What’s a common “fact” that’s spread around that’s actually not true and pisses you off that too many people believe it?
That the granny who sued McDonald’s was just upset that her coffee was too hot.
She suffered from either third or fourth degree burns, on her lap.
Parts of her were fused together.
She just wanted McDonald’s to cover the medical bill, but they dragged her name through the mud.
Yep, also they had previously been warned about serving coffee that hot, but studies had shown that serving it that hot meant that people drank less of it. And that “crazy” judgement (2.5 million?) wasn’t a random number. That’s how much they make off coffee in one day.
Yeah we actually learned very quickly about that in legal studies (high school) way back in 2000s and it was presented like a silly Americans (Australian here) kind of thing, just a quick silly case in a small box in the textbook. Wasn’t til I got older I learned the full story!
We had an Aussie silly case too, not just picking on the US 😅 ours was about some drink in an opaque bottle and someone drank it all before they could see there was some kind of bug or even a snail in the bottle? Something like that so they sued the drink company 🤢 can’t remember enough about that one to find anything on it!
I saw that, yeah McDonald’s really tried to blast her as a sue happy bitch. All she asked for was medical bill costs initially which is reasonable.
Propaganda from the fossil fuel industry.
Solar panels are the cheapest source of electricity now. Batteries have dropped in price by more than 90% in the past decade, and are now viable for grid-scale storage, addressing the main issue with renewable energy. EVs are competitive with combustion cars, and in some ways superior. Heat pumps are now superior to furnaces in many locations. The solar punk future is now! But you wouldn’t know any of this by listening to the public discourse, mainstream media, and many politicians.
Relevant video from Technology Connections
The average person only lived to be 35 back in the day.
No, the average lifespan was like 35 back in the day. 40 year olds weren’t some rare wrinkled old person, the average was affected by the extremely high childhood mortality. If you could survive the first few years of your life your chances of surviving the next 60 were pretty good.
That being said, even among people who survived childhood, living to the ages we see nowadays was more rare than it is today due to a lot of environmental and societal factors like plagues and war. It wasn’t unheard of, but that is also something that brought the average down to an extent.
That all the Y2K preparation stuff was a waste of time / a scam, instead of an example of massive success (people coming together and pulling off something to avoid a disaster)
Also see Acid Rain and the hole in the ozone.
These are the people who think the precautions around Covid were unnecessary too. If there hadn’t been any precautions, there would have been a lot more deaths and these same idiots would be asking why nothing was done to prevent it. But instead the death toll was kept to a minimum and these people just assume this is how it woukd have been regardless, no sense of cause and effect. Disasters are successfully mitigated and people assume there was no potential disaster at all. But if it had been allowed to happen, then they’d be asking why no action was taken
Trump was good for the economy.
During the election this kept being repeated even though the economy collapsed because of his covid response
God.
History time!
Myth: People in the past drank beer because it was safer than drinking water.
Fact: People in the past drank beer because it was full of calories and tasty. Before modern times people generally had access to or knew how to find clean water, and water has always been the most popular drink throughout history.
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Myth: People needed spices to cover the taste of rotten meat.
Fact: People ate fresh meat when it was available and preserved it when they could by smoking, drying, salting, fermenting, or otherwise processing it. When they didn’t have access to meat they just wouldn’t eat it. They wanted spices for the same reason we do - because they taste good.
Wasn’t that literally the purpose of grog? A mixture of beer and water used on ships to kill harmful bacteria that would grow in the ships’ water stores over a long voyage?
And if people in the past knew how to make water safe to drink, then why was epidemiology invented when Londoners couldn’t figure out that they should stop drinking poop water?
Grog was way after the middle ages.
Beer was the main beverage aboard ships before, as it keeps better than water in eigen kegs. But you can’t stock up on beer everywhere. Distilled alcohol has a better form factor, do you can take more. It made the water kind of palatable but doesn’t clean it.
I can’t speak to practices on sailing ships, those surely differ from general history especially when it comes to fresh water which isn’t freely available on the ocean.
And to your second point, in the context of history that happened in modern times. The cholera epidemics happened in the 19th century with the epidemiologist John Snow publishing his treatise in 1855. Unsafe drinking water causing widespread disease was mainly a problem of modern cities in the industrial age and the overcrowding and unsanitary conditions that came with it.
Yeah no, pubs used to totally used to use curry powder and ketchup to drown the taste of gamey meat.
New cars are reliable.
First of all, no. Their more complex and failure prone, and you are the guinea pig they test new crap on.
Second of all, you literally cannot call a one year old vehicle reliable. You do not have enough data to make that claim. My jeep is about 40 years old, and with the 40 year old head start will still out live a brand new jeep. It has no “limp mode” because u slipped out of 4 lo in the woods (actual customer example), and it doesn’t require Internet connection + a security gateway authentication to reset things like limp mode and doing a clutch position relearn. If you want a reliable vehicle get something made between 85 and 05, as long as it doesn’t rust out from underneath you it will give u less headaches than anything made in the last 20 years.
What’s the name of that new transmission thing that makes cars made after 2020 break down after 5 years?
Your probably thinking CVT, but could also just be any Ford 😂
People who think cheap Chinese vehicles will be reliable: there is no data to support this.
Agreeing to disagree is only applicable to matters of taste.
Example would be a preference of maple or agave syrup with your choice of cooked dough.
One cannot agree to disagree when one of the parties is factually wrong.
A lot of people don’t understand “factually wrong” is often not possible, if you’re literally debating specific stated facts that you have outside references to sure but anything relating to complex systems, issues, the human experience etc is simply not that black and white
The old “tomatoes are not a vegetable” is pretty frustrating. They are a vegetable.
In botanical terms, the concept of a vegetable does not exist, which is where tomatoes are classified as fruits. But in culinary terms, vegetables do exist and tomatoes are classified as such.
I just find it frustrating, because I believed that garbage myself at some point, and I thought, I was smart for knowing that.
Just one of those examples that you can easily spread misinformation, so long as you make it sound plausible.In culinary arts vegetables are the non-sweet edible parts of plants (not fruit). So no, they are not a vegetable.
What is true is people call them a vegetable.
If you want to get pedantic the tomato is a berry.
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Sure, but it is not a vegetable.
The birth rate going down = the population is collapsing.
No.
The birth rate is going down and the population is increasing. Both of these are happening at the same time.
It does mean population aging. Which isn’t great.
Other than capitalism, why? We have enough resources to support everyone if we want to. People are still having kids just not as many. Why do we need so many people? What if the population drops to a more sustainable number?
The problem isn’t the number of humans on the planet. The problem is how many of them are retirees/elderly compared to working age.
Old people don’t work or work less, still require food, and often require increased amounts of medical care. If you view the world’s economy through a detached, Sim City player eye view, the elderly are a dummy load we dump resources into out of a sense of sentimentality. In an extreme case, where a baby boom is followed within a lifetime by a baby bust, you get into this behind the power curve situation where most of the relatively few working age people are employed in the elderly support industry making orthopedic shoes, walkers, those strawberry hard candies and staffing hospice houses.
That extreme case? Actually happening right now, especially in Korea and Japan.
Yes but again those are only issues because of capitalism. What if we tried something else? If the system doesn’t work anymore why not change it instead of trying to make more babies to fix the issue? Why is the only option more babies? It’s not the only thing we can do
That has nothing to do with capitalism. How does communism solve the “we have a lot of old people that need care” issue that doesn’t divert more people of working age to the Taking Care Of Old People industry? The Soviet answer seems to be “life expectancy of 52” and the Chinese answer seems to be “that’s their state mandated 1 child’s problem.”
I didn’t say communism solves anything. But we have enough resources and technology now that we can provide for everyone without everyone having to work. If only like a quarter of the people got all the “work” done the rest of the people could be old or care for them.
A lot of the “work” that people do today are just jobs programs to keep the system moving. Think of people working at insurance companies or car dealers. Pointless middle men that could be free if they weren’t in this system.
You blamed the problem on capitalism, I used communism as a non-capitalist example to demonstrate irrelevancy. If the tire is flat, it doesn’t matter if the car is manual or automatic. That is what leading scholars call an analogy, it is a rhetorical device used to draw comparisons between relationships. Stated in full: The problem of an aging population has as much to do with capitalism vs communism as a flat tire has to do with the vehicle’s transmission being manual or automatic. I state this because I have come to believe you’re the kind of internet idiot/troll/bot that takes analogies literally out of genuine stupidity or intentional bad faith.
We don’t have the technology to eliminate the majority of the workforce. If we did, the Epstein class would have done it by now out of pure shitheartedness. And only in the fever dreams of a syphilitic moron would one quarter of the population work to take care of the other three quarters be a solution to anything.
“Just doing my job” being a valid excuse for causing even minor harm.
Maybe it would be very hard to choose not to take thay paycheck. Maybe it would have negative consequences for you to not sell fake insurance to people who don’t know better. You don’t get to pretend you didn’t choose to do harm to others.
Things being “illegal”.
No it’s not against the law. Just because someone can sue you doesn’t mean what you did was a crime. Just because a business can’t sell a particular product doesn’t mean it’s illegal to have. You can’t ‘get arrested’ for half the shit people think is ‘illegal’.
I got another one. It bugs me when people say that it’s not possible for two dark haired people to produce a blonde child. These people think they’re so smart because they know genetics exist. But if they learned anything about genetics at all, very basic punnet square genetics you learn in highschool biology explains why it’s not only possible but pretty common. If both dark haired parents are carriers for the blonde gene, there is a 25% chance of a blonde child. And reality is probably more complex than what I learned in highschool.
It’s like the stubborn fuckers who refuse to accept the science of sex and gender being any more complex that “penis man vagina woman”. They think they’re so smart for knowing “basic” biology and refuse to fucking learn anything beyond that.
There are many genes that affect the color of our hair and skin. Dark colors are caused by higher amounts of melamine in hair/skin. Those darker traits are dominant genes. In the same vein, two black people can have a child that will have lighter skin than them if the parents carry recessive genes and pass them on.
But it is even more complex than that because there are so many factors that affect the expressivity of genes : the environment, the diet or even other genes.
And don’t get me started on genre/sex… Biology is sooo complex, and genetics is just one of its branch, but people want to believe it’s simple to justify their bigotry. I studied biology for two years at university and I just know that I know practically nothing about it…
Hairs grow longer, thicker and darker when you cut them.
