I’m surprised that nobody mentioned tax brackets.
I laughed my ass off when my racist uncle smugly explained that he turned down a raise, because that would put him in an upper tax rate and cost him more money than the raise was worth.
Tried to explain how income tax works. Didn’t go through that thick skull of his.
Yep.
A graduated tax structure is evidently just literally too complex for about half the population to understand.
Throw ‘how is Social Security funded’ into that as well.
The top bracket is 176,000 and everything above that.
All it would take to keep Soc Sec funded is just add more brackets after that.
But nope, America is full of morons who think that their dumb ass making 40k or 80k is going to see a higher tax bill if you explicitly only additionally tax those making stupendous amounts of money.
Had an ex try and convince me that taking overtime pay instead of banking hours would net me less money for the same reason.
That can happen, depending on your company’s payment software. One place I worked at would calculate the expected tax burden based on the highest paycheck you made, so if you worked 50% overtime (thus making 175% of your normal paycheck), it would be placing you in a way higher tax bracket for the rest of the year, and you’d have to reclaim it all in the refund when you did your taxes.
Yeah this is just the payroll processor intentionally fucking with people, not how taxes work.
The only scenario I can imagine that making sense in is if you are getting SSI or SSDI and the overtime you exceed the threshold to keep receiving benefits, but would not exceed the actual SSI benefit itself.
Or for SNAP or TANF or something.
… the only other scenario I can think of is your ex is commiting tax fraud.
… or they can’t understand middle school level math… =[
That last thing
This misconception is widespread enough that I can only think that it is deliberately perpetuated by the ruling class to save them money. The number of people who are convinced that going up a tax bracket could mean you make less total money is astounding, and many of them are like your uncle— utterly convinced to the point that being informed correctly sounds like naivety to them.
Another example is “Don’t work overtime, the taxes cost more than you make.”
Unless your marginal tax rate for your overtime is > 100%, that’s simply false. Given that all marginal income tax rates in the US are < 100% (that I know of).
Some people are terrible with money. Take my wife… (Please) - after 20 years she suddenly* decided she wants a divorce. Rather than either of us keep our house, she wants to sell it and split the equity we get out of it. Fair enough, I can agree with that… But then she said she wanted to dump it on a flipper for 300k, when comparable houses have gone for 430-450. I said if you’re going to let it go that cheap, let me buy you out. I crunched the numbers, we owe 150k, so I’d either refinance or assume the loan, and give her 75k (her half of the difference between the sale price and what we owe) - she accused me of trying to screw her over. “I’m not letting you have the house for $75k!” “That’s right, you’re not- we (the couple) would be selling it to me (the individual) for $300k, it’s the same as dumping it on a flipper, just that I’m the flipper!” There was no getting through to her. Eventually she agreed to try and sell it properly for what it’s worth.
*to me… Evidently she had made up her mind months ago, but wasn’t going to tell me until her job situation improved…
If you’re on some social security program it could be wise to turn down a small raise. At least in some places. Once you earn above a certain limit those benefits stop and you actually lose money.
I had to explain progressive taxation to a coworker a while ago. Admittedly he was in his mid 20s and was a self described bad student. To his credit he actually understood. He also went back to school some time later and got an undergraduate degree.
Sometimes there’s hope for people.
I don’t think tax brackets are explained very well. I’m relatively intelligent, and didn’t understand until I was in my early 20s, at my first real job, and made a comment during the financial retirement introduction. Luckily the person leading the orientation took 30 seconds and blew my mind.
Except you’re ignoring tax credits. There are a slew of tax credits that only apply at certain income levels and below. It is very possible that you can suddenly no longer qualify for a credit by getting a small raise which is less than what the credit would have given you.
Always consult a tax advisor.
Ah sorry, I live in a country where we don’t require every single citizen to hire an accountant to file their taxes.
My condolences.
This happend multiple times. A lot people seem to not know that a Cow had to be pregnant to produce Milk…
I never knew knew that. I assumed we’d done some selective breeding along the line so when they start they just don’t stop. Seems really inefficient.
Yep. Really inefficient and horrible. In nature a cow give birth to about 4-6 calves in her entire life (They get about 20 years old.) In the dairy industry, they are fertilized for the first time at 15 months. From then on they are permanently pregnant until they die (in the industry they live to be around 5 years old). The calves are removed from their mothers after birth in order to pump the mother’s milk. Horrible for the calve and her mother cause they have the same kind of bonding to their child/mother that we have. In addition, the cows’ udders are extremely over bred for maximum profit. This makes it extremely painful for the cows to give milk.
The dairy industry is extremely brutal and morally reprehensible. Everyone who consumes dairy should take a look at how milk is actually produced.
From then on they are permanently pregnant
that’s not true.
Would you like to expand on your answer?
typically, they are only pregnant once per year
(They get about 20 years old.)
cows do not live to 20 years old without food, water, protection from the elements and predators, and veterinary care.
Ahh true. I forgot that every other animal in nature only gets a few month if not a few weeks old because they don’t have food, water, protection from the elements and predators, and veterinary care…
let a jersey in the woods.
A cow is a mammal !?!? Shocked Pikachu
I remember in 7th grade, our social studies class did a module on taxation and tariffs. Seemed pretty easy to understand at the time. Little did I know, later on, that many, many people would not understand this relatively simple concept.
why consumers pay tarrifs
That in Judaism, Jesus isn’t all that special.
I thought that was obvious when they crucified him /s
The earth isn’t flat.
Seriously, what the fuck.
How to put phone in silent mode.
My mom was proud that the neighborhood worked together to block an “ugly new cell tower” from being constructed in the area. Then she was upset that her cell service was spotty, in literally the same fucking breath.
I was eating at a BBQ joint with my ~30 year old friend, when I had to break the news that the pigs don’t survive if you “only take their spare ribs.”
This is definitely something he was told by his jokester dad or uncle when he was 8 and then never had the idea challenged since then.
That’s entirely possible. He didn’t know where the thought originated, just that he “always thought that’s how it worked.” He saw the flaw when I asked him about piggy surgeries. His face was priceless.
That’s still a shocking amount of willful ignorance.
What 😅
Dude legitimately thought it was more ethical. At one point in the conversation, he compared it to eating eggs. It’s a real challenge wiping tears away when your hands are all sauced up.
It’s like bacon and eggs. The chicken is involved, but the pig is committed.
“A morning’s work for the chicken, a lifetime commitment for the pig” as they say
Ha ha ha
I think we have a winner.
Having to explain that a certain infamous “Chinese alphabet” font¹ (favoured by tattoo joints everywhere) is not how you write in Chinese. There is a shocking number of people who have somehow managed to grow up not just to adulthood but to senior citizen levels who think that foreign languages are just English with a funky spelling; that grammar rules are otherwise the same, and that words translate one for one (and sometimes, in extreme cases, like the gibberish font, letter for letter).
¹ https://hanzismatter.blogspot.com/2006/08/gibberish-asian-font-mystery-solved.html
山尺工卞工几呂 勹丹尸丹几ヨ己ヨ 工己 ヨ丹己と!
I saw a brand a while back, can’t remember exactly what, something like coffee or chocolate, and they were using this fake Japanese for all their product names and merchandise labels.
It was certainly the most surefire way to instantly demonstrate to me they have no actual understanding of, or connection with, Japan or Japanese culture at all.
Literal cultural appropriation.
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Something explained to me…
I was 41 when I realised that people actually see things in their minds eye. It is not just a metaphor.
Blew my mind, like it is some kind of superpower, you can just imagine stuff, and you see an image of it…
My partner is such a good cook, partly because she can combine flavours in her mind, to check if they will taste good together, that is just fucken cheating.
When people “get a song stuck in their head” they can literally hear it… How the fuck do you get anything done, you crazy bastards.
I’ve encountered this the other way. I would design something for a customer, and I’d leave it Fusion360’s default grey texture. Let’s say I’m making a table. The following conversation would take place:
“Why is it grey?”
“That’s just the software, I’m gonna make it out of wood.”
“I don’t want it to be grey, I want it to be wooden.”
“I know, I’m going to make it out of wood. What do you think of the shape?”
“I can’t see it if it’s not wooden.”
I honestly don’t know you function like that.
Horrifying.
What makes it even more horrifying is that they might vote.
i can’t see things in my mind’s eye but like, i can fucking comprehend the concept of representative models, that has no relation to the aphantasia lmao
i think they were just a bit dumdum
My partner is such a good cook, partly because she can combine flavours in her mind, to check if they will taste good together, that is just fucken cheating.
Okay I can do the other stuff (as can most people; you probably have aphantasia) but this? This either is fucking cheating or I have atonguasia
I may be biased since I’m also able to do this (and have gotten pretty good), but I’m reasonably sure it’s a skill you can learn. Just take two things, make a prediction how they’d taste together, then try it and see how correct you were. If you keep doing this, you’ll eventually be pretty good at predicting new things.
I’ve done this since I was a child (because it was always interesting to me), so it might take some time, but humans are very good at learning such patterns!
If you want something to start with, take a slice of banana and add mustard. It doesn’t taste great (also not terrible), and the flavors mostly stay separate, but they combine a bit in an interesting way.
I have multi-sensory aphantasia.
I cannot combine two flavors I’ve never tasted together in my mind, but I can recall what I did taste before and make an educated guess as to how to reproduce it based on how the individual parts taste. Apart from that it’s trial and error - I’d say 65% of the time it works, 25% of the time the result is forgettable, and 1/10 times it’s a “what was I thinking??” situation.
I don’t think I could even do my job without this. I mean, I know not everyone can do it as well as Zi can, but I guess I never thought that there are people that can’t do it at all.
That’s how I compose music. My brain plays it to me before I can try and put it on paper. Also when I sing I can hear the instrumental on my brain without actually playing it.
Related to this, I’m a fairly decent dancer…but only if there is music playing. I cannot dance at all with no music, it is just impossible for me to look at all coordinated. I have no music or beat in my head to follow, it is a little crazy to think that the “normal” case is that people hear music in their heads.
Same. I can’t see anything in my mind’s eye but it’s loud as hell up there.
gotta love when you’re in a dead quiet room and suddenly it just becomes an mp3 player, i’ve straight up fallen asleep to music playing in my mind.
I’m on the other side of your discovery. When my kids were young and in karate, I couldn’t understand why they were having so much trouble acting out techniques in the air. In my mind, I could see where the imaginary opponent was and how they would move, but most of the kids had a lot of trouble with that.
While talking to my wife, I found out that not everyone can envision people and things in 3D.
I was also the parent who made the kids’ Halloween costumes. My sewing technique is pretty terrible, but I can see how the costume should look, and I can take it apart in my head and see what shape the pieces should be.
I am very confused now. Isn’t that just imagination? I know some people are not good at envisioning things but never heard about people not being able to do it. Ig TIL.
I think more what I’ve had to explain is the opposite. Aphantasia exists, so there are people out there (like me and assumingly you) who CANNOT picture stuff in their head.
But yeah I also had to learn people could actually do this as an adult. Boy did that make me not caring to read books make way more sense.
I think that liking/not liking books doesn’t have a lot to do with aphantasia. I love books and reading, but some authors are just terrible because they put too much visualization porn between interesting story elements (looking at you Tolkien).
For me to like a book, the story has to flow; Terry Pratchett is my favorite author, his stories flow in a really nice way and he tackles a lot of social issues in a great way.
I mostly meant just personally, not that anyone with aphantasia would not like reading. Just not my thing, and once I realized everyone else could actually picture things, kinda clicked why I never got into books as these great doorways to the imagination.
If I read, it would probably be Terry Pratchett, the couple made for TV movies are some of my favourites. Fantastic writer.
It is really different for everyone, much like the distribution in more “neurotypical” people. For me it is all about story, a good story will get me, but just describing how something looks doesn’t add to the story for me.
e.g. enough character detail for me would be something like, “just then, Jim walked in, extremely tall and whippet like, he had a sallow sickly complexion” much more than that, and it becomes redundant for me.
I was a member of r/aphantaisa for a long time, a lot of discussions there were started because someone was trying to blame their (perceived) shortcoming in some area on aphantasia. Without fail, some other aphant would come along and say…na that is how I make my living, it isn’t because of your neurodiversity. The classic one is visual art (I’m terrible at that), but a whole heap of artists are aphants. But reading came up fairly regularly also.
Yeah I mean, it’s funny I don’t care to read, but I will sit and read entire setting books for TTRPGs. Much more into how things work or about interesting stuff than reading stories.
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I don’t know, I’m pretty sure I’ve got aphantasia, but I love reading. I just tend to skip over character descriptions and have no clue what any of them are supposed to look like. On the plus side, I’m pretty much never disappointed with casting of an adaptation meaning the characters don’t look as I’d imagined them, since it’s just not something I do.
i’m utterly unable to imagine new visuals, but i can sorta half-imagine things i’ve already seen (though they have to be kinda distinct so to stick in the memory), so when i’m reading books all the characters end up looking like actors i’ve seen that feel like they fit the role. Very strange when i think about it.
What’s funny for me is I definitely think I’ve got a bit of aphantasia, I can somewhat see images but it’s low detail, details are wrong, have a horrible memory for faces, etc.
However I loved reading, I did usually tend to skip over descriptions of scenes that might go on too long because I get the gist and everything else just doesn’t get added in lmao.
Doing LSD and other hallucinagines (misspelled?) was extremely interesting due to the effect on aphantasia, it absolutely allowed me to “see” in that way as I never had before, I am not sure how much it actually “stuck with me” or not though if you get my meaning.
I was maybe an early teen when I learned that. Might explain my decreased skillset.
I worked in a retail pharmacy so here is a list:
- Women do not have prostates
- During Fukishima nuclear incident, there would be no physical issues for people >5,000 miles away
- Antibiotics don’t work on viruses
- Vaccines
- “Natural” medicines can significantly interact with other medicines
- What jock itch is and the astounding amount of men who thought it was normal
- Don’t recklessly shove things into your eye, ear, nose, butt, penis/vagina (exceptions apply)
wait what the fuck is jock itch?
A fungal infection most common amongst teenagers forced to wear sweaty unwashed clothes over and over again for gym and sports because the school system is somehow set up too stupidly to effectively deal with mildewy clothing in 2025
It can happen to anyone. It’s just super common amongst teens because enforcing and facilitating hygiene for young men is the lowest priority in our society for some reason
Do I want to know what the exception is where shoving things into places “recklessly” is okay?
Maybe recklessly isn’t the right word, but there are emergency medications that are administered rectally or nasally where it’s better to be quick than gentle. Rectally administered diazepam for seizures is a good example.
TIL that rectally administered diazepam is a thing.
I think I could have lived my whole life not knowing that and been the happier for it.
Women do not have prostates
That’s a good one
Most don’t, some do, in context presumably it was relatively clear
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My wife had to explain to me that pickles were pickled cucumbers and there wasn’t a pickle tree.
I was 30 something years old.
Me too, but I was in my 40’s and found out at a bierfest.
Makes me wonder, can you pickle zucchinis?
You are on The Internet. You don’t have to wonder about anything, anymore.
Now you can post to this topic about how you had to explain to an adult that the Internet is more than just a message board, but actually a repository for information as well.
You can pickle pretty much anything. Vegetables, eggs, fish, you name it.
Can you pickle cheese?
Okay, calm down Satan
Edit: This time science has gone too far 😂
https://www.allrecipes.com/recipe/73939/pickled-cheese/Mozzarella is brined which is a form of pickling. So the answer is, “Yes, you can”.
Two things that are almost always in my fridge are pickled sliced red onion, and pickled jalapenos. It’s so easy to put together, and a nice bright addition to dishes
Yes. And cauliflower, watermelon rinds, radishes, all sorts of things. It’s not just cukes, beets, onions, and eggs.
Yes. They are delicious. Acide makes them
I mean if it helps you they are made from a special pickle sized breed of cucumber.
Some kinds like gherkins are smaller than the cucumbers that show up in the store, but people pickle the large cukes as well (more common as the dill or sour varieties). Also in other countries it’s common to pickle all kinds of vegetables and even some fruit
pretty sure the large “normal” cucumbers only get pickled after being sliced up, i have yet to see a footlong cucumber pickled whole.
Yeah the spears aren’t quite that big usually–you probably have to go to an old timey general store for big ones.
That sounds like a real pickle you went through.
If it helps there is a variant called “Parisian Pickling”
I was much younger when I figured it out, but my mom also did a lot of gardening and canning when I was younger, so we had all kinds of pickled vegetables on the shelves.
There was still an aha moment when I realized that pickles were just pickled cucumbers, just like the pickled greenbeans, and pickled beets, etc.
I guess cucumbers were first on the scene and got to use the shortened name ;-)
“Tax the rich” does not mean anybody wants to tax you for owning your home. Unless it’s a fucking palace.
I had to walk a classmate through how to install a program in Windows. You know, go to the website, hit download, wait for it to finish, next next next, etc. We’re two weeks away from getting our diplomas. In IT.
If you know how to build a computer, you’re already ahead of 50% of people going into entry level IT support.
I’ve had enterprise grade desktop servers with fans plugged into the wrong fan header (pump vs case fan, the pump header runs at 100% and its noisy AF), same problem for multiple of the same model. $3000+ computers and the people making them cant RTFM (they included the manual)
I was ‘two weeks ago’-years-old when I realized that maybe setting my AIO pump to 100% instead of letting it be throttled up and down like a CPU fan might be a good idea. (I was installing it on a motherboard too old to have a “pump header;” it only understands
CPU_FANandSYS_FAN.)Considering that my previous AIO worked just fine for seven years being treated like a fan – and in fact would still be in use if not for it failing to fit in my new SFF case – I’m still not actually sure the difference matters.
Is this actually how it still works on windows? Like it has not evolved since the 90s?
Look, they’re too busy changing the UI completely every two years to change things like functionality.
They just copy Plasma anyway.
package managers technically exist, including Microsoft’s own winget, and if you’re on windows they’re a decent choice, though they do come with a multitude of issues
there’s even a decent ish package manager GUI called unigetui
Plus 1 for uni get. It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn good.
how would it change, netbooting still requires significant infrastructure that only nerds and business have and almost no phones have support for USB mass storage device emulation (technically not emulation) so it still needs a USB drive or DVD.edit: misread the previous comment, didn’t see program
You mean you don’t just type in the name of the program in an app store like Synaptic or f-droid?
Me, still in university, trying to tell 3 graduates (all computer science grads) what a “data exception error” in COBOL was.
