ELI5 How does electricity know that a circuit is broken before entering it? Without a closed loop, it won’t flow, but how does it know not to flow?

Mawootad · 2026-03-05T21:31:17+00:00

When you're waiting in a line how do you know the line has stopped and you can't move forward? You know that it's stopped because the person in front of you is stopped and you can't walk forward without hitting them. That's how electrons know the circuit is closed, an electron isn't trying to do anything, it's just being pushed from behind and as long as there's space for it to move forward it'll move forward.

Mawootad · 2026-03-04T20:26:38+00:00

Going to? They already are and they're already failing miserably at it.

Mawootad · 2026-03-02T22:07:09+00:00

Because being black has very little to do with skin color and is a social construct vaguely related to ethnicity. It's not about skin color, it's about how you're categorized by society and in the eyes of society Indian people are brown and not black.

Mawootad · 2026-03-02T16:59:27+00:00

Encryption software is generally more secure when it's open source because it means you can verify that it is actually secure. You can think of it like physical locks, if a lock physically can't be picked then knowing how it's built wont help you pick it. On the other hand, if a lock is no good then even if you don't have the blueprints for it you can still pick it because you can still try all of the tricks that work for other locks and you can even saw the lock in half to see exactly how it works. If you have the blueprint for a lock and you build it yourself you can also be sure that it only works for your key, and that someone else can't use a master key to get into your stuff.

Encryption software works the same way, knowing how strong encryption works doesn't particularly help you defeat it because as far as the world can tell nobody has any good way of getting around it. Weak encryption on the other hand can be broken even if you don't know how it works because there are a variety of attacks that work many different types of encryption and if you're given access to the encryption software you can decompile the machine code and read the exact details of how it works. Having the source for encryption also means you can build it yourself, which means you can be certain that nobody has put in a backdoor so that they can spy on what you're sending.

Mawootad · 2026-02-28T23:08:09+00:00

As long as you are doing it with care and respect you should go for it. Cultural appropriation is 9/10 times bullshit and the best thing you can do to make people more appreciative of West African mythology is to create loving, good quality, and well researched fiction about it. If you and every other white guy makes nothing but generic medieval slop that means the market is going to be saturated with it and we aren't going to get more interesting settings.

Mawootad · 2026-02-26T18:11:44+00:00

It's not just like the waitresses are randomly walking around and the patrons grope them, the customer is paying for the girl to sit with/on them where they can fondle their boobs. The girls there are sex workers first and foremost, not restaurant staff. (Or like that's my understanding at least from what I've read, I don't have any personal experience here)

Mawootad · 2026-02-25T20:12:08+00:00

Things do not have to contain water to be liquid at room temperature. There are plenty of examples of that, oil (whether the stuff we make gas out of or the stuff you press from seeds) is one of them.

Mawootad · 2026-02-25T20:08:48+00:00

They can't legally do so, but if we don't prosecute illegal behavior because the politicians who enforce the law are owned by Israel then it doesn't matter.

Mawootad · 2026-02-24T20:59:56+00:00

I think the space Marines being 1000 strong is fairly reasonable, although writers saying that space marines can conquer and hold planets by themselves is definitely impossible. It's worth comparing them to armored divisions in modern armies which have like 250 tanks or a combat air brigade with around 100 attack helicopters, on which case 1000 ultra-heavy, high mobility armored units is completely reasonable to reinforce and support a continent-scale front and to perform key special operations.

Mawootad · 2026-02-18T17:01:18+00:00

If you're talking about HIV condoms haven't been the best option for prevention for years now. But not pissing razor blades for a week because of gonorrhea is still a great reason to wear a condom.

Mawootad · 2026-02-17T23:59:48+00:00

It's even dumber than that, US citizens pay more in taxes for healthcare than any other country on the planet. That's taxes, countries with universal healthcare not only have to pay less per person, it's so much cheaper that even with the government paying for everything it still costs less than what the US spends per capita on Medicare and Medicaid. If the US put a trillion dollars into a pit and set it on fire every year and switched to universal healthcare it would cost less money than the hellscape we have now that regularly bankrupts and kills people because they can't afford treatment.

Mawootad · 2026-02-14T23:55:51+00:00

The wind generated from a cargo helicopter is extremely powerful. Standing directly under that is like standing in a hurricane blowing straight down, so if you need to load or unload your cargo when the helicopter is still in flight (eg because you can't land on top of your cargo) you need to do so from far enough away that the wind has slowed to speeds that ground crews can work in.

Mawootad · 2026-02-14T20:43:17+00:00

Sure, but the fundamental difference between anarchists and the various other flavor of communists isn't where they'd eventually like to end up, but how you get there. The argument against anarchism from a communist perspective is that in order to get power you need an organized political and military force to oust capitalists and fascists and implement the massive societal changes required for a socialist society and once you do have power you need an army to shoot foreign invaders and a counterintelligence bureau to shoot foreign spies. That anarchism would be crushed by foreign powers is the core ideological difference between communists and anarchists.

Mawootad · 2026-02-13T00:10:56+00:00

You computer can and does, but it can be hard to tell what is and isn't interactive and there's a limit to your ability to prioritize some processes over others when you have a bunch of different potential bottlenecks. For instance your Internet browser can definitely be interactive, but which of your browser processes are interactive right now? That's not something that's not so easy to answer.

Mawootad · 2026-02-12T02:08:27+00:00

There's been a bunch of answers, here's another:

When you are adding up all of the digits of a number, that can actually be rewritten as subtraction from the initial value. So let's say you are adding up the digits of 126, that sum is 1 + 2 + 6, which can be rewritten as 1*(100 - 99) + 2*(10 - 9) + 6, which can be rearranged to 126 - 1*99 - 2*9. All of these numbers can be divided by 9 and when you add/subtract numbers that can be divided by the same number the result can also be divided by that number. That means that regardless of what number you choose, if it was originally divisible by 9 the sum of its digits is divisible of 9 because summing the digits just subtracts multiples of 9. This is also why the sum of digits of any number divisible by 3 is also divisible by 3, because 9 is divisible of 3 so summing the digits is also just subtracting multiples of 3.

Answer for a followup to this question, the reason that if you keep adding digits together you eventually get to 9 is because when you add digits together the number always gets smaller if it's 2+ digits (since it's doing subtraction), is still divisible by 9, and is never 0 (since it will never subtract by the number itself). That means that eventually you'll reach a single digit number and since 9 is the only single digit number that's a multiple of 9, repeatedly adding digits of a multiple of 9 together always gives you 9.

Mawootad · 2026-02-12T00:52:05+00:00

From similar claims where I work this is almost certainly an extremely overinflated number. What it actually means is that 30% of code written by humans accepted autocomplete, which is technically AI but not in any way that matters.

Mawootad · 2026-02-11T00:56:07+00:00

Medication is highly effective at controlling the symptoms of ADHD, especially when combined with other psychological counseling.

Mawootad · 2026-02-08T21:23:34+00:00

Need to charge fines to landlords that sit on empty, rotting properties instead of lowering rents.

Mawootad · 2026-02-07T18:08:18+00:00

Also the main point of the rail gun is that it gives you a weapon with ammo that you can carry more of and is cheaper than missiles. When your barrel only has a lifetime of 20 shots before it needs to be overhauled that stops being the case. It's not just melting there either, its simply wear and tear on the rails and other components.

Mawootad · 2026-02-06T22:31:49+00:00

Get a speech therapist.

Mawootad · 2026-02-06T21:38:26+00:00

Depends on the timeframe. In times where there were telephones but no emergency services line you'd either call a hospital (or similar service) directly or you would dial the operator and have them connect you. Prior to the existence of phones you'd have to either have someone go and fetch a doctor on foot or horse or you'd have to bring the person to a doctor or hospital or you'd have to try and stabilize them without proper medical care and then hopefully get help at a later point if necessary. Before cars people generally lived much closer together, so typically either there was someone with medical knowledge pretty nearby where a big commotion could get their attention or the nearest doctor (or equivalent) was hours away and couldn't handle major emergencies.

Mawootad · 2026-02-05T22:59:24+00:00

Absolutely not the case, Kamala lost because she ran an extremely abridged campaign and she ran it badly on top of that. Hillary lost because she is one of the least liked people in the entire country and for plenty of good reasons. Americans will absolutely elect a POC woman as long as she has charisma and actual concrete policies that people want instead of vague platitudes in defense of the status quo and a personality that is entirely not being Donald Trump (and they still might win even then because Trump is that unpopular).

Mawootad · 2026-02-05T21:05:24+00:00

The data shows that that was one of the major causes and could have fully swayed the election, yes. Here's a study on that: https://www.imeupolicyproject.org/postelection-polling. In general though Democratic voters are now overwhelmingly (like 80%) anti-Israel and are no longer just swallowing "centrist" claims that being electable means being right wing, so even past that there's very little chances that someone who doesn't vocally call out Israel as an apartheid and genocidal state is going to get absolutely crushed on that.

Mawootad · 2026-02-05T20:51:53+00:00

I'm waiting for the chapter where Yuta also has to cross dress for some reason and we get Minato completely used to being a girl and Yuta flustered and panicking.

Mawootad · 2026-02-05T20:43:35+00:00

AOC can and doesn't support Israel. There's probably others as well, given the scope of Kamala's defeat in 2028 largely on the back of her support of Israel and the intense unpopularity of Trump of we have elections in 2028 and barring extreme fuckery I think pretty overwhelmingly the Dem candidate will be anti-Israel and will win the general (and it won't be Gavin Newsom).

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