What’s a common “fact” that’s spread around that’s actually not true and pisses you off that too many people believe it?
The old “tomatoes are not a vegetable” is pretty frustrating. They are a vegetable.
In botanical terms, the concept of a vegetable does not exist, which is where tomatoes are classified as fruits. But in culinary terms, vegetables do exist and tomatoes are classified as such.
I just find it frustrating, because I believed that garbage myself at some point, and I thought, I was smart for knowing that.
Just one of those examples that you can easily spread misinformation, so long as you make it sound plausible.In culinary arts vegetables are the non-sweet edible parts of plants (not fruit). So no, they are not a vegetable.
What is true is people call them a vegetable.
Other sweet plant parts are also considered culinary vegetables: carrots, squash, red peppers, sweet potatoes, fennel, and onions.
Some of them you do have to cook to perceive as sweet, but non-sweet doesn’t seem to be a good dividing line. Striving for non-overlapping categories instead of just accepting the mess seems like a mistake.
I will accept these are also not vegetables in the culinary sense as well. Looks like you have single handedly eliminate a bunch of vegetables, congratulations.
Ok, so what about peas? Or cabbage? Artichokes? What’s the specific cut off for being too sweet to be a vegetable?
If it is sweet and is a berry/fruit like a tomato then it is not a vegetable. I am personally not having a hard time with this. Not sweet = vegetable. Sweet = debatable.
Hold on, it didn’t need to be a berry/fruit earlier, does that mean carrots and sweet potatoes are vegetables after all?
You know what, let’s try this the other way around: could you name specific examples of things you consider vegetables? Because we’ve named quite a lot now and you don’t seem to consider any of them vegetables.
I am literally going off the culinary definition which is related to taste. If it is sweet it is a good chance it is a berry or fruit of the plant and not the vegetable matter.
As a cook, you are wrong. Those are all vegetables. There is no purity test you can run on what is a vegetable and what is not, it’s literally just what people arbitrarily decided however long ago.
If you’re responding to me, that was my point. They’re all vegetables.
Oh yeah I definitely responded to the wrong person. It’s annoying how often that happens on Lemmy lol
There are vegetables where you eat the root.
There are vegetables where you eat the leaves.
There are vegetables where you eat the stem.
But for cucumbers, pumpkins, aubergine and paprika you eat the fruit, why should the tomato be different?I believe the point is non-sweet, tomatoes are often quite sweet without any cooking required
Yes, but bell peppers are also quite sweet. As a kid I learnt that vegetables are from perennial plants (only live for a year) but that rule of thumb is also inconsistent.
Vegetable refuse to be categorised. Become unrulable.
Got it, if ungovernable, it’s a vegetable
If you want to get pedantic the tomato is a berry.
Sure, but it is not a vegetable.
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.
True, but we don’t wholesale shit in our drinking water any more while riddled with syphilis
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.
Fun fact, the bubonic plague never went away. It’s still kicking around the world. Obviously not like it was with The Plague, but still.
There are a couple cases a year in the States. It’s treatable now, that’s the difference
I got relatives that lived to their 90’s in the 1600’s, we may have skewed it a bit
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.
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.
I’m skeptical of this. It seems more likely that they’re simply correlated because biodiversity is higher in warmer climates, both of microorganisms and plants.
Ask yourself these two questions. One, why would there be any spoiled meat around? Why was it not consumed or preserved immediately? People knew meat spoiled quickly and would treat it accordingly.
Two, have you ever smelled or tasted rotten meat? It’s quite literally repulsive, it’s hard to even get near. No amount of chili or black pepper is covering it. And if you were able to stomach it it wouldn’t be worth the vomiting and diarrhea it might cause. Food poisoning could be a death sentence in premodern times, and in fact diarrhea is one of the most common causes of death in undeveloped regions today.
Billing and Sherman have some pretty robust statistical controls to address these kinds of alternatives. Worth reading the paper.
Fully spoiled food is inedible, but there’s a long window of pathogen growth before that point, which can be lengthened further by spices. Why would some meat not be consumed immediately? Because life is messy, people make mistakes, and animals are large.
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.
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
I see the “agree to disagree” as a bit of a social flag for the conversation that says “I don’t wish to get into it / continue arguing about it” because there is no way to respond to it. If you try to continue the debate you look like an asshole, and if you drop it the person who says it gets to continue being wrong without being challenged.
It’s very annoying and I hate it.
That Social Security is going to collapse. I’ve been hearing it for literally 50 years. I honestly grew up thinking SS would not be there at retirement, and now I’m collecting it (although I’m not retired). It was a psy-op the whole time, trying to keep workers anxious, and at the grindstone.
Social Security is literally the easiest problem in DC to fix. All they have to do is raise the income cap. Right now, the cap is $184,500. You pay into Social Security on the first $184,500 of income, and anything over that doesn’t get touched. If you make less than that, then 100% of your income gets tapped for SS. But if you make more, you pay a much tinier percentage of your total income.
So if SS is looking like a problem, all they have to do is raise the cap. It goes up a bit every year anyway, but there is no reason it can’t be $500,000, or even $1 million. Of course the rich will scream, but they’re always screaming. We have to learn to ignore that as background radiation, nothing to be concerned about.
Raise the cap enough, and you not only protect Social Security forever, you can give Grandma a nice raise. Doesn’t she deserve it for all those delicious cookies? Or brownies actually, in my Grandma’s case. She made the best homemade brownies, and she cut them BIG!
another one, single or more public option for healthcare cost more, or takes too long to see a doc. not true its almost equal to Insurance provided healthcare in wait times. but the cost is way more significantly higher rather than low cost or free.
also depends if your using a PUBLIC network with govt subsidized hospitals over a private network that is subsidized by the govt that provides free healthcare to patients.
50 years ago was 1976, which was before the 1983 reforms. In 2023, I see a prediction it will run out of trust money by 2035. In 2009, they were predicting the same trust exhaustion in 2037. In 2005, Bush’s campaign warned it would run out by 2042. You’ll notice that these dates keep moving closer and closer as we get more data. There are real structural problems in social security.
With the cap, social security collected 1,159,984 + 188,399 million dollars in 2024, on the 6.2% + 6.2% tax rate. Medicare with no cap at the 1.45% + 1.45% tax rate collected 441,003 million dollars.
That implies taxable income for medicare was 14,172,517 million dollars, and for social security it was 10,874,056 million dollars. Completely removing the cap on social security would fix the current shortfall, but leave the structural issues in the program intact. Maybe it would buy us 25 more years. There are still people living today that would pay in more than they can possibly receive back from the system.
In short, you’re telling the people funding your lifestyle, “Fuck you, I got mine”, then denying that that is what’s happening.
I hear you, that all makes sense, and I’ve been hearing it my entire life. When I was young, Social Security was supposed to end before the 21st Century, and yet, here we are.
I believe they’ve just been softening us up to accept it when they finally figure out some mechanism to kill it, and they can say “Well, we always said it couldn’t last,” and we’ll say, “Yeah, it was good while it lasted.”
Orrrr just remove the cap entirely. No reason to give them any happiness at all. Raise the floor above 100k and remove the cap. And then change the rate to say 5x.
Or even a sliding scale, so the further you are above the floor, the higher rate you pay.
Over 1 million or so and it gets up to 100%.
I’ve thought of that, but then we miss out on the opportunity to piss them off every time we raise it, and that’s so much fun.
I love when rich people start screaming that they don’t have enough money, and the poor get all the breaks, and it isn’t fair. Hilarious.
Oh I’d rather just drown them in their anger and literally tax them to financial (and in most cases actual) death then keep them around to listen to their torture. I’m actually 1000% ok with making a new law yesterday that just means death sentence for having over a certain amount. Legal to earn only if you can show that you are personally investing billions into infrastructure and public good. To be planned and handled by neutral parties, so you can’t be faking numbers and all that.
I feel like it’s the reverse of that saying from the Incredibles.
Once no one is rich, everyone will be.
Valid perspective, the main point being that it is imperative that we reconfigure our country so that neither society, nor the government serve the needs of the wealthy, the wealthy serve the needs of government and society. The wealthy have no needs, they are wealthy.
They need to learn that they keep their money at the pleasure of the Citizens, and if they step out of line, or even hint at trouble, the Board of Directors goes to prison, and their entire net worth is confiscated. Do that to a few wealthy families, make them destitute, and have to send their kids to {gasp!} public school, and they’ll learn real quick who they work for.
Nah, just guillotine them and make the kids wards of the (new and improved) state. Everybody wins.
Also valid. When the time comes, we’ll have that discussion in earnest. Sociopathic Oligarchs will not be consulted.
Aye, I’ll raise my weed vape to that.
That we eat spiders in our sleep. Just grab them and nomf or they willingly crawl into our mouths of something.
I found one literally right next to my pillow today
EDIT: And yes, it was delicious
Damn you, Spiders Georg!
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’.
“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)
I just came from another post that reminded me of this so I’ll go with it: gerrymandering does not affect your vote in statewide races.
I kept coming across people before the 2024 US elections saying their vote wouldn’t matter in states like TX because of gerrymandering. No. No! It screws you in representation, but not the votes that are a raw count like governor or president.
What about the electoral college?
Adding onto the other commenter - yes the electoral college skews votes towards less populous states. But state borders weren’t drawn with this intent, so it isn’t gerrymandering.
only two states award electors by district, the rest are winner-take-all
in most states its all or nothing so its the popular vote of the state. I think some have some sort of proportional but not sure if its based on districts.
There might be second order effects of gerrymandering in terms of voters feeling disenfranchised, and deciding their vote doesn’t matter. And not going to vote at all, even in state-wide elections. Not saying this with any evidence just thinking.
Totally!
Gerrymandering makes many elections useless if you’re in the districted minority, so you and many who think like you don’t vote. Results come out showing a sweeping win for the majority, so you and others who think like you feel like you’re so far in the minority that there’s never a point to voting because you’ll never “win,” even in statewide elections.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a part of the calculus behind gerrymandering in the first place. Not only do you get the immediate representation you’re seeking, but also makes it so people who disagree just stop voting altogether.
Here’s one that makes me angry: the myth that suicide is a criminal offense, that you can be criminally charged for attempted suicide. This myth might make people reluctant to seek help. Police don’t only have power to intervene when there’s a crime. They intervene to protect you if you’re attempting suicide. It is NOT a chargeable offense.
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)
You’re tired of this? Like, you’ve encountered people actively talking about it so much you’re tired? Besides the odd online post, I’ve never met anyone making reference to or talking about this.
Dozens of times yes
Mate i pulled 70+ hour shifts for months on end to make sure it wasn’t a problem, it only takes one fool for me to be tired of hearing it
Fair enough.
A friend of mine got a high-paying temp job reprogramming servers in some obscure programming language. I think the client was a major bank.
Yeah, a lot of dirtbags took advantage of Y2K, but that doesn’t mean Y2K wasn’t a serious problem. It easily could have been.
It easily could have been
It was a very serious problem.
Very few dirtbags took advantage of it.
Obscure language was probably COBOL. Obscure in the sense that it was once immensely popular for business applications, but by the late 90s there were very few new applications written in it, but a huge number of large businesses still ran it.
You are really underselling the fact that many of these businesses are still running COBOL despite it being the equivalent of ancient Mayan.
That’s not a fair assessment really… Some of them are still using PROLOG.
Shivers
I meant “it easily could have been” in the sense that it if it hadn’t been taken seriously, it would affected virtually everyone in some way.
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.
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.
That Dems are Communists. Like, if only.
Don’t forget Marxists and Socialists. All at the same time.
They are three different things.
dems are RIGHT wing asf, the us being the most right country in the west. thats why conservatives can flourish in AMERICA, they cant be too right wing otherwise they end up like russia. schumer, hakeem, slotkin, NEWSOME are right to center right. while bernie and aoc, zohran is mostly to the “left of them”.
and supporting Israel/ME with military aid makes your party very right wing. an actual left influence is quite small in america, despite the RIGHT constantly drumming up the boogeyman “leftist”
New cars are reliable.
First of all, no. Their more complex and failure prone, and you are the guinea pig they test new crap on.
Second of all, you literally cannot call a one year old vehicle reliable. You do not have enough data to make that claim. My jeep is about 40 years old, and with the 40 year old head start will still out live a brand new jeep. It has no “limp mode” because u slipped out of 4 lo in the woods (actual customer example), and it doesn’t require Internet connection + a security gateway authentication to reset things like limp mode and doing a clutch position relearn. If you want a reliable vehicle get something made between 85 and 05, as long as it doesn’t rust out from underneath you it will give u less headaches than anything made in the last 20 years.
People who think cheap Chinese vehicles will be reliable: there is no data to support this.
What’s the name of that new transmission thing that makes cars made after 2020 break down after 5 years?
Your probably thinking CVT, but could also just be any Ford 😂
