What's something that's not common knowledge but you think everyone should know?
What's something that's not common knowledge but you think everyone should know?
Specifically thinking of stuff that make your life better in the long run but all kinds of answers are welcome!
I've recently learnt about lifetraps and it's made a huge positive impact on how I view myself and my relationships
The HR department at your company is the company's advocate they are not your advocate.
It's important to remember that - unless you work directly for the owner or an executive appointed by the board - they're not your boss' advocate either.
If the company is worth a shit, they don't want bosses that abuse their power or make their subordinates miserable. Happy employees are productive employees.
We've rid ourselves of a few problem bosses that way. Of course, this only applies to legitimate issues. If a boss is causing people to quit, you've got a good case.
This is the part everyone misses. I worked in HR for a number of years and 90% of my job was telling low/middle level managers "you can't do that to your employee." (I wasnt high up enough to be dealing with c-suite level complaintants), 9% was recruiting and paperwork, and 1% was telling an employee "You did something potentially terminable."
Most people only seem to recall that 1% and then keep talking about how "HR isn't your friend/on your side theyre on the company's side." Which is true! But they also didn't see the 1000 times I slapped their managers hand because I was on the companies side not the managers. Unless your really high up your manager is someone's employee too. HR isn't siding with you manager for shits and giggles, there is a reason management won a complaint against you and it isn't "HR likes management better." It's that they framed your problematic behavior better than you framed theirs. Frame everything you report to HR as "this is why it's a liability for the company" not "I don't like x,y,z. So-and-so is mean."
Also remeber just being a bad manager (not doing something immediately terminable) isn't a firable offense. Yelling/being a low level dick for example may not be something deemed firable. One complaint isn't gonna e enough and ideally multiple people will complain as well.
The trick is knowing how to phrase it so it's clear it's a problem for the company. They usually love SBIN (situation behavior impact next steps) so it's good format to use:
Dear HR,
On the meeting XYZ
My boss Bully McIdiot was screaming like a toddler at everyone that disagreed with him
This is preventing the free flow of ideas and Innovation and creating an »»hostile work environment««
So he should be fired. Preferably from a cannon.
kisses and hugs,
the employee of the year
However, the two things aren't mutally exclusive. Bad behaviour that risks reputational or legal damage to the company will make HR cross. Think about how you frame things when talking to HR
I am continually flabbergasted that people don’t know this. HR is not your friend.
The clue is in the name. Human resources, they just see you as a resource.
Is this also true outside America? You know, the kinds of places with unions, labor rights and laws that actually favor the employee?
It is still true, at least in Europe. I mean, they're not actually trying to destroy your life, you know, but they're after the company's best interests. They might help you, and might make things not the worst they possibly can, because that'll give a bad rep, but they're not your friend.
At least in Germany it is
Everyone should know that, very often, they are just wrong. And that’s ok. We all are.
The more ready you are to really accept that you could be wrong about anything, and admit when you are wrong about something, the better you will make your own life, as well as the lives of those around you.
And not only will you make everyone's lives better - seemingly ironically, by simply accepting the fact that you're often wrong, you actually make it more likely that you'll be right.
That's the part that I think people especially need to understand, since a refusal to admit that you're wrong is generally rooted in an ego-driven need to be right, and refusing to admit that you're wrong guarantees that right is the one thing that you won't be. You'll just keep clinging to the same wrong idea and keep failing to fulfill that need to be right.
If, on the other hand, you just freely admit that you're wrong, then you're instantly free to move on to another, and better, position, making it that much more likely that you'll actually be right. And if you don't get it that time, that's fine - just freely admit that you're wrong again and move on again. Keep doing that and sooner or later you actually will be right, instead of just pretending to be.
So you'll not only make everyone's lives more pleasant - you'll actually better serve your desire to be right. What more could you want?
I am ready to accept that I'm wrong but I don't want to deal with the bullies after proven wrong :(
Dude, you just don't care.
If you're swayed to their side, then bullied for it, ask them why do they even bother arguing then and why not just go fight random strangers? Then tell them to have some self respect and act like they've been here before. Say "for fucks sake" under your breath but still in earshot, shaking your head as you walk away.
I don’t think this fits here. Nobody on the internet is ever wrong! /s
Thanks for the advice! :)
Can confirm. This is the way.
I think so many more people should heed this advice. I hope I’m wrong though, and that’s ok 👌
Control + Backspace deletes entire words rather than individual characters
Control + Arrows also moves your text cursor by whole words. Combine it with shift and you can easily select a bunch of text without the mouse.
Another one that took me far too long to learn: Shift + Tab will do the same thing as tab (next element) in reverse
similarly if you're using arrow keys to move the cursor where you want, ctrl + arrow key moves you along word by word instead of letter by letter.
In bash, it's alt-backspace 👍
Ctrl + shift + v to strip formatting before pasting (can be application dependent)
think it’s cmd+alt+shift+v for our mac friends
For a key-combo I've found handy:
shift + ins = a more general paste-command. While ctrl + v works in most Microsoft-contexts, shift + ins seems to work both in MS Windows, Command prompt, Linux and several other systems.
The ducks at the park are free. Like you can just take them.
I had a conversation with ChatGPT on that subject. It could not stress enough how terrible it would be for the duck if I brought it home with me, and that was despite me informing the AI that the duck in question was special, that it could talk and had specifically requested to come home with me.
This is not true. There are a litany of laws that capturing a wild duck from a public park would be a violation of, so don't do it.
If you abduct them (pun intended), they're no longer free.
Which country?
Have you tried?
Yeah, but do the ducks like it?
You can only help people who want to be helped. That goes for yourself, too. You can't help yourself until you actually have the desire to improve.
In the same vein, wanting different outcomes requires different incomes.
Take all your actions and add them up = this. If you wanted that not this, all your inputs need to be under the spotlight and changes made; including and especially habits, vices, behaviours, opinions, assumptions, collection and quality of knowledge, relationships, etc etc. Sometimes the cost or sacrifice from and of yr current self is large and largely invisible.
Being uncomfortable means you're learning. Learning means you're growing. If you're never uncomfortable, you haven't reached luxury and made it, you've reached stagnation and have stopped 'living' your life.
Choosing the lesser of two evils, or the devil you know, or never doing anything about a life you don't like or want, is cowardice and will slowly crush your soul into despair. Choosing the unknown might end up sucking, but it might be better. If the known is guaranteed to suck, take the unknown - at least there's hope there and despair, a feeling worse than pain, is a failing to find hope.
Pretty awesome advice!
This is true. But if it's somebody important your life, social pressure can help.
Demonstrate the lifestyle you want to help them lead. Give them opportunities to join you, not pushy opportunities just let's do a thing together. And you demonstrate the better lifestyle.
No it wouldn't get somebody off drugs. But it might help somebody exercise more or eat healthier if you normalize it
- Exercise grows your hippocampus
- So do antidepressants according to recent research
- Small hippocampal volume is an excellent predictor of depression and anxiety
- Exercise grows your hippocampus, in a dose-dependent way
- Exercise grows your hippocampus
- Exercise grows your hippocampus
This is the most important fact I have ever learned.
Just adding some sauce for the weird cult like talk: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1015950108
What do you mean by "in a dose dependent way"?
I think it means more exercise leads to more growth.
So does meditation according to my psychiatrist
Apparently it also increases the feeling of needing to repeat yourself 🤔
The gas gauge tells you which side the filler is at on a vehicle.
Drowning is very fast, seconds not minutes like in the movies. People in distress can take minutes before they are actively drowning. Active drowning is silent, they will not be yelling for help. It looks like the person is "climbing" or pushing down at the water. They will be vertical in the water and may be "bobbing", going underwater and resurfacing. They will have their head tilted back parallel to the surface of the water.
If you see someone go under in open water keep looking at where they went under while calling for help, don't take your eyes off it. If you are the only one who saw them go under, your job is to direct others to where they went down. In open water it's very hard to find people because the bottom isn't visible.
Username does not check out.
Also drowning can happen after inhalation of water. All incidents involving children being rescued from water may require medical intervention, even if they seem fine initially. "Dry drowning"
If you see someone go overboard, get someone else to start throwing stuff off the deck to where they are in the water (while you keep pointing at them). Makes for much easier locating by others, and a quicker rescue
We trained on this a lot. Also yelling "swim" because apparently the shock of sudden cold water can make you forget to do that.
There's a YouTube channel that shows videos of people drowning and being rescued so you can see what it looks like: https://youtube.com/@LifeguardRescue
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://youtube.com/@LifeguardRescue
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
This is true regardless of symptom severity or health status, every person is at risk. I think most people really aren't aware of this, they absorbed the narrative that it's gone, mild, only kills/harms the vulnerable, etc. This isn't really their fault, there are a lot of factors that have led people to that belief, but people should know their lives and livelihoods are much more at risk now than 4 years ago.
And that this isn't inevitable, there are simple methods of disrupting transmission and protecting yourself and others. COVID-19 is here to stay (unless we do something about that) and it has impacts on every person infected and on society at large. That shouldn't mean folks accept illness and worse quality of life. We adapt and adopt precautions in our life to reduce long-term health impacts, like we've done before with many other illnesses that plague humanity.
And the possible risks are compounded with each infection. People are acting like covid just isn't a problem anymore, like it's gone away. Meanwhile, roughly 100 Americans are dying of covid every day - and we're not even in a surge at the moment.
I'm too lazy to verify your numbers, but realistically, covid nowadays is simply just another life risk. Yes, people are still dying and that's bad, but most of them are just in the age where people tend to die of such infections.
I'd guess, there are about 4 million deaths a year in a country the size of the US. So having something on the order of 100k per year due to covid isn't that concerning, if the lifespan isn't affected that much.
We have vaccinations against covid. If you're properly vaccinated, you'll probably be fine and younger children will grow up in a world where you just get covid once in a while and get better immunity than we old folks could ever have.
Anecdotal evidence but I have collected the 4 big strains and albeit vaccinated correctly it was quite the hassle each time (a week in bed or more), and yeah short of breath and more after each (once for around 3-4 months with brain fog, with the addition that I didn't really feel spicy food at all spicy during that period, just very good).
It's definitely not a joke and I hope I won't catch it again.
To add to this, SiDock is an awesome project working on an open-source, patent-free, self-stable antiviral for covid using the computers of volunteers. Anybody can volunteer their spare computational power with a few clicks. I have been crunching it since 2020 and find it very fun.
Bleach + vinegar = toxic chlorine gas that can be lethal.
Not sure how many people know this but I was in my mid-20s when I found this out, luckily not the hard way.
Also bleach and ammonia.
Basically, don't mix cleaning chemicals.
Also, ammonium nitrate + gasoline = bad day.
I know a farmer who lived to tell the tale. He had a bunch of empty sacks, and he had piled them up and was ready to burn them. He poured some gasoline on them so that the fire would start easily. Unfortunately, he didn’t know that one of the sacks contained a little bit of ammonium nitrate, which happily combined with the gasoline and fire. Next, the mixture exploded, throwing burning gasoline everywhere.
After he managed to put the fires out he was taken to the hospital. Today, he still has some nasty burn marks on his skin, but he survived.
Something that applies when you get a little older - if you’re in a relatively specific job field, don’t burn your bridges at a job you’re going to leave. You never know who will be sitting across the table from you at the interview, at the meeting table, on the job site. People in the same field tend to move around in the same jobs as you. If it’s someone you burned, you may not get the job, or if you do, it could be pretty miserable.
I am now the client of a company I worked at for over 15 years.
Because I handled a difficult situation leaving well, we still have a very good working relationship.
It's a very niche industry, and I've worked for or with almost all the players in my region. My former employer, while small, is the best at what they do.
Unless you are wealthy, if you think life is to expensive you should ask for more taxes, not less.
The issue is not your net income, but wealth redistribution and solidarity.
Magnetic USB connectors are a thing and can save your cables/devices not just from wear and tear (unplugging/replugging constantly) but also from cables being tripped over or otherwise pulled. Highly recommended if you're using VR! Sadly there are no standards to these.
My dad has Parkinson's Disease, so he has poor coordination in his hands and can't plug in small cords like a charging cable.
My sister bought him magnetic USB connectors and it's changed his life! There's a small USB end that plugs into his smartphone port, and the cable connects to it via magnets. Takes my dad almost no effort; he just needs to get his phone near the end of the cable and it latches on.
There are regular charging cables and fast-charging cables. Depending on your device, make sure you know which one you're buying. The regular cables take half a day to charge my phone.
Are there magnetic USB-C connectors that can do USB 5Gb or even 10Gb?
Bonus tip: get as many as you need, and then a couple more. Sounds like I’m some kind of salesman, but trust me. I bought some to create a simple charging station for my vr controllers. Works great. Now I want some more to charge other things with the cables I already have laying around (I had some more). Didn’t have the right adapter pieced for in my devices. (Needed usb c, only had micro b and lightning). Now, a few years after I bought them to make that charging stand thingy, they don’t sell this exact one anymore. Bummer.
Which brand/type can you recommend? I want some, but I find them hard to search for.
Especially with the amazon whatever slightly matching keywords providing bogus results.
Keyboard shortcuts and basic computer knowledge. I'm in college and just existing with tech illiterate people is maddening.
Yeah IMO not so much shortcuts but file management is often lost on the old and the young.
What is a file. What is a file type. What is file size. Where do files go when you download them. What is your user directory. How do you rename files. What is a file sync app like google drive.
This stuff could save so many people so much time. Every day millions of professionals are emailing clients "Thanks for sending that though, but it looks like you've emailed me a shortcut instead of the actual file."
I got a contract to produce some exhibits for an event at a university. These exhibits included some touch screen information kiosks that would allow guests to find out more about the exhibits. I used some software that was kind of like turbocharged PowerPoint; it could do graphical things on the screen, it could run other applications, running on a Raspberry Pi it could handle the GPIO and blink lights, run motors, whatever.
I built the exhibits themselves and rigged up this framework, a student from the university was assigned to actually generate the content. Each of 4 exhibits was to get 3 or 4 video files each. From this student, I get about 5 emails that each contain two or three video files. There is no coherent naming scheme, "video1.mp4" "hector.mp4" "version 2.mp4"
So I call up this kid and ask her how I'm supposed to know which of these videos goes where in what exhibit. "Watch them and figure it out I guess." Even if I had time for this, which I didn't, that's outside the scope of my contract. YOU organize them into something like "exhibit-1-video3.mp4" and I will put them in the places they're supposed to go.
I feel for the professors that have to deal with the work these kids turn in.
i still remember when i learned ctrl c and ctrl v in school, that moment was unforgettable because its a basic skill
The cable is the weakest link of Earbuds for durability.
IEM's with replaceable cables are readily available and getting very cheap & good these days (e.g. Moondrop Chu 2, Truthear Hola, etc)
Better yet, you can get Bluetooth ear hooks for both 2-pin and MMCX IEMs, if you ever want to lose the cable. They last longer than airpod types, offer better sound quality, and you can replace them without replacing the IEMs themselves.
Whoa this is interesting. What kind of setup would you suggest for someone that wants: products that have replaceable parts (especially the cable), microphone, sound quality not being the most importantly aspect, being able to use while playing pc games? Seems i should get an iem with a cable that has a Mic, but maybe that's a bad idea
When you're about to face a high risk, high reward situation, you should willfully, willingly start to hyperventilate, as this helps your brain ...
NEVER take any stranger's advice on the internet as credible without checking it with a specialist. This is especially true when said advice relates to your health and/or safety.
That seems like good advice...
I guess I can't trust it. Since a stranger in the internet told me eh? Lol
... without checking it. If that's your understanding, you're correct.
On the affirmative, ALWAYS check whatever advice you hear/read on the internet. Be ultra careful with your health and safety.
Sounds risky, but the rewards are limitless.
Most microwaves can be muted so the button pushes are all silent. You will have to look up how to on each microwave model but almost all models have a mute option.
A partner of mine has an above-range microwave with the worst implementation of this that I've ever seen. When you mute the button beeps, it mutes the entire microwave. Food finished cooking? Silent. Manual timer set? Hope you're looking to see when it hits zero. There's no way to silence the buttons without muting all alerts completely.
Ugh, that's how mine is too. All the noises or none at all.
Usually its holding start and stop buttons for a few seconds
I read somewhere you just have to long press zero on most model to mute them
Is this a joke my microwave is too analog to understand?
What wasn’t reasoned in, can’t be reasoned out. Many people who suffer from conspiratorial thinking need help and support more than evidence and debate.
In Windows 10 & 11, window+shift+S then draw a box to grab a quick, pre-cropped screenshot. It goes to your clipboard for easy paste and you get a notification you can click to view and save to file.
Bonus: use window+L at work to lock your desktop, preventing shenanigans.
I keep learning this exists and then instantly forgetting about it...
basic windows knowledge may be needed unexpectedly someday
Cement is highly alkaline. If wet cement comes in contact with your skin, it can cause third degree chemical burns. So don't write your name in wet cement like Bart Simpson.
Yeah, use a stick, not your fingers.
Is tongue okay?
IDK if "third degree" chemical burns are a thing.
Cement will dissolve the fat from under your skin, and a third degree burn is when you cook the fat under your skin.
Also it's not going to burn you within a few minutes the way we normally think of a chemical burn.
Tires can get damaged internally and the only real way to tell is to dismount them from the rim. If there is internal damage they can potentially explode while being filled with air.
I see a lot of people filling up their tires while sitting straight infront of them and if they do explode it explodes straight outward. My tip is to connect the air gauge and then stand of to the side while filling, just in case.
I have filled a lot of tires and I cannot think of a single time where I had appropriate equipment to inflate the tire from any position that wasn’t right in front of it.
The aircraft mechanic school I attended had a little cage to put tires in while inflating them. This is the only such thing I have ever seen including during aviation service in the field.
Tires being products that can directly affect consumer safety have very stringent rules about safety factor, which usually allows close to twice of rated pressure or load before they fail. So unless you are ballooning it to uncomfortable levels you should be fine.
The more credible danger from tires are if you constantly use them under inflated, which can cause them to separate out during transit causing loss of control in vehicle. So keep check of pressure once a week to rated pressure and you should be fine
Too bad the little clip mechanism at the end of the hose is always broken or very loose. There’s no other way than to stand in front of the tire and presses the end of the hose with my hand.
Mitochondria (the famous powerhouse of the cell) is a symbiotic bacteria that became so entangled with our cell that neither can now live without the other. Sorry to everyone who knows, in some regions this is not common knowledge. Knowing this makes your life immensely better because it's such a cool fact.
Mitochondria is basically a bacteria that got stuck in our cells and found a symbiotic function inside us. Fun fact: the mitochondria has its own DNA and is used in lineage tracking.
The mitochondrion apparently turns out to be a relative of the bacterium that causes typhus. At some point, an intracellular parasite evolved into an intracellular symbiote.
DNA sometimes moves from mitochondria to the cellular nucleus.
This can lead to speciation.
Woa.
Use windows + p to change the presentation settings on a laptop when connecting to a monitor or audio / video system. This lets you quickly change between laptop, dual display, and extended desktop.
Windows + x and then b brings up a menu where you can turn on "presention" mode, preventing the laptop from going to sleep during a presentation.
Also Win + K brings up the casting option if you want to connect to something.
Is that for like mirrorop and such? I did not realise that.
And Ctrl+shift+alt+win+L to open LinkedIn (seriously, try it!)
Cars are way more expensive than you think, and getting rid of it will make you happier and way wealthier.
I don't think it will make me happier to spend 1.5 hour in the bus and train instead of 20min by car.
Yeah, a lot of the in the Americas it's not the fact that we'd rather be in a car it's that our public transit options are just so non-competitive with driving by design that it makes no sense to ever use them from a time perspective if you can afford not to.
If you live somewhere like the Bay area where you've got the BART or Chicago with the L, you can 100% use public transit as your daily driver because it's actually faster then driving in most cases and you can read or do work while doing so... sadly this is not the case in most places. Takes me 15 minutes to drive into downtown, if I took the bus it would take me 2 and a half hours.
Yeah, I'm generally anti-car in urban areas, but the bus system where I used to live forced me to get a car to go to work (it would have taken like 2 hours 40 minutes and involve walking for a fair amount of that. each way.)
unless you live in like, the netherlands maybe, the traffic is going to make driving by far the least enjoyable option. Have fun sitting trapped in your car while others switch to micromobility and literally arrive home faster than you while enjoying the breeze on their face and the money to spend on having fun instead.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztHZj6QNlkM
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I'm open-source, check me out at GitHub.
Lithium batteries are happiest between 20 and 80% state of charge. You should not store them outside of that range. Charging a little often also doesn't hurt your battery like many seem to believe.
Charging while cold is bad, but storing in cold is good.
Also, NiMh and NiCd batteries are different tha Lithium based ones. Check what type of battery you have. Phones and EVs are almost always lithium though.
To be clear, a car that uses either gasoline or diesel will have a lead acid battery and not a lithium battery. Electric cars have lithium. Just to clear up any confusion.
Quite a lot of electric cars will still have a lead acid battery for the low charge things like wipers, electric windows and electric mirrors. It's simpler to do that than to have a complicated system to step down the voltage to something they can accept from a lithium ion battery.
So essentially electric cars have two independent electrical systems that have nothing to do with each other. Interestingly this means that you can use an electric car to jump start an ICE car, even though a lot of people claim you cannot.
That said some electric cars do go the route of a step down transformer so check your car.
Dang it! And I just rigged my alternator to stop charging my car battery at 80%.
Yes, correct! I will update my post to reflect this. Working with EVs can give me EV blinders.
70% is the Sweet spot...
As a camper, i set the dc to dc to stop charging at that, let the solar fill the rest sloowwly as im at the desired destination.
Been happier with the battery health since
If someone tells you no or you try and fail at something, life actually just continues on from that point, and you can try other things
In my very early life if I tried things and failed my parents would then try to help by offering harsh criticism and then a very tedious and didactic lecture. Made me unwilling to try to do anything.
In later life I belatedly learned that being really good at anything usually involves being really bad at it for a long time. Also, there will come a point where you don't suck at something and you will mistakenly think you have become quite good at it. You can still take pleasure from not sucking but be careful of overestimating your abilities.
tl;dr - It's ok to be bad at things, you have to be bad at things before you become good.
Move the decimal point one number to the left. That's 10% of the original number. Double that number to get 20% of the original number.
Now you have your tip.
Pay liveable wages like the rest of the developed world, with medical, retirement contributions, and taxes all sorted. Then you don't have to tip.
No one has to tip.
Tipping in the US is fucking wack. We have a service charge already on the bill and if i liked the service I tip, giving them more. Nobody should tip for standard service.
As a kid, I was taught to tip 15% for standard service. I still do that today.
20% is for exceptional service. 10% for mediocre. 2¢ for service that's so bad they should probably think about getting a different job.
Anyway, getting 15% is still very easy. Get 10% the way you said. Now add half of that.
The power in your punch comes from your legs.
What if I sit down and punch downwards ?
That GoodWill and Autism Speaks are not valid as charities/nonprofits.
Could you provide a explanation for someone not in the US?
GoodWill is a chain thrift store that uses legal loopholes to achieve charity status. A lot of charities are like this in America as well as elsewhere (should stress it's not just an "American thing"). Sometimes the legal definition of a charity isn't well-thought-out enough which allows for too much wiggle room when it comes to what a charity is. GoodWill achieved charity status by presenting itself to exclusively offer positions to people with disabilities in a society that does not favor them for job positions, but at the same time GoodWill underpays them and inserts them into working conditions comparable to the beginning of the industrial revolution when children would be injured or killed by the machines they were supposed to be working on.
Autism Speaks, another famous so-called charity, has a similar story. They came into prominence for saying they will help "treat autism" and help those in need, and they are partners with Sesame Street, with whom they are co-sponsors. However, people often ignore their attitude is one of eugenics. They believe the people they present themselves as helping are burdens and will side with anyone who has acted on this, including Planned Parenthood and even the Canadian government pre-2020, the former of whom is preferential with abortions (therefore amounting to eugenics, in fact that was why they were eventually cancelled) and the latter of whom did not let anyone with a disability immigrate into the country for forty years.
Since we live in the digital age, I think it would be awesome if everyone knew a little bit of python and how you can automate boring tasks using it. Well doesn't have to only be python but it would be cool if something like it was added to school systems
I know a little python but have no idea how I would use it to automate anything useful. Any suggestions? What do you do with it?
Back in my day, we used shell scripts and Perl AND WE LIKED IT!
Seriously though, learning anything to automate the boring bits can be good. Just test well before relying on anything.
Take the following with a big spoon of salt, since I am not a lawyer. Those are the results of interest and some reading on that topic.
Insulting someone is illegal in Germany (§ 185 StGB). You can get financial penalties and in worst cases some jailtime. However, if you insult someone back immediately, those can cancel each other out and the judge can exempt both of you or one of you from punishment (§ 199 StGB). Furthermore, since it is considered a crime, you could, theoretically, detain the culprit in case they want to flee until you are able to get some identification on them, i.e., see their ID card, or until someone like the police arrives (§ 127 StPO). Also this is not okay if you already know the person or have easy means to determine their ID (e.g., your neighbour or someone working at a facility you visit). In all cases the proportionality of your actions are important. (Beating someone senseless just to detain them, because they called you an avocado in a mean way is certainly not okay. This might be slightly different however, if the person in question commited a violent crime and is still acting violently.)
That's super odd. What constitutea as an insult?
There are quite different aspects to this. Formally insults are considered "libels" (or to translate it more literally from german: violations of honour). Some things depend a lot on the indivdual circumstances and actions, some are almost universally. Insults can be expressed verbally, non-verbally and through various means of communication (text, pictures, gestures, etc..).
For example, showing a driver the middle-finger (which is the common "fuck you"-gesture), because they took your right of way, is usually considered an insult. Whereas it is not considered an insult if you and your friends do that among yourselves with a humorous intent (which also needs to be perceived humorous for all participants). Another example: dumping your softdrink over your fellow pupil is usually an insult. Calling someone "bitch" can be an insult if it's meant in a demeaning way. It is not an insult if it's meant in a friendly manner, like the "heey biaaatch" and suchlike in colloquial English.
So it really depends on the intentions behind it and the reception of the one receiving the insult.
The jurisdiction of the German Federal Supreme Court of Justice says that insults are expressions about contempt or "dishonoring" (idk if that's a good translation) towards another person.
I could write a whole lot more about this as there are even more aspects to this (e.g., how family is a special case, how you don't even need to be the victim of an insult and it could still be illegal, some "flavours" of insults which are handled by different laws and much more), but I'm too lazy to do so now. ;)
But, which is very important and to avoid confusion: You can have a negative opinion about someone and are allowed to express it. It just depends on how you express it. Opinions and insults are different things. Freedom of speech is protected in Germany, but that has limitations there, where you can really hurt someone. (Reminds me of how insults provoke similar neurological reactions as a slap in the face.)
There's a paragraph in the German constitution that lists all words that count as insults. German school kids have to recite the constitution once per week in school and when that paragraph comes everyone giggles.
/s I think there probably is some list of insults, though.
my example for why the 1st amendment exists to prevent goofy ahh laws like this
I don't find it goofy. Having an opinion and insulting someone are different things.
Holy shit what a hellhole
I find it good that there is such a law. It is a law to guide and enforce civil behaviour. No one should be exposed to this as if it were nothing.
By the way, that doesn't mean that you can't voice your opinion. Freedom of speech is protected so far. Even if that's confusing for some people: having an opinion and insulting someone are different things.
Edit: Typo. You can voice your opinion. forgot a "'t" at the "can".
Evolution was largely theorized and understood down to the nuance that each parent contributed to a 'doubled seed' for trait inheritance and that trait success depended on survival of the fittest well before Jesus was even born.
(In fact, the author who wrote the only surviving book detailing this used the specific language of calling failed biological reproduction as "seed falling by the wayside of a path" around 80 years before the parable of the sower described how seed that fell by the wayside of the path didn't reproduce but that which found fertile soil produced more and more - a parable unanimously spoken in public in canon but provided a secret explanation thereafter and one believed by 'heretics' to have been referring to seeds described extremely similar to how Leucretius described his "seeds of things" in De Rerum Natura, the aforementioned book. Also, in the extra-canonical scripture this 'heretical' group followed, the parable of the sower immediately followed a couplet of sayings about how no matter if lion ate man or man ate lion that man was inevitable and how the human being was like a large fish selected from many small fish in the sea.)
What does it all mean though?
It means people were debating intelligent design vs evolution at a time when people used to pee on their hands to clean them.
And at that time, they had no scientific methods to evaluate which side was correct, so the people who in hindsight were proven correct were able to be dismissed and forgotten by their peers and later generations.
Leucretius described light as made up of tiny indivisible parts that moved really quickly. The experiment proving the particle behavior of light is what got Einstein his Nobel prize 2,000 years later.
From this foundation Leucretius claimed that the sun, giving off light, was not an infinite resource and would one day itself die. This was only a few centuries after Anaxagoras was exiled from Athens for claiming the moon was a giant rock reflecting the sun's light.
In a single book are ideas literally over a thousand years before their time (in part due to intentional suppression by the church), and my guess is that until the comment above, you had no idea.
And that's unfortunate.
That's what it means.
That's interesting and all, but why do you think everyone should know that?
Because a lot of people think evolution was only as old as Darwin.
Some of those ideas may have gone back much further than even the 3rd-1st century CE. The alleged Phonecian creation story from around the time of the Trojan war was about how life began as senseless round creatures that emerged from mud and eventually over time became watchers of the sky.
And the Greeks credited their ideas around atomism not to Democritus but to the Phonecian Mochus of Sidon from around the time of the Trojan war.
But because any sources from back then haven't survived, we tend to credit it to the later sources we can reasonably back up.
Yet the only reason we know that these ideas were around in the 1st century BCE is because the secretary of the Pope right before the Renaissance went around to monasteries bribing guards to smuggle out texts. The only copy of the book about evolution from antiquity was being eaten by worms before it was saved (there's a Pulitzer winning book about its rediscovery and influence on the scientific revolution during the Renaissance called The Swerve).
But most people today have no idea that these ideas go back that far.
And I think that's a shame.
Evolution is kind of a big deal and pretty relevant to our lives.
And the masses collectively forgetting those that came earlier on is a bit like those maggots having been successful in eating away at the legacy of history. Or more accurately, like the church having been successful in denying humanity its own history of innovation and brilliance, let alone having successfully suppressed that knowledge for over a millennia.
Why is any knowledge or history worth knowing?
If you're unsure which side of a path to be on especially with shared paths default to the national driving side. Bonus if you hear a bike bell don't jump to a side or call your dog into their path just keep doing what your doing
The bike thing is real. So often I hit my bell or call out “on your left” when about to pass people from behind. About 50% of the time those people immediately move to the left, which is why I always try to indicate far enough in advance for them to get in my way, realize their mistake and move back before I catch up to them .
The only people that keep doing what they were doing when I call behind them on my bike are the ones that are walking in a group side by side blocking the entire width of the pathway...
If you're in a country where most people don't drive, don't expect this to work well. Japan seemingly has no system (though people in most of the country will probably move left most of the time). It definitely takes some adjusting to the chaos of everyone walking wherever the hell they want.
Fodmaps are sugars and sugar alcohols that many people struggle to process well. Lactose intolerance is commonly known but there are lots of others. Wheat fructans are in most gluten containing foods and may be why some people find gluten free diets beneficial even if not coeliac.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FODMAP if anybody else had no idea what that meant.
Ah yes, I have seen some of these words before.
Yeah and you can systematically work through the various FODMAPs to figure out which ones cause you problems. It's not that FODMAPs are all bad, it's that there are groups of foods that you might be sensitive to.
Basic cybersecurity skills, like
- don't click on random links in random emails
- identify phishing/scam emails
- use a password manager & generate long enough passwords
- know how long a safe password is
- use unique passwords everywhere
- use an ad blocker
- don't click on sketchy links
- identify sketchy links
- don't share your personal data when it's not necessary
- make offline & online backups
- change the admin and wifi passwords of your home router from the factory default
- have some sort of a firewall and antivirus software
- etc...
I would add that if you're using Windows then you don't need a 3rd party anti virus as long as you keep Windows up to date. Many commercial anti virus programs behave more like malware than the things they're meant to protect you from
Never heard of life traps. I googled it and it seems like marketing speak for psychological issues to deal with in therapy. Is that it means to you or something else?
Yeah i had to search the term to find an english translation for it as it's not my first language and the search results felt a bit off to me... But I'm currently reading a book on it and it really has helped me realize where most of my thought and behavior patterns come from and how to learn to be a better version of myself. It might not be for everyone but it helps me
it seems like marketing speak for psychological issues
I just googled it too and this is indeed what it sounds like. Influencer spam. "How I avoided these 11 common Life Traps!"
It is that it means.
You are not forced to retire once, near the end of your life, for the rest of your life.
Go on. ...
I think he's trying to say that retirement is voluntary and that you can still go back to work near the end of your life? Also that retirement isn't determined only by your age. But the wording of the comment makes it a bit difficult to interpret tbh
All salespeople in every shop have negotiation brackets (well perhaps except grocery supermarkets) for most products and are willing to go down on the price if that may encourage you to buy. The negotiation wiggle space is normally included in the price and yeah, they do know you're uncomfortable haggling and will go out of their way to not discourage you from purchase.
Also, but this is something I only heard from a colleague, you can negotiate up to 40% off if you convince them to purchase the product using their employee discount (so bulk price) and split the difference off the record.
I'm just imagining some jackass negotiating at Walmart now.
I actually have done it at Walmart. I was buying a computer mouse, the website had it for like $30, the store wanted like $40. I showed the store page on my phone, and he said "Yeah we'll do that."
Health related:
- "Healthy food" is a grift meant to sell you shit. And by that I mean most "Healthy Foods" you find on the supermarket or are advertised as superfoods or are at the core of the latest fad diet are in fact just as trashy as any other ultraprocessed prepackaged food. Even if they are truly healthy foodstuffs, they are often something that isn't a staple of people's everyday diets (usually shit that is part of the diet in a foreign culture, but not on the West) that you get massively overcharged for because "Muh superfood".
- The real way to eat healthy is to buy fresh ingredients, cook your own meals, and inform yourself on what your body actually needs so you can be smart about what you cook... But that requires time and work investment, which most people cannot afford to do, which is why obesity is more common in poor folk than on rich folk. Have I mentioned that knowing certain stuff will make you, if not politically radicalised, very angry regardless?
Computer related:
- In windows 10 and 11 if you press Win+V instead of Ctrl+V you'll get the option to activate clipboard history. After that, you can use Win+V to get a little menu that lists things that were in your clipboard and which you replaced by copying/cutting something else. You can then choose what to paste. Linux has plenty of programs that add this functionality and was in fact there first. No idea about MacOS.
- Learning a bit of your operating system's command line interface will save you a lot of time and effort in the long run -- And you don't need to become one of those turbo-weirdos that uses nothing BUT the CLI -- But the reason the good ol' console-host/terminal-emulator has stuck around after all these years is that there is a lot of shit that is just faster and more practical to do by typing a few words vs. going through 10 different menus and tabs.
- Save yourself some money: If you're not gonna be doing hardcore state-of-the-art gaming or heavy video editing or some other intense task, a middle-of-the-road computer from ten years ago with some light upgrades will carry you just fine. Get a used PC, get a decent quality SATA SSD and some extra sticks of RAM (8 minimum, ideally 16 or more) and you'll be all set for everyday internet browsing and office tasks and shit. Heck, slap in a GPU later and you can get away with playing a lot of games, if not with DigitalFoundry tier performance.
On the topic of the command line interface: it doesn't necessarily mean using the computer by manually typing long lines of code. The CLI, be it Bash, cmd or PowerShell is also a programming language, and you can save series of commands you frequently use into text files which can be run like executables. At least in Linux, you can weave these into the GUI; For example in the Cinnamon desktop it's fairly trivial to create context menu items; I can convert a .docx or .odf file to a .pdf by right clicking on the file, no need to open it in an editor, and so on. A few lines of Bash and a little config file and that's it.
You do not have to embody or enact your thoughts and feelings.
We have no real moment-to-moment control over what comes down that highway…it just comes, an endless firehose of bs, at times, and it is entirely possible to notice and observe this activity, instead of being swept along and/or making it all mean things.
How to troubleshoot and give your electronics basic maintenance.
Care to expand on this ?
Of course.
Mostly pertaining to software related malfunctions, I've been on the helping end of so incredibly many "have you tried turning it on and off?" situations that I can't remember all of them. Aside from that, not knowing how antivirus works, not knowing how to search for fixes and solutions to common problems, not reading error descriptions or even how the basic device settings can/do impact performance, etc.
Many people I know don't know how to navigate their computer's or phone's OS and/or settings properly and don't understand basic descriptions of what functions and settings do, and they're around 25 yo. They can't troubleshoot hardware issues either, are unable to identify faulty components or peripherals correctly, and e.g. commonly confound RAM and HDD storage, be they related to phones, computers or other kinds of electronics.
Something stops working and it's immediately a) call the techy friend to get a free fix for zero effort, b) trade it in for another one/throw it away and buy a new one, or c) call an actual (or not so actual) expert. I mean often times it's not really that hard to solve the problems. It's always a faulty product, not the end user failing to identify proper use and how their electronics actually work.
Most of what society tells us will make us feel happy and fulfilled in life is bullshit. Living a good life is primarily about your personal relationships. Things like social status and personal wealth are far less important.
How to sing, dance and make music.
Life would be different if people wouldn't argue but express their emotions in a song.
You wish more people knew how to quit porn?
Having an active sex life really dried up my porn consumption. So boyfriends and girlfriends are the cure to porn?
Update: I just read that book.
It starts off by pre-blaming readers that any failure is due to them " not following instructions ", " not understanding the instructions ". You know it's going to be a good read when you're already blamed before you start.
Anyway like halfway into the book they reveal the magic method.
- Stop watching porn
- Don't think about porn
The rest of the book is a huge amount of verbiage, a Socratic walk through a theory of mind, doing a lot of straw man arguments that one might use against porn.
It's clearly a book, written from the heart, but man they need to learn how to be a more effective writer.
The end of the book calls for all porn to be behind age verification. The blight on our society.
Wild Read