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What is a misconception you are passionate about and would like to clarify?
That is such an infinite subject that a lot of people are passionate about. It could easily be a scheduled post. So this time I am the one doing it. Any misconception is welcome as long as it is something you genuinely care about!
Oh. Sorry. One more.
We do not address the roots of addiction, and thus addiction will continue. You cannot just treat the drug problem, you need you treat why the person became addicted to drugs in the first place. So I guess the misconception is that you can treat addiction without treating the root cause of the addiction.
What is the root cause?
Knowing several addicts and former addicts, it doesn't just seem to be economic anxiety, mental illness, stress or any of the other stuff. Many of these addicts grew up in safe homes, in well to do areas, with plenty of economic opportunity, good schools, etc, etc.
They happened to get addicted to drugs because they had or have addictive personalities, so I'm not really sure what might have steered them otherwise. Thankfully they're clean now and I'm still regularly involved with them, as we've been friends since we were kids, but I just don't see what could have been different for them not to take that road.
To be clear, the root cause is different for each person. I’m going to refer to drinking, but this can apply to any behavior.
One of the ones that is overlooked that is perhaps relevant to the situation you’re thinking of, is sheer boredom or lack of purpose. This one is particularly hard to root out because it is so embarrassing and has a stigma like, “wow you drink because you’re bored !?” But at least the last time I researched this, boredom is actually a really common reason that people drink.
Other times, the person lacks pleasure or feelings in their lives, numbness. They drink to “feel something” — which in my non-professional feeling is a sign of depression or some other unknown disease fucking up the pleasure center.
To your other point, yes, people have addictive personalities or a penchant for becoming addicted which increases their susceptibility to addiction.
Lastly, generational trauma and lack of coping skills is another root cause, as you mentioned, the people in your stories had been exposed to substance use as a coping mechanism from family members. I think they could have found a different route if they had something in their lives that felt fulfilling, had a community to support them, and role models for them to mimic.
As far as recommendations, I wish more people were aware of what addiction looks like - so they can recognize it in themselves and others. And then I recommend they seek help amongst peers (peer led groups like AA). I don’t know what material is out there to help others help people — but I know there is guidance of how to take care of yourself if you are a loved one, friend, etc of someone who is struggling. I think people being trained in how to take care of themselves while aiding someone in the throes of addiction, would help people want to help other people.
Thanks for coming to my ted talk.
I remember an article on Cracked about homelessness that made this exact point. Homeless people lack access to entertainment options like books or TV or phones, or even just people they can consistently socialize with. Survival is one thing, but we also need mental stimulation or we go crazy. So a lot of homeless people eventually turn to drugs to just have something to do. Boredom is a lot more dangerous than people realize.
Addiction also provides a community. It may not be a safe community, or a terribly reliable one, but frightened people will do an awful lot just to feel like they're not alone, no matter what that happens to mean.
I agree, and would add that teaching someone to take care of themselves while helping someone going through any bad time would be great.
I think its a little different for everyone.
For some people its the only thing that makes them feel ‘right’ and so they overdo it.
For some people its a lack of discipline, they never had to work hard at anything to excel at it and so when they find something they actually want to be doing, they overdo it.
For some people they were medicated for ADHD, depression or anxiety from a very young age and so they don’t know how to be sober. Every single person I know that was on medication for ADHD as a child is a total mess, and I know several, so that cant be just a coincidence.
I had a lot of friends in high school who were never great people, they didn’t put a lot of effort into other people, but they found their drug of choice and put all their effort into that.
I could keep going, but you get the point. My first taste of adulthood was 2008 so me and basically everyone my age around me has or had some kind of drug issue because none of us knew how to cope.
Oh boy do I disagree about the ADHD meds meaning "you don't know how to be sober".
Yeah people with ADHD often have harder times with addiction, there's numerous things about the neurotype - thrill seeking behavior, gratification/novel pleasure seeking behavior, dopamine not hitting as hard on repetition- that can lead to that but also the societal factors like ADHD people losing their jobs more often leading to financial stressors.... Self medication with caffeine and nicotine. All of this means that ADHD folks are more vulnerable to addiction.
And research backs me up
If everyone you know that took meds as a kid has addiction issues that speaks far more to the prevalence of addiction issues among ADHD adults not the anectodal fact that they took meds.
It can in fact be a coincidence.
On the opposite end, I don't have thrill seeking tendancies and do not recall experiencing boredom past adolescence. I probably have the opposite of whatever drives addiction: no matter how taken I am with an activity, I will suddenly and without deciding to, forget to continue to feel engaged with it and drop out. It's like an anti-gambling personality. That's also probably also why none of my prescribed ADHD medication ever worked for me. :/
Yeah I think there's a lot of interesting research about how sometimes mental health medications may not work the same for people who have the same diagnosis (and symptom expression) but that if you do an MRI, say, and see that their theoretically anxious brain looks more like a bipolar brain then mood stabilizers manage the anxiety better than anxiety meds do (I'm glossing over a lot for the sake of brevity)
But meds don't work for everyone, I did very poorly on strattera (non-stimulant) but do very well on Adderall. Therapy or coaching works to different degrees for folks. There's a lot of factors. I don't do the "thrill seeking" but I do "dopamine" seek or accidentally eat a whole bag of chips if I'm not paying attention, etc.
I have joked that my ADHD has probably saved me from an eating disorder because I can't maintain habits, including harmful ones. So there are some pros I suppose
hey ADHD buds again lol—yeah I think Ritalin is the benadryl of ADHD, where that was the frontline option but may have done more harm than good & the effects of which turned a lot of people off to ADHD medication in general, which is a shame. And honestly my reactions to medication should have alerted somebody I had something weird going on brain-wise: awake after anesthesia for a weirdly long time, almost no effect from pretty heavy oxycontin prescription after some medical stuff when that was still a thing, etc. Sort of like how coffee makes some people sleepy? I dunno, there's something in there for sure.
My understanding is that between methylphenidate-based stimulants like Ritalin and amphetamine-based stimulants, they are pretty much the same statistically -- in terms of response rate, efficacy, and side effects when measured on a population level. They're both phenomenally effective as a treatment for ADHD, to the extent that they're some of the best psychiatric medications at treating what they're intended for. For a given individual with ADHD, often one of them works better than the other and/or one has worse side effects than the other, but which the better option is varies between each individual person.
That said, getting on the right dose of the right medication is always contingent on having a medical provider who knows enough about the treatments available and who pays attention to how your body responds to them and how you feel when on then. If your doctors weren't doing that, that was a bigger problem than any individual medication.
Given how heavily benadryl is currently recommended against, and I don't see a similar level of that for Ritalin (but I don't prescribe or anything so I may not be in that loop), I think that comparison is overstating things.
But we have so many more options that when things aren't working people don't have to be stuck with something that has the side effects for them, or don't have to be stuck with the most expensive new medication. There are pros and cons to both.
But yeah you definitely see people with a wide variance to responses to caffeine, stimulants, sedatives, etc. Caffeine doesn't make me sleepy, it can suppress my "tired" feeling, but I can also go pass out after drinking a soda/coffee/etc.
Yeah thats the study they used to justify medicating the shit outta their kids.
Maybe if these kids got medication and therapy it might have been okay, but they didn’t. Everyone just tossed Adderall at them and called it a day.
Impossible to know if its because their ADHD is so severe, that it caused both the medication situation and the further issues in adulthood.
The medication definitely did not and continues to not do them any favors. We’re talking several people here, like 15/20 people I know with ADHD of those, the ones that were medicated as kids are not functioning at all as adults. Medication alone is not enough to treat this disorder.
This is genuinely a really bad take that is anti-science, stigmatizes mental health and addiction both and presumes that the 15 people you know with ADHD who apparently had medication "thrown" at them by uncaring parents are a victim of their medication and not the uncaring parents. I'm not even sharing my anecdotal experience which actively contradicts yours. The ADHD folks I know who take meds, and have since childhood, are pretty roundly doing quite well. But that's not research.
Here's a study with ~40k people
Stimulant ADHD medication and risk for substance abuse
And for the record, yes, people do often need more support than just medication. Maybe that lack of support leads to them struggling and not taking their meds regularly or getting fired, or whatever else they have going on. But taking meds is a protective factor against substance abuse and addiction.
You're actively adding to misconceptions about addiction and ADHD in a thread about debunking them.
I think that maybe the situation is different in the US because of the unreliability of our healthcare system.
Of everyone in my sample set, they aged out of their parents healthcare and could no longer afford their medication. Many of them had been abusing other substances before that anyway, but thats when it started to get pretty bad. When they finally got access again, they already had the addiction issues and still could not get therapy for it. Then the supply chain shortages hit last year and they’re all back at square one.
Also, therapy just wasn’t an option for most of us. It wasn’t that their parents didn’t care, they did the best they could. My friends who weren’t medicated only weren’t because they couldn’t afford it.
Theres a pretty obvious bias in my sample set, those who weren’t medicated and thus did not graduate high school, I lost touch with all of them. Many of them are dead, some died in high school.
Of my entire community of ADHDers in the southern US, none of us are doing well. The ones who made it out of high school unmedicated are doing better than the ones who had been medicated as kids, who did better than those who didn’t graduate, unmedicated or otherwise. So its probably just that those of us who are doing better don’t have symptoms that are as severe.
I feel like if I find more research you'll tell me there's something wrong with that too. But let me try 3 million people in the US.
ADHD medication tied to lower risk for alcohol, drug abuse in teens and adults
Not being able to afford your meds and not taking them regularly could absolutely lead to addiction. So can a ton of other issues, such as not having a job with insurance when aging out of parents' coverage - that likely a financial risk factor there. So can a culture of drinking or drug use etc. you've described a bunch of environmental risk factors while doubling down in your previous posts.
That has zero to do with "not knowing how to be sober" due to taking meds as a child or the meds themselves. The conclusions you're drawing from your personal experience are not the ones that make the most sense given even what you shared here nor with the scientific data.
Thank you for being here, and doing the hard work.
𖡼𖤣𖥧𖡼𓋼𖤣𖥧𓋼𓍊
Thank you
I am, occasionally, passionate about a misconception or two. It seemed to fit.
So, from skimming it seems that you have clarified your anecdata quite a bit to where your initial statement can't be taken as valid anymore.
You have removed a bunch of people from the cohort (people who dropped out) and also added the qualifier that the remaining people already used other drugs and where forced to pause their prescribed stimulant use.
That reads quite differently to me.
For your point on people who were medicated at a young age, what’s to say that the cause and effect are the other way round. That’s to say they were put onto medication from a young age as their condition was very severe and therefore noticed earlier on as opposed to them being messed up by the medication?
Because that wouldn't allow them to spread a narrative that mischaracterizes and stigmatizes ADHD and prevents those of us with it from accessing medication that has demonstrated better treatment results than almost any other psychiatric medication.
I am also frustrated by their line of reasoning, but unless they're some intelligence operative tasked to astroturf, almost nobody has an intrinsic drive to denigrate and stigmatize. These comments read far more like someone who has had to rationalize a lot of tragedy happening to people they care about than a bigot, to me. They're wrong, but probably just incorrect, and there's no benefit for anyone to start framing it as maliciously as that.
At some point, when someone's behavior is indistinguishable from bad faith, it ceases to matter to me whether their position is based on their own traumatic experiences or not. When someone repeatedly argues against people who both actually have ADHD and cite extremely large and robust studies that evidence the efficacy of stimulant medication, I don't think I have the obligation to treat them as though they're acting more reasonably than they are, especially in a topic devoted to countering misconceptions like the nonsense they're perpetuating. It doesn't matter whether they're rationalizing their experiences or not if their positions turn into legislation that prevents me from getting treatment.
I'm not going to argue about ethics in communication or deny your right to exercise your own moral framework. I will say that I disagree and that, especially in the context of conspiratorial reasoning, an oppositionally polarized denigration of their own intentions and denial of the value of their agency is far more likely to further entrench their suspicion and the suspicion of any onlookers who have similar ideas than to deny their claims and provide evidence.
Denying their claims and providing evidence has been done elsewhere in the thread by people more patient than me. My thinking that they ignore reasonable alternatives that account for their experiences because they contradict their current moralistic, stigmatizing view of the issue does not amount to "conspiratorial reasoning." I haven't alleged any conspiracy, I'm simply interpreting what I consider to be their reasoning, conscious or not. I'll acknowledge that my interpretation is not a charitable one, but I don't think it's baseless given their responses to those who provided evidence more politely elsewhere in the thread.
Apologies, I meant that they were clearly engaging in conspiratorial reasoning, not yourself. Your lack of charity is reasonable, I'm only saying it seems unproductive to confidently characterize their comments in the worst-possible interpretation.
Ah, okay, misread you there, my apologies! And fair enough, I just think we have different thresholds for giving up on charitable interpretations.
Almost certainly. Stakes on the table: I also take stimulant medication for ADHD, and find it crucial for day-to-day stability, so I'm not lacking in concern. Just a gag reflex, so to speak.
Having a predilection toward conspiratorial reasoning myself, I mostly wrote my first reply in the hopes that rebuffing your comment might leave some light in a third party's black-and-white worldview than to tell you off, to be clear. (But to say so off the bat might imply an attempt to coerce their worldview! to say so now may as well!)
I think you're a lot more optimistic than I am! But fair enough. Today I had to take a pretty big chunk out of my day to pick up a new prescription for my meds (which, because they're a controlled substance, I can't get digitally), so I'll admit I'm probably crabbier about this than usual lol. For me honestly they help stabilize my mood a lot, and I've been out for a few days, so that's probably been a factor.
Nah, I'm just more neurotic, hah.
That's the funny thing about some of the most common misconceptions about those meds: it's not like they make resilience and discipline atrophy, they just stop the loop of [minor setback]->[reminded of fears]->[focus on fear]->[ignore task at hand]->[mistake] from self-propagating and dominating the mindscape and afford the individual the emotional space to remember that they do, in fact, have a locus of control. The exact opposite of allowing mental "laziness"!
My point: the mental state that comes out of struggling to get ahold of medication that safely makes getting through each day 10x less punishing is really painful and bitter, so I get it.
Something that's always bothered me: Snakes are not poisonous. They are venomous. Venom has to be injected into the blood stream for it to be effective. Poison must be ingested or absorbed through the skin. This is why nothing would happen to you if you were to drink snake venom.
Frustratingly enough, in my native language, Swedish, the word for venom and poison is the same ("gift").
Bonus: it's the same word for married.
This is one of the things I enjoy about language...
What are there words for in different languages, how does it differ from other languages and what could that tell us about the peoples using those languages?
I live in an area that has one of the very few potentially poisonous snakes. I have taken great delight in saying "watch out, that snake might be poisonous" to my pedantic children, who tell me the same thing I've told them; poison means you bite it, venom means it bites you.
Then I get to be pedantic about how garter snakes can be poisonous based on their diet!
I love a good parent joke setup and "gotcha"
(◠‿・)—☆
Gold star for you
I had not considered drinking Venom before and your statement has given me new insight.
So, puffer fish are just poisonous right so their puffing has nothing to do with the poison part ?
Follow up question, do venomous jellyfish sting you the way a snake bites you ? If that makes sense ? Do people milk jelly fish like snakes to make anti venom ?
Pufferfish are poisonous, yes. They contain a tetrodotoxin, a potent neurotoxin in certain organs. Their spines, although extremely sharp and painful to touch on their own, do not inject any venom.
Jellyfish are venomous, and their method of delivering their venom is extremely fascinating in my opinion. Devon from Smarter Every Day explored this on his YouTube channel a while ago
If you have a stomach ulcer or other injury though, the venom may well kill you.
Jellyfish have little stingers, and they are venomous. The stingers are contained in specialized cells called nematocysts, and some people do harvest them for making anti venom.
This is exactly what I was going to post hahaha
Venom is a type of poison.
I tried to look this up, and there seem to be two schools of scientific thought on this. Here's a summary:
a) that's true
b) that's not true
I think it mostly comes down to a linguistic choice. I read one point that said that venoms and poisons are both toxins; I read another that had poisons as the parent group, and venoms as a subgroup. I read zero places where the parent group was venom and the subgroup was poison.
Feels like it’s one of those things where there’s a scientifically/linguistically correct
and a colloquial usage where either works.
Although, re-reading your comment, it seems like maybe there isn’t a true scientific consensus?
I think that there isn't a clear "winner" with regards to science, but I only spent about 4 minutes on it and didn't do a full peer review ;)
One abstract talked about venom as a type of poison; one talked about venom and poison as types of toxins. I think it's likely that this comes down to a linguistic choice that scientists don't really care about that much, similar to tomatoes being fruits or vegetables.
I don't really believe this... While vegetable seems to be a nonscientific term in biology (I'm sure other sciences use it in a defined way) I can't imagine that biologists who are in a field where classifications matter don't care whether tomatoes are a fruit or vegetable at work.
Vegetable is a culinary term, which refers to the edible parts of plants, so scientifically all fruits are vegetables.
Scientists do care about the classification of things, and have classified tomatoes appropriately, but the problem is that people started saying "actually it's not a vegetable... it's a fruit!" as if fruits and vegetables were necessarily distinct with no overlap.
If we want to dive into it:
So a tomato is a fruit, in the same way that peppers, cucumbers, eggplants, green beans, etc are. But they are also clearly vegetables. Somewhere along the line, people started thinking that fruits and vegetables were the same sort of "thing" where they're actually different taxonomies.
As I'm one of these people...
I think I might enjoy pointing out that
Because no one I know would call an orange or apple a vegetable so clearly there is some other way to classify food stuffs that probably has to do with where they grow, how we eat it and when.
Peanuts are a fruit. Bananas are a fruit. All berries are fruits.
My overall point is that just because whatever thing is in one category, that doesn't take it out of another category. And just because something is pedantically in one category, that doesn't necessarily mean it's useful to treat it like any other member of that category. There's no utility in pointing out that peanuts are fruits. People do this thing where they get pedantic about something, and think that something else is not true.
Peanuts, cashews, almonds are colloquially nuts. If you are in the culinary world, you use the term "nut" to refer to them. That's not incorrect. If you are a botanist, and you are classifying things, then you wouldn't call them a true nut, you'd classify them as a legume. But that doesn't make the culinary classification incorrect.
Similarly, tomatoes are a vegetable. You cook with them like you cook vegetables. They're also a fruit in the scientific sense, but that doesn't make them not a vegetable.
Sorry, yes, you're of course absolutely right and correct in many ways.
I just find it intetesting and fun to point out these kind of small inconsistencies.
A quick introsoection makes me believe that being quite a bit of a besserwisser* has been a safe way to be "smart", funny and slightly confrontational.
* I'm mildly proud to not have used the word messerschmitt here that is a common way to trigger other besserwissers
I think knowing the inconsistencies, knowing the trivia, and sharing it out is awesome! Knowledge is cool, and sharing knowledge is one of the coolest things to do. I think that sometimes people take it to another level, though, and layer incorrectness on top of their correctness, and then end up sharing disinformation. The tomato issue is a good example of this. I think that there's some level of cultural saturation for the factoid that "a tomato is a fruit and is not a vegetable" and it's just... not right. It's like saying "wood is a plant, not a building material". One is what it is made up of, and the other is what it is used for.
What would be scientific about a distinction between these?
Yeah, it's entirely linguistic, which also means a poison is...whatever we want it to be.
To be extra pedantic, some snakes are also poisonous.
Everything (practically) is or is comprised of chemicals. Some commonly encountered ones just have friendly pronounceable names for convenience in addition to their scientific names. Chemical ABC is chemical ABC no matter whether it was made in a lab or made by “nature”. It is complete nonsense to want to “avoid [nonspecific] chemicals” or whatever.
And the "don't eat what you can't pronounce" thing, while already bull is really just a "took organic chemistry" filter IME.
But haven't you heard about the dangers of dihydrogen monoxide? It is one of the most outrageous chemicals known to man. More people need to be made aware of the dangers of this chemical. Here is a fantastic website outlining the dangers and potential problems of this chemical. Here are some facts that you may find worrying. DHMO can cause death from accidental inhalation. It is a major component of acid rain. It is commonly found in cancerous tumors. Despite these risks, many athletes still use DHMO as a performance enhancing chemical. Stay safe out there and educate yourself.
As a side note, I think this might be the same group that is trying to save the endangered Octopus paxarbolis.
Along those lines, I love pointing out to my kids all the crazy properties of sodium (exploding on contact with water!) and chlorine (highly poisonous!), and then what you get when you put them together.
Too be fair, sodium chloride gas would probably be very dangerous, too.
Hell even as a liquid it's honestly not very nice
I like to point out to people that water is literally burnt hydrogen.
Once I became aware of the dangers, I wanted to avoid it or eliminate it from my intake as best I could, but the I found out that the withdrawal symptoms can be lethal within days! It’s so pervasive and insidious and completely unavoidable in modern society, and it’s not even required in standardised labelling for packaged food so you really don’t know if it’s in your food or not!
Could there be potential risks to lab production leaving byproducts behind in the final product? If I use arsenic as a catalyst and don’t completely remove it from the final (consumable) product, that could cause issues.
(I ask from a place of ignorance looking to be educated rather than rebuttal)
Sure, in theory. But every step of the process is going to be clearly understood and mapped out because chemistry is predictable. I'd be more worried about tainted natural products than regulated synthetic ones.
For byproducts / contaminants, risk will vary on a very individual basis. The specific synthesis process used, purity requirements, safe levels of anything potentially remaining, etc.
Like @Soggy said, any reputable manufacturer is going to have a very well understood and, most importantly, repeatable process. Natural production can vary a lot and the organism may also produce a bunch of unnecessary or actively harmful chemicals (e.g. trace arsenic in almonds, nitrates in some veg, various anti-nutrients). Plus potential external contaminants from the growing environment or from the harvesting and processing and (optional) purifying.
Edit: Note that I’m not arguing one way is always better than the other. Some things are really difficult or expensive to manufacture. Some things are really difficult or expensive to grow/forage/extract. Case by case.
So this is part misconception and part proselytizing, but I hope I can change some minds. The way companies decide what to bottle their wine in is completely backwards. A wine container needs to have the following qualities:
The hardest requirement is the oxygen requirement. Cork is somehow absolutely perfect for this. It is truly a fantastic material. Also natural cork harvesting is quite eco-friendly, which I found surprising. So for anything that needs to age a long time, cork is the perfect material. But there is a huge caveat: most wine does not age. There have been a bunch of studies done on how long the consumer keeps a bottle of wine before consuming it. Depending on the study, 70% to 98% of wine is drunk within 24 hours of purchase. So for 98% of the wine market, a fancy cork gives absolutely zero benefit for aging.
Companies focus almost exclusively on the "be appealing for the customer" requirement, and often neglect the "be good to the environment" requirement. If I can slowly change people's minds about what is appealing, then companies will slowly change their packaging methods. The specific thing I would like to see changed is bottle weight. Companies say that consumers view a heavier bottle as more premium. But that heavy bottle comes with some significant drawbacks.
Wine bottles in cases aren't very dense when it comes to packaging. Much of the space they take up is empty air. And heavy glass is, well, heavy. Basically all wine is transported by trucks at some point. Wine loads are always limited by the weight requirements for the roads. So extra glass weight means less wine in a load, which means more trucks on the road and more emissions. I will admit glass is pretty fantastic when it comes to recycling, but I don't think most glass we purchase is actually recycled.
Enter bag in box. Most consumers think boxed wine is poor quality. In California, this is true, but not because the box is a bad method of containing wine. Actually, for all of our metrics, box wine is better than other closure methods. In a pallet, boxes of wine take up almost all of the volume, with very little wasted space. The packaging is very light, reducing the emissions of transportation. After opening, it can keep the wine viable for around a month, unlike a bottle which is only good for a few days. It does have reduction issues after about a year, but as I mentioned, 98% of wine doesn't make it past a day, so this isn't really a concern. Bag in box is pretty much the best wine containment method humanity has invented. For anything that needs to age, light glass and a cork.
So next time you are at a winery, and they show off their super premium wine with an incredibly heavy bottle, ask them about how the bottle choice affects the carbon footprint of the bottle.
If you have any other questions about wine, send them to me and I will debunk/confirm them if I can.
Can you talk about the benefit of switching to presumably (non-recyclable) plastic bags/nozzle from (very recyclable) glass bottles? Obviously we make gains in terms of shipping more efficiently, but this trade off still requires additional carbon input it seems?
I mentioned this briefly in my reply to spacecow, but it definitely needs more attention. I don't have enough information to confirm if glass or boxes is better for the environment. It is probably a very complex issue that people could spend an entire career studying. I just think it is important to remember that there isn't a clear and obvious winner. I agree that oil based plastic is bad, can't always be recycled, and when it can, it isn't infinitely recyclable. And I agree that glass is kind of a fantastic material, especially when it comes to both reusability and recyclability. But in a world where almost all transport of goods burns fossil fuels, there isn't a clear winner. If we electrified all goods transport overnight, and installed enough wind and solar to keep it powered, I would be happy to agree that bag in box should give way to glass. But that isn't the world we live in.
What I can say without a shadow of a doubt is that heavy glass is bad. Once you reach the point where a wine bottle is thick enough to be reasonably durable, adding any more glass is bad. Absolutely, unequivocally, bad for the environment. It serves no practical purpose and only increases transport emissions. To everyone working at companies with the power to choose what glass molds you use, think about this. You can make an incredibly simple decision that doesn't harm your product in any way, and saves a ton of pollution. If you don't make your glass as light as possible, you are making the world a worse place.
As far as glass vs bag in box, I don't know what the right answer is. I will be keeping an eye out for developments or research on this, because I think it's an interesting issue. But I encourage everyone not to dismiss boxed wine just because "plastic = bad". It isn't that simple.
Also, I can't find it online now, but I think I have heard about cellulose based bags being developed for wine. If someone can actually develop a cellulose alternative to the current PET bags, that fixes nearly all of the environmental issues for box wine.
I have no idea what the implications are with wine. But in the world of soda, plastic is actually a pretty poor container for any kind of long term storage (i.e. more than a month or two). Carbon dioxide is able to diffuse through the plastic, eventually leaving the beverage flat. The half-life for this process at room temperature is about 6 months, meaning a bottle of Coke manufactured half a year ago will be 50% flat. Soda sold in cans and glass bottles lasts a lot longer in storage.
I'm lucky enough to have access to glass recycling (that I pay for) so I at least know that my empty wine bottles aren't getting sent to a landfill.
Thanks for the reply! It's clearly not a simple answer, but involves various trade offs. I agree that not all plastic = bad. There's a lot of extraneous plastic use we could cut down on, and keep things plastic that actually benefit from that. Or as you say, some plastic alternatives. It's an incredible material!
It's similar in a way to lightbulbs: LEDs require many more elements than do regular tungsten filament bulbs, but the trade off is that LEDs last so so much longer, that the need to mine for more materials at least reduces waste into landfills.
The world is very interdependent and heavily carbon-based!
I like the LED analogy. Also worth mentioning their greater efficiency means less heat produced, so they are safer, and require less air conditioner cooling. But then that requires more heating in the winter, which will likely provided by fossil fuel heating sources. I think LEDs are a pretty clear advantage over tungsten, but let's not pretend they are better in every aspect.
I asked my mom for some numbers. She works in wholesale wine shipping logistics. A 12 pack of wine bottles (9L) in medium weight glass is about 36 pounds. 9 liters of water only weighs 19.84 lbs. Alcohol is slightly less dense than water, but that won't throw off this estimate too much. So about 45% of the shipping weight is just glass. A truck can take 42,000 lbs of weight (in California, since we have extra emissions laws which reduce the weight a trailer can be)(not including the pallet or dunnage). So one truck can take 10,500 liters of wine. In 2010, according to some random website, the US consumed 29 billion liters of wine. With medium weight glass, that is 2.8 million truck loads per year.
Now, what if we switched to bag in box? I'll assume 9L of box wine is 20 lbs, which should account for the weight of the packaging. So a California compliant truck can take 18,900 liters of wine in a single load. Now our yearly consumption is 1.6 million truck loads per year. Since most boxed wine comes in 3L boxes, that requires 9.9 billion plastic bags.
So what is worse for the environment: 1.2 million trucks or 9.9 billion plastic bags? I really don't know the answer.
The bags are possibly better, because that carbon is in a product we can bury instead of in the atmosphere. But a lot of waste is burned anyway. The trucks could be replaced with more efficient transport, like electrified rail (I am ignoring electric trucks, since I have yet to see an electric truck that can actually work for long haul, cross-country trucking). And glass manufacturing isn't necessarily carbon neutral. It takes a lot of heat to mold glass, and that could come from fossil fuels.
For what little it is worth, most glass bottles are not recycled in the U.S. From what I can find, it's around 30% of bottles that are actually recycled. If you add to that glass construction materials (windows for instance) a vast majority of the glass we create is never recycled.
The added fossil fuels used to transport the weight of glass bottles also needs to be taken into account against the oil used to manufacture the bags. As others have said, it's an extremely complex issue and would require intensive study to come up with even a semblance of an answer. I would put money on that conclusion showing that it's not that much different in the end.
[edit to add below:]
Here's an interesting article with more on it. It concludes that glass bottles are worse for the environment than plastic bottle or cans. The CO2 emissions from remelting for recycling is apparently quite large due to the high temperatures needed.
The problem isn’t the packaging, it’s the practice. Recycling is bunk. We shouldn’t be relying on it. We should instead focus on getting rid of single-use items. If something is actually not reusable - something like the trays that package lunchables, for instance - it should have a heavy, heavy tax on it to discourage anyone from using it. And for things that are reusable, like bottles and jars, we should vastly expand the deposit system. Right now the highest bottle deposit is 15¢, but that is so low it couldn’t even buy you a single piece of chewing gum. Give people a real incentive to return them. And finally, those reusable containers should be standardized across industries so that anyone can get them back and start reusing them.
Beyond that, a lot of food products probably don’t actually need packaging. Dried things in particular should be available in bulk bins so that consumers can pick exactly as much as they need and use their own containers. Fresh fruit and vegetables don’t need to be portioned in plastic bags. Liquids can be put in vats and portioned out by customers as well.
I want to thank you for adding a comment close to what I was going to add. Recycling is incredibly complex and more labor and resource intensive than most of us think. I did my capstone project on the economics of recycling, focusing just on base material recycling such as an American would typically think of curbside recycling, and was flabberghasted at just how little of what we "recycle" actually gets recycled. There are countless logistical and technical considerations at every step of the process, especially for anything other than aluminum cans.
This is why, unlike Weldawadyathink, I posit that aluminum cans are the superior wine vessel. Infinitely recyclable, portable, and you can gesture wildly while holding one!
I feel that's the biggest hurdle. Even I, a non-wine drinker find this place glamorous. And giving a bottle as a gift has more, well, weight that a box would.
Maybe those boxes should be sold as faux wooden kegs?
Speaking as someone who enjoys box wine qua an underdog, I’m gratified to hear about the quality of the packaging.
Can you speak a little bit about medium-to higher-quality wines in box? Anything you feel relevant/interesting, from where the box packaging becomes problematic, to what the best box wines on the market are.
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I think the biggest drawback of box wine is that it's viewed as low quality, therefore nobody packages high quality wine in boxes, which further perpetuates the stigma against it. It's a vicious cycle. So, to be honest, I don't think I can really recommend any box wines if you are looking for quality. Here in France, I have been impressed by almost all the boxes I have bought, but only because of the price per quality ratio. If you are in France, I encourage you to explore the range of 20-40 euro boxes (typically 3L, but sometimes smaller).
Bottling in box takes a specialized bottling line, but the technology is pretty advanced, so I don't think it's significantly different than glass bottling lines. I think the dissolved oxygen uptake (a measure of how much oxygen is introduced into the wine during bottling) is typically lower than a glass bottle line, but I don't know that for sure.
Another big consideration is it does use single use plastics. When the wine industry already uses glass, a fantastically recyclable material, it feels wrong to advocate for a change to single use plastics. I think there is some development into cellulose based flexible bags, but I am not very familiar with that.
Probably the biggest issue with box wine is that it doesn't travel very well. I don't mean the "last mile" to the grocery store or your house, I mean inter-country and especially over sea travel. For this reason, box wine is typically consumed very near to where it is bottled. In France, I have never seen a box wine that wasn't from France, and almost always from the nearest region to where I am. In California, I doubt you would ever see a box wine import from Europe. However there are some exceptions to this. You can transport wine in a tank and bottle it near where it is being sold. For example, I have heard the Netherlands consumes a lot of French wine, and most of it is from boxes. The wine is shipped by large tank to the Netherlands and bottled there. I think this model is also used for exports to places like India.
There is also one technology I learned about which is fun from a box wine perspective. Over the road and rail trucking can easily use tank cars, so shipping bulk wine using these methods is relatively straightforward. However boat shipping typically uses conex boxes. They have giant plastic bags that you can put into a conex box and then fill with wine. So it effectively becomes one big metal bag in box wine!
This kinda became a brain dump of random stuff I have learned over the last year. I hope it is somewhat intelligible. Sorry I can't give you any specific recommendations for wines. In France, I have found the sweet spot to be about 15 to 20 euro for a 3L box. Those typically turn out pretty decent. In California, I have zero experience with box wine, but I usually needed to spend 20 dollars on an individual 750 mL bottle to have it be consistently good, at least for California produced wine.
Hell yes, thanks for the pleasantly meandering response. Love me these wine facts.
While I’m from America, not France, the biggest drawback being perception coheres with my expectation. Even despite that, I’ve so often been pleased with the quality:price ratio. People love to dunk on box wine, and consequently I have a great time defending it as a killer value.
So cool to hear about the tanking stuff for long-distance. Modern shipping is just bananas sometimes. Amazing.
Thanks for the response.
My problem with packaged goods is how often they are watered down. Pretty much every liquid cleaner, soap, or detergent has water in it. Why are we paying extra money for a resource that would have otherwise cost us a fraction of a penny? And as an added bonus, the containers are bigger, heavier, and take up way more space than they need to.
And anything with a foil lid under a cap that cannot be cleanly removed should go straight to hell.
I mean, the key is the word "liquid." The water is the main way these things are given the liquid form-factor. I don't think that's remotely worth it (and as a result I use powdered detergent in both my washing machine and dishwasher), but that's the reason.
The last time I bought laundry detergent I considered switching to powder for some of the same reasons, but when I got to the store I found that it wasn't cheaper than the liquid detergent on a per-load basis. Not sure if that's because liquid is more popular nowadays and has better economies of scale, if I just showed up on a weird pricing day, or if it's something like the packing issue described above (liquid detergent appears to have a lower volume per load based on package size). I would have considered the powder detergent at a higher price if it came in a paper box, but both liquid and powder came in plastic containers. Anyway, I spent way too much time standing in the store thinking about this, and I eventually decided to let the store decide what is more efficient and bought the cheaper option.
You are correct in that laundry detergent pricing feels off, but I imagine it is some combination of economies of scale and also just pricing the market on demand and what the companies want to sell. I have recently switch to using laundry detergent sheets that come in a fully recyclable box. It is even better than powder in this respect and is very compact. The sheets work well as a detergent, the only issue I have seen is that they don't dissolve well in very cold water, so for northern areas with extremely cold tap water, you may need to set your washer to use something above "tap" for the water temperature.
To bring up a meta topic, your response is the second comment to suggest economies of scale without elaborating further on the topic, even though I'd already mentioned it in my comment.
Is it something about how I'm structuring or wording my writing that's not clear?
Do I need more line breaks or something?
This is not a criticism of you. I'd like to improve my writing to be better understood.
You started your sentence with a "Not sure if...", so it made it sound as if you were not confident that was the case. I was agreeing with you that I suspect that is part of why you see prices of liquid detergent, but I also don't know any of this for sure.
I had intended that to mean that I didn't have enough information to know which of the three ideas was the more impactful factor, but I see how my writing was not clear.
I interpreted your response as a suggestion rather than agreement, but that could just be because I need to learn to be less defensive when interpreting responses.
Thanks for the feedback. I really appreciate it.
Sure no problem!
I'm able to get my powdered detergent in a cardboard container, which def is an improvement imo, and I think I get more per gram of weight than I would with liquid detergent, which is relevant since I'm taking my things home by foot or public transport rather than by car. I haven't really compared the price per wash directly, but I also know I use less than the box says bc it's suggesting way too much (and also bc I pair mine with a laundry descaling powder which helps lower how much you need due to our hard water here).
I would imagine that they get quantity discounts on the liquid detergents.
There’s liquid, and there’s dilute. Dr. Bronner’s liquid soap has water, but it’s very concentrated so a bottle will last you a very long time. Method makes a liquid laundry detergent that is half the size of an equivalent bottle of Tide. A spray bottle of household surface cleaner is ready to go, but there have always been brands of less concentrated versions and the amount of actual cleaner in them has about the same volume as one of your hands. And concentrated cleaners can be applied at higher concentrations for more stubborn jobs.
The vast majority of US washing machines and laundry detergents are HE detergents, which typically require two tablespoons of detergent per normal load. The HE label is US-specific afaik, but the associated qualities are common to the machines and detergents I've seen here in Germany as well. Ofc there is some variance between brands, and detergent manufacturers of course have incentives for you to use a bit more than you otherwise would -- but for the average person, using too much detergent is a bigger issue, as most detergents these days are much stronger in smaller quantities than they were in the past. I personally have found it easier to moderate how much detergent I use to an effective level with powdered detergent when compared to liquid, but that may be a matter of personal taste.
Regardless, my only point about the liquid form-factor above was that any liquid detergent or soap is going to contain some water, even Dr. Bronner's, which is why it's present in the ingredients at all. The ratio is different between products, of course, but I don't think liquid form-factor is possible (at least not easily) without some water.
So many misconceptions about aerospace things, but I'll pick just a few:
Mach Number – most people seem to think that all you have to do is divide your speed by the speed of sound at sea level (343 m/s or thereabouts) and boom, you've got Mach Number. This leads to descriptions of orbiting spacecraft traveling at "Mach 25" through the vacuum of space.
But Mach Number ceases to be a meaningful measure in the absence of a fluid medium. The speed of sound varies with temperature, which varies with altitude in the atmosphere, and once you leave the atmosphere sound doesn't travel at all. Mach Number has important applications in the equations of fluid dynamics far beyond just an illustration of how terribly fast something is moving, but it gets misused, miscalculated, and misreported constantly.
What Counts as "Space" – Somewhat related to the previous point. Earth's atmosphere does not have a hard boundary line; it fades out gradually. This makes it pretty difficult to come up with a satisfying definition of when you actually leave the atmosphere and enter space. The ISS, for example, orbits so low that it experiences significant drag from the thinning residual atmosphere and must reboost itself multiple times a year just to avoid reentering.
Add to that the fact that orbit is usually the goal for objects launched into space, (it takes much more effort to enter a stable orbit than it does to simply shoot straight up and back down) and you have a recipe for confusion. It's never easy to explain why to get to orbit you don't need to go up, you need to go sideways.
The Enormous Differences between Commercial and Private Aviation – This one has been apropos lately, what with all the news about plane crashes. Many people know the factoid that "commercial aviation is the safest form of travel" and understandably extend that to all forms of air travel, but that could not be further from the truth. The reason commercial aviation is so unbelievably safe is because of regulations! We have learned many hard lessons and implemented systems to make it that way. Commercial aircraft are inspected regularly; they have extensive redundancy; there are always two pilots aboard whose physical and mental states are carefully monitored. They have checklists and backup plans for their backup plans.
General Aviation, by comparison, is the Wild West. Small planes crash all the time, like at least once a week in the US, and they're usually fatal. The regulations are much less strict when you're taking your own (and your friends' and family's) life into your hands. Most folks just see the news reports of plane crashes and assume they're all created equal but there's a huge difference between the DCA crash (horrifying, cascade of errors, extremely rare) and the many private plane crashes that were reported on in the frenzy of the following weeks. The truth is that private planes crash constantly, and the rate hasn't really increased, the media just decided to focus on them for a while. General Aviation is wicked dangerous.
Follow up reading / listening / playing:
This was very informative comment. I was absolutely under the impression that the Mach number could be derived by dividing the speed by the speed of sound. I also knew that it was meaningless outside of a fluid environment, but I hadn't really thought about the technical details before.
Mach Number is velocity divided by the speed of sound, my point is that you don't know the speed of sound without knowing the temperature, and it can vary a lot. As you go up in altitude and the air gets colder, the speed of sound drops, so your Mach Number will be higher than it would be at sea level at the same speed. And as you say, in space it's entirely meaningless.
Here's an example using the International Standard Atmosphere and the National Weather Service's Speed of Sound Calculator. Say you're in an SR-71 Blackbird, going Mach 3 at 20km above sea level. The temperature at that altitude is -56.5°C, so the speed of sound is only 295 m/s. You're going 885 m/s – pretty fast! But if you instead used the sea level value for speed of sound (343 m/s at 15°C), you might think you were going 1029 m/s. That's a 15% overestimate.
Do you know if there is some kind of engineering benefit to using speed dependent on speed of sound, as opposed to just speed?
Like maybe speed relative to number of air molecules around or something? Or is it just cool to exceed the speed of sound and it's a measure that stuck due to tradition?
Mach Number is primarily used to identify the flow regime, so you know what approximations to use. The speed of sound is also the speed that information propagates in a fluid, and that heavily influences how it behaves. Different assumptions need to be made depending on the Mach Number. The "Sound Barrier" is the point at which your vehicle is traveling faster than the air can react, which has all kinds of aerodynamic implications.
It's been quite a while since I did any aerodynamics but I seem to remember that it's also sometimes useful to non-dimensionalize the velocity when manipulating the Navier-Stokes Equations.
Regarding your last point about private vs commercial flight, how do we as citizens distinguish between the two? From this side, I'm buying a ticket and I'm going for a ride: the experience is very similar and the smallest tourism companies try hard to make their counters and spaces look exactly like a large commercial flight. What about budget airlines? Essentially, which ones are safe and which ones are death traps?
As a rule of thumb, larger planes are safer. If you're booking a scheduled flight on a passenger jet, even through a budget airline, you've got nothing to worry about (at least in the western world). Accident rates spike as aircraft size decreases – especially single-engine propeller planes. That's not to say all air taxis and sightseeing companies are death traps, but statistically the risk is much higher. Even if a charter airline is doing everything in its power to promote safe operations, the margins of safety are tighter and the consequences when something goes wrong are often much more severe. It's an inherent risk that can't be entirely avoided except by not flying on small aircraft. Personally I would only ride an air taxi if I had no other options, I would hesitate to take a sightseeing flight at all, and unless I am being rescued from something I will never set foot in a helicopter.
This is gonna come off as gatekeepy/snobby/crumby: people who say "I hate math" or "I'm bad at math" don't know what math is and have been let down by our education system. When someone says it about simple arithmetic it feels like complaining about reading during normal daily activity. Computing a tip or savings from a discount is not "doing math."
There I said it and I feel better.
I was 100% with you until this point. The above is math, and it's an important part of the overall picture that math is literally everywhere and so vital! It kills me that our education system (speaking from the POV of a US citizen) fails to excite kids about the multitude of applications for math in everyday life. It's a muscle that becomes a super power when exercised. :)
That's arithmetic, which is doing math but it's equivalent to spelling in terms of doing language. In general, you can be quite good at maths without being good at arithmetic, just like one can be adept with a language while being a terrible speller. These are mechanical parts of the overall subject, and frankly not the most important mechanical parts of either.
I suppose I don't get the purpose to saying "you aren't doing real math" as a concept then. It feels like gate keeping. I am not a mathematician, but I had to get through a fair bit of math on my way to engineering degrees. Excitement about the application of math and arithmetic in daily life was a big part of my growth as a person, so it seems silly to make the distinction and possibly discourage people because they aren't "doing the real thing". 🤷♂️
The main reason is not to point out what is real math, but to let people know that just because they are bad at arithmetic, that doesn't make them bad at math.
My oldest kids can't do arithmetic to save her life, but there are lots of mathematical things she can conceptually grasp and do.
I don't disagree with your premise, but the rest of the thread has a sort of elitist feel that is rubbing me the wrong way about the whole concept I guess. It doesn't ultimately matter in the grand scheme of things if we disagree, and there have been plenty of other instances where I have wholeheartedly agreed with you (even in this topic lol). So I'll just take a deep breath and chill. :)
I definitely understand about it feeling elitist; I try not to be that way!
For me it's really about this: "you aren't doing real math" and the tone that is associated with that. When I read it, with the word "real" in there, that sounds like a really feel-bad phrase to me, and I wouldn't say it like that.
I usually think of it more like this. Imagine a kid at the basketball court, and he's trying to do sink three pointers, and not doing great. Then he comes to you and he says, "I'm terrible at basketball." You might say to him, "hey, shooting threes isn't the only part of basketball. You're great at free throws, you play great defence. You're actually a great basketball player." You might also (kindly) say something like "What you were just doing isn't really basketball - there's more to it!"
That's the sort of energy I'm trying to bring to the discussion, and I'll immediately state that this isn't a perfect analogy (ie. if anyone brings up that arithmetic is more intrinsic to maths than shooting threes is to basketball, I will refer to this paragraph) but that's the vibe.
Also, about maths education, it is something that I'm pretty passionate about, and we have a whole load of people who have ended up entirely conflating arithmetic with mathematics and don't really understand what it means to study or care about mathematics. So we can end up in discussion where someone says "I hated math, but I love logic puzzles" and I'm over here going nuts because logic is maths. Heck, playing a board game has a lot of mathematics in it - game theory is directly applicable to board games - as does any number of common activities that we do. To go back to the basketball analogy, it would be like if there was a basketball class that you had to take for 12 years, and it was all about three pointers, if you were a basketball enthusiast, you might be a bit miffed that everything you learned in school about basketball was just related to three point shots.
I think I got you now, but I'm three comment replies deep so i think you're accidentally burying your lede lol—for this to get to people in the way you want it to (or the way I think I'm understanding that you want it to), I would start with "People think they're bad at math but really they're just bad at arithmetic, because that's the area of mathematics they start with in school, and a lot of people never get very far outside of that." I just saw your reply below to @Mendanbar and it seems like maybe you're already aware of how it comes across; what I would avoid is the part when you say it's "real" or not, as that puts the other person on the defense immediately as they don't think you're qualified to be deciding that what they're doing is or isn't the "real" version of something (i.e., if I'm having a hard time with jump shots & you say "Oh that's not even real basketball," it doesn't make me feel better and it doesn't make me want to hear your other opinions about basketball lol, even if you mean it to be helpful—and if I grow up being bad at the basketball I'm exposed to, it's not likely I'm going to maintain any early natural love for it, unfortunately).
So I would avoid comparing real v. not real aspects of things (real here meaning "true, advanced, technical, proficient-level" etc); as it is, it sounds like you're saying "Well that's not really math," when it seems like you're going for "That's not all there is to math"—I use a lot of "fancy" punctuation when I'm writing, and I tell myself that's because it looks & reads better, but maybe the truth is that I don't want to have to go back and edit anything to be more concise, right? And Ernest Hemingway made a pretty good living with choppy sentences, so if I go in & tell somebody "Well if you're not even using semicolons that's not real writing," that person is going to immediately hate me lol.
If I have your position correct, now I can disagree with your example lol, and maybe your argument: people who are illiterate or have a hard time reading have a hard time doing a huge percentage of things in life, to the point where it can really affect broad outcomes & ability levels (or if you're really lucky you can become president!). In the US, supposedly, third-grade reading levels are one of the best predictors of graduation rates, and high school graduation is one of the best predictors for Not Going To Prison (graduates are 5x less likely to be arrested)—and while dyslexia and other conditions definitely affect those numbers, socioeconomic status is the number-one predictor of literacy levels, with high-income household producing students that read five grade levels ahead of low-income peers. So not only would it be unhelpful and maybe unkind for me to tell someone who doesn't read a simpler text well that it's "not real reading anyway," it would also be statistically very likely that I'd be criticizing them for something that is observably connected to how much money their parents made when they were a child, which isn't really something they can do anything about. I think math is probably the same way: most teachers def. don't have the time/brainspace to tell a child struggling with long division "Just wait, let me show you how cool trigonometry is going to be in seven years!" And math is so cumulative, iterating on what you learned previously, that I'm not sure someone struggling with what you're saying is the most simple & straightforward branch of mathematics is going to be able to discuss or do much with higher concepts, even if they have a natural ability/inclination—just like how someone who struggles with literacy would have a hard time expressing themselves, regardless of natural talent or whatever.
You say:
What I wrote was this:
It seems like I did write it the way you though it should be written?
You also wrote a fair bit arguing about "real math". To be clear, I did not and would not introduce the idea of 'real math' (or real writing, or real basketball) to someone when talking about this area, and I did try to address that and push back against doing that when it was brought up by someone else:
Also, not to be argumentative, but I very carefully picked spelling as the analog to arithmetic, not illiteracy. At no point did I make any claims related to illiteracy, though I will make one right now; one can be a bad speller, and not in any meaningful way be considered illiterate. I did not and would not claim that anything I was talking about in any of my other comments was related to illiteracy. I also agree that literacy is intensely important. That's all I'm going to say about that section.
I don't feel great about saying this, but I feel like your lengthy comment is arguing against things I didn't say at all, and either misunderstanding or misapplying almost every aspect of what I wrote.
Hmm well it is certainly possible we’re just missing each other—I thought you were saying that people misunderstand what you’re trying to say about mathematics, so I was trying to present another way; I do see now where you said you weren’t trying to qualify “real” math/basketball, but what I was going off of is where you said “That’s not really basketball”—so I’d stand by my point that presenting arithmetic as a circle inside of the math Venn diagram is a better angle than saying it’s “not math,” but I also didn’t realize that was actually @notcoffeetable and not you who started all this lol, so maybe you weren’t defending all the shades of it—and my perhaps overly-passionate reading example was also directed at the original comment not by you, which did directly compare reading to arithmetic (I don't even think I saw your spelling comparison haha, but it’s spot-on).
So: it turns out we both actually disagree with a third person, thanks for pointing me in the right direction!
I didn't interact with this thread because when i made the post it would ruffle feathers as it is a "common misconception." And people take it personally when it is called out that 3rd grade mathematical literacy is a problem. I said it would come across as gatekeepy because I know how people respond to this. As a mathematician every time someone learns my background they say something like "omg I could never. I liked math until those damn 'letters' showed up." At which point i need to respond in some way to protect their ego or hand wave it away.
I made pains not to say "real math" because arithmetic is real math. My area of study is "ARITHMETIC geometry."
What I was trying to get at is when people say "I'm bad at math" for a concept introduced in elementary school. It feels like being asked to read Green Eggs and Ham and responding with "omg I'm so bad at reading." If an adult said that it would be quite concerning. But that is allowed when it comes to math.
All these areas of study have levels. I'm not holding it against someone that that derivatives are scary, or even trig is intimidating. They're things rarely used by most people past school. But we all do grade school arithmetic regularly.
Edit: a thought occurred to me based on the "which languages do you speak" thread. I know some basics of a couple languages but would never say I speak those languages. Consequently it would be pretty out of touch of me to say I hate a language despite not having any real competency in it.
Yeah that context/elaboration is super helpful—I would imagine it's frustrating to constantly have people telling you they just can't imagine, etc. I'd almost compare it more to public speaking: almost everybody can talk, but some people are really good at it, and those people probably think it's not a big deal, especially the objectively easier parts. It's for some reason definitely more socially acceptable to be "bad at math," which is unfortunate.
Every person who studied math at a university level or above whom I've met has emphasized the difference between mathematics and arithmetic, and they don't honestly share a ton in common given how much they're conflated.
Ha, I see that 44 seconds after you left this comment, I showed up to fulfill the prophecy.
hahaha I'm proud of my precognition
Couple of years ago I was building a bed (out of wood) and my wife wanted those little farmhouse Xs on the headboard and footboard. No problem I said. Busted out the ol' SOHCAHTOA that's been sitting in a dusty shelf of my brain, untouched for over a decade, just for this exact moment. Got the angles right on the Xs first try and felt like a fucking wizard.
Back to the dusty shelf it goes. Right next to Please Excuse My Dear Aunt Sally and My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine
Pizzas.I think that maths doesn't really get taught in a way that's acceptable at all, at least until about grade 12. I might also be snobby because I studied Mathematics in school, but I think there's a general failure in making it interesting until late high school level, and then a focus on the tough mechanics at the start of University, which makes it difficult to get into some of the interesting stuff. I feel like there are 8 minute long videos from Numberphile that have been better math communications than entire courses that I studied.
I read a while back that part of this comes from the expectation that someone is born either good or bad at something. If you try once and do poorly, you are therefore bad at it and always will be.
I like math but I don't like rituals and social expectations that add unnecessary friction to everyday life. It fills me with existential dread--like doing the same thing over and over every day until you die. Prices should have all taxes, fees, and other externalities baked in. It's market failure when people are comparing two products and one has unaccounted externalities.
What I find really interesting about maths in comparison with other subjects in school is that being good or bad at maths is so closely related to being perceived as smart or dumb (by yourself as well as others).
Maybe this is why you don't seem to be able to just be decent at maths in school but have to be either great or terrible at it.
Knowing is not half the battle. Doing is the majority of the battle.
We have made ideas the most highly regarded commodity, when doing the thing is often much harder than knowing the thing.
Really I think we have some — interesting ideas about intellectual property, in general.
Second thing : neurodivergence is not a quirk and it’s quite debilitating depending on what environment you live in. Specifically, OCD and ADHD are totally misunderstood.
I think you understand me well, and that you highlight accurately that there is nuance to what is contained in knowing vs doing.
I have some specific fields in mind. But simplified examples are things like “knowing” exactly how to shoot a perfect basketball, but still not being able to shoot a basketball.
Knowing the steps to stop being addicted, but not being able to execute those steps.
Knowing your team needs to focus on fundamentals, but not being able to execute that.
Another example is knowing a recipe, but not being able to execute it.
Having an idea for a book but not being able to write it.
You ventured into my field so I had to comment with a hard agree. I have peers who are very capable at writing code to fix a bug, but routinely awful at understanding why the bug came to be, what the intention was, what the correct fix is, and whether what they did is a fix or buying time.
A classic example is any time a bug is caused by some disagreement between front end and back end about what the data should look like. You can usually fix this bug by changing the backend to do what the front end wants, or changing the front end to do what the back end wants. Both will "fix the bug", but only one will align the fixed code properly with the overall system design. The other will actually make the system design flaw worse while fixing the "bug".
Taking this to the thread at large, I don't see a way to separate knowing and doing. I'm currently (pun) trying to get into hobby circuitry. So far I've done nothing but learned a lot. At the start I couldn't have started doing because I didn't know what to do. Eventually I'll reach the point where I know enough to do, and if I keep learning more then I'm probably no longer being productive. I find that learning any new field is a pattern of learning what to do, doing, learning what to do next, doing.
Some of the people I admire most for their ability to master things tend to have a really strong instinct for how wide/deep to learn a new topic before moving in to doing. I err on the side of learning too much, sometimes going so far that I lose interest before I ever do (I may never buy a single breadboard or make so much as a blinking light).
Anecdotally, I see a lot of entrepreneurs as risk takers, and a broad category of risks I see them engage in is doing without knowing. For example, how many of the current storm of AI companies are experts in AI (IMO: none; the field is evolving too fast for a lot of these applications to be wise without further study)?
I imagine for some people, the wisdom they need is that doing without knowing will give you unpredictable and sometimes sub-potential results. For anyone like me, it would be that knowing has a point of diminishing returns before you need to do. For someone in the business business, it would be "do as long as you're funded, until you succeed enough to hire someone who knows".
That's all very specific to new fields, since that's where we have to choose between knowing and doing. I suppose if it's something I already know, then it's easy to say that doing is the only remaining part that's very important.
Autism as well.
I think I'm going to get this on a poster to put up somewhere. Succinctly and just about perfectly expressed.
Are you telling me that G.I. Joe was lying to me all this time? As a kid, it was also clear that the mysterious other half of the battle was some combination of red and blue lasers.
I have taught my daughter that the proper response when someone says, "Knowing is half the battle," is to say, "The other half is violence."
I don't think anyone who grew up with GI Joe could come to any other conclusion.
So the idea that black holes are cosmic vacuum cleaners that suck up everything in sight is relatively wrong. In reality, a black hole's gravity at a distance is exactly the same as any other object with the same mass. If you squashed our Sun down to a tiny point, Earth's orbit wouldn't change, earth would be doomed by other reasons if this happened but we'd only feel the "vacuum-cleaner" effects if we got extremely close, where tidal forces stretch you like spaghetti and light bends in crazy loops. At "everyday" distances, a black hole just pulls like any other object of the same mass, it's only its extreme compactness that unleashes those wild relativistic effects up close.
Go figure! An object of one mass bends space-time the same amount as another object of the same mass! 😉
Honestly, I never thought about it that way but it does seem totally obvious from that standpoint.
I'm also convinced that the way my wife packs her suitcase that she fits a singularity within it. Of course, a singularity of how much mass? It's at least another suitcase worth. 😉
Ha! Exactly! Gravity really is just about mass and distance. And as for your wife’s suitcase “singularity,” the only thing collapsing there is airline luggage rules hahaha.
Apart from snobs, most photographers dont' really care that people are shooting everything in portrait or apply filters. The fact that a lot of processing can be done before the shot is even taken is amazing. It's nice that people have fun with their photos and I'd just want everyone to print out and album/display as much as possible since that is a lot more memorable than it sitting on a drive with thousands of other files.
I take more issue with newer work photographers not being crazy enough. I've been to a few events this month and most of the photography had the energy of taking an ID photo. Yes, the bread and butter shots are important and what the client paid for. But you've got featherweight gear and more storage than some PCs on that camera. Turn off the Auto for a bit and go nuts when you can. Get out some props. Use creative framing and composition. Play with extreme exposures and aperture. Offset lighting to exaggerate shadows. Mod out your old lens filters and soft boxes. Use verticality and unexpected angles. Take a few candid shots. And most importantly, talk to the subjects and give direction.
I think that the biggest misconception is that we equate journal style photos and artistic photography. Our phone cameras are mostly used as record keeping tools and we aim to capture what we see and communicate the emotions through the literal composition, captions and other context outside the image. But in artistic photography, what humam eyes see is what the Auto setting is trying to replicate. But that is just the blank canvas when you have a machine that literally let's you paint with light. It's easy to forget that photons are a thing that exist and interact with the world. It's unimaginable numbers of single particles moving so fast and chaotically that it's a wave that exists with its own special set of rules.
When you're taking a photo, there is a firehose of light poring right at you and your camera gives you millisecond control of how much you let hit the canvans. Your lens is a line of devices that let's you stretch, focus, spread, stain and block the light before it hits the camera. Then you as a person can also change the light source, what the light interacts with and the strength of its flow.
When it's point and shoot thousands of photos per session, it's easy to forget just how much is happening and how many tools are at your disposal. And this isn't even considering the social aspect of photos, color, movement, depth of field, perspective and the hundreds of other tricks that are.
This is so eloquently put. In an age of wonders, it's easy to forget to see them.
(He said, as he typed into a wireless device with more computing power than his first computer in college, blithely going about his digital business in the midst of a city-wide blackout.)
As a shitty photographer, I really like your points. Outside of competitions, I don't care if others use filters. In fact, maybe we're all jealous that you can skip the Adobe subscription by using a phone and still get 90+% of the benefits of "retouching."
I also agree with your third paragraph but I think there's an additional facet: social media photography is making general photography more boring. There was a real turn somewhere in the mid-2010s where social media - Instagram is primarily what I'm thinking of - went from mostly pictures of things/events to mostly portrait photography. Maybe it's just me, but most portraiture is boring and self-indulgent and generally, not very risky. Add in the weird shame that comes with posting things outside the generally accepted and you end up with a whole lot of boring, repetitive portraits. It's refreshing at this point to see my uncle's terrible vacation photos taken from too far away and slightly out of focus because at least it's not yet another quaffed and posed individual in front of a canned and framed location. Additionally, I think social media is so influenced by advertisements - and thus the pictures we take and post are influenced by the very same - that I sometimes can't tell the difference.
Cybersecurity in general. How to do it well, how to do it poorly, the careful risk analysis that goes into security controls.
A lot of people really oversimplify it in their mind. They think of a house with a door, and if you get hacked, it's because you didn't do a good job locking the door, or you have a bad lock, or you're not paying attention.
A modern organizations network is more like a gargantuan campus with thousands of doors, and all of those doors have different brands of locks, and different keys that open them. New flaws with those locks are being discovered every single day, and although some of the manufacturers release new versions of those locks for free, you still have to send someone out to go replace the lock, sometimes to issue new keys too. Some manufacturers don't do that though.
You also have a small team of people to do all of this work, so the idea of fixing all of them, for any organization, is preposterous. So what you have to do is then think about what kinds of attackers you might have that are interested in your organization, and prioritize putting really good locks that you keep updated on the things that those attackers might be interested in, and which secure really important stuff.
At the end of the day though, that's just a guess. Plus, people are constantly building new doors throughout the complex. Sometimes they tell you, but sometimes they don't and you just discover it while walking around. Many times, those doors don't even have locks on them.
Also, this complex doesn't just have a couple of local thieves that go check on doors once every few years. All of the worlds criminals are constantly running through the campus checking doors, just in case they can either get in, or sell the information about how to get in to another criminal.
Because of all these factors, you have to sort of conclude that a hack is inevitable, and it is.
That should lead you to draw a few conclusions:
And 2. You should never give out sensitive data to anyone unless it's absolutely necessary. I don't care how good the organization says their cybersecurity is, or how much money they spend on it, or how much you trust them. We've already established that being hacked is inevitable. You can't change that. That means that given a long enough time horizon, the data you give out will become compromised. If the benefit exceeds the risk of that happening, then sure, go ahead. If not, you should reconsider.
Are you anti password manager?
I'd wager he's a proponent of a self hosted password manager. Many popular password managers offer an option to self-host and completely disconnect from their infrastructure. Unless you host that on a NAS with all the ports wide open, that is almost always more secure.
Not at all. Ideally you're using an offline password manager, but just like anything, the decision to use one is based on balancing risk.
The real decision is do I use a password manager, or do I use the same password everywhere, or do I write my passwords down on a piece of paper. Even an online password manager with a company with a history of data breaches is still better than the other two options. The decision of which password manager to use then comes down to usability versus security. And as much as a lot of cybersecurity people tend to ignore it, usability is an aspect of security as well. If something is too much of a pain to use, people won't use it, meaning it's a useless security measure.
So to sum up, I'd say no, I'm not anti password manager, and the best password manager is the most secure one you'll actually use.
What are your thought on using "base" passwords with small variations? My family does that with family-wide accounts such as our WiFi and streaming, and just add some numbers, symbols and/or words. (Which ended up being a boon because turns out my mom used that base for her old Windows 7 work laptop which is the only one she uses. Somehow she had never logged out or needed the password in the two years since her retirement...) We got the trick from an article years and years
I assume it's a bit safer since most cracking is automated and looks for reused passwords across multiple platforms, so the programs presumably won't be trying to tack on extra words/characters each time. We got the tip from an article years and years ago about password safety, but I don't know if that tip was ever good or if cracking software has advanced to make it ineffective. So curious to hear an expert's opinion.
My understanding is that common character substitutions and additions have been part of brute forcing a password for ages, so I doubt they aren't being used when there's a database of known passwords to go off of. I can see it being recommended years and years ago, but I doubt it's more than marginally safer than reusing the same password these days.
2: You protect it all like an impenetrable fortress... only for some idiot to give their key to a random guy who says he's there to fix the plumbing, even going so far as to lower the drawbridge over the alligator infested moat and help the guy past the rental scanner and maze of invisible, deadly laser beams.
What are your thoughts on the CNAPP and CSPM etc paradigms getting popular in the industry?
I think that devops and cloud technologies have started entering territories with dangerous levels of abstraction. Modern enterprises consist of tech stacks so complex that no one person can grasp most of it anymore. Between virtualization, containerization, APIs, microservices, serverless functions, devops pipelines and the hundreds of other technologies used for abstraction and communication, there's just so much going on that it's impossible for a human being to actually get a grasp on the security for. CNAPPs are the latest evolution of having security teams basically say "Jesus, take the wheel", and trust automated tools tuned by vendors be mostly in charge of the day to day work of security operations.
That works well most of the time, but when it fails, most organizations will be scratching their heads understanding how an attack took place and how to prevent something similar from happening again.
So in short, I think that CNAPPs, and tools like them are necessary to deal with the absolutely gargantuan amount of complexity and abstraction in modern information technology. At the same time; although I understand why it exists, that level of complexity is really bad news from an infosec standpoint.
Thank you for sharing this. I’m working on a CSPM product myself and wanted to know the opinion of a fellow practitioner. Are there any pitfalls to avoid or any recommended reading you would suggest?
"Diabetes is caused by eating too much sugar", and while we're wishing, I'd love it if we could not call type 1 and type 2 both "Diabetes". They are different enough that it causes more confusion to lump them together.
Could you expand on that? My understanding is that the symptoms are almost identical, but the root cause is different. Is that a misconception?
I'll avoid comparing too much, as I don't have a lot of experience with T2, and I know it's also misunderstood. But I can give my experience with T1, since my son was diagnosed at 13 months. T1 diabetes is an autoimmune condition where the body attacks and destroys pancreatic cells that produce insulin, which the body needs to regulate blood sugar levels. Not having this vital hormone can very quickly cause full organ failure and death. Before the discovery of a way to synthesize insulin outside the body, T1 diabetes was a death sentence. It can't be regulated by diet and lifestyle, and must be closely monitored to ensure that blood sugar levels stay within range. If sugars go too high, there is risk of long term organ damage. If they go too low, then it's a coma and death. Even though we are super careful, my kiddo's life expectancy is shortened just because precise blood sugar control is a constantly moving target. So the result is that we typically have to keep his blood sugars higher than normal to avoid dangerous lows.
In short, T1D has radically changed my kids life and everyone's around him. And it's pretty hard to remain calm when someone suggests we fed him too much sugar when he was a toddler to bring this all about. Especially since, as I understand it, that's even an extremely reductive way to describe Type 2.
Maybe someone who lives with T2 (or the other flavors) can chime in and provide a more complete story.
Sorry for the tirade. I guess my answer to your question would be: It's complicated, but there is a lot lumped under the umbrella of "Diabetes", and much nuance is lost in the process.
Type 1 diabetes, as pointed out by Mendanbar, is a deficiency of insulin.
Type 2 diabetes is typically characterized as an insensitivity to insulin - the body is still producing it but for whatever reason, cells don't respond to insulin as they should. Last I read, the primary hypothesis is that the insulin receptors on cells don't properly match up internally when insulin binds, which impairs the ability for cells to take in glucose. Symptom-wise, this would look similar to type 1 diabetes.
Eventually with T2 it's possible for you to stop producing insulin, if I understand the diagnosis correctly (and I have it but I am not a doctor), your pancreas compensates for the insulin resistance by making more until it just can't anymore. Meds often encourage insulin production and try to reduce resistance by increasing uptake, relieving some of the strain and keeping the pancreas kicking.
My body isn't trying to kill my pancreas through violence, it's trying to ghost it until it gives up.
Yeah, and that's why I'm hesitant to talk too much about T2 and compare. Because there are cases where T2 develops to the point where the person is fully insulin dependent. At that point there really is very little practical difference.
So maybe my frustration is less about the fact that they are called the same thing, and more about how little education there is about the different varieties and their unique complications.
Seriously, I have had nurses in the endocrinology dept at hospitals ask me what my son's "dose" is, expecting me to just give a number. Like, what do you even mean? It varies based on food, exercise, and sometimes alignment of the planets! (That last one was a joke, but sometimes it does feel so random)
Are they asking for kiddos basal or just assuming you like feed the same thing everyday? (I know nothing about insulin really but yeah weird. )
If you aren't a part of a giant diabetes discord that came from the subreddit, I highly recommend them and would happily send you an invite. It's too large for me to keep up with but they really helped me with my panicked flailing when I got the diagnosis and they're full of knowledgeable people with all types of beets themselves (parents of kids are definitely welcome) plus they have a lot of resources pre-made and linkable when you ask questions!
For other curious folks there's also T1.5, T3C, CFRD and MODY alongside the T1 and T2.
I do get the frustration I think that T2 gets the "your fault" sort of thing more often, mostly because kids get off the hook more, but as you pointed out then people just blame the parents. I get why they're both "diabetes" and so are all the others I listed, plus gestational, and I think it's a case of reasonable medical terminology leading to shitty social outcomes.
Average daily Basal/Bolus amounts and percentages are a pretty common ask, so it was probably something along those lines. But it was clear that this nurse didn't really understand what she was asking for. Maybe she was just subbing in the office that day from another department, or maybe she was new? I couldn't say. It was pretty unexpected to come across in the endocrinology dept though.
I am subscribed to a few groups and communities, but I would welcome another. Besides, you mentioned the bonus of dessert recipes, and I'm always looking for those. :D
Sent a PM!
I wouldn't be surprised if she was covering from a different dept or office, that makes sense.
Ah, I never thought to look into the long-term effects of type 2 - I did not know that! It makes sense that the high glucose signal coming into the pancreas would further promote insulin production, because the pancreas doesn't know anything is wrong. I'm curious now what happens to the organ that would result in an overall decrease in insulin. I'll have to do some reading once I finish up this semester.
My understanding is it basically wears out and kicks the bucket. But it could be more complicated in that it's actually something more complex with the hormones. It's been a minute since I looked into it as at the time I was panicking about going blind and dying of a heart attack
Also, we've been discussing things in the context of blood sugar a lot in this thread, but it's worth noting that a lot of things contribute to the rise and fall of blood sugar.
Just taking foods as an example: With Diabetes treatment, we don't just need to worry about foods with sugar in them. Anything containing carbs (and some things without carbs) can contribute to rising blood sugar. This can be frustrating, as most of the common Diabetes jokes are centered around eating sugary foods. The fact is that you could completely avoid sweet foods and still have a lot of insulin management to do.
In addition, activity also impacts blood sugar levels, usually having a decreasing effect. This sounds like a nice balancing factor at first, but when you consider that insulin can take up to 30 min to take effect (and has a long absorption tail), it can make meal and insulin planning around an active period really tricky to get right.
Also sickness can cause wild spikes and dips in blood sugar.
Also, sometimes the body gets "stuck" in a high or low and it can take more effort than expected to get back in range.
Also also also...
There's just a lot going on, and not a lot of education about it. So we end up getting crass jokes about eating too many pastries and getting Diabetes. :(
Edit: added video link for some context.
And there are more types than 1 and 2. And the treatments vary pretty widely.
(And my diabetic discord has the best dessert recipes. Yes they have sugar, because they're mostly T1s who adjust their insulin accordingly)
My partner is T1 and this kinda thing drives her nuts. Lumped in with the diabetics who freak out about every gram of sugar and carbs.
She basically eats like a regular person and takes insulin as a result. The only thing that gets her is when she gets a low and needs a candy or something.
I slept on this prompt. And after thinking about it, I realized that it’s one of the things I don’t miss about Reddit. On Reddit there are a ton of misconceptions and I’m constantly telling people they are wrong. It just doesn’t happen too often here.
One thing I have spent a lot of time debunking is the stories told about the Sega Saturn. No, it was not a 2D machine with 3D functionality tacked on. It was actually significantly better at 3D than any console released so far (the 3DO, Jaguar, or Sega’s own 32x). The PlayStation just looked better because it was one of the first consumer systems with hardware T&L, so it was capable of accelerating now-common operations that nothing else could do at the time of its release - not even consumer PC graphics cards IIRC.
There is a common belief that the Saturn has to generate 3D by “manipulating its sprite engine”, whatever that means, but having read the technical manual it’s just because it refers to the polygon drawing and sprite drawing together as sprites. But it is drawing true polygons. The Saturn is indeed capable of drawing triangles; the manual just says to make two vertices coincide. It’s just that you’ll have a much better end result if you actually make your models with quads because you’ll have less texture distortion and fewer overall polygons.
The reason why Sega exited the console market was almost certainly because of their absolutely horrible management during this period. In the US, their CEO was replaced by Bernie Stolar, who was probably one of the most incompetent CEOs I have ever seen. He thought that nobody in America wanted to play RPGs in a time when Final Fantasy VII was selling record copies. One of the best Saturn games, Panzer Dragoon Saga, actually did get released in the US, but it came so late and in such small quantities it’s one of the most rare and expensive games for the system now. He is quoted in a magazine interview saying “The Saturn is not our future”, which is the exact opposite of what a CEO should be doing; he should have been a goddam cheerleader saying the Saturn was as necessary as oxygen. This was before Sega even announced they were working on a new console, so he Osborne effected their console sales.
That being said, Japan was busy making terrible mistakes too. There’s the 32x to begin with, which Japan actually wanted to release as a standalone console and only turned into an add-on thanks to the American CEO of the time, Tom Kalinske, talking them down to an add-on. Then the Saturn was rushed to market, making for one of the worst big console launches of all time. The console was actually pretty popular in Japan but when they were launching the Dreamcast they tried to cut off all support for the Saturn, including stopping third party developers from releasing their games! That pissed off those third parties something fierce; famously, Camelot (of Shining Force and Golden Sun fame) had completely cut their ties with Sega, effectively ending their Shining Force series, a series with eight released games at the time.
This doesn't fit your prompt exactly but I immediately thought of it so I'll share anyways. I'm somewhat known in some circles for thinking the end of Game of Thrones was good. This is not true, it's definitely bad. Bad bad bad. BUT I firmly believe there were many excellent decisions made which are commonly cited as reasons the ending sucked, but they didn't, they're just getting conflated with all the other adjacent suck. GoT has always been a show which is not afraid to gut punch and betray its audience's wishes. Oh were you liking that seasons main character? Head on a spike. Were you rooting for the likeable underdog? Nah, big evil man gets the better of him. I don't like spoilers even for concluded shows so I'll leave it at that but this trend continues with several similar FUs to the audience in the final season and frankly I love that. I think had they not botched the basic storytelling, pacing, and personalities at the end everything else that everyone hates about it would have actually made it the best season of the series.
I completely disagree with this. It wasn't that GoT tried to betray the audience, it was that actions by the characters had realistic consequences. Ned was decapitated because he failed to fully commit and expose the queen's infidelity, and she had him killed to cover it up. Oberon got so worked up over trying to force the Mountain to confess that he delayed killing him and put himself into a position where he was vulnerable. What made the series special was the lack of plot armour meaning that major characters could be killed if they stuffed up, and the reputation for betraying expectations followed from this.
The problems with the later seasons were that the show betrayed this principle. All of a sudden you had your main characters acting really stupid and getting away with it. The major plot swings weren't character-driven any more, but now were written that way specifically to shock the audience.
I really want to know what good decisions you think were made for the endings that people usually think are bad. I am a spoiler purist like yourself (perhaps even more so because I think even mentioning something ends bad is a spoiler). Feel free to DM me or use the spoiler/hidden text markdown feature please !
I don't think we can spoilerlessly discuss the GoT ending even remotely coherently, so I ask you to name what specific GoT ending events were good (that everyone commonly hates).
Spoiler kinda but not really
Daenerys was never intrinsically “good”. Rather, she loved the adoration and worship she received with her image as a godlike figure. She had a hero-complex from the start, but it was always about the way it made her feel—not about actually doing good.IMO this view of her character makes all of her decisions, including the “bad” ending, completely consistent with her personality.
(See here for above formatting.)
I just finished rewatching GoT season 8, and I am surprised to agree with you. There were a few awful decisions that ruined it for me the first time around, but overall, I was happy with it. I never would have thought. This is from a 5x reader of the series.
I appreciate your passion. I never watched GoT but your first free sentences resonated so hard with me that I'm almost triggered into making a similar post about the end of Lost.
I hated the ending, but it seems like that's a myth (or maybe I'm wrong) that people who hated it did so because they misunderstood it. I understood it. I hated it, and I double hate that people always told me I hated it because I didn't get it. I could write an unhinged diatribe about the many ways I think they could've made sense of the nonsense up until about the last episode.
But I'm not going to make a post about Lost.
The premise that the monomyth is a story template followed by all historical folklore is not true: there are many counterexamples in mythologies around the world. The idea is often accused of being based on cherrypicked examples. It has become a self-fulfilling prophecy though, because of people deliberately building their stories around the structure of the monomyth.
It's a common structure because it's good, but IMO following the template without understanding why each element works is like designing a vehicle in the shape of a sports car - if the internals don't match it won't vroom how you want and it'll just be harder to see why. Conversely, if you have a good grasp of how stories work, your work will be compelling regardless if it converges to the common structure or does something new and bold.
Can you define what a “monomyth” is ? I want to be angry with you, but I don’t know what this term is.
The monomyth is another word for the Hero's Journey. It was developed by Joseph Campbell for his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces, where he hypothesizes that almost all myths adhere to the Hero's Journey structure in some capacity, hence the monomyth. It is to my understanding that most modern takes on the monomyth are that the Hero's Journey is a good structure for stories, but (as @Fiachra points out) the examples are cherry-picked and there are many, many myths that do not adhere to the monomyth.
It's another term for The Hero's Journey
Wiki
Folklorists do not agree with the idea of a monomyth and generally want to fight Campbell on sight as a matter of general principle. He's dead so that's more difficult.
It was popularized by Joesph Campbell and more commonly known as The Hero’s Journey https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey
The original Star Wars movie is a textbook example of following The Hero’s Journey template.
"Wild" horses in the North America are NOT native. They are feral and a harmful invasive species that costs the US millions every year to manage their numbers in a losing battle, greatly hampered by activists with romantic views of mustangs belonging in the west. Imagine if Australians wanted to protect their "wild" goats, that's basically what people are doing by protecting "wild" horses. Between irresponsible ranchers overgrazing land to the dirt and horses attempting to do the same, the land of the west won't ever heal.
Some light reading from the Wildlife Society that covers this topic fairly well: (https://wildlife.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/FactSheet-HorsesAndBurros_FINAL.pdf
Wow I didn't know how harmful they could be. Interestingly though, there actually were horses native to North America, just thousands of years ago. Example 1 and Example 2. They went extinct long ago and have nothing to do with the wild horses of today, which like you said were brought by Europeans. But we still find bones of these paleo-horses today, along with other megafauna like dire wolves, giant sloths, mammoths, and saber-teeth cats.
Yup horses originated from North America, but they went extinct so long ago that they just don't have a place in the wild today. A lot would have to change for that to work out, humans being a big factor in that.
Just to include the whole story... we could make it work with only a few negative aspects. However, it'd either require allowing humans to cull the herds or a fast change in the human impact on the environment and some predators, likely wolves, would have to learn to or evolve to take down horses.
That human impact is, and this is sure to turn into a rant, mainly Cattle which have a far more devastating impact on the environment with irresponsible ranchers allowing their cattle to graze until there's no food left, sometimes leaving areas barren, and the BLM has little they can do about it as they're bogged down in bureaucracy requiring multiple warnings that by the time they can take action the damage is done and even then, when they do take the cattle away, they can end up being forced to give them back to the rancher or paying the ranchers for them. It's a ridiculous system that greatly hinders the management of BLM land far worse than horses. Though, just a note, I'm assuming nothing changed since my father retired from the BLM around 15 years ago. The BLM would do something like reseed after a wildfire and ranchers would let their cattle out on the newly seeded areas which ruins the entire purpose of the project (these seeding projects can cost millions). Ranchers will cut fences that protect ponds from being trampled to death then say the fence broke despite the wire being obviously cut. While I feel for those ranching where it's their culture, I really can't wait for lab grown meat and leather to decimate ranchers and vertical farming to make open air fields obsolete.
We all have hemorrhoids. It's the inflamed hemorrhoids that are the problem.
Evil things are like a curse, the inflamed one are such a pain in the ass.
Flea and tick meds for pets do not repel fleas and ticks. (There are occasional wacky exceptions, but so far those mostly don't work.) Instead, they make your pet poisonous to these parasites. With good meds, a tick will die and drop off before it can transmit the illnesses for which it is a vector; with good meds, a cat wandering around the house will help kill off any flea populations hiding in the carpeting.
Unless the emitter has diarrhea and is wearing no clothes, smelling a fart is not the same thing as inhaling poop particles. The aroma of feces is from a variety of molecules (ie, not particles) like DMS, DMTS, mercaptans, H2S, etc. These are much much smaller than particles and can pass through filtering materials like clothes easily.
But were those particles also in my butt? Because I think that's ultimately the part most people mentally object to
I worked in an electrical testing shop one summer in college. It was mostly blue collar shop work (building panels) and field work, with the owners and one engineer working in the front office. Every morning, one of the owners would come into the shop and use the bathroom there for his "morning constitutional". This never bothered me because I grew up working in the kennel in my dad's vet clinic. But this one guy in the shop would always complain about it.
"Lee, why do you gotta come back here and do that here where we all have to smell it."
Lee's response will stay with me always.
"Paul, if it makes you feel any better, whatever it is in the air that makes it smell that way used to be in my ass."
I live in hope that someday I will find the perfect moment to use that line, but so far no dice.
No, people object to it because they think you are inhaling tiny poops, but it's not accurate.
I'm trying to distinguish between particles and molecules, so no. The molecules were in your butt and now their nose; the particles made it no further than your undies.
No reason to object to the molecules (other than their aroma), because they are not fecal matter.
Also, there may not even be any significant fecal matter [particles] in a GI tract, but you can still produce farts [molecules].
I apologize I should have said 'those molecules in my butt'
And I take your point but I don't think saying that "no no the molecules were in my butt and now your nose" is that much better. I know it's fine and not poop, but I do also mentally recoil at the idea of those molecules being in both locations in quick succession.
It's like knowing that water has been through the whole water cycle innumerable times and thinking about how it was waste water immediately before being processed for my drink.
I see this on reddit all the time and I think it's a part of a bigger problem with germophobia that seems to be more prevalent in the US than where I live. I don't care if having a toilet in the bathroom where I keep my toothbrush means that I have shit residuals on the toothbrush because the only effective consequence is "I know about it and it feels gross".
Maybe it would make a difference during a norovirus infection on something, but even then I highly doubt that this specifically would be a significant factor for spreading it.
The assumption that children who grew up during or after the period where personal computers became omnipresent are naturally computing experts... which has been going on for long enough that the "children" this originally applied to are now adults. This couldn't be further from the truth. Computer literacy is a skill that needs to be trained like any other, and while learning how to use a computer effectively might have required a deeper awareness of the underlying systems in the past, that has not been the case for over a decade. If anything, this belief that children automatically become "good with computers" without needing to be taught actively drags down the general public's computer literacy and should really be done away with by now.
USB naming has become quite a mess, and it makes it difficult for consumers to understand what's going on.
First of all, there is USB the connector, and USB the communication protocol.
Historically, these mainly carried the USB 1/2/3 protocols, at varying speeds, with their own mess of naming. These names included:
See how the advertising names go off the rails? They've since retconned this and somewhat improved the naming, but the damage is done on 10+ year old protocols.
As an additional twist, any one of the above Connectors could carry any of the above Protocols and Speeds (There may be one or two combinations that were not possible, but the vast majority were possible).
The protocols also had different requirements for the construction of USB cables. Since cables are often unmarked or poorly manufactured, it is common for users to have a lower-speed cable and leave performance on the table. You can even have charging-only USB cables that completely omit data wires. This is probably what you're getting from a gas-station USB cable.
Enter, Thunderbolt and USB 4. Thunderbolt and USB 4 are fundamentally different protocols from those discussed above, but still use USB-C connectors. Both protocols are able to carry the above USB 2/3 protocols, in addition to others such as DisplayPort and PCIe.
Thunderbolt and USB 4 cables have much higher quality requirements to accommodate ridiculously high speeds. These high speeds also mean that cables have length limits, typically less than 2 meters. Cables can be longer, but require special built-in hardware to boost and retransmit the signal over the longer distance. So next time you see a PC vendor selling a $50 "USB-C to USB-C" cable, it may not be a (total) rip-off. Check the specs.
The groups in charge of USB seem to know that naming is an issue, but they are still making some silly naming decisions. We can hope for a brighter future.
Funny, I was just thinking about this yesterday because I've got a portable LCD monitor which requires one of those special USB-C cables.
Like, if I lose it, none of the other USB 3 cables I carry around will support it. I have to use a USB 4 cable that supports DisplayPort Alt Mode.
This cable is noticeably thicker and stiffer, but the ends are... USB-C unless you look for the miniscule embossed "DP" symbol. I've occasionally erred and connected one of the others to my laptop, with the resulting lack of power and image.
I suppose it's nice for manufacturers that all the input holes are the same shape, but it's reached the point where some color-coding would be nice.
What has always confused me is why tf we skipped USB-B. I assume there's something out there with that name that didn't catch on as widely but like... why?
We didn’t.
There is a USB-B. USB-A is supposed to be host-side only, while USB-B is supposed to be only on the device side. USB-B is the one that looked more square with two notches cut out; it’s the one you used to see on printers and such in the 2000s.
What @tech-taters referred to as Micro-USB is actually Micro USB-B, preceded by Mini USB-B. And to make things more confusing, the Micro USB-B connector used on phones was for USB 2.0 only, for USB 3.0 and beyond there was a very cursed alternative you had to use instead.
Even with all the confusion to the signals the USB-C connector can carry, Id say we’re probably still in a better world for it.
Having looked at the picture from someone else's comment, I can confidently say that I have never actually seen a USB-B connector or needed to use it. But I also wasn't trying to set up printers when I was in elementary school.
Your comment has big:
energy and I'm greatly enjoying it. Proves my point that USB is a mess :)
Thanks for expanding on the connectors. I am a USB-B stan, despite excluding it. I appreciate the heft and the clear orientation for when you're bent over behind the printer.
USB-C is pretty great, all things considered, but the receptacle is too small for some cases, in my humble opinion.
It's because the Type-B connector, seen here on the left, was meant for connecting to peripherals. The connector we all call Micro USB is technically the Type-B connector for the Micro USB standard. USB Type-C's distinction is that the connector is usable for both host device and peripheral.
How about you, Lou ? Did something prompt your question ?
Isn't Lou the person who normally asks questions like this?
Oh, I always have something to complain about that is for sure! Perhaps I will share something eventually.
I don't know where this myth originated, but particle accelerators (colliders in particular) are not capable of creating black holes in any scale which presents any sort of meaningful risk to matter even in its nearest vicinity.
I say this because some theorised models present the possibility of extra dimensions, which would theoretically allow miniature, tiny, insignificant black holes to exist (in theory), and also explain gravity being so weak (which explains why black holes aren't feasible in the energies produced by the LHC).
Additionally, not all particle accelerators are colliders! For a lot of people, particle accelerators conjure images of two particles being smashed into each other, but that is not always true! Some are, like the LHC, but there are many types of particle accelerators, like:
Ok I got another one. People often describe unregulated meme coin cryptocurrencies as "a casino" or "gambling", but this is completely wrong. Casinos are tightly regulated to ensure the games are fair and the odds of winning are transparent. Shitcoins are a rigged casino at best. The insiders are guaranteed to make money, and everyone else is just subsidising that.
If you feel the urge to yell at me, please note my care to refer only to unregulated meme coins and not crypto as a whole.
That Yugoslavia was behind the iron curtain. Since I come from North America, European history is generally lacking among my peers, even highly educated ones.
If you think about it, it would make perfect sense, communist country in eastern europe post-WWII and all. It was even how it went for a while, until the Tito-Stalin split around 1948. This led to a country that was a lot more open towards the west, and sought to be independent of either the US, Soviet or China's oppressive influences.
It turns out they also made really good music while doing it, and that's how I fell into the rabbit hole. They had very good rock (Bijelo Dugme), punk/post-punk/new wave (Paraf), and electronic scenes (Bastion]), among everything else. Plus some of my favourite Eurovision entries ever, mostly in the form of Tajči's Hajde da ludujemo in 1990, right before the whole thing collapsed.
As a lover of history... just so much. Too many to list. In fact, other people have already listed them, for there are entire books written about things you might be mistaken about in history. And podcasts about things you might have missed.
In a more general sense: it's weird, people tend to both romanticize the past, thinking that the past was a lot better than it actually was, while also looking down on certain groups and making the past out to be a lot worse than it actually was. Like we'll collectively idolize certain figures and time periods and nations/empires (how many shows/movies/books/games can you think of with vikings, or Spartans, or set in the Roman Empire, or in Victorian England, or with larger-than-life figures like Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan), while ignoring a lot of the bad parts of those peoples and times. And yet we look down on other peoples and cultures and social classes, while not appreciating that they were human beings with the same characteristics as us.
The truth is that the overwhelmingly vast majority of people, like ever, were just regular human beings like all of us here. There were assholes in every place and time, but there were also just common people looking to live out their lives and do right by themselves and their families. Their day-to-day looked different, and they didn't know half the stuff we do today, but they still went about their lives adhering to their social norms and personalities just like we do today. No where am I more reminded of this then when seeing dick jokes and vulgar graffiti in Pompeii. We're all just meat bags with emotions, and if you had been raised in (insert place and time here) you'd act like a regular person of that time.
A lot of this misconception and general misunderstanding of history comes down to education. Students often times don't take many history classes growing up, and if they do it's only a superficial focus on a few key figures and dates related to that country or state or province or whatever. And if you only ever have one or two history classes your entire life, all it takes is one or two bad history teachers to drive you away from the subject forever. Before I met my wife, she thought history was super boring because the only history class she had in her entire K-12 education was boring as hell just memorizing dates and figures and events. Now she loves it after hearing me talk about it nonstop for the last 11 years or so (or at least I tell myself that so I can keep rambling about stuff during shows we watch).
I took two entire classes in grad school about Historiography and how history is written/studied. And luckily there are some positive developments being made in recent times, like the rise of social history and the de-emphasis on 'great-man' history. I could go on for hours but I'll just leave it at this: we should be more understanding and appreciative of people and cultures of the past, while also not venerating and romanticizing certain figures and cultures who were no better or different than we are today.
/rant
Another issue on top of that is repetitive history classes that focus on the exact same time periods. This gave me a flashback to my high school US history class which was better described as "The Colonies, Revolution and Lewis and Clark". For some reason the entire first semester was spent on just the colonies, then the revolution, and then a bit afterwards including a week-long project about the Lewis and Clark Expedition that mentally burned me out. We barely even touched the civil war before the year ended.
It frustrated me so much because the colonies and Revolution are covered repeatedly throughout grade school history classes. We didn't need to spend a whole semester on just the colonies. I was so jealous of the previous year's class which had a different teacher, because I knew they at least reached the Watergate scandal. Most of my knowledge of American history from after the Revolution and civil war comes from my own independent reading and interest in history.
Meanwhile in college, two of my favorite classes were history classes. I remember liking one because the tests weren't about memorizing dates or names, but essay and short answer responses to explain why something happened. I particularly remember coming to a conclusion about how the Nazi party rose to power in part due to aiding the economic instability of Germany due to WWI reparations. Hardly the sole factor, but it still gave me a better insight into how such a now-hated regime managed to get support.
The other was a Women in History class, which was more focused on what you said about your historiography classes than just notable women in history. We talked about how so much of history is built on faulty and biased records since only people with a certain level of education and affluence could leave records that also had a likelihood of surviving a long time. So there are a lot of surviving journals and letters from major male politicians who floated in wealthy circles, but very few direct records from some unimportant poor woman who lived in a dilapidated shack. So, most history books are based on biased sources that couldn't fully grasp daily life for the average person.
It was a fascinating class, and just adds another dimension to my ponderings about life throughout history. There really is a focus on the more glamorous aspects such as nobility, or the absolute worst parts of life for the poorest, with little in-between. People don't think much about the actual day-to-day life of an average person who wasn't living in absolute squalor. It's always so fun to find little anecdotes showing people have always been the same throughout history though.
Yup, everything you said in this paragraph was essentially those two historiography classes condensed into a few lines. So much weight is given to what is written down in various historic sources, but equally important (and sometimes even more important) is why it's being written down and who's doing the writing.
And I totally get where you're coming from about the classes focusing on the same few time periods and events. Like I get the need to talk about the American Revolution in a class about American history, but there's more to life than just George Washington, ya know?
I'm sure standardized testing plays a nefarious role somehow. A lot easier to quiz kids on 'which year did Columbus sail the ocean blue?' rather than open-ended questions about the impacts of said voyages.
Mules are thick goats
Mules (and probably their cousins, too) aren't just lazy horses. They're muscular work animals, built to handle all kinds of terrain and steep inclines. Mules are incredibly versatile, resilient, and strong. They traverse terrain that most animals cannot manage with a human on their back. They're amazing. Riding a mule is probably the closest I'll ever get to sitting on one of those Boston Dynamics' robot dogs.
Film is an actual major
I don't call myself an engineer or anything, and majoring in film doesn't make me an instant expert on everything cinema-related. But it'd be nice if, once in a while, I could offer a bit of insight without people assuming I'm a judgmental asshole. Yes, I know everyone knows stuff about film. Often more than I do. Still, a little credit would be nice. They weren't handing out diplomas when I showed up. I worked for mine. For years.
People seem to both overestimate and underestimate the value of being a film major. On one hand, it's seen as completely worthless. Like I paid for Wikipedia classes. On the other, it's treated as overly valuable and intimidating, as if having a film major in the room somehow invalidated everyone else's knowledge and love of film. They "strike back". So I must hold back on sharing my experiences. It's a little annoying.