Ask Lemmy

A little while ago, people were complaining incognito mode didn't do what they thought it did.

That you need to wash your hands after going to the bathroom. I’ve seen too many grown men walk straight out of the restroom after urinating.

That chiropractic care is not evidence based

You cannot achieve any good by hurting people.

People are so convinced that if we're more cruel to criminals, they'll stop committing crimes, or if we're harsher to workers, we'll work harder, or if you're tough on border controls, immigrants will go away. It does not work and it cannot work.

The current system of getting a job is horrifyingly toxic, broken and inefficienct

All rich people became rich because people like you and me are paying more for services and things than they're truly worth, which means we pretty much never get our money's worth even when we feel like we do.

There are no good rich people.

Hours spent working is not the same as productivity.

Twice as many people assigned to a project does not double productivity either.

I could go on...

Perpetual growth in a finite system is impossible, and anything that relies on perpetual growth to function is doomed to eventually fail.

For instance: social services that rely on perpetual population growth (especially youth population; e.g. Japan/South Korea), companies that rely on perpetual increase in users (most publicly-owned companies; e g. basically every social media company ATM), industries that rely on perpetual advancements in technology (e.g. industrialized agriculture, which constantly needs new ways to fight self-induced problems like soil depletion and erosion), housing as wealth generation (to be a wealth generator it has to outpace inflation, but at a certain point no one will be able to afford to purchase houses at their inflated prices no matter how over-leveraged they get; e.g. Canada). [Note that these are merely examples where these issues are currently coming to a head; they are by no means special cases, they're just in a more advanced state of "finding out."]

In other words, a lot of the modern world, in both public and private sectors, is built around a series of ponzi schemes.

*Lemmings. (I was going to use that as an answer to your post, but someone learning something new never gets me even the slightest bit miffed.)

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Most scam products like "power saver" plug-in modules for your home, fake ODB2 gas saver modules for cars or those little stickers for cell phones that are sold as "antenna boosters". Also, anything that is marketed as a "detox" product will piss me off.

All of those products are actively being sold on Amazon, EBay and at some other major retailers or in malls. They are openly sold because people refuse to learn that magic does not exist.

Please. Stop buying these things.

The left lane is for passing. If you're not passing somebody, move over to the right lane. It's not that hard people

I'm a relatively good driver (not the greatest) I'll never understand how people don't understand there's more you can do to control your vehicle speed besides just hitting the gas then the brake. It's terrifying seeing someone speed up on someone then hit the brakes ever every 3 seconds. I've had my set of brakes on for nearly 7 years I know people who change them yearly and I'm strictly talking about the ones I know for a fact get the same level of quality brakes that I get. I own a truck hauling stuff around nearly every day so in theory I should be going through brakes WAY more than the average person.

"Homeopathic" does not mean organic, or good for you, natural, wholesome, effective, or inherently safe to consume.

It is, in fact, a code word for no active ingredient.

Capitalism is not working.

LLMs are not general AI. They are not intelligent. They aren't sentient. They don't even really understand what they're spitting out. They can't even reliably do the 1 thing computers are typically very good at (computational math) because they are just putting sequences of nonsense (to them) characters together in the most likely order based on their training model.

When LLMs feel sentient or intelligent, that's your brain playing a trick on you. We're hard-wired to look for patterns and group things together based on those patterns. LLMs are human-speech prediction engines, so it's tempting and natural to group them with the thing they're emulating.

How corporations use advertisements to influence how the media reports on their activities. Prime example is how BP ran all those "We're Sorry" ads when they poisoned the Gulf of Mexico. They weren't apologizing to the public. They were using the ads to pass bribes to the news agencies to make sure to give them soft coverage when they should have been ranking them over the coals.

You can recharge your new iPhone in the microwave.

Dandelion leaves are like crack to ducks and geese and you can use them to influence said fowl for your own nefarious purposes

When changing lanes or turning you are supposed to use the turning signal before doing the manouver. The turning signal is supposed to warn other drivers that you are going to do something. It doesn't make any sense to use the turning signal when already mid-turning or while already changing lanes. Many drivers don't seem to know that.

Fundamental attribution error. Wanting something to happen ≠ believing it should happen. When wanting becomes believing, you are fucked.

Too many people think that the world should bend the laws of reality to conform to their ideas. Gamblers are the prime example. They take something solvable by pure math and completely discard the solution, opting for a solution based on their wants instead of reality.

Any system that relies on people selling themselves will inevitably select for those who can sell themselves best, not any other metric

That reality is not defined by our wishes, but by observable, verifiable facts.

Sadly, a large amount of people cannot accept this.

Not voting doesn’t stop an election.

When you're done with the microwave and took your food out early to avoid the alarm, clear the fucking time that's remaining.

That documentation is supposed to explain how a thing works to people who don't know how it works. I know, sounds extremely obvious, but you'd be surprised how much documentation out there is written in a way, expecting you to already know what it's talking about. No. I do not. It is the documentation's job to explain ME what IT is talking about...

American cars having their brake lights and turn signals be the same light is stupid and dangerous.

Things you will need to operate while driving your car shouldn't have touch screen controls.

God isn't real. No deities exist. Stop being delusional.

That other than a niche we specialize in, we're pretty fucking dumb at everything else.

Here's one that's not as consequential as other posts here. It's not going to change the world, but would make things slightly better.

Split lock washers are worse than useless. They're supposed to be a spring against the bolt to help resist it turning back out over time. They don't. If anything, they make it worse.

Here's a NASA publication on fastener design (because of course there's a NASA publication on fastener design): https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19900009424

The lockwasher serves as a spring while the bolt is being tightened. However, the washer is normally flat by the time the bolt is fully torqued. At this time it is equivalent to a solid flat washer, and its locking ability is nonexistent. In summary, a Iockwasher of this type is useless for locking.

This was published in 1990, but we're still using this shit. Stop. There are many other kinds of fastener locking that work, like nylon locking nuts or threadlock, and we don't need these.

Humans are not descended from apes. They have the same ancestors.

Why is that so hard to understand?

The spices at the grocery store I've been going to for the past 25 years has had the spices alphabetized this entire time.

Edit, I misread the question but I'm not fixing my response

We should live more instead of wasting time at work but we can't because we're forced to get income to live

Conspiracies that require absolute lock tight secrecy to function at a basic level aren't generally tenable to be sustained for longer than a handful of years at a time at most. Somebody always fucks up or basically was just lucky nobody checked for awhile. The nessesity of any large scale collaboration creates inefficiencies and potential error points in the system. Even the best of the best spy agencies fuck up and get caught rather routinely, particularly when operating on their home soil. A lot of investigative journalists accidentally trip over stuff all the time but have good faith arrangements (or in some places laws) to not disclose the active manoeuvres of the state to the public.

It's just really hard for humans in general to accept that events that effected them or things they care about very deeply personally weren't somehow also grand in design. Grocking sometimes it really is just random chance or stupid mishandling is not something we're well wired to handle. Stories of all powerful conspiracies masterminding the world scratch that itch... But logistically speaking the conspiracy aspect is completely unnecessary. If someone is trying to blame a nebulous bogeymen who exists as nameless, numberless ultimately wealthy but also totally off the books super spies.... chances are they are just trying to capitalize on making you feel flattered, smart and empowered by something "only you are smart enough to believe" - while feeding you bullshit they can personally profit from in some way with you none the wiser.