The country claiming to have the most “freedom” of any country has the highest incarceration rate of any country.
Not so fun fact: the constitution allows for slavery as long as it’s a punishment for a crime.
Hmmm… Nah, those dots don’t connect at all.
Oxford University is older than the Aztec empire.
Oxford University founded in 1326, Aztec empire ~1428-1521
Don’t mean to pick, but Oxford was founded in 1096 and Cambridge in 1209.
I worked for cambridge in 2009 and got a nice little 800 year badge
Thats 900 years dumbass
Edit: you got epic trolled by summzashi!!!
And some of the colleges of Oxford University are older than the university. Merton College was founded in 1264.
The USA is not a true democracy in the academic sense of the word.
And it was never designed to be. It was always meant to be a republic.
We first were a confederation. Were your idea of a true democracy was more or less in place. The revolutionary war was won in 1783. The constitution wasn’t ratified till 1789, and the bill of rights written until 1793. Before that the US had almost no central government, and each state was independent from one another. Had their own currency, banking system, laws, and military.
States still have a lot of that same autonomy today, but there was no central government tying them together. If the US went to war and a state didn’t want to go, they wouldn’t. A little more complex than that, but generally that’s what it amounted to.
Having this type of system created a bunch of problems and came to a head when Shay’s Rebellion happened. I won’t go into depth about it, but mainly confederated Massachusetts couldn’t fight off the rebels attempting to take over the state. Since the US was a confederation there was no central government the state couldnt call on for help, and all the other states more or less said ‘meh sucks for you’.
This incident lead to the Constitutional Convention that wrote the document we still uphold today, and bringing in more of a centralized Federal Republic, and not a decentralized confederated one.
My ranty point is, we tried the whole true democracy thing and it failed. So we went to a Federal Republic, still very much democratic, but moved away from a true democracy.
“republic” is opposite to “monarchy”. It is unrelated to democracy or authoritarianism. Nazi Germany was a republic. France is a republic.
Your republic is flawed by design. Your founders didn’t trust democracy so they weakened it, the country hasn’t managed to improve the democracy since.
Australia is also a Federation, but a monarchy not a republic. Australia is quite a bit more democratic than America
A day on Venus is longer than a year on Venus.
If you start to think about how these lengths of time are defined it becomes clearer.
1 day = time to rotate on it’s axis once 1 year = time to complete a full rotation around the sun
For Earth, it takes us ~24hrs to rotate on our axis and 365.25 days to orbit the sun.
However, because Venus’ axial rotation is so slow (and another interesting fact, it rotates in the opposite direction to other planets) it actually completes a full orbit of the sun before 1 axial rotation.
Hence, a year is shorter than a day
For those interested:
1 Venus day = 243 earth days 1 Venus year = 225 earth days
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a clock running backwards is right four times a day.
This only works with 1-dimensional time though.
A broken clock is right twice a day, but a running clock is probably never right.
At this point you get into a philosophical discussion about what “right” really means
If you’re lucky, a clock that’s slightly too fast or too slow will be right once
My grandfather clock is correct* about once a week when I wind and correct it
*It must be correct as it’s very slightly fast (less so than can be fixed with a quarter turn off the pendulum screw) and I set it slightly in the past
you are loved and deserve happiness
Bullshit and lies.
No one loves me, and i deserve nothing, for I am trash.
Fuck Lemmy is unexpectedly wholesome
Oh, I have two good ones:
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Nuclear power causes less deaths (per energy unit produced) than wind (source)
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You get less radiation when living near a nuclear power plant, than if that nuclear plant hadn’t been there.
To explain the second: A major misconception is, that nuclear power plants are dangerous due to their radiation. No they aren’t. The effect of radiation from the rocks in the ground and the surroundings is on average 50x more than what you get from the nuclear power plant and it’s fuel cells. (source). Our body is very well capable of dealing with the constant background radiation all the time (e.g. DNA repairs). Near a power plant, the massive amounts of isolation and concrete will inhibit any background radiation coming from rocks from that direction to you. This means, that you’ll actually get slightly less radiation, because the nuclear plant is there.
Regarding the dangers of nuclear disasters. To this day, it’s been very hard to find out, if at all any people have even died to Fukushima radiation (ans not other sources such as tsunami/earthquake/etc.) Nuclear radiation causes much more problems by being an emotionally triggering viral meme spreading between people and hindering it’s productive use and by distracting from the ironic fact, that the coal burned in coal power plants spew much more radiation into the atmosphere than nuclear power plants themselves. (source)
Additional fun fact. There has been a lot of research and activity dedicated to potentially switch coal power plants to nuclear. Currently, they cannot do it, because the coal plants and all the equipment associated produces far more radiation than regulations allow a nuclear plant to emit.
Therefore, unless they could find a practical way to decontaminate the radiation away from existing coal equipment, or regulations change for transformed plants, they can’t do it.
Did you know, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s only mandate is to ensure the safety of nuclear power, not to promote its implementation. Many regulatory bodies have a dual mandate to stop them from just shutting down what they’re supposed to regulate.
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Lighters were invented before matches! 1823 vs 1826
So why did anyone use matches then? Was it just more economically viable?
If you’ve ever played around with an old-style lighter (think classic Zippo) you’d get it! They’re fairly expensive, and aren’t airtight so they need to be refilled every few days/weeks. If you fill them too much they need to be kept upright or they’ll spill lighter fluid on you. Super cool and can hold flames for a while but not nearly as conventient as a matchbook for quick fire lighting
It just occurred to me that zippos are basically the same type of oil lanterns that we’ve been using for thousands of years
General Motors, Firestone Tire, Standard Oil, and Phillips Petroleum were convicted of an actual conspiracy related to the monopolization of transit systems, which replaced beloved streetcar (rail) systems with rubber-tired oil-burning buses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Isn’t this Judge Doom’s plan?
The closest planet to Earth is Mercury.
On average that is. Mercury is actually the closest planet to every other planet in average. Because when it’s on the other side of the Sun, it’s still pretty close.
Wow, you’re absolutely correct!
The average distance from Earth to Mercury is about 1.04 astronomical units (au), which is the average distance between Earth and the Sun.
In comparison, the average distance between Earth and Venus is approximately 1.14 au, while the average distance between Earth and Mars is around 1.7 au.
You can check that in Wolfram Alpha.
Your car keys have better range if you press them to your head, since your skull will act as an antenna. It sounds like some made up pseudoscience that would never work in practice or have a negligible effect, but it actually works.
Edit: idk if it’s actually because your skull acts as an antenna, although that’s what I’ve heard. I looked it up and it seems like it’s your head acting as a reasonance chamber. Since your body is conductive, your head can bounce and amplify the radio signal.
Your skull acts as an antenna
How?
The tinfoil hat you’re wearing amplifies the signal!
The northern most part of Brazil is closer to Canada than it is to the southern most part of Brazil.
What is this sorcery?
Every Rubik’s Cube, no matter how scrambled, can be solved in at most 20 rotations.
I don’t think this is true for all of them. My cube takes at least a couple hundred rotations and then you have to take the stickers off and move them around to solve it.
- Wombat feces are cube shaped.
- Bananas are berries and strawberries are not.
- Oxford university is older than the Aztec empire.
- Humans share 50% of our DNA with bananas.
Almost every atom in your body has been part of other living organisms thousands if not millions of times before.
