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 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.
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.
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.
I got relatives that lived to their 90’s in the 1600’s, we may have skewed it a bit
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
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.
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?
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.
Grog was way after the middle ages.
Beer was the main beverage aboard ships before, as it keeps better than water in eigen kegs. But you can’t stock up on beer everywhere. Distilled alcohol has a better form factor, do you can take more. It made the water kind of palatable but doesn’t clean it.
Yeah no, pubs used to totally used to use curry powder and ketchup to drown the taste of gamey meat.
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)
These are the people who think the precautions around Covid were unnecessary too. If there hadn’t been any precautions, there would have been a lot more deaths and these same idiots would be asking why nothing was done to prevent it. But instead the death toll was kept to a minimum and these people just assume this is how it woukd have been regardless, no sense of cause and effect. Disasters are successfully mitigated and people assume there was no potential disaster at all. But if it had been allowed to happen, then they’d be asking why no action was taken
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.
If you want to get pedantic the tomato is a berry.
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Sure, but it is not a vegetable.
“Just doing my job” being a valid excuse for causing even minor harm.
Maybe it would be very hard to choose not to take thay paycheck. Maybe it would have negative consequences for you to not sell fake insurance to people who don’t know better. You don’t get to pretend you didn’t choose to do harm to others.
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.
A lot of people don’t understand “factually wrong” is often not possible, if you’re literally debating specific stated facts that you have outside references to sure but anything relating to complex systems, issues, the human experience etc is simply not that black and white
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
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.
Other than capitalism, why? We have enough resources to support everyone if we want to. People are still having kids just not as many. Why do we need so many people? What if the population drops to a more sustainable number?
The problem isn’t the number of humans on the planet. The problem is how many of them are retirees/elderly compared to working age.
Old people don’t work or work less, still require food, and often require increased amounts of medical care. If you view the world’s economy through a detached, Sim City player eye view, the elderly are a dummy load we dump resources into out of a sense of sentimentality. In an extreme case, where a baby boom is followed within a lifetime by a baby bust, you get into this behind the power curve situation where most of the relatively few working age people are employed in the elderly support industry making orthopedic shoes, walkers, those strawberry hard candies and staffing hospice houses.
That extreme case? Actually happening right now, especially in Korea and Japan.
Yes but again those are only issues because of capitalism. What if we tried something else? If the system doesn’t work anymore why not change it instead of trying to make more babies to fix the issue? Why is the only option more babies? It’s not the only thing we can do
That has nothing to do with capitalism. How does communism solve the “we have a lot of old people that need care” issue that doesn’t divert more people of working age to the Taking Care Of Old People industry? The Soviet answer seems to be “life expectancy of 52” and the Chinese answer seems to be “that’s their state mandated 1 child’s problem.”
I didn’t say communism solves anything. But we have enough resources and technology now that we can provide for everyone without everyone having to work. If only like a quarter of the people got all the “work” done the rest of the people could be old or care for them.
A lot of the “work” that people do today are just jobs programs to keep the system moving. Think of people working at insurance companies or car dealers. Pointless middle men that could be free if they weren’t in this system.
You blamed the problem on capitalism, I used communism as a non-capitalist example to demonstrate irrelevancy. If the tire is flat, it doesn’t matter if the car is manual or automatic. That is what leading scholars call an analogy, it is a rhetorical device used to draw comparisons between relationships. Stated in full: The problem of an aging population has as much to do with capitalism vs communism as a flat tire has to do with the vehicle’s transmission being manual or automatic. I state this because I have come to believe you’re the kind of internet idiot/troll/bot that takes analogies literally out of genuine stupidity or intentional bad faith.
We don’t have the technology to eliminate the majority of the workforce. If we did, the Epstein class would have done it by now out of pure shitheartedness. And only in the fever dreams of a syphilitic moron would one quarter of the population work to take care of the other three quarters be a solution to anything.
Venice is often touted as being the “birthplace of Opera.” When in fact the true birthplace of Opera is Florence. We can credit its development to a group of artists and intellectuals called the Florentine Camerata.
This is extremely important everyone! Please take note of this and the next time you and your fellow construction workers are debating the intricacies of music history, set them straight!
Also, editing to add the little fun fact that one of the Florentine Camerata’s members was Galileo’s dad, Vincenzo Galilei.
I am the very model of a modern Capitano.
I’m sick of people saying there are no original movies. Original movies come out literally every week, and I’m using the actual meaning of the word literally. Look at the website MovieInsider for a list of all the movies being released. Some recent original movies are quite popular too, like Sinners, KPop Demon Hunters, and Project Hail Mary. It pisses me off because if you care enough to complain, you should care enough to look up what movies are out instead of just knowing about the ones heavily advertised. I don’t know what video games are out but I would make an effort to know if I played video games. If you care what movies are out, you should look it up.
I think you might be judging these people too harshly. I think what they really mean is less that new movie ideas are not coming out and more that there are too many re-hashed ideas. The two ideas are easy to confuse. And I think you’ll admit that there have been long strings of superhero movies, tons of vampire movies, never-ending franchises and that doesn’t even include all of the tropes that get used over and over again. This leaves people like me wondering how many great ideas pitched to Hollywood are turned down in favor of another sequel because it’s perceived as the easiest way to make a quick buck. I’m always delighted when a movie surprises me because so few do.
Maybe I take things too literally because of my autism, but in the contexts I see these comments it seems to mean there are no movies that aren’t sequels or remakes. There are plenty of movies that aren’t sequels or remakes and these people seem to be willfully ignoring them. I’ve seen many movies this year, some have been sequels or remakes, some have not been. I personally count movies based on books as original, like the movie Reminders of Him, but that’s not good enough for some people. The authour of the novel had an original idea and it was made into a film, but no they won’t accept an adaptation as original. And yes, some original films are derivative of ideas that have been done before. All fiction is derivative of other fiction. It’s basically impossible fir it not to be at least a little derivative.
I concede that it is unfortunate that there are likely original ideas being rejected in favour of franchise movies. But I think part of the reason this happens is audiences are hypocritical. If the audience would put their money where their mouths are and see more original films, more original films would get made. Franchise films are getting made so often because it’s what people want, as proven by them making money. People blame the marketing for their choices. It’s a chicken and egg situation, franchise films make more money because they’re marketed more and they’re marketed more because they make more money. If people saw more original films, original films would get more marketing. I’m annoyed by people blaming the corporations for their own choice to see franchise movies more than original movies
I think it could be a bit of both.
I mean independent films don’t aire in as many locations so it’s a self fulfilling thing to some extent.
I’ve never really known if it’s the chicken or the egg. For example, I like a smaller cell phone. It fits in my pocket and is easier to use with one hand. But… It’s also harder to see. Smaller phones are going extinct. Is that because people want larger phones or because companies want us to want larger phones? I have no idea really. All I know is it will be very difficult for me to “vote” for smaller phones with my dollars, if there are literally no smaller phones to choose.
I dunno, all those movies you mention seemed to have a lot in common, like a protagonist who becomes unsatisfied with their life, enters a new realm with different rules, undergoes great trials, almost fails but receives unexpected aid, and ultimately gets what they sought but finds themself no longer fitting into their former life.
Just something I’ve noticed.
That is the standard plot for any good story.
The most basic version is: normal person gets pushed out of their comfort zone, undergoes turmoil, comes out of this turmoil changed.
Unfortunately popular movies tend to make them all “tough guy gets pushed into violence, destruction ensues, he gets the girl and/or revenge” or “uptight person gets put in absurdly contrived cringy situations that are supposed to be funny, then comes out of the situation not uptight and gets the girl.”
your brain doesn’t do maths to figure out how to move yourself or how to throw things, it just learned/knows which neurons to fire to move different parts of your body and has an impression of how much force must be applied to do different types of physical work. (e.g move through fluid)
True. But our bones do some of the calculations as well. We’re born with kinematics. Contrast with a video game that needs to do a lot of IK math to simulate bones.
And our neurons are doing a lot of calculations … just a different way.
But yeah, nobody is doing that Sherlock Holmes fight club stuff in their heads.
I agree so much with this. We can use math to describe what you are doing when you throw a ball, that doesn’t mean you are doing the math calculations when you throw it.
We can use math to calculate all sorts of things, doesn’t mean those things themselves are doing math to decide how to do them. Waves, the moon’s orbit, all kinds of natural systems we can use math to describe, but they aren’t doing math.
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’.
Trump was good for the economy.
During the election this kept being repeated even though the economy collapsed because of his covid response
