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Never underestimate cultural momentum I guess. NBA players shot long 2 pointers for decades before people realized 3 > 2. Doctors refused to wash their hands be
by hardwaregeek 11mo ago
Never underestimate cultural momentum I guess. NBA players shot long 2 pointers for decades before people realized 3 > 2. Doctors refused to wash their hands before doing procedures. There’s so many things that seem obvious in retrospect but took a long time to become accepted
- brailsafe 11mo ago[flagged]
- trueismywork 11mo agoPeople in Europe spents years with people dying due to heat stress before they discovered ACs....
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo agoThis isn't really true. Heat stress deaths in Europe are comparitively rare, or were until urbanization and climate change became bigger factors.
- miroljub 11mo agoUrbanisation.
- 867-5309 11mo agopython uv
- maneesh 11mo agoI mean, more Europeans die from heat issues than Americans from guns. https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/28/opinion-us-heat-death-prevention/ https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/07/28/opinion-us-heat-de...
- ciupicri 11mo ago> This content is not available in your region I guess Europeans will never find out how great the US is :-)
- PaulDavisThe1st 11mo agoGood article, thanks (I've actually read it before, but forgot the overall stats).
- seanw444 11mo agoThey still do. More Europeans die every year from heat-related injuries than Americans do from guns.
- anthk 11mo agoSpaniard here. Don't lecture Southern Europeans on surviving heat when the church of the village of my parents predates America itself (and it's pretty fresh inside in Summer).
- terminalshort 11mo agoAlways sucks when you're arguing with someone and it turns out the buildings in their town are older than yours. Sometimes you just gotta take the L.
- johnisgood 11mo agoI've wanted an AC, but I cannot get one. This apartment is just not equipped for it, it literally cannot handle multiple ACs (the cables are old, yadda yadda). And you have to get lots of permits to have an AC installed legally. If you do not have a permit, you will have to pay a really hefty fee when the inspectors come. So yeah, buying an AC is what most people would do, but they do not because of the damn permits they most likely will not get. It is a shitty situation.
- DarmokJalad1701 11mo agoPeople in Europe spent years walking to the store everyday for food until they discovered that mechanical refrigeration exists...
- supportengineer 11mo agoBad example. Walking to the store everyday for fresh food would be a drastic improvement for most Americans.
- CharlieDigital 11mo agoSomething I think that goes underappreciated: in many parts of the world, the food supply chain is shorter and the food is fresher to begin with. You're not meant to shop for 14 days at a time; you're meant to go more frequently and get what you need, fresh.
- tialaramex 11mo agoThe refrigerator is a relatively modern invention. There's always been a refrigerator for me, but as a child my mother sometimes stayed with people who didn't own one and for her mother they were a new invention many people didn't have. Actually this idea of just buying things at "the store" is relatively new too. Historically people would make more things themselves, and more food would be purchased directly from farmers who had grown it.
- rustystump 11mo agoWrong kind of cheek my friend
- IMTDb 11mo agoUsually when someone comes with that argument, I ask them to pick any week date in the past year and then I take a random item on my calendar on that day; I give them the time and address of where I need to be as well as the address of my home and I ask them how long it's going to take me and how much it's going to cost. That's usually enough to bring them down a notch from "train work" to "sometimes train work". (But they tend to forget very often, they need to be reminded regularly for some reason). Do you want to play that game with me to get your reality check in order ? Western Europe in a VERY dense city BTW.
- dpc050505 11mo agoI'll happily play your game with a bicycle.
- ipaddr 11mo agoGreat lets pick Canada in January. Bring a shovel.
- nickserv 11mo agoThey don't clear snow from cycle paths in Canada? If not then it's an infrastructure problem, not a weather problem.
- aziaziazi 11mo agoSound like a German saying : > there’s no weather problems, there’s clothing problems
- refactor_master 11mo agoJust to add a less opinionated take: https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/why-winter-is-a-poor-argument-against-bike-lanes/ https://www.citymonitor.ai/analysis/why-winter-is-a-poor-arg... Personally I've also biked to work (and everywhere, really) in sub-zero degrees many times, because the bicycle lanes are cleared and salted. It's really not too bad. It actually gets a bit too hot even, because you start out by wearing so much.
- bongodongobob 11mo agoYeah all you need to do is raze and rebuild every city in America and it will work great!
- brailsafe 11mo agoWell, there is precedent...
- MobiusHorizons 11mo agoThis is not people’s fault individually, but rather in aggregate (ie government). The places that have good train infrastructure that is legitimately an alternative to driving are very few and far between in the US. It’s just not an option for most people. And people can’t just all move to the places where it is an option, because housing and jobs are already strained in those places negating many of the benefits.
- taneq 11mo agoHave you considered that the repeated attempts to reinvent what's basically trains are not, in fact, evidence that people don't know about trains, but evidence that people like the advantages of trains but that the downsides suck so bad that people will pay literally tens of thousands of dollars a year to avoid them?
- ipaddr 11mo agoPeople paid 100x more for their hosting when using aws cloud until they realized they never neded 99.97% uptime for their t-shirt business. Oh wait too soon. Save for post for the future.
- sethops1 11mo agokubernetes
- frde_me 11mo agoPeople spent half their job figuring out self hosted infrastructure until they realized they rather just have some other company deploy their website when they make a commit.
- terminalshort 11mo agoPeople paid only 100x more than self hosting to use AWS until they realized that they could get a better deal by paying 200x for a service that is a wrapper over AWS but they never have to think about since it turns out that for most businesses that 100x is like 30 bucks a month.
- deleted 11mo ago[deleted]
- tehnub 11mo ago>NBA players shot long 2 pointers for decades before people realized 3 > 2 And the game is worse for it :')
- terminalshort 11mo agoThis is a fundamental problem in sports. Baseball is going the same way. Players are incentivized to win, and the league is incentivized to entertain. Turns out these incentives are not aligned.
- jancsika 11mo ago> Players are incentivized to win, and the league is incentivized to entertain. Players are incentivized to win due to specific decisions made by the league. In Bananaball the league says, "practice your choreographed dance number before batting practice." And those same athletes are like, "Wait, which choreographed dance number? The seventh inning stretch, the grand finale, or the one we do in the infield when the guy on stilts is pitching?" Edit: the grand finale dance number I saw is both teams dancing together. That should be noted.
- terminalshort 11mo agoSure. There's a market for that. But the NBA sells a lot more tickets than the Harlem Globetrotters.
- kbenson 11mo agoBut that's a matter of scale. When I was a child, the Harlem Globetrotters were far more more famous than any 3-4 NBA teams combined. They were in multiple Scooby Doo movies/episodes. They failed tp scale the model, but wrestling didn't.
- jancsika 11mo agoWould be very curious about, say, the worst MLB team's ticket sales vs. the Savannah Bananas.
- peterfirefly 11mo agoThey did wash their hands. Turns out that soap and water wasn't quite enough. Lister used carbolic acid (for dressing and wound cleaning) and Semmelweis used chlorinated lime (for hand washing).
- msla 11mo agoAnd Semmelweis is a perfect case against being an asshole who's right: He was more right than wrong (he didn't fully understand why what he was doing helped, but it did) but he was such a horrible personality and such an amazing gift for pissing people off it probably cost lives by delaying the uptake of his ideas. But this is getting a bit off topic, I suppose.
- llanowarelves 11mo agoOr you could say it the other way around: Even leading scientists are susceptible to letting emotions get the best of them and double-down defending their personal investments into things. "A scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it." - Max Planck.
- Ferret7446 11mo agoThat was later; earlier in history doctors (or "doctors" if you so insist) did not wash their hands.
- peterfirefly 11mo agoI was mainly pushing back on the idea that something as seemingly obvious as hand washing was the thing that made surgery safe. It took quite a bit more than just simple hand washing.
- hrimfaxi 11mo agoWas soap often used prior to the mid 1800s?
- hshdhdhehd 11mo agoHey and you can use both lanes in a zip merge!
- eru 11mo agoIsn't that the law anyway? Morale: follow the rules.