What’s a common “fact” that’s spread around that’s actually not true and pisses you off that too many people believe 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’.
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)
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.
Also see Acid Rain and the hole in the ozone.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
“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.
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 were better in the past”
No… you just spend too much time on the internet. And yes, that includes comparing everything to 1950s America. Of course, there are ebbs and flows, and things get worse for some people or groups of people sometimes. But on net, if you compare the present to the past over any substantial period of time, based on metrics that people generally find important like health, safety, free time, and freedom to choose how to live their lives, the present is wildly better than the past.
Taking 1950s America for example, since it is such a popular example, 1/3 of homes didn’t have indoor plumbing. We don’t even have to go back to medieval times and talk about how you probably wouldn’t be a princess - we can just compare to the supposed golden age of one of the richest societies the world has ever seen, and you have a one in three chance of having to poop in a hole outside every day and heating your bathwater in a stock pot on the stove.
SOME things were better in the past. Most were not. Just because someone can you can name a few examples of things that were better doesnt make them right.
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 a more accurate take is that the well of originality is drying up very fast. There will be nothing anymore that is entirely original. Everyone is going to be borrowing something from something else, if it hasn’t happened already.
I mean duh, there are no original movies, okay then what? Just enjoy what you can! If you have an idea for an ‘original movie’ then go out and be a director of something, because indie movie making is a thing!
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.”
“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
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.
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).
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.
“We are not collectively responsible for the output of this system we collectively use to run our country”. Disagree.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
That just reporting on one study by the pew research center. Which may be non-partisan, but they sure as hell aren’t unbiased.
“LLMs are not AI”
Artificial intelligence is a term used in computer science to describe a system capable of performing any cognitive tasks that would normally require human intelligence - like generating natural-sounding language. The issue isn’t that the term is being used incorrectly, but rather that most people think it means more than it actually does. It’s a broad term that covers everything from old Atari chess engines to artificial superintelligence.
The problem is people think llm AI means it’s thinking, when it’s obviously not. Thus: “llms are not ai” is said so people will hopefully stop thinking the llms are thinking.
If AI was able to actually think, it wouldn’t even need your input to feed it thoughts from you to respond. It’d probably just talk right away and accurately assume it knows what you want.
AI is just simply an over-glorified piece of tech that is placed in things when humans are incapable of doing it themselves and doing it as efficiently as possible. Like reading anything in microseconds.
That’s weird because I have a calculator that can think, so AI should be able to think too.
That’s not thinking. That’s calculating. It doesn’t have any thoughts about your math problems.
I can see what it’s thinking right there on the screen. It thinks that 6x7=42
Touche
I’ll give you that one lol
It doesn’t have any thoughts about your math problems.
You say that but I feel judged sometimes.
I’m math intolerant. It destroys my stomach
Really? You’re asking what’s 6x7? Didn’t you learn that in elementary school?
That’s about when I first read the Hitchhiker Trilogy, so, yeah.
Marketing and pr pressure to be able to use the term “Ai” because it’s the current hype. Everything is now Ai. It’s now a meaningless term. Image processing, data calculations, language interpretation, language generation, all claim to be Ai. If your product has Ai it now tells me nothing about what it does.
Artificial intelligence is a term used in computer science
Arguing that because nerds appropriated an original term does not mean that we have to change the meaning of the original term…
I don’t look out my “transpart glass” I look out my windows. Even tho that’s the name of an operating system. If I say I grok something, it means I understand like Heinlen intended, not that I asked a racist AI about it.
“Artificial Intelligence” and all sorts of things computer nerds are trying to claim they invented have existed in theory at least as far back as Rome.
So “the problem” is you first heard about it in the context of chatbots, so now you want to insist that is the only meaning the phrase has ever represented and everyone else needs to change to accomdoate you.
The problem isn’t people are using the phrase wrong, the problem is you don’t know what it means except in a very narrow context.
None of any of this shit is new, people are just ignorant.
It’s like when I was a kid and watched pro-wrestling, I thought I was cool and original, because I didn’t know the media that they were blatantly ripping off of.
That’s where you are at right now with Artificial Intelligence, you only know the version the grifters have appropriated.
Pre-emptive edit:
I’m not saying chatbots are AI, I’m saying the definition that calls them AI is incorrect because grifters just changed it to fit what they were doing, for money.
First, that actually is how language works. Meaning is given to words by consensus and consensus alone. Generally, since it came to widespread usage in the modern lexicon it means exactly as they described.
Second, you say it was appropriated. Okay, from what?
You say that like computer scientists in the 1950s who invented the concept of AI stole it from science fiction writers instead of the other way around.
See also: “crypto.”
“Water drains in opposite directions in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres”.
No, it doesn’t.
Sure it does. Up here it drains down but down there it goes up.
The coriolis effect is a real thing, but it is spectacularly weak.
Strong enough that you have to steer against it when flying, too weak to decide the handedness of your toilet.
The atmosphere is much larger than my toilet.
it’s like gravity
(small objects don’t have (well, show, I guess but uhhh) it but large ones do)
