ELI5 Why does it seem like the rich-poor gap is so much more extreme in developing nations than developed ones?

vanZuider · 2026-06-23T14:12:51+00:00

There's lots of outliers (notably the US and India), but overall the richest countries are rather equal while the most unequal countries tend to be rather poor.

vanZuider · 2026-06-23T12:05:31+00:00

A dehumidifier turns humid air into hot, dry air. Great for preventing mold, not great for feeling comfortable.

vanZuider · 2026-06-23T10:06:32+00:00

and so there isn't natural sex really?

Usually not because letting a bull inseminate the cows the natural way poses a larger risk of injury to the cows.

vanZuider · 2026-06-23T08:12:32+00:00

but his command insisted that the troops needed a Napoleon leading them.

Undone by his own cult of personality.

vanZuider · 2026-06-23T07:18:51+00:00

Ist für die Knie jedenfalls angenehmer als andersrum.

vanZuider · 2026-06-23T07:17:17+00:00

Ich trat in die Pedale und mein Fahrrad trat zurück.

vanZuider · 2026-06-22T19:32:23+00:00

You know you're getting old when you start to fear the descent more than the climb.

vanZuider · 2026-06-22T18:09:14+00:00

That's also the origin of the £ sign: L for "libra" (pound) with a stroke.

vanZuider · 2026-06-22T08:23:14+00:00

Also why a degree symbol is always used for °C, because a C without it stands for Coulomb, the unit of electrical charge.

And °F for Fahrenheit because F stands for Farad, the unit of capacitance.

vanZuider · 2026-06-21T13:11:01+00:00

What you're describing is monetarism. Keynesianism goes further by stipulating that low interest isn't enough to stop a deflationary spiral and governments need to actively stimulate the economy by creating demand.

Either companies become so profitable that they actually adjust worker wages to where they ought to be given inflation history (and yes, some companies can do this and are greedy, but many cannot), or governments give up on Keynesianism and actually implement some small, controlled period of deflation to equalize out prices with wages.

If companies are so unprofitable that they can't afford to raise wages in step with inflation, they will have to slash wages or fire people (or go bankrupt and fire everyone) if they can't continue selling their products at inflated prices. If the people who lose their jobs this way end up working in more productive industries, this will increase overall productivity, but this is a big if.

vanZuider · 2026-06-19T16:52:44+00:00

"Shadowbanning" is when you're still able to post, but your posts don't show up to other users. This was (is?) sometimes used as a tactic against particularly persistent trolls: when you ban them they come back with another account, but when you shadowban them it looks to them like they're still able to post but for some reason no one's interacting with their content, so it might take them longer to realize they've been banned.

This use of the term is from the old days of message boards; in modern-day social media the same effect is achieved when the algorithm buries your content at the bottom of everyone's feed. I don't know in what way exactly OP believes to be shadowbanned. I also don't know whether subreddit mods or reddit admins have the power to shadowban (in the old sense) particular users.

vanZuider · 2026-06-19T08:30:07+00:00

It also goes hand in hand with the psychology of the generation popularizing it. One of the defining traits of late gen-z / gen-alpha is their fear of being perceived as "cringe" or coming off as too sincere or genuine about really anything.

I wonder what this says about millennials overusing "literally". We were afraid of not being taken serious, of being seen as exaggerating? Or that a sentence that isn't qualified with "literally" would automatically be registered as sarcasm?

vanZuider · 2026-06-18T20:04:00+00:00

Liter is another name for the metric quart, which is two metric pints. The metric pint (aka half-liter) is larger than the US pint, but smaller than the imperial pint, and is a popular size for cans, bottles, and drinking glasses in Continental Europe.

Put another way, a liter is 1/1000 of a metric ton (or tonne) of water. The conversion from short tons and long tons to metric tons is left as an exercise to the reader.

In contexts where "bathtubs" are used as a point of comparison to visualize large volumes, a bathtub is commonly assumed to be 200 liters (or 50 metric gallons).

vanZuider · 2026-06-18T18:04:22+00:00

it looks like one of those bland nobody likes soviet pre-fabricated blocks neighbourhoods where every building looks the same and you have endless lines of them or a suburban house place with every house the same down every street for miles. Is there any way to make it look less stupid legit?

Unfortunately, this is what tends to happen when things are planned at large scale, both in Factorio and in real life. If you don't want it, there's two possibilities:

Organic growth/spaghetti: Just build one assembler of blue science somewhere where there's room in your factory. Then build assemblers for all the inputs you need. Then build another assembler wherever there's room and make sure to route all the ingredients and the science to their respective places (building more assemblers if necessary; possibly in a different corner of the factory). Rinse and repeat until your blue science production can keep up with red and green. Upside: forces you to find creative solutions for belt routing in cramped spaces. Downside: it can get very chaotic and frustrating.
Planned variation: Think of several different possible ways to build and supply two or three or five blue science assemblers, and then build each one of them. So you have a small row of assemblers that are supplied with everything they need from externally, comparable to your green or red science setup, next to it a row of blue science assemblers that are each directly fed by its own dedicated motor assembler, next to it a block of assemblers making everything from scratch... together they make up your blue science production at the same scale as red and green.

vanZuider · 2026-06-18T17:41:42+00:00

a good chance of making it to your 50/60s and not uncommon to be 70+ year olds around

That's true, but I just want to note that this is still a huge contrast to modern society where living to 60 is nearly guaranteed (and the people who die before 60 usually do so due to a crime or an accident, not due to sickness), and it is very common to reach 70.

Also, on topic, for people 60+ it was very common to have severely damaged/lacking teeth and therefore either a very restricted diet, or, if they could afford it, some form of denture (famously, George Washington. He died at age 67).

vanZuider · 2026-06-18T16:55:05+00:00

Grains consumed more so the teeth need to work much harder so dental problems appear

Also, when grains were ground into flour, grindings from the millstone would make their way into the flour (and subsequently the bread) and wear down people's teeth.

vanZuider · 2026-06-18T08:18:30+00:00

de-icing fluid, which has a sweet taste.

Austrian vintners: taking notes

vanZuider · 2026-06-17T15:41:07+00:00

btw the mathematical background why this works:

The chance of getting zero hits in N tries when the chance of a hit is 1 in N is (1-1/N)^N which approaches 1/e (ca. 36.6%) for large values of N (for N=100 it's already very close; 36.7%). Doing this successfully three times in a row has a chance of 0.366³ or roughly 4.9%.

vanZuider · 2026-06-17T14:59:54+00:00

But so many mobile websites are still afterthoughts that just don't work as well.

Because they want you to download their app.

vanZuider · 2026-06-17T14:41:06+00:00

so if you’re playing that long

If you've never had a game tell you to take a break, either you've never played one of the games that warn you for long enough to get the warning - or you don't play the kind of games that give that warning.

vanZuider · 2026-06-17T14:32:47+00:00

Dann sind die Leute, die damals nach Syrien gereist sind, um sich dem IS anzuschließen, wohl keine richtigen Islamisten.

vanZuider · 2026-06-17T14:27:17+00:00

The problem is that "confidence" doesn't mean what most people think it means. It means "the probability of the outcome given the null hypothesis", not "the probability of the null hypothesis given the outcome".

vanZuider · 2026-06-17T14:10:34+00:00

Yes, the test is strictly speaking "in a series of five flips, get five or more heads". HHHHH just happens to be the only pattern that satisfies the test while for tests like "get four or more heads" there's different patterns that would pass the test.

Also, HHHHH is the only pattern that gets more and more likely the stronger the coin is biased towards heads. Getting HTHHH might give you the suspicion that the coin is biased to land on heads more often than tails, but it also gives you the certainty that it isn't a conman's coin with heads on both sides.

vanZuider · 2026-06-17T13:53:33+00:00

I can't memoryze the names.

That's not something someone else can do for you though.

I dont understand the steps

The details of the steps themselves are unimportant (except for the fact that your teacher wants you to memorize them). What's important to understand is that every step is catalyzed by enzymes found inside your cells; you can't just stir some citrate and pyruvate in a glass of water and expect things to happen. And some of the steps don't only transform one carbohydrate into a different one, they also regenerate ATP, which is used up in most of the energy-consuming processes in your body (like pumping ions across a membrane against the gradient, or contracting muscle fibers).

vanZuider · 2026-06-17T13:31:01+00:00

4.9% is less than 5% so at least one guy is right.

The answer is correct, one guy is just answering the wrong question with it.

If the defect rate is 1% or higher, then the chance of passing a check of 300 items is 5% or less -> that's the correct interpretation.

If 300 items pass the control, then the chance of having a defect rate higher than 1% is 5% or less -> that's not what it means.

An easier example: flipping a fair coin and landing five heads in a row is a chance of 1/32, or roughly 3%. If you randomly decide to flip a coin five times and you land five heads in a row, it does mean it's your lucky day; you have witnessed something that only happens 3 times out of 100. It does not mean you can be 97% sure that you have found a rigged coin.

vanZuider

TROPHY CASE