What’s a common “fact” that’s spread around that’s actually not true and pisses you off that too many people believe it?
God.
Oh plenty…
The myth of “alpha wolves” and all the men who build a toxic social and psychological image of themselves and other men because of it, apparently because they would like to live in a zoo and get into conflicts with other men they have never met before or something.
But seriously, there were some grave errors in how this came to be. This wasn’t observing wolves in their natural environment. There are no “alpha wolves” in nature. The researcher, David Mech, who was in part responsible for this stupidity has been working since then to correct this, but media and society already swallowed the misconception too hard.
Next one:
“LLMs are not AI.” Yes, they are. AI is a scientific label for a bunch of methods, algorithms, and models.
“But they are not ‘intelligent’.” My dear fellow flesh bag, we do not even have a clear definition of what ‘intelligence’ even is. Come up with a good one, then let’s talk about this particular label. Until then, you can rename AI to ‘pesto alfredo’ for all I care as long as we agree what kind of methods we mean by that to categorize a bunch of computer science stuff.In the opposite corner:
“We have achieved AGI with LLMs”. No, we have not. There is still a substantial lack of capabilties and properties.Or: “LLMs are sentient and self-aware”. To the best of my knowledge, they are not. To be fair, there is little room for debate, which often boils down to stuff like semantic arguments about consciousness and definitions of understanding, but the consensus is that they are not.
Another one:
“Homeopathy cures diseases.” No, it doesn’t. It has a placebo effect but that’s pretty much about it.
There is more:
“Evolution theory is just a ‘theory’.” No, it’s a proven set of explanations and models supported by overwhelming empirical evidence. Popular confusion of the colloquial use of the word “theory” with the scientific one.Colloquial meaning: a guess, hunch, speculation, or unproven idea.
Scientific meaning: a well-substantiated explanatory framework supported by extensive evidence and capable of being tested and potentially falsified.
And there is even more, but I have already written a wall of text and am tired now.
Marginal Tax brackets drive me insane especially my parents constantly misunderstand and think a payrise will make them lose money.
They don’t understand that the tax is only paid on the money earned in that bracket. So going up 5% isn’t your total income being taxed an extra 5% its only the money earned on that bracket that is taxed at the higher rate.
There’s technically a spot where making more can cost you money, but that’s well out of reach of normal people. It involves triggering the alternative minimum tax.
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.
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 😂
That Dems are Communists. Like, if only.
That food stamps or any handouts at all are a serious problem. Our (the US) government launches a single bomb that’s worth years of food support. Idgaf if the food stamp recipients never do a damn thing but watch TV. I’d much rather millions of people doing that than bombing brown people half a world away.
Additionally, it’s been proven in scientific study time and time again that giving people enough money to meet their needs significantly reduces crime and costs significantly less money than the “traditional” approach like inflating police budgets. Literally giving people cash money reduces crime better than any other way you could use the money.
The idea of monetary scale is one I think is a big misconception anytime we’re talking about budget. “This committee wasted MILLIONS of dollars on this stupid niche scenario!” Well, yeah; the USA has millions of people in it. If a program affects the entire country, how much are you willing to spend per person? 8 cents?
Exactly. Budgets on national levels do not compute on a personal level. I like it when articles scale down the numbers to a more individual level “so let’s pretend that the federal government is a single family home…”
I also find it irritating when politicians brag about bills like “this will create 3000 American jobs.” Seriously, that is not even a drop in the bucket.
I also am sick of the sacrificial worship at the altar of “jobs.”
Jobs doing what? Variably scheduled positions pushing bricks around with a broom for minimum wage and getting laid off 4 months later? Jobs only open to those with a Master’s in lepidopterology? Jobs at Burger King making flame-broiled whoppers wearing paper hats?
Seemingly the public loses their poop if it means “jobs”, but won’t put enough energy into support outside of jobs, because we have a state mandated religion based solely on exhaustive toil for its own sake, value and results optional.
Stuff your jobs. Give us healthcare, dammit.
That we eat spiders in our sleep. Just grab them and nomf or they willingly crawl into our mouths of something.
Damn you, Spiders Georg!
I found one literally right next to my pillow today
EDIT: And yes, it was delicious
That the general population are directly responsible for the amount of pollution occurring a la “carbon footprint” when there are 10 companies producing 70% of the world’s pollution
Huh, odd, why do they do this?
To make the general population think that they’re responsible for the problems caused by the massive uncontrolled exploitation of limited resources by corporations.
(Or in simpler terms; So the general population don’t show the CEOs just how fragile their mortal bodies are.)
No, why do they produce all the emissions?
Combustion produces byproducts, such as carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and depending on the fuel or the quality of combustion, sulphur oxides and other fantastically poisonous substances that are building up in our limited breathing air and drinking water.
Engines that use this process are called internal combustion engines, they mix the fuel with air and ignite it, this creates heat and pressure, because the big molecules that make up the fuel are broken down into a massive quantity of smaller ones. That pressure then pushes on pistons which turn a crankshaft that can be connected to a transmission in a car, or a generator in a power plant, the hot exhaust gases that make up a lot of the pollution then get forced out of the engine into the air.
Unless you’re asking why specifically those companies are the ones producing the emissions, in which case it’s a matter of the amount of carbon fuel they use to mine/refine/move the materials and build/run the factories, and the transport they use to move their finished product and run all of the processes that lead up to the product being made. All of which drives emissions.
To draw on an example thats incredibly apt right now, considering Utah is now allowing a datacenter that will use 9 GW of power, more than every combined person and business in the state uses.
A data center is designed in CAD software - electrical energy from the grid is used in the computer
The data center is built - Heavy machinery prepares the ground and Concrete is poured - earthmovers use carbon fuel, the concrete manufacturer itself burns fuel to create the concrete, then ships it via trucks to the building site where it is poured, setting concrete also releases carbon dioxide.
The computer components are built - rare earth metals are dug from the ground and refined into chips that are shipped to factories where they are assembled onto circuitboards - the material and manufacture requirements of these components take a lot of fuel, and a lot of highly specialised equipment that is energy intensive
The computer components are shipped to the site - this also takes fuel.
This is all contributing to the emissions cost that the company has racked up, and the datacenter isn’t even active yet.
ALSO, NONE of these examples take into account physical pollution, where crude oil or a carbon product (such as in Palestine… the American one; where a derailed train load of polyvinyl was set on fire and left to uncontrollably burn because it was cheaper than calling a chemical spill team) is either poured into the worlds water from crashed tankers or from drilling platforms (or from military actions where refineries are burned, and we get events like the mass swathe of marine life dieoff thanks to oil being spilled into the ocean)
Hopefully that answers your question, if not you’ll have to ask a different way because I don’t know what you mean when you say “why do they produce emissions?” (The answer is burning things makes emissions, and they’re burning the lot.)
The point they are trying to get at is that the vast majority of carbon produced by these companies is produced to see to the wants and needs of common people, and it is disingenuous to imply that solving climate change would impact no one except these companies shareholders.
Most carbon isn’t being created to build data centers. It is used to build roads, apartments, office buildings, cars, and trains. It is created by people driving cars or using gas stoves or eating hamburgers or running a heat pump on electricity generated in a coal plant. It is created when cheap plastic knick knacks are manufactured in indonesia, shipped across an ocean, and then transported overland to a store where they can be bought, used today, and thrown in the dump the next.
So regardless of where you apply pressure to stymie climate change, common people will be impacted, and pretending otherwise is essentially telling a lie to those common people.
Yeah convenience culture will have to die. To keep food not in plastic and not shipped halfway across the world you’re going to gave to give up getting your favorite flavor of dorito from the gas station at 2am. They won’t be able to package specialty flavors at a plant 600mi away then seal them in airtight nitrogen and ship them all over the country to that stores that are open 24/7 where they’ll be shelf stable for the next few months. You’ll have to order them by mail yourself or make do with local / regional variants made with different ingredients. The kids who stop eating when their dino nuggies have a different breading are just gonna starve (had an ex like that at 25y/o he was exhausting.)
I’m being a bit annoying about it because the companies don’t burn all that crap for fun but, as you laid out, for our collective consumption patterns. I developed the impression that the whole “x companies do y% of emissions!” thing, similar to “no ethical consumption” reminders tends to fulfill a function not aimed at motivating larger-scale changes (e.g. banning animal agriculture wholly instead of making an individual choice to not consume em; banning ICE cars from being produced/sold while creating comprehensive public transport instead of merely biking to work yourself) but at detaching oneself from the role we do actually play in society. (Also, smaller/individual scale weirdoes are a good source of activists that can radiate social structures out into general society)
To be clear: the direction I’d like to see isn’t ignoring larger-scale changes but embracing that these things are linked. Companies don’t burn fuel for fun, but for profit (or non-capitalist modes of resource allocation - if the central party committee decides to satiate the people’s hunger for meat and cars, that’s also a problem). And the profit there comes from all of us, individually as well as collectively. So action against that probably should also happen on both levels.
I think the issue lies in that the corporations have an incentive to keep the increased carbon footprint and the average person composting or sorting trash for recycling (typical footprint reduction suggestions) does nothing to reduce this incentive. Moving the markets desires away from items with high carbon footprints is a monumental task and one we should strive for but a faster method of reduction would be direct pressure to the corporations exploiting cheap labor that has a higher carbon footprint cost
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!
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 WW1 was the same moral black and white as WW2.
In my opinion, every country in WW1 was the villain just that one side was impatient enough to be the aggressor first.Yep, WWI was the result of a bunch of inbred rulers turning family disagreements into a war because they could.
Yeah. When you look at how the war even got started, you start to see that Germany didn’t expect Austria-Hungary to be that incompetent diplomatically and that Russia was the one who threw away a potential peace plan before the war started.
Ooh this is a hot take, can you explain a little?
I don’t think it is.
They all were colonial powers that oppressed and subdued their colonial holdings, extracting wealth and even soldiers. France was the only republic, all the others were monarchies and Russia had the most absolutist monarchy. But that doesn’t really factor in, because even France wasn’t fighting to spread or preserve democracy.All were fighting to beat them arch enemies, to steal a piece of land or two or maybe a colony and to test their newly developed industrial weaponry. They were all
stompingchomping at the bit before it started.The German Empire was surely the most militaristic society. But they still fought all for the same ideology and reason.
To my last point, you can see that in the result: the losers had to gave up colonies but not to independence but to the victors as spoils.There was a large propaganda effort by the British and French to pin the blame for the war on one of the Central Powers and Germany was the only major Central Powers that didn’t fall apart due to the war.
Stomping at the bit? I’ve never heard that phrase
Yeah I meant chomping at the bit. It comes from horses chewing the metal part of the bridle because they’re fired up and want to run.
“champing” not “chomping”
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/champing at the bit
Ah, thanks. I am not a native English speaker.
May you explain why you think it’s controversial? Only if you want to.
That you only need headlights to see in the dark. Headlights are just as much so other cars can see you, than they are so you can see. In the rain and in the fog, they’re crucial to have on.
I live in the PNW where is rarely sunny and often raining and the number of people who don’t understand this is too damn high!
So do I. Guy almost hit me a few years back because I lived on a mountain road and it was pouring out, didn’t see him at all.
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)
Also see Acid Rain and the hole in the ozone.
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.
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.
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 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.
People are really bad with misretelling court cases. The amount of times I’ve read “this guy was arrested for wearing a silly hat!” Only to look deeper and find out he was threatening to stab people or something.
This misconception was well paid for. McDonalds and a large group of fortune 500 companies started a slander ad campaign against lawsuits. They literally paid people to write and run stories about “stupid and unjust” lawsuits, claiming the lawsuits wee a waste and of course bringing up this one.
It worked.
Yep, also they had previously been warned about serving coffee that hot, but studies had shown that serving it that hot meant that people drank less of it. And that “crazy” judgement (2.5 million?) wasn’t a random number. That’s how much they make off coffee in one day.
Yeah we actually learned very quickly about that in legal studies (high school) way back in 2000s and it was presented like a silly Americans (Australian here) kind of thing, just a quick silly case in a small box in the textbook. Wasn’t til I got older I learned the full story!
We had an Aussie silly case too, not just picking on the US 😅 ours was about some drink in an opaque bottle and someone drank it all before they could see there was some kind of bug or even a snail in the bottle? Something like that so they sued the drink company 🤢 can’t remember enough about that one to find anything on it!
I saw that, yeah McDonald’s really tried to blast her as a sue happy bitch. All she asked for was medical bill costs initially which is reasonable.
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’.
