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What's something that's not common knowledge but you think everyone should know?

Specifically thinking of stuff that make your life better in the long run but all kinds of answers are welcome!

I've recently learnt about lifetraps and it's made a huge positive impact on how I view myself and my relationships

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  • What wasn’t reasoned in, can’t be reasoned out. Many people who suffer from conspiratorial thinking need help and support more than evidence and debate.

  • That GoodWill and Autism Speaks are not valid as charities/nonprofits.

    • Could you provide a explanation for someone not in the US?

      • GoodWill is a chain thrift store that uses legal loopholes to achieve charity status. A lot of charities are like this in America as well as elsewhere (should stress it's not just an "American thing"). Sometimes the legal definition of a charity isn't well-thought-out enough which allows for too much wiggle room when it comes to what a charity is. GoodWill achieved charity status by presenting itself to exclusively offer positions to people with disabilities in a society that does not favor them for job positions, but at the same time GoodWill underpays them and inserts them into working conditions comparable to the beginning of the industrial revolution when children would be injured or killed by the machines they were supposed to be working on.

        Autism Speaks, another famous so-called charity, has a similar story. They came into prominence for saying they will help "treat autism" and help those in need, and they are partners with Sesame Street, with whom they are co-sponsors. However, people often ignore their attitude is one of eugenics. They believe the people they present themselves as helping are burdens and will side with anyone who has acted on this, including Planned Parenthood and even the Canadian government pre-2020, the former of whom is preferential with abortions (therefore amounting to eugenics, in fact that was why they were eventually cancelled) and the latter of whom did not let anyone with a disability immigrate into the country for forty years.

  • Health related:

    • "Healthy food" is a grift meant to sell you shit. And by that I mean most "Healthy Foods" you find on the supermarket or are advertised as superfoods or are at the core of the latest fad diet are in fact just as trashy as any other ultraprocessed prepackaged food. Even if they are truly healthy foodstuffs, they are often something that isn't a staple of people's everyday diets (usually shit that is part of the diet in a foreign culture, but not on the West) that you get massively overcharged for because "Muh superfood".
    • The real way to eat healthy is to buy fresh ingredients, cook your own meals, and inform yourself on what your body actually needs so you can be smart about what you cook... But that requires time and work investment, which most people cannot afford to do, which is why obesity is more common in poor folk than on rich folk. Have I mentioned that knowing certain stuff will make you, if not politically radicalised, very angry regardless?

    Computer related:

    • In windows 10 and 11 if you press Win+V instead of Ctrl+V you'll get the option to activate clipboard history. After that, you can use Win+V to get a little menu that lists things that were in your clipboard and which you replaced by copying/cutting something else. You can then choose what to paste. Linux has plenty of programs that add this functionality and was in fact there first. No idea about MacOS.
    • Learning a bit of your operating system's command line interface will save you a lot of time and effort in the long run -- And you don't need to become one of those turbo-weirdos that uses nothing BUT the CLI -- But the reason the good ol' console-host/terminal-emulator has stuck around after all these years is that there is a lot of shit that is just faster and more practical to do by typing a few words vs. going through 10 different menus and tabs.
    • Save yourself some money: If you're not gonna be doing hardcore state-of-the-art gaming or heavy video editing or some other intense task, a middle-of-the-road computer from ten years ago with some light upgrades will carry you just fine. Get a used PC, get a decent quality SATA SSD and some extra sticks of RAM (8 minimum, ideally 16 or more) and you'll be all set for everyday internet browsing and office tasks and shit. Heck, slap in a GPU later and you can get away with playing a lot of games, if not with DigitalFoundry tier performance.
    • On the topic of the command line interface: it doesn't necessarily mean using the computer by manually typing long lines of code. The CLI, be it Bash, cmd or PowerShell is also a programming language, and you can save series of commands you frequently use into text files which can be run like executables. At least in Linux, you can weave these into the GUI; For example in the Cinnamon desktop it's fairly trivial to create context menu items; I can convert a .docx or .odf file to a .pdf by right clicking on the file, no need to open it in an editor, and so on. A few lines of Bash and a little config file and that's it.

  • Ironically, most people I know doesn't know how to use their phones or computers at all.

    Not all of the people require more knowledge than Excel, but it's very useful to recognize types of errors, backups, where are the settings you may need and how to find your device options.

342 comments