Ask Lemmy

Restaurants are 100% more disgusting than your own kitchen.

It really doesn't matter which one unless it's like super high end. And you've almost definitely eaten something that was dropped on the floor.

Cars produce more harmful airbourne pollutants from their brakes than they do from the tailpipe. Copper is being phased out and the ultimate goal is to abandon friction braking entirely in favour of electrical regeneration.

Sysadmins have no idea what they are doing, we're just one step ahead of the rest of you at googling stuff.

Monocultures in Agribusiness. One 'public secret' many outside of the industry might not be aware of is the prevalence of monocultures in crop farming. Vast expanses of land planted with the exact same genetic line of a crop. While this makes farming operations easier and often more profitable in the short term, it's a ticking time bomb for pests and diseases. One well-adapted pathogen could wipe out an entire crop species in an area (look up citrus greening in Florida), because there's no genetic diversity to halt its spread. But hey, it keeps the costs down...until there's no food to eat.

For those in the US: no medical office dealing with insurance has a clue what they're doing. Why can't you ever "shop around" and get a price for your procedure? Because nobody really knows the price until they submit the claim. It's basically impossible for a human to keep track of the policies that change daily across dozens of insurance providers along with the hugely complicated calculations needed to get a price. And that's before they have software try to rearrange your claim to get the most money possible from insurance companies. And good luck figuring any of this out yourself; even if you manage to track down the policy data, it's written completely in medical insurance jargon and might even leave some room for interpretation.

Basically, even with the insane amount of work medical coders (people who process and interpret medical claims and policies) do to try and stay on top of it all, at the end of the day, you have to just submit the claim to a black hole and hope that it gets accepted. The patient's cost is whatever it spits out.

Also, dozens of doctors across the US get fired, banned from practice in their state, or have their licenses revoked every month. Some of them are unfortunate, like doctors being forced into retirement due to old age or physical inability to do their job, but many others get in trouble for practicing without a license, sexual harassment/assault, and, of course, prescription drug abuse. This data is all publicly accessible, but being on atrociously designed and maintained government websites, it's nearly impossible to keep track of who's in trouble without paying for third party software to do it for you. If you don't happen to catch it, it's pretty easy for a medical provider to move a few states over and set up shop like nothing happened.

Edit: Oh yeah, our company was very serious about HIPAA training and treated patient data with extreme caution. Some offices... really didn't. It got to the point where we'd straight up have to reject ticket requests for having identifying information. Our ticketing system was secure on our end, no telling what was going on outside of it.

As a side note, for the trans people out there, don't accept that you have to be misgendered on your medical records without a bit of a fuss. There's special modifiers that specifically override restrictions on sex-based medical procedures when your reported gender doesn't match their requirements. Unfortunately, whether your provider knows about or uses them is a bit of a toss-up.

On a brighter note, as stupid as it is that every single diagnosis has to be codified specifically for the insurance industry, there are some funny codes in there.

Some favorites:

• Bitten by a dolphin (specifically the first time. There's different codes for a second bite and any more after)
• The weirdly specific set of codes for various injuries on different watercraft
• Of course, something stuck up your ass

Now there's a new standard coming into effect, ICD11. The biggest complaint with ICD10 was the overly specific codes they had to keep track of. They did change things so that you didn't have a completely different code for every single type of, say, dolphin injury, but they did add many more animals.

Teacher - school districts are so afraid of getting sued that unless a kid is physically assaulting another student we have absolutely nothing we can do about it (even then, no guarantees). If your kid goes to a public school, all of your kids classes have one or two students that are allowed to do essentially whatever they want with no consequences.

Cell phone addiction is also huge. A lot of the “learning loss” being blamed on Covid is in part just the fact that students spend class watching TikTok’s or bullying each other in group chats. Don’t fucking text your kid during class. Vaping is as predominant as smoking was in the 80s.