Had someone contact me because a browser interface was ‘down’ and it was actually a cert issue. It surprised me that in an IT context, this person didn’t have a basic understanding of SSL certs. They didn’t even know how to add a cert exception.
It got me thinking, what basic ubiquitous things am I a dumbass about outside of IT?
Ive seen lots of ‘fun facts’ compilations, but it would be better to get a wide range of subject suggestions that I can spend 30 minutes each or less on, and become a more capable human.
Like what subjects would plumbers consider basic knowledge? Chemical interactions between cleaning products and PVC pipes?
What would an accountant or a landscaper consider to be so basic its shocking people can live their lives without knowing any of it?
For most areas of expertise, its difficult to know even what the basics are to start with.
I’m constantly amazed at how many people don’t understand the concepts of basic finance and how compound interest works.
Years ago, I brought my laptop with me to buy a car so I could plug all the numbers into a quick amortization schedule. The sales person offered me a choice of $1,500 cash back or 1.9% financing instead of the typical rate a few percentage points higher.
I plugged the numbers into my spreadsheet and saw taking the cash back would cost me a couple grand more than the lower finance rate. When I told him I wanted the finance rate instead of the cash back, he mentioned that I was the only person he’d seen not take the cash back.
Maybe he was pulling my chain, but in my experience, the average person doesn’t know what compound interest is, let alone what an amortization schedule is.
That’s wild. When I was getting a mortgage for my house, the lender was like “your interest rate is X, but if you pay $Y you can add a ‘point’”. I’m like “wtf is a point?” Turns out, it’s a roundabout way of saying, higher down payment = lower interest rate.
It already wasn’t obvious what their jargon meant, so for you to have a sales person offering the exact opposite of what my lender did, actively bribing customers to take a worse deal for themselves, it’s just…scummy.
Yeah, buying points is a bit different though and again is a great example of why everyone should at least have a basic understanding of how to make an amortization schedule.
Buying points isn’t exactly the same as a higher down payment, because that money doesn’t take any principal off your loan. It’s basically paying interest up front, giving the lender a lesser amount now rather than a greater amount later.
Shit gets complicated real quick, so plugging it into an Excel spreadsheet makes it much more clear.
Cool, see I didn’t even know about that difference lol. To me it amounted to “do you want to pay us more up front for a lower monthly rate”, which just sounded like the same thing as a larger down payment.
I believe knowing a little bit on how a car works helps you understand why maintenance is important or from getting scammed at mechanics, I loved old commercials like these that explain in such an easy way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
Some skills I wanna pick up is how to micro solder, I deal with a lot of tech and sometimes you just need a type c port replaced and soldering iron is not the easiest tool for tiny pins.
For microsoldering: you want the quick 861dw or one of the knockoffs and a bunch of tips. Sometimes you can get away without a microscope but usually you need one of those too. You need a swing arm mount for it because you often won’t be able to position your board under the objective of a tabletop mount.
You 100% cannot get away without a fume extractor. You’re gonna need low melt solder and flux, so you also need to be wearing disposable gloves.
You need a board holder because once all the solder in the area is liquified you don’t want the heavier parts sliding off the board because it’s propped up on a piece of wood at a ten degree angle.
If you wanna extend the amount of work you can do with just a decent iron: use flux and low melt to get everything on your usbc liquid at the same time so you can lift it off the board.
I found that using a soldering iron to be unweildy, which could either be a bad iron or my poor skills. I was thinking of maybe investing in future for one of those hakko hot air rework stations and see if it is any easier. Right now that’s on hold, but totally something I want to try in the future, maybe as a hobby.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
https://www.piped.video/watch?v=yYAw79386WI
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
Learning about cars, engines and motorbike maintenance at this stage in life really opened my eyes. I could have easily been a mechanic or an engineer if I had the access to this knowledge when I was younger.
Now I do as much of my own maintenance as I can, and I’m pretty sure my engine will hit 400K before I start getting serious issues. None of it is overly complicated or difficult, and saves me money in the short and long term.
I was fortunate to have a dad who had the tools, space, and time to teach me how to do repairs, with the things he taught me I can save a lot of money buying a beat up car and fixing it up for usually 1/3 to half the price of a used one.
Some skills I wanna pick up is how to micro solder, I deal with a lot of tech and sometimes you just need a type c port replaced and soldering iron is not the easiest tool for tiny pins.
Good news, the broken component is a common 2 dollar chip!
Bad news, it’s an SMD, and in the middle of a giant block of plastic and 2 more circuitboards.
amortization schedule
Thanks! excellent suggestion.
You can also use an interest calculator or multiply the payment by the term length to see how much over the purchase price you’ll pay in interest.
This is why it’s important to haggle over the purchase price and not the monthly payment. Never ever negotiate over the monthly payment, or you’re likely to get stuck with a 96-month loan at 23% interest.
My mother in law bought a truck the same week I bought my car. I mentioned that I got a 1.9% interest rate. She got a 22% rate!!! I was absolutely floored when I found out what she did.
22% is insane, that should be illegal honestly. Pretty much bought it on a credit card.
Yeah I was absolutely disgusted when I found out. It made me realize that there’s definitely a “poor tax”. If you don’t have good credit and/or aren’t informed enough to pay attention to interest rates, you’re basically going through life on hard mode.
That’s also why you never buy a car near a military base.
Have you told this story before, possibly on reddit? I swear I’ve read this verbatim including the part about the laptop and “I was the only person who took the lower APR.”
Maybe, but it would’ve been years ago.
With each year that passes since the re-telling it gets exponentially more interesting.
Could just be we’re old as fuck to the point that we find amortization schedules and saving money interesting.
The interest in this story is definitely compounding.
If people say ‘i have excel competence’, the difference could be between ‘i can resize fonts and do tables for my company forms because I don’t know how to do them in word’ to ‘fully modelling a business plan for a Telco, including it’s subsidiary units’. Make sure you test for the level of competence you’re after.
Learn a new formula every now and then, or at very least learn to read other people’s formulas, then google what you don’t know. Literacy in any field is the result of a long process of learning.
(Reread your question) Outside of IT: if an appliance stops working, it’s sometimes just a fuse that needs replacing. It’s cheap and easy to do.
‘Basic appliance troubleshooting and repairs’
Thanks !
Using pivot tables will make people think you’re a wizard.
If someone tells me they’ve mastered excel, they’re either overqualified for any job I’ll ever hire them for (I’m not in IT) or lying.
You’re ignorant of most things, and recognizing this is one of the most important things to growth as a person.
I honestly have no idea what your first paragraph is about. It might as well be in Chinese.
I’m a molecular biologist. I was recently surprised when I told someone that RNA is a thing that all living thing are brimming with. He thought that RNA was something scientists invented in 2020s to use as COVID vaccines.
I also once worked with someone who had a degree in biological sciences and was shocked to learn that female cows have vaginas. She didn’t explain where she thought baby cows come from, but we decided not to push the matter and changed the subject.
ELI5 of certificates:
The “s” in “https” in urls like “https://wikipedia.com” stands for “Secure”.
When you connect to Wikipedia’s computer to read something, how do you know if the content you get back is what they actually sent and wasn’t altered by your friendly neighborhood hacker?
Wikipedia can “sign” the content before sending it you. They also give you a certificate telling you how they have a particular signature which has been verified by someone else whom you already trust, and how long this particular signature is valid for.
If a hacker tries to alter the document returned by Wikipedia, they wouldn’t be able to sign the document correctly. If they tried to give a certificate with a different signature too, you would catch it because they wouldn’t be able to fake the verification of the “someone you trust” so you’d catch the fake certificate.
Browsers handle all this stuff for us. If it detects something fishy, it’ll just show an error along the lines of “could not verify certificate”. In some cases, it’s genuinely an issue where you/the website is under attack and you may get a virus.
In some other cases though, it’s an issue of the certificate expiring and the guys at Wikipedia not being proactive about getting a new signature and certificate. If you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you’re just dealing with a lazy developer and not a malicious hacker, you can tell your browser to ignore whatever issue it detected and show you the content that was returned by Wikipedia.
Thanks for attending my TEDx talk.
Basic knife skills is something I’m often almost shocked by. I had a housemate last year who’d bought herself a decent Sabatier chef’s knife (like this) but the way she cut veg, she may as well have been using a sharpened bit of moss. All the gear and no idea. Thankfully she forgot to take it with her or something when she moved out so it’s my knife now.
“or something”… You hid it didn’t you lol
I would also add knowing how to sharpen a knife on a stone and never using the knife-blunteners that come prebuilt into knife blocks these days.
What can I do or watch to improve my knife skills? I’m aware of how woefully incompetent I am when it takes me like 2 minutes to dice an onion the way Ramsay does in 10 seconds lol
For onions specifically:
Sharpen your knife and make French onion soup.
You’ll cut so many that you’ll figure it out.
For everything else: pinch grip and crab your other hand. The pinch grip is where you rely on a pinch between thumb and forefinger on the blade just in front of the handle to grab the knife. It’s the choke up of holding a knife and will make you much safer and give more control. Crabbing your other hand is where you curl your fingers up like ginger roots instead of letting them extend out like little baby carrots. It will keep you from being hurt when something goes wrong and allow you to go much faster because you’re not having to slow down to avoid cutting yourself.
I don’t usually read the names of posters, but getting food and cooking advice from “bloodfart” is rimjobsteve tier.
Happy to help, citizen!
Keep your knife sharp, remember that you cut by running the blade along something rather than pressing into it, and keep your fingers out the way by doing the claw with the other hand and keeping your grip firm. Then just practise!
I’m a person you will be horrified by because I gave up on sharp knives, switched to serrated for everything, and NO REGRETS.
I respect it actually!
As someone who works with tech, here is my 2 cents on basic knowledge.
If your computer is “not working” restarting the computer can generally fix 80 percent of the issues. We are not trying to make you mad, this is literraly first thing I am doing if you present me a problem.
Stop downloading things from unknown sources.
Use generic effects/fonts on your powerpoint. Just because you bought something cool doesnt mean it will magically transfer when you pass your presnetation to another computer for your presentation. (Microsoft does not migrate your paid effects)
For gamers Stop playing pvp on your pc/console on wifi, are you a mad?
Everyone in general We are at an age of computers. Learn how to type, it will save you tremendous amount of time, literally.
FYI you can embed some Truetype fonts in PowerPoint and word (not on mac)
Do… do people really buy add-ons for pp to enhance their slide decks?
Yes, i have seen it happen several times and i get blamed why its not showing on the show laptop. The moment i ask, “did you purchase any add on effects?” i feel like a customer service telling a customer your credit card was denied.
That’s just wild. I’m in meetings with slides constantly and never heard of this. We’ll, now I have a new rabbit hole to go down (as in “finding the most ridiculous of these”).
Basic computer competency starts with reading the error message.
I’ve worked in IT and you’d be amazed how many people are stuck with some problem that would be fixed if they just read the error message on their screen.
For example, it might say:
Error! The green button needs to be pressed. It’s on your keyboard. It’s green. It also has lettering on it that says PRESS HERE.
People will bring their computer in, at a total loss for what to do.
The customer service manager sent not one, not two, but three emails in one hour demanding our engineers fix this login error that a high valued customer had.
The error was “username or password was incorrect”.
I fixed it by resetting their password.
If you’re pulling on a rope really hard, don’t wrap it around your hand to get a better grip. If it starts to pull away from you, you won’t be able to let go, and if someone runs up to help and starts hauling on the end, your hand is going to be in a world of pain.
What if there’s no reason for it to pull away?
Point the knife away from you when cutting
Especially the poop knife.
And definitely don’t lick it menacingly like a pirate.
How to do basic DIY. Do you know all the functions of your drill? Can you screw something in to wood, brick, plaster - for dab and cavity? What fixings and screw types should you use? Can you re-wire a plug? Change a tap? Wire an Ethernet connector and punchdown? Balance your books, calculate your tax, basic car maintenance…?
As a software engineer or IT person it’s easy to think we’re all so very smart, but anyone skilled in ANYTHING will know so much you don’t in their own subject.
Basically everyone is an idiot about most things.
Weirdly enough I’m an IT guy and can do all of those things, some of them only in a basic way which is why I leave taxes and car maintenance to the professionals.
Or, phrasing it a bit more nicely, people nowadays have pretty specialized knowledge.
50/50 on those things… Thanks, there are a few things in the list I can improve on.
you probably don’t know how to do a valve check on the car you drive every day
I know how, but I’m not messing with it. I have a Volvo 5 cylinder. It has plugs in the cam girdle (it doesn’t have a valve cover, the upper cover is also the upper half of the cam races) you pull the plugs and check the clearance. Then you do a calculation and order new lifters from the dealer. It’s not making noise, so I don’t care enough to check it.
don’t lie to me steven
How do the shims stay in place?
I know how to do a valve check… I probably should on my car. I did the valves on my motorbike. That was a real mission.
It’s really easy to understand diabetes but it’s not something a lot of people grasp quickly if it doesn’t affect them.
First, when you eat carbohydrates they are converted into sugar by the body. Your cells want that sugar, but they don’t want too much. Too much sugar in the blood can damage blood vessels, leading to all sorts of issues ranging from annoying to fatal.
Insulin is like UPS, it delivers the sugar to the cells, also facilitating its entry into the cells. Normal people’s pancreas release an appropriate amount of insulin to match the amount of sugar in your blood and keep your blood sugar in a safe range (70-120, guidance on this varies this is not medical advice).
Type 1: Pancreas is damaged, often by the body’s immune system, and can no longer produce insulin. It’s genetic, and it doesn’t usually present after adolescence. The only treatment for type 1 is insulin. If you don’t have a pump you take a 24-hour insulin for a baseline and then a short-acting insulin for your meals. You usually have a carbohydrate to insulin ratio. 1 unit of insulin to 15g carbs is pretty common for a starting point. If you have a pump it just releases a slow drip of insulin as a base and then you program your ratio for meals.
Type 2: Your cells become insulin resistant and your pancreas responds by upping the amount of insulin it produces. Eventually it can’t keep up and your blood sugar rises. There is a period of time where you can avoid developing type 2 with diet changes. There is a period of time where you can just take pills. The final stage is using insulin injections like a type 1.
Finally, insulin is really expensive (or was, I think there’s legislation lowering prices in my state). The retail price without insurance of 2 insulins, needle tips, and blood testing supplies can easily be $1200/month. That’s the price you pay to eat without dying as a type 1.
I’m just a simple guy but if making that much money off people who literally have no other choice isn’t evil I’m not sure what is. Do we deserve to be able to eat? Tough call I guess.
We are all terrible at applying statistics, it is incongruent with the way our intuition works. It takes intentional consideration plus math and understanding to consider things statistically, much harder than the immediate intuitive answers our brains give us. The worst part is sometimes those intuitive answers are dead on, sometimes they totally miss the mark, and we have no way of knowing which is which without doing the hard work to evaluate the situation statistically.
The boom Thinking Fast and Slow covers this in great detail and provides some guidance on how to manage it.
The sales are continuous at Lowe’s. Probably other stores too, but I can say that I worked for Lowe’s for about 15 months and during that time we always had a sale going.
It’s a ruse to provide an artificial sense of urgency. One sale would end say 1/13 and on 1/14 we’d take down all the signage from that sale and put up the signage got the next sale.
That’s just how retail works.
This is typically why education and experience are still needed if you’re self taught.
I know from learning programming that people online don’t explain “common sense” problems. So many times you’ll look up a problem and see people talk about huge refactors or complex niche fixes when in reality you misplaced a single line of code.
Or forgot a ;
