revered over the passage of time. This segues into a phenomenon called \"availability bias\". Essentially, think about the statement, \"They just don't make cars like they used to.\" Well, they actually make cars _better_ than they used to--they generally last longer and crashes in them are more survivable (as well as getting better gas mileage and going faster and so forth). It only seems like old cars lasted longer because the few that lasted, have now lasted a _really long time_ and are impressive for it, and our brains take that notable data point and emphasize it when creating our understanding of time/quality relationships. At the same time, we don't see the ones that didn't last, so we don't think about their non-existence (our brain de-emphasizes them). This overweighting of what is \"available\" is the fundamental characteristic of \"availability bias\" (see also \"survivorship bias\", of which both of these are also examples)",
"The Nazis killed it off. Seriously, since the times of Bach or earlier that had been a trend of increasing complexity, in ways that were sort of designed for intellectual analysis rather than listening to. (Bach is plenty complex too, but in ways that jump out at you at first listen.) This abstractness accelerated through the Romantic period until you get to the Modern period. 12-tone music seems pretty clever when you look at it on paper, but I don't think I'm really going too far out on a limb to say it sounds like shit. That's not what you hear on the classical music radio stations. And a lot of it did come out of Germany, which was the intellectual center of the world at the time. Afterwards, you get the Postmodern period, which has some pretty cool stuff (I'd recommend Philip Glass) but there was basically no further to go in the direction of intellectualism in music. And then of course there was also more competition from lower-brow \"folk\" music, which of course always existed, but could then be more easily recorded and reproduced.",
"Throwing my two cents in here, might not be worth anything: The Classical circuit became inundated with increasingly experimental music in the 20th century. I've heard some argue that the last original thought in music was the Tristan Chord, which introduced dissonance in the 1860s. Later people like Arnold Schoenberg and Krzysztof Penderecki steered classical music into increasingly atonal directions and there was the similar rise of minimalism/serialism like Philip Glass. While I personally enjoy some of this music (Glass, Corigliano) it can leave a lot of people cold, confused and even angry. Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring's premiere was met with a literal riot, and listening to Glass's solo piano album is tough on a lot of people. And as the classical arena became more and more (pardon the term) academic in their writing, that doesn't appeal to a mass audience. Most people like melody and harmony and a great deal of these composers turn their nose up at this style - Górecki's minimalist but beautifully melodic Symphony No 3 was outright dismissed by his contemporaries (Story goes fellow composer Boulez shouted \"SHIT!\" at the end of the premiere), yet its one of the few classical works of the last 50 years that has gained real acknowledgement outside the classical music world: in the early nineties, a recording sold something like a million copies in its first year which is unheard of. So while there are some amazingly talented people who write for orchestra - Corgliano, Goldenthal, John Williams, John Adams, Joseph Curiale are some I adore - the majority of the movement is not what most people want to hear."
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8cpf94 | How does Saudi Arabia make sure all of their expats like engineers, businessman, and English teachers follow their religious laws? | I heard that personal computers are all inspected for adult content and images. How are all expats monitored? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It only 'counts' inside the country. If you hang out with Arabs, you quickly learn they are all hypocrites and will happily travel to a less restrictive country where they get to drink and party.",
"It's hard to wrap your head around if you assume the end goal is maintaining absolute purity of the country & laws are enforced fairly & equally. It's much simpler to understand if you view it as a tool of control. If you're a foreigner with money & don't make enemies of the wrong people, you can get away with a lot of things as long as you do them in private. It's only after you piss off the wrong people or are stupid enough to do things publicly that they start coming after you to make an example out of you. Saudi Arabia isn't a modern Western Liberal Democracy. It's a theocratic absolute monarchy where the royal family literally owns the majority of the country and they aren't bound by pesky details like a \"Constitution\".",
"if you are talking about alcohol and clubs, then there is no place to get booze excepts embassies. embassies usually hold parties and alcohol is served there, some is smuggled through. and there are compounds, which pretty much is a different countries inside saudi arabia. if you are talking about pornography then there is good old vpn, some saudis might even recommend you something. I have asked many foreigners who work in saudi, the worst part is that there is no night time activities like in the western world, and most go to dubai or kuwait or bahrain to have a good time.",
"The main rules we had to follow was this: don’t flout the rules publicly. If you were drunk in your home, nobody cared as long as you didn’t sell alcohol to the locals. And don’t be drunk on the street. Don’t, don’t, don’t get caught drivinf under the influence. Long sleeve pants were strongly encouraged, but with all the heat out there, it was a great idea anyway! (Bare skin + vinyl car seat in July = PAIN) Most bigger companies paired the new folks up with a more experienced family who helped get you up to speed with the society’s expectations. Sometimes you got a welcome book from the company, too - giving you advice and guidance on not breaking the laws. The mutawwah these days have much less power, you won’t get arrested for inappropriate dress; harassed, sure, but not as bad as before. Also, depends on what city you’re in; the coastal cities are more liberal than the central highlands. Your luggage gets inspected at the airport (well, xrays now) but you’re not followed around. Source: 20+ years in KSA",
"Expats from Saudi Arabia, or those in Saudi Arabia? They have no control over those that have left their country, but for those moving to their country they do have the ability to check their homes, computers, phones, etc for what they deem to be illegal."
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8csd1f | Kendrick Lamar has been awarded the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music for his album 'DAMN.' Why is it (and his previous work, notably TPAB) considered a masterpiece? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"He engages with social and economic issues on a level that few mainstream rappers ever have. He makes hits that everybody can get down with but speaks on serious issues too. Most of all though, his flows are crazy. Kendrick does wtf he wants musically. Of course the people he works with (Dr. Dre, Mixed By Ali, Pharell, Thundercat, Kamasi Washington, Sounnwave) contribute a great deal to the overall sound."
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8ct2d8 | If Miranda states you have the right to remain silent / seek attorney , how come more often than not, the accused will consent to a willing interview with investigators. Are their consequences for remaining silent? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"No, there are no consequences for remaining silent. people are just dumb. Most people think that they have the ability to talk their way out of their legal situation, which is wrong. If the police truly think you are guilty nothing you say will prevent the cops from moving on with their prosecution. All talking does is provide possible harmless facts that could aid the prosecutions case. If the cops ever arrest you should **NEVER** talk to the police with out a lawyer, even if you are guilty.",
"> how come more often than not, the accused will consent to a willing interview with investigators. Mainly because people are uninformed about the risks involved. \"I'm innocent, so talking won't cause any problems for me,\" they incorrectly assume. And also because police lie. \"Just tell us what happened, off the record, and we'll get you out of here and back home to your family,\" they might say while still recording and having no intention of releasing the suspect any time soon. > Are their consequences for remaining silent? Nope. Nothing other than potentially being treated coldly by the police when you refuse to play their game."
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8cv5ym | How and why did caskets get their hexagonal shape? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"**Coffins** got their hexagonal shape because tapering at the shoulders and feet reduced the cost of the coffin (less wood to produce). **Caskets** are rectangular. [Source and brief history]( URL_0 )",
"This shape allowed enough room for shoulders, and used less wood than a box the same width as the shoulders for the entire length.",
"I think technically a casket is when it isn't that hexagonal shape you are thinking of, but rectangular or pill shaped. When it is that classic wide at the shoulders hexagonal shape it is called a coffin, and as previously stated it was to save on wood.",
"I'm having a hard time believing the shape was to conserve materials. Angles can often create a lot of waste if not bulk producing a product. Coffins also hide wood, too, in those angles for the shoulder. The amount of wood saved has to be nominal at best and not worth the joint work. I would guess it's more to do with style and fashion but that's just a guess.",
"This is an awesome question. I've never thought about this, but I'm going to suggest that it's important for many people to be burried the correct way, it might be that this shape is used to show which way to bury the body. It is a very odly specific shape. Edit- just asked an engineer friend who thinks - the shape is much stronger and could hold 6ft of dirt, the volume of the void is less so there won't be as much of a collapse into the hole in the future. Also tradition. Plus it is lighter to carry.",
"I would assume that it is to conserve the amount of wood being used to create the coffin.",
"This is going to get buried, but 'saving materials' doesn't seem right. It seems like there might be a connection to the shape of the exterior coffins of Egyptian mummies. They have the typical hexagonal shape to accommodate the folded arm position. A simplification still evokes the human shape, with a recognizable head vs. feet. It's disorienting to approach a rectangular casket, because you can't easily tell where the deceased's head is. Maintaining a tradition like this for thousands of years across time and geography is a bit of a stretch though, I wouldn't be surprised if it became trendy when Eqyptomania became a thing a few hundred years ago. Karma to the redditor who can find backup for this!",
"Just a quick correction: technically what you described is a coffin. A casket is rectangular in shape. No big deal, but now you know!",
"I want to know why coffins aren't inserted standing up in order to save space and add more plots."
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8cx7er | Why is time personified as male and nature personified as female? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"As a historian I can at least answer part of your question. In the early stages of human religious evolution, specifically in indo-european sedentary tribes, Earth, or nature related female deities where considered to be the primlary deities. According to some researchers, this is due to the idea that females \"give\" life by \"giving\" birth, which would be similar to how the earth \"gives\" life (fruits, crops, etc). As such, female nature-related deities came first, and only when in those cultures the role of the male during conception was understood, where male \"sky\" deities introduced, such as Ra, Zeus, Odin, etc.",
"Time is destructive / nature is generative? Time is a force or order / nature is a force of chaos? Other such arbitrary and binary oppositions?"
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8cxxe2 | Why are so many Americans opposed to the idea of a universal healthcare similar to other high income nations? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Usually shortages of doctors occur not long after, resulting in rationing. This leads to waiting lists and a lack of innovation in the medical field. Doctors typically don’t go to medical school for several years for just $70k/year. Universal health care is usually good for small things like colds but with things like cancer it becomes more of a problem because people have to wait much longer for scans and other basic things you can get quickly here. This is why Canadians usually come to America for treatment. Also this can lead to the government deciding who lives and who dies. (Before I get hate, please understand that I lost my grandmother because of these issues)",
"In a nutshell, Americans have long not trusted their government to run anything well. In fairness, with such a large population and geographical area there are more complications with running a federal health service compared to how the U.K does. There is also the perception that a government run healthcare is ‘socialist’ and socialism is dirty word in America.",
"Not all Americans are but the ones that are opposed to it generally believe that a free market economy based on competition to provide these services actually leads to better care at a lower cost. Plus at least 50% of Americans believe that smaller government is better. Less government equals less taxes equals more money in their pockets at home.",
"I've heard a few reasons: * They are worried their taxes will go up * They distrust the government and don't think the government is capable of overseeing healthcare payments * They believe a free market economy is best, even for healthcare * They don't want to see their tax dollars paying for medical procedures they disagree with * They oppose socialism in general either out of preference for capitalism or they believe it leads to people being entitled * They are worried about healthcare shortages if people overutilize healthcare once they aren't personally paying for it Now I don't personally agree with these (so you don't need to argue with me over them), but they are some of the arguments I've heard from people who oppose universal healthcare. The concerns about taxes and government incompetence are probably the most common, but the others pop up now and then.",
"Ever been to the secretary of state? Know much about the costs of making a simple bathroom building in a park (millions!)? Food stamps have also not worked out well, and neither have welfare attempts. To think that this massive thing could be done by government is to ignore the historical pattern in America: government into every-day lives / needs = terrible",
"My opposition is on the grounds that I don't think throwing more money at a problem is a good way to fix it. We already spend more on healthcare than any other country. We need to fix the system before we expand it.",
"I don't personally want to pay for everybody else's healthcare. A lot of the middle class feels that way.",
"I don't think this gets talked about much, but there's a major hurdle unique to the US. Currently, it's more or less standard for employers (mainly white collar workers) to provide a healthcare plan for their employees. Most people with employer provided healthcare are reasonably ok with their healthcare. Moving over to a government universal program likely means dismantling employer healthcare programs in favor of a new system. Even if this is a better long term move, it's not likely to be a painless transition, therefore many are hesitant to ditch their current plans in favor of a new universal system. This demographic is also one that's more likely to vote, so politicians tend to share this concern. Disclaimer: I'm just a random dude on the internet and this is just my best understanding, so this could be totally wrong."
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8czxvv | How does art (older and newer) become priceles | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The art world is completely arbitrary. It is run by rich snobs who can piss away millions of dollars on whatever art they like. Once a certain artist becomes popular among rich art snobs, everyone wants to buy that work. And there are Other factors... If a piece of art was owned by somebody famous, it acquires more value because some rich snob wants to be able to say, “This painting was once owned by So-And-So famous person.” I’ve seen auctions where people spent millions of dollars on the shittiest paintings just because they were previously owned by a celebrity. There is no logic to it."
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8d02i5 | How did suffixes for differing nationalities come to be named as such (-ese, -ean, -ish) | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"This is only a partial answer, but you're actually correct about “French.” Around the time of the Holy Roman Empire, there was a group of people in France called the Franks, or *Frankish*, and in the year 800 AD the Pope crowned their king Charlemagne the first Holy Roman Emperor. Even in modern German the word for the country France is *Frankreich*, literally “Land of Franks”. Over decades and centuries “Frankish” was corrupted into “French,” like in the telephone game where people in a line repeat a message and it usually is different at the end from how it started. Also, it's possible that *-ese* as in “Chinese” and “Japanese” derives from the Latin **-ensis**, which is used to indicate place of origin. The word for this is “demonym.”",
"The difference between -ese and -ish in English comes from whether we get the word from French (compare to Modern French: chinoise, japonaise, hollandaise, mayonnaise, etc.) or from its Germanic roots (compare to Modern German: Englisch, Chinesisch, Japanisch, Französisch, etc.). Old French -eis became -ese, while the Old English -isc became -ish. As to why we decided to borrow the French word for Chinese instead of use a more native Germanic word, that I don’t have the answer to. Languages are complicated and change occurs often and without much reason. For why some things are -ese and others are -ian, you’ll have to ask the Ancient Romans. My guess would be that something similar happened a long time ago where one people used one ending, and another people used another ending, and after one people conquered the other and the languages blended, they ended up with two different ways to form demonyms.",
"Interestingly if you are from New Zealand (as I am) there is no proper demonym like English, Italian, etc. New Zealanders are not New Zealandish or New Zealandian. The closest adjectives are the somewhat informal “Kiwi” or the clunky sounding “New Zealander” (which is fine as a noun but weird as an adjective).",
"If people from Poland are called Poles, why aren't people from Holland called Holes?",
"If it ends with \"ish\", it very possibly comes from Old English. Places relevant to Germans will feature this commonly, such as \"English\", \"Danish\", \"Swedish\", \"Polish\", \"Frankish\", with \"Scottish\", \"Spanish\" also, and by extension \"French\", \"Dutch\". These are usually from before 1740 or so when \"ish\" was basically just the default. If it ends with \"ian/an\" it's from Latin probably via Normans. These are usually Roman concepts, like a unified \"Germania\" filled with \"Germani\", or a land of \"Italia\" filled with \"Italiani\". Medieval/modern Latin still applies and this becomes the default demonym ending in English after 1470 or so when Modern English, influenced by French-speaking Normans, takes root in recognizable form. If it ends with \"ese\" you can blame Marco Polo, but also something about the Italians dominating things for a bit. \"Cinese\" to \"Chinese\", \"Giapponese\" to \"Japanese\", \"Milanese\", \"Bolognese\", \"Parmese\", and I'd blame \"Viennese\" on Italy too, but really it's a weird rule about the way words end. The French are to blame for this too, with \"Congolese\". \"i\" as an ending is from Persian and that's because Persia basically dominated the Middle Eastern cultural sphere for the past 2000 years. After a while, English stopped taking from German, or French, or Italian, or Persian, and just started taking whatever they called themselves. That's why subsaharan African names are so weird- it reached that stage of \"yeah whatever\".",
"Most languages have their own suffix to denote a demonym. In English other Germanic languages, that suffix is \"-ish.\" (e.g. English, Spanish, Turkish, etc) However sometime in the last hundred years English speakers stopped applying that suffix to other places, and started borrowing demonyms from other languages, usually French. Usually the suffix ultimately derives from the Latin -ensis, which gives us -ese and -ian via French. -An also ultimately derives from Latin. In modern English usually whichever suffix sounds best is chosen and that becomes convention.",
"I really like some british demonyms that come right out of left field. e.g. Liverpudlian, Mancunian",
"While this topic is being discussed, I have been curious for a while about the -ic ending. I have only seen it used in Icelandic and Greenlandic ( also Hellenic ). Does anyone know the etymology behind this? I tried to find the answer before but never did find anything.",
"A fun fact that I don't know if it's true and I'm sorry for not being an answer. But Brazil, using a Roman language, should use a Portuguese version of the latin -ensis for demonyms. And we do for a lot of nationalities. Yet we ourselves are \"brasileiros\" using and ending (-eiros) that is usually used for professions. And I think it actually fits, because we are not the \"people of Brazil\", but the \"workers of Brazil\" and that's the life of a Brazilian: be born, grow up and work until you die.",
"Switzerland here... what is that „suffix“ you speak of?",
"In our case, we ended up having a new word for the nationality (Spaniard) as the original word (Spanish) became more associated to the language. I can't recall another country with the suffix -ard",
"Something I noticed is that countries ending in “land” tend to go to “ish” (English, Polish, lrish, Scottish, Finnish). And then I thought of Icelandic and decided to go to bed. Also one more ending I haven’t seen mentioned here is -i as in Pakistani"
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8d0oui | Why is the word "german" so different in other languages? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The name of a country is invented in each language (or language group) independent of other languages. Particularly in antiquity when there likely were few if any translators to work between the two groups.",
"Germany as the modern nation is a relatively new concept, before that it consisted of several territories that kept changing along tribes, then states, before consolidation. However other countries already had contact with them before Germany so they called them according to their relations so the words in their respective languages refer to those rather than the modern nation.",
"There is an entire wikipedia article on this very topic, which I will link to at the end of this comment. The answer to your question is that for a very long time, what we now know as \"Germany\" was once a group of different tribes and states. Authors from different cultures would refer to these tribes with a single word, which might be the name of a particular tribe (Saxon), a made-up word (Germany), or the word that the people there called themselves (Deutschland). URL_0"
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8d163a | The Smith Mundt Act (Propaganda) | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The original Smith-Mundt act allowed the US State department to create and distribute US propaganda abroad. The updated version allows that propaganda to be distributed domestically. For the purpose of this act, \"propaganda\" is simply government telling the people stuff directly. It's not necessarily insidious, false or misleading. For example, \"Zika virus is spreading, here's how to protect yourself\" is propaganda."
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8d27iy | Why do NBA players always wait for someone to help them up? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"When I played sports, it was for two reasons. To prevent injury from straining and stretching in weird positions. It was also just another aspect of playing on a team. That you were in it together, and they were there to pick you up."
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8d64it | why people are/can be attracted to cartoon or anime characters | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"So first, your brain is pattern seeking. It doesn't really see a man or woman infront of them. It see's a lot of specific patterns like hip to waist ratio, eye spacing, symmetry etc. And that all makes someone attractive or not. Anime, or similar art, works by highlighting specific characteristics and usually putting emphasis on them to make them specifically attractive somehow. As for the emotional attachment, it could be partially pathos. Pathos is where the audience empathizes with the character of a story. We grow feelings for these characters. Those feelings can be internalized. Second is a sort of disconnected feeling amongst certain people. Often these people don't have a whole lot of love coming to them from real life. Either percieved or real. So they settle for what they can get, even if it is artificial. Often the artificial love is in some ways better than real life. Virtual waifu loves you unconditionally, despite your failings. Something that many real relationships don't offer.",
"Because at some level we don't see them as fake, which is the reason we can enjoy them in the first place. When you watch a program on TV, what you are really seeing is glowing bits of color moving across a flat surface. We know it is \"fake\", that there isn't a car chase in our living rooms, but that doesn't stop us from relating to it as those it were real. We feel excited about the action, we identify with the good guy trying to save the day and worry about the bad guy getting away, even though we know it is fake on many levels. There is no reason these sorts of emotions can't extend to animate characters who are just fake in one additional way.",
"It's kinda like this: what's better, a cake, or a picture of a cake? The cake smells pretty good, looks pretty good, and tastes pretty good. It's not great, but not bad either. The cake in the picture however is the perfect cake. It is, objectively, better than any other cake, in every way. But in the end, it's only a picture of a cake. In short, these people look at the picture of the cake, and like that. They can't eat it, but they still prefer it over the real deal.",
"A character in the anime Genshiken explained it quite well: URL_0",
"Like much of psychology, there is a lot of speculation and a lot of different theories on how and why people think. However, to understand why people have waifus requires a brief explanation of attraction. The generally held consensus is that, first of all, your brain is pattern-seeking. You look at symmetry, ratios, and the like, and you determine that a character is attractive that way. As cold as that sounds, there is another half to this. The other half is personality. What makes someone likable is that they are relatable to you, or you find them interesting in some sort of way. Waifus may display both, but they are obviously not real, tangible people. The reason people choose waifus is because it gives them a sort of connection that they may otherwise not have.",
"I get what you're driving at but your phrasing of this sucks. A picture of a 'real' woman in a magazine or whatever is just as 'fake' as any other picture. It's a picture. Lines and curves, color and shade, given form. Also uh, I dunno about 'emotional attachment' do you get emotionally attached to an image of a pair of tits, real or otherwise? I don't think you understand how arousal works.",
"A good story suspends disbelief for the duration of the story. Hence movie stars, screen crushes, and the difficulty of most people to entirely separate actors from the screen roles they've played. A screen crush happens when we've spent a relatively short but intense period of time with an interesting and charismatic character. In a movie, these fictional characters are every bit as fake as an animated character. One is drawn and one is pantomimed by a human, but the characters are equally unreal. Or equally real."
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8d6kzk | If I buy a French island as a British person, could I then make it a British island? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"While I'm not ~super~ versed on French law, I believe that no. If you own real estate in another country, it's still within that country's borders and you're under that government's control. That real estate being surrounded by water doesn't change the rules.",
"> If I buy a French island as a British person, could I then make it a British island? Let us restate your question another way: Suppose you bought a plot of land out in the countryside. Can you decide to make that land part of another country of your choice? No. No you can't, that would be ridiculous.",
"Every piece of private land has two owners: the citizen and the state. How do you know you own your island? Because the government of France says you do. When you bought it, the previous owner wrote a deed telling the French government it was yours now. If someone else tries to take it from you, the government checks the deed, and then sends guys with guns to kick the intruder out. What if you said \"sorry, France, this land is part of Britain now, I'm not paying you property taxes\"? It depends on how the British government reacts. If the Brits say \"What? Who is this joker?\" then the French government sends guys with guns to arrest you. If Britain says \"Yep! We agree!\" and sends guys with guns to protect you from France's guys with guns, then it's a war. Your ownership of your land is secondary to the nation's ownership of it, and the nation's ownership is backed by guys with guns."
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8d6nlk | Why is it okay for men to show their nipples in public, but not women? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It is ok for women to show their nipples in public...at least according to a federal judge. Prosecutors failed to provide sufficient evidence that a women’s breasts are different than a man’s. Realistically, it’s because men see a woman’s boobs as sexual objects and don’t think they should be expected to control themselves."
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8d902o | why do “bad words” exist? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"It's all in culture. Some accept it some don't. Its that we give these \"bad words\" their connotation it's more just the power of majority thinking these words hold meaning. Nothing more nothing less."
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8dbrx7 | Can am orchestra function without a maestro? As long as every section follows the music they have to can’t they just all work autonomously? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"If it’s something like a march it may be easy enough, but the real trouble comes when the song has a varying tempo — ritardandi (slowing down), accelerandi (speeding up), fermatae (held out notes), etc. The reason for this is because the conductor dictates how much a part will slow down or speed up, or how long a certain note (or rest) will be held out before resuming to the next part. Extremely difficult to get dozens of performers to agree on a degree/rate of tempo fluctuation without some kind of leader.",
"Yes, but it's the conductor's job to play the whole orchestra like an instrument, communicating with gestures when he/she wants to hear more volume or less from various sections, keeping tempo, and leading the group. Can an army function without a commander? They can all still operate their equipment, but group cohesion would suffer, and strategic objectives wouldn't be met.",
"If they are small and close together, and highly skilled yes. But in general not well. The main purpose of the conductor is to give a single point of reference that the entire orchestra or band can have. They can simulate this by listening to each other but the combination of human reaction time and sound travel distance will cause there to be a distinguishable schism between one side and the other. If there are any tempo changes at all then they will drift even further apart or not take them at exactly the same time and rate."
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8dc5by | Why, after flipping a coin to decide something, do we then flip the coin back over again onto the back of our hand before revealing? | From what I understand about the practice, it is to let fate decide the outcome. But by taking the already flipped coin, and then reversing its decision, it feels to me like we're all agreeing to do the exact opposite of what fate has chosen. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Mathematically, it doesn't change the odds of any particular outcome. It's really just a tradition. I suspect it might be rooted in preventing unscrupulous people from doing slight of hand and manipulating the coin since it's much easier to move things in the palm of your hand than things on the back of your hand.",
"Assuming flipping a coin has a 50/50 chance for coming up heads/tails, doing one last flip is irrelevant to the outcome. In the 50% heads comes up, you'll flip to tails, and in the 50% tails comes up, you'll flip to heads. This leaves us with the same 50/50 as before.",
"Mostly for convenience at the small cost of knowing that we add 1 half flip to every toss. Really, each toss of a fair coin will come up heads 50% of the time, and tails 50% of the time, but in random intervals. So as long as our method of flipping is *consistent* across each flip, what we do before the reveal of the face doesn't really matter, provided that we aren't looking at the results and altering them somehow through trickery.",
"I always just flip it and let it drop. Same with everyone else I see flipping coins. Touching it after the flip has started is a good way to get accusations of tomfoolery. -source, i'm a soccer referee and do (and see) a LOT of coin flips in 0 trust situations."
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8dew8u | Why is the contraction of "will not" "won't" and not "willn't"? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Willn't is valid if somewhat archaic - Charles Dickens used it. Won't is a contraction of wonnot, which was itself derived from an alternative for will used a long time ago, namely woll."
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8dgwy3 | Why do women take the last name of their husband when the get married? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"We don't, always. My last name is hyphenated with my husband's, and while we were engaged we considered all permutations including each of us keeping our names as well as my husband taking my name. Additionally, outside the West this is a far less common tradition. But, yes, if we're talking about (most of) Europe and parts of the world that are influenced by traditional European culture, it's because, until the 20th century, a woman did not exist as a legal individual in her own right but was under the guardianship (called couverture in legal terms) of her husband or father. Fun semi-related fact: as late as the 1960s a woman could not necessarily have credit or a bank account in her own name without the permission of a male relative.",
"Marriage was often a transaction with the woman as some kind of property, certaily in more upper-class situations. It is still enshrined in many marriage ceremonies. \"Who **gives** this woman to be married....?\" and the father actually being the one giving away the bride and thus relinquishing his obligation to provide for her. After marriage, she would go from her family home to become part of her husband's extended family. The early Christian church considered the husband as \"head of the woman\" as well. The wife was expected to defer to him.",
"It is definitely something cultural too. I know in Brazil you usually get both names, so your last name is one of yours and one of your husbands. Or both from each. Then you get really long names",
"Cultural. Iceland has a largely patronymic system. A woman has her father's name - sort of - until she gets married. If the father is Erik Gunnarsson (lit. Erik, Gunnar's son), the woman is Helga Eriksdottir (cee wut I did there? lit. Helga, Erik's daughter). When she gets married to Ragnar Leifsson she remains Helga Eriksdottir. She does not become Mrs. Leifsson. Her children become XX Ragnarsson or XX Ragnarsdottir. Icelandic phone directories are the stuff of nightmares.",
"You've gotten good answers so far for the historical context and where the tradition began. Now, in many cases, it's a matter of convenience just supported by the tradition. when you get married, if you have kids, buy property, etc it really does simplify things to have the same name. It makes it easy to clarify that you are one family unit. Applications for loans, kids' school functions, even credit cards just takes a layer of explanation out of it. It's not really a big deal and easy to overcome, but it just simplifies things when you choose one collective name. I've got several friends that went with the wife's name because it was an easier name or had less historical baggage, but I think many just use the husband's name out of tradition.",
"When I married my wife, there was no question as to whether she would be taking my name. We both understood that the traditional concept of marriage as a property exchange (the property in question being the woman, of course) was no longer relevant. It didn't make any sense to change a name and take on a bunch of paperwork for a meaningless and archaic gesture. I have a good friend who, when he married his wife, went through the procedure to change *his* surname to hers because his own father was abusive toward him. So some people have their own reasons irrespective of the traditions they choose to observe."
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8dj2i0 | The Indian caste system. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The Hindu caste system is made up of stages called Varna. They are as follows... Brahmin - Religious leaders, priests, educators, scholars. Kshatriya - Warriors, political figures. Vaishya - Farmers, merchants. Shudra - Manual laborers, craftspeople. Dalit - \"Untouchables\", dirty jobs no one else wants to do.",
"Right. So when the Aryans were living in India, they gave people last names based on their professions. At that time, it was just a way of identifying who did what for a living. Slowly, this morphed into four professions: Brahmins (The people who read the holy texts and worked at temples as Pandits), Soldiers (Can’t remember the original term), Vaishyas (Farmers, Merchants) and Shudras (Menial Workers). The thing is, what started as a convenience based system slowly developed into a system of prejudice and discrimination. The Brahmins were considered the most important as they were deeply associated with religion and those who fell out of the system into the more odd jobs became the Dalits (Untouchables). Unfortunately, the system lasted for a long time and the Dalits faced the worst of it. They were not allowed to drink from communal wells, couldn’t get a job that was something other than the ones they were wont to do, were denied education, etc. Naturally, the Dalit community grew on to be secluded and disadvantaged. This was how the caste system worked. Just like Apartheid, almost as terrible.",
"Follow us on this question: if someone was an untouchable could they just move and say they belong to a different class?"
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8dl870 | How do you go about opening/starting a school | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"What kind of school? What sorts of subjects will be taught at this school? Where will the school be located? How will the school handle funding and revenue? Depending on where the school will be, there will most likely be legal requirements to start a school. There may also be \"accreditation\" organizations, which conduct periodic reviews of school activities in order to ensure a high standard of education. Between those two sets of requirements, that should make or break whatever idea you have in mind."
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8dsg0j | Why does NASCAR race on oval tracks, rather than the more complicated layouts of other motorsports? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Oval tracks are a completely different kind of race, requiring different strategies to win. In the same way tennis, badminton, and volleyball share many similarities but are ultimately very different, different kinds of racing are very different sports."
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8duk83 | why is it in Japanese stuff some text is still in English | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"Most Japanese (especially those that would play video games) know at least some English, enough to read the random few words in the game that are in English (or at least can figure them out from context). So this small amount of English isn't really a detriment to the game. As to why they have English, in this case the game was developed in Japan, so it's probably just because it looks cool. Other games might include English to keep localization costs down, which is probably the reason the opening cutscene hasn't been redubbed in Japanese.",
"Everyone takes English in school, so they know at least some words even if they don’t pay attention in class. English also lends a more “modern” feel, because technology and modern business words tend to be loaned directly from English, whereas a game or anime or something that’s going for a more traditional feel would stick to pure Japanese, avoid loanwords, use old fashioned expressions, etc. It’s pretty misleading to claim Japanese youth “idolize” the West. A certain amount of English has just become assimilated into the culture. Some are into Western media, some aren’t, and most hate English class, but in the same way that most students hate math class. Most people do watch Hollywood movies, by far America’s strongest cultural export not just in Japan but all over the world, so that probably has a lot of influence. But keep in mind that Japanese people prefer to watch foreign movies dubbed, by a significant margin. As a whole, they quite like their language. A sprinkling of English adds some flair, that’s all.",
"The Japanese think English is really cool to add in randomly. Listen to any anime song and you will probably find a few English phrases in there. The reason they think it's cool is probably because the west in general is seen as cool. Japan used to be very traditional and now as a counter movement young people idolise the west.",
"Your question should really be: #why is it in [foreign country] stuff some text is still in English? This is not a phenomenon unique to the Japanese: 1. The British ruled half the world for a century, their colonies and lasting influence in terms of culture and language can be found in many countries. Second and third in terms of global influence in the colonial period would be Spanish and French. Even countries not directly ruled by the British absorbed English words by means of the extensive British trade network. 2. America followed Britian as the world power, and American influence, culture, and trade dominates. 3. English is a second or third language for a huge percentage of the world. In fact, English has the most speakers in the world, if we're counting second language speakers. 4. English is the de facto international language for: aviation, international business, international tourism, technology and programming, science and research, medicine, the Internet, etc. 5. Almost every individual in foreign countries knows or is learning or wishes they could learn English, not necessarily because they love English or America, but because it gives them a big economic advantages and opens up more opportunities in the fields mentioned above. Not to mention many people wish they could travel to, work in, or live in an English-speaking country. 6. Basic English is either a required part of primary school curriculum or a very common elective in primary and secondary education in almost every country. In Japan it is usually part of the basic required curriculum. 7. Like French or Latin before, English often has an air of civilization and refinement about it. Many things are named or referred to by English words because it makes it sound more sophisticated or exotic or of higher quality to foreigners. English and Americans do the same thing with French and Spanish words (and other languages). Older, educated people, or those wanting to sell something, like to use English for this reason. 8. As English generally is the language of Hollywood, the coolest movies, the most famous singers and rappers, the best athletes, etc. English tends to have a general \"cool\" factor for many foreigners. The younger generation and like to use English for this reason. Not all of these factors apply simultaneously, but the net result is that there are TONS of English loan words in every language, for things like food, or technology, or business, etc. Of course, former Spanish or French or German, etc. colonies might have more loan words from those languages, but English still permeates every nation in the world. China's authoritarian government recently had to take steps to forbid the usage of English loan-words in official media because they are becoming so prevalent. There are so many example of creole- and pidgin-English vocabulary, and even creole- and pidgin-English languages. Just looking at Asia you've got: Singlish (Singapore) Chinglish (China) Hinglish (India) Konglish (Korea) Taglish (Philippines) Japlish / Engrish (Japan) Mix-mix (Hong Kong) Watch Filipino, Pakistani, Malaysian, Indian, Nigerian or South African news or soap operas and be amazed at how many English words are slipped in all the time. You've also got Spanglish in North America. You've got Sheng (Kenya) and Camfranglais (Cameroon) in Africa. You've got Franglais, Denglish and Finglish in Europe. And there are many more that I could name that don't have funny names like West Africa Pidgin or Thai pidgin. URL_0 URL_1 So the answer to your question is complex, and multi-faceted, but the basic reason is simply because English is everywhere. But specifically for Japan, they were effectively an American colony following WWII, and so American culture and influence and language has become especially integrated into their culture, way of life, and national psyche. After Japan's defeat, instead of being a target of Japanese resentment, we strangely became something like a big brother to them that they looked up to and aspired to be like. To this day, we remain close allies both economically, and militarily. And there is a strong continuing exchange of culture and language in terms of science, technology, video games, anime and manga, movies and music. What was once an unequal relationship has since changed into one of mutual respect, with Japan and America both admiring each other's economies, technologies, foods, histories, lands, and cultures. So it is not surprising at all to find English words in common usage in many parts of Japanese daily life. In fact, if you travel enough you will be more surprised to *not* see English around the world.",
"Sometimes the English word is preferred depending on the situation. I localize US ads to Japanese all the time and sometimes they have me keep the English word since Japanese will associate the english word with the product better. Often I use lots of English in action games. Or the katakana spelling on the word. But for japanese RPGs it is often all Japanese. But even stats are often written in English.",
"The same reason we have other languages in English around us. We have French words like entrepreneur. A cafe in a movie might be called \"Le Pappillion\". We often use loan words when discussing foods rather than coming up with our own words, like for \"sushi\" or \"quesadillas\" Sometimes it's cool and exotic to have foreign words, just like when people get tattoos of Chinese symbols that they don't *really* know what they mean."
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8dzy9k | Do shows like American Idol have to pay an absurd amount in royalties? Is there some loophole to avoid paying for every single song people cover? | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"They aren’t playing the original recording, but instead are creating and performing their own versions, which are called covers. The agreements are different, and generally less expensive for covers than original recordings. In general, if you’re compensating for covering music correctly, there’s usually a reasonable fee paid up front, and then a minuscule fee paid for each air play or download. This is like a dime on the radio or on-line service. It’s probably more for television. Of course, you’re also probably underestimating the costs paid by television shows, and the amounts they generate. Shows like American Idol not only generate the typical television revenues from ads and syndication, but also from the releases of the songs, and the eventual take of their share of the royalties of the artists when they move to their hopefully successful careers. I’m speaking from pedestrian knowledge, and the discoveries I’ve learned by having friends in bands try to do the right things when they release covers. I’m sure the real answer is not far off, though.",
"I think you're vastly underestimating the amount TV shows spend on royalties. Every single time any song plays on any TV show, royalties have to be paid to the artist. One example of how crazy this can be is any time someone says \"LET'S GET READY TO RUMBLE\" on TV, Michael Buffer (who trademarked the phrase) gets an estimated $5 million in royalties."
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8e0qmt | How did an asteroid end with dinosaurs if earth is so big? | How did an asteroid end with dinosaurs if earth is so big?, And even if there were many asteroids it's like throwing hot stones to an ant colony, you may kill many but a few would survive. | Culture | explainlikeimfive | {
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"The asteroid impact caused a lot of dust and dirt and so on to enter the atmosphere, where it disrupted the weather patterns (making the planet colder due to less sunlight reaching the land below) for a significant time since it takes a long time for that much dust and debris to finally settle. The dinosaurs weren't killed instantly by a single impact or anything. They died out over the course of many years, which on a geological time scale is still pretty much the blink of an eye."
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