What’s a common “fact” that’s spread around that’s actually not true and pisses you off that too many people believe it?
That food stamps or any handouts at all are a serious problem. Our (the US) government launches a single bomb that’s worth years of food support. Idgaf if the food stamp recipients never do a damn thing but watch TV. I’d much rather millions of people doing that than bombing brown people half a world away.
The idea of monetary scale is one I think is a big misconception anytime we’re talking about budget. “This committee wasted MILLIONS of dollars on this stupid niche scenario!” Well, yeah; the USA has millions of people in it. If a program affects the entire country, how much are you willing to spend per person? 8 cents?
Exactly. Budgets on national levels do not compute on a personal level. I like it when articles scale down the numbers to a more individual level “so let’s pretend that the federal government is a single family home…”
That the general population are directly responsible for the amount of pollution occurring a la “carbon footprint” when there are 10 companies producing 70% of the world’s pollution
Huh, odd, why do they do this?
To make the general population think that they’re responsible for the problems caused by the massive uncontrolled exploitation of limited resources by corporations.
(Or in simpler terms; So the general population don’t show the CEOs just how fragile their mortal bodies are.)
That WW1 was the same moral black and white as WW2.
In my opinion, every country in WW1 was the villain just that one side was impatient enough to be the aggressor first.Ooh this is a hot take, can you explain a little?
I don’t think it is.
They all were colonial powers that oppressed and subdued their colonial holdings, extracting wealth and even soldiers. France was the only republic, all the others were monarchies and Russia had the most absolutist monarchy. But that doesn’t really factor in, because even France wasn’t fighting to spread or preserve democracy.All were fighting to beat them arch enemies, to steal a piece of land or two or maybe a colony and to test their newly developed industrial weaponry. They were all
stompingchomping at the bit before it started.The German Empire was surely the most militaristic society. But they still fought all for the same ideology and reason.
To my last point, you can see that in the result: the losers had to gave up colonies but not to independence but to the victors as spoils.Stomping at the bit? I’ve never heard that phrase
Yeah I meant chomping at the bit. It comes from horses chewing the metal part of the bridle because they’re fired up and want to run.
Ah, thanks. I am not a native English speaker.
May you explain why you think it’s controversial? Only if you want to.
That all the Y2K preparation stuff was a waste of time / a scam, instead of an example of massive success (people coming together and pulling off something to avoid a disaster)
Also see Acid Rain and the hole in the ozone.
A friend of mine got a high-paying temp job reprogramming servers in some obscure programming language. I think the client was a major bank.
Yeah, a lot of dirtbags took advantage of Y2K, but that doesn’t mean Y2K wasn’t a serious problem. It easily could have been.
It easily could have been
It was a very serious problem.
Very few dirtbags took advantage of it.
Obscure language was probably COBOL. Obscure in the sense that it was once immensely popular for business applications, but by the late 90s there were very few new applications written in it, but a huge number of large businesses still ran it.
You are really underselling the fact that many of these businesses are still running COBOL despite it being the equivalent of ancient Mayan.
I meant “it easily could have been” in the sense that it if it hadn’t been taken seriously, it would affected virtually everyone in some way.
You’re tired of this? Like, you’ve encountered people actively talking about it so much you’re tired? Besides the odd online post, I’ve never met anyone making reference to or talking about this.
Mate i pulled 70+ hour shifts for months on end to make sure it wasn’t a problem, it only takes one fool for me to be tired of hearing it
Fair enough.
Dozens of times yes
That the granny who sued McDonald’s was just upset that her coffee was too hot.
She suffered from either third or fourth degree burns, on her lap.
Parts of her were fused together.
She just wanted McDonald’s to cover the medical bill, but they dragged her name through the mud.
Yep, also they had previously been warned about serving coffee that hot, but studies had shown that serving it that hot meant that people drank less of it. And that “crazy” judgement (2.5 million?) wasn’t a random number. That’s how much they make off coffee in one day.
Yeah we actually learned very quickly about that in legal studies (high school) way back in 2000s and it was presented like a silly Americans (Australian here) kind of thing, just a quick silly case in a small box in the textbook. Wasn’t til I got older I learned the full story!
We had an Aussie silly case too, not just picking on the US 😅 ours was about some drink in an opaque bottle and someone drank it all before they could see there was some kind of bug or even a snail in the bottle? Something like that so they sued the drink company 🤢 can’t remember enough about that one to find anything on it!
I saw that, yeah McDonald’s really tried to blast her as a sue happy bitch. All she asked for was medical bill costs initially which is reasonable.
This misconception was well paid for. McDonalds and a large group of fortune 500 companies started a slander ad campaign against lawsuits. They literally paid people to write and run stories about “stupid and unjust” lawsuits, claiming the lawsuits wee a waste and of course bringing up this one.
It worked.
That you only need headlights to see in the dark. Headlights are just as much so other cars can see you, than they are so you can see. In the rain and in the fog, they’re crucial to have on.
Agreeing to disagree is only applicable to matters of taste.
Example would be a preference of maple or agave syrup with your choice of cooked dough.
One cannot agree to disagree when one of the parties is factually wrong.
I see the “agree to disagree” as a bit of a social flag for the conversation that says “I don’t wish to get into it / continue arguing about it” because there is no way to respond to it. If you try to continue the debate you look like an asshole, and if you drop it the person who says it gets to continue being wrong without being challenged.
It’s very annoying and I hate it.
Propaganda from the fossil fuel industry.
Solar panels are the cheapest source of electricity now. Batteries have dropped in price by more than 90% in the past decade, and are now viable for grid-scale storage, addressing the main issue with renewable energy. EVs are competitive with combustion cars, and in some ways superior. Heat pumps are now superior to furnaces in many locations. The solar punk future is now! But you wouldn’t know any of this by listening to the public discourse, mainstream media, and many politicians.
Relevant video from Technology Connections
The best first aid for someone having a seizure is to shove a wallet (or something) in their mouth, so that they don’t “swallow their tongue”.
NO!
Never do this. Absolutely never. It’s far more likely that you’ll injure the victim (or yourself) in the attempt.
Furthermore, don’t restrain a seizure victim in any way unless it’s absolutely necessary for their physical safety (like if they’re in danger of falling down a stairway. Even then, it’s usually better to just stand at the top step and act as a barrier). Whenever possible, move things they may hit out of their way; don’t try to move the victim. If there’s something you can’t move, try to put something soft between the victim and the object.
Most of the time, the best thing you can do for a seizure victim is to not touch them at all, and simply give them room.
Is putting a pillow or something soft under their head adviseable? I know the floor is considered a hard immovable object but it putting something under them sorta so im not sure if that qualifies
Generally the advice is moving everything out of the way, if possible a blanket or something under their head as quickly as possible if they are on a hard surface and calling the ambulance (if someone else is there get them to do that straight away while you move stuff!) Also a good idea to time the seizure if possible! When they come to, have them stay laying down for a few minutes at least before sitting up. Some people can appear to be okay but go back into seizure so slowly, slowly with sitting up and even before offering a water.
If you know someone who has seizures, even irregularly, it’s a good idea to ask them about it beforehand in case it ever happens when you’re with them. People can have different management plans and it also just gives you some guidance and the other person some control should it happen.
(I work in disability!)
Thank you. I work with someone that can have seizures and we have a looot of hard floors so this is great advice for me.
The average person only lived to be 35 back in the day.
No, the average lifespan was like 35 back in the day. 40 year olds weren’t some rare wrinkled old person, the average was affected by the extremely high childhood mortality. If you could survive the first few years of your life your chances of surviving the next 60 were pretty good.
I got relatives that lived to their 90’s in the 1600’s, we may have skewed it a bit
That being said, even among people who survived childhood, living to the ages we see nowadays was more rare than it is today due to a lot of environmental and societal factors like plagues and war. It wasn’t unheard of, but that is also something that brought the average down to an extent.
We essentially had a plague in 2020, and there are multiple wars going on as we speak. Those factors didn’t disappear.
The deaths from both the wars going on in the modern day and infectious diseases like COVID are nowhere near on the scale that they were before, especially in terms of the percent of the world population killed by them. We haven’t had deaths on the scale of WWI or the Spanish Flu since those events.
We haven’t had deaths on the scale of WWI or the Spanish Flu since those events.
WWII had 3-5 times the number of deaths (depending on whose numbers you trust) as WWI though? Like, it’s not even close. Even using the highest estimate for WWI (22 million) and the lowest estimate for WWII (70 million) WWII was more than triple the deaths.
The global population at the time of WWI was ~1.8 billion, and at the time of WWII is was 2.3 billion.
So in terms of of percent of the world population, WWI loses.
I will concede that the Spanish flu was a lot worse than COVID.
True, but we don’t wholesale shit in our drinking water any more while riddled with syphilis
The birth rate going down = the population is collapsing.
No.
The birth rate is going down and the population is increasing. Both of these are happening at the same time.
It does mean population aging. Which isn’t great.
History time!
Myth: People in the past drank beer because it was safer than drinking water.
Fact: People in the past drank beer because it was full of calories and tasty. Before modern times people generally had access to or knew how to find clean water, and water has always been the most popular drink throughout history.
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Myth: People needed spices to cover the taste of rotten meat.
Fact: People ate fresh meat when it was available and preserved it when they could by smoking, drying, salting, fermenting, or otherwise processing it. When they didn’t have access to meat they just wouldn’t eat it. They wanted spices for the same reason we do - because they taste good.
Then why does people’s preference for spicy food correlate to local food pathogen prevalence?
See: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9586227/
To elaborate a little further. “Just not eating” something is a modern luxury. For most of our history, you ate everything that was available or (someone, usually your youngest kids first) starved. The argument isn’t that spices cover the taste of rotten food, but that they actually kill the pathogens that make humans sick, making more food edible for longer. This is a spill over from these plants’ long evolutionary arms race with phytotoxins. Cultures in places with high food pathogen prevalence, where spicing makes a real difference to survival, develop a preference for spicy food, despite their initially aversive taste. Cultures in cold climates with few food pathogens don’t.
Wasn’t that literally the purpose of grog? A mixture of beer and water used on ships to kill harmful bacteria that would grow in the ships’ water stores over a long voyage?
And if people in the past knew how to make water safe to drink, then why was epidemiology invented when Londoners couldn’t figure out that they should stop drinking poop water?
Wasn’t that literally the purpose of grog? A mixture of beer and water used on ships to kill harmful bacteria that would grow in the ships’ water stores over a long voyage?
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Grog was a mixture of rum, water, and lime juice. Beer does not have enough of an alcohol content to have any antibacterial impact. Your basic premise is flawed.
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The main reasons grog was invented were twofold, first and foremost, it diluted the alcohol to manage the sailors’ intoxication levels (much like drinking a rum and Coke does today). Secondly, the addition of lime juice helped fight off scurvy (leading to British sailors being called “limeys”).
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While it did improve the flavor of stale water, the disinfecting properties have been greatly exaggerated over time.
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I can’t speak to practices on sailing ships, those surely differ from general history especially when it comes to fresh water which isn’t freely available on the ocean.
And to your second point, in the context of history that happened in modern times. The cholera epidemics happened in the 19th century with the epidemiologist John Snow publishing his treatise in 1855. Unsafe drinking water causing widespread disease was mainly a problem of modern cities in the industrial age and the overcrowding and unsanitary conditions that came with it.
Things being “illegal”.
No it’s not against the law. Just because someone can sue you doesn’t mean what you did was a crime. Just because a business can’t sell a particular product doesn’t mean it’s illegal to have. You can’t ‘get arrested’ for half the shit people think is ‘illegal’.
The old “tomatoes are not a vegetable” is pretty frustrating. They are a vegetable.
In botanical terms, the concept of a vegetable does not exist, which is where tomatoes are classified as fruits. But in culinary terms, vegetables do exist and tomatoes are classified as such.
I just find it frustrating, because I believed that garbage myself at some point, and I thought, I was smart for knowing that.
Just one of those examples that you can easily spread misinformation, so long as you make it sound plausible.In culinary arts vegetables are the non-sweet edible parts of plants (not fruit). So no, they are not a vegetable.
What is true is people call them a vegetable.
Other sweet plant parts are also considered culinary vegetables: carrots, squash, red peppers, sweet potatoes, fennel, and onions.
Some of them you do have to cook to perceive as sweet, but non-sweet doesn’t seem to be a good dividing line. Striving for non-overlapping categories instead of just accepting the mess seems like a mistake.
There are vegetables where you eat the root.
There are vegetables where you eat the leaves.
There are vegetables where you eat the stem.
But for cucumbers, pumpkins, aubergine and paprika you eat the fruit, why should the tomato be different?If you want to get pedantic the tomato is a berry.
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Sure, but it is not a vegetable.
“Half of Americans voted for this”
No, half the people who actually showed up to vote voted for the guy, but not necessarily all he is and has been doing. It’s actually only about 20-22% or less of the population that actually voted this guy into office and fewer than that are on board with current events. Far from “half of Americans”, so just stop it.
People who didn’t care enough to vote are just as bad as the ones who voted for Trump. They were warned what was coming and they allowed it
While voter apathy is widespread in the US, note that voter disenfranchisement has been honed over decades so many people either didn’t get to vote or could not vote because the impact to them short-term was too great to afford making decisions for the long term (e.g. people losing their jobs while living paycheck-to-paycheck).
Approximately half as bad, in raw outcome terms. A vote for the opponent is significantly worse than not voting. But yeah, big losers for not even voting.
it also doesnt count un-registered people, it just assume anyone of at age that can vote dint, some arnt even registered, and some are unable to vote for one reason or another that is not due to personal choice.
No, half the people who actually showed up to vote voted for the guy
He only got 49.8% of the popular vote in 2024, so while it’s close enough that most people would accept rounding up, even this statement is not factual in the most literal interpretation.
NPR: Trump would have won even if everyone eligible voted. I agree that substantial Trump voters disapprove of current events, but the truth is one in two US citizens preferred Trump over Harris on Election Day. Not to mention turnout was 64% not 42%, so it’s 30% not 20%
so it’s 30% not 20%
Fair. I was going by population numbers vs votes cast and didn’t have the voter turnout numbers handy when I originally wrote that out and was paraphrasing from that to save time.
But that’s still far from half, and I’m tired of people using the misconception/phrase to justify their xenophobic rhetoric.
oh i thought you were referring to people saying it to illustrate how bad the system is and how important trump winning the election was lol. i definitely agree that it doesn’t justify what he’s doing (even if it legally stands, even if it legally stands, it doesn’t stand socially)
but it is not inaccurate to say nearly half of the citizens preferred him on election day. per the link, pew research shows 48% of non-voters would’ve voted for trump as opposed to 45%, with a pretty high validity.
Nope. Everyone who didn’t vote, voted for this…and every American who isn’t out on the streets right now, fighting to end this, is silently supporting it.
The world gave Americans the benefit of the doubt in 2016, but not this time. Y’all fucked up big time, and it’s your mess to clean up, so get to it.Maybe check your facts. NPR: Trump would have won even if everyone eligible voted
Trump won in 2024 with just under 50% of the vote, 49.7%-48.2% over Democrat Kamala Harris.
Roughly 64% of the eligible-voting population turned out in 2024, the second highest since 1904. 2020 was the highest.
But even if everyone who could vote did, Trump would have won by an even wider margin, 48%-45%, according to Pew’s validated voters survey
Whether it’s your intent or not, the narrative you’re spreading is used to dissuade folks from demanding better than the choice between a shit taco and a turd sandwhich. It affirms a shitty status quo and demands political patience in the face of a fucked up world… to the benefit of fascists and their corporate cronies.
nah, the DNC refused to actually released the election autopsy, they know they won but they dint want to call out the rigging. 2024 was so obviously rigged by musk and other people. why should the Dem voters have to vote overwhelmingly to overcoming rigging by the republicans every time, the DINODNC are totally complicit in allowing trump a nd the gop to win the elections.
Man I like npr but its missing a lot. It says he would have won by a larger margin but he would get a lower total percentage. So its basically saying that many who did not vote would have voted for a third party as in the election it was apparent just over 2% but in the theoretical one the third party would have won 7%. Of course that is the popular voted and it does not go into where the differences were and for which side. Given the electoral college it really comes down to the swing states. In other words does the thing over the country remain the same just looking at Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Because if they had moved by less than a percent then the election would have went the other way. The real question is if the third party voters really feel the country would be just as bad under kamala as trump. like how bad they view ice and war and tarrifs and dismantling of agencies and firing of experienced people and having a ever more right supreme court and such. From what I can tell they think it would be just the same using online coments anyway.
I don’t doubt that. All i was saying was that, if you didn’t vote, it was an automatic vote for what America got. I’ve always said that Trump isn’t the hero America needed, but he’s the one they deserve.
That just reporting on one study by the pew research center. Which may be non-partisan, but they sure as hell aren’t unbiased.
“We are not collectively responsible for the output of this system we collectively use to run our country”. Disagree.
A lot of people who voted for him didn’t like either choice and thought he was least evil for whatever reason. We can never know how evil Harris would have been - even if she wins in the future that doesn’t show what she would have been if she was in now. The situation and people change over time
lol. we 100% could know harris would be less evil than trump. it would have been 4 more years of essentially the same administration but with a younger bend which likely would have been better. only reason people think of trump less evil than harris are ones you cheer on the ice things so they have a twisted version of right and wrong.
That is a matter of opinion. The ‘right’ has different beliefs from you and finds many of the things ‘the left’ supports wrong\evil.
Yeah and Nazis had different opinions about Hitler so we definitely should just be all philosophical and say there really is no difference. /s
What a, putting it lightly, not well thought out argument.
I didn’t say there was no difference in how they are ‘evil’. I said they were both evil and Harris has evils that to the right are just as unplatable if not more than Trump is to the left.
I think they believe that but I have watched thier philosophies dropped by their party to the point where whatever they represent changes whenever. The party is so different now than they were in the 70’s that their own politcians would see the current incarnation as evil. Add to this the blatant violations of the constitution. Americans at the least should be able to understand the bill of rights and how it fits into the declaration of independence’s grievences that lead to the revolutionary war. What happened in the residences in chicago reads exactly like colonial america you just have to replace ice with redcoats. The fact people call themselves americans and think that due process does not apply to all is just. well. frustrating.
It is very frustrating as someone with those ideas that are lost. Nobody is close to what I want. The left keeps moving to socialism and the right to authoritarianism
the left maybe but not democrats who until recently have been going right such that they have a lot in commone with 70’s republicans. Even then the movement left is with a minority caucus within the party but heck it just used to be bernie practically.
