Ask Lemmy

Your PC runs firmware written by some companies with really sloppy engineering and security practices. Whenever possible opt for a computer that runs open source firmware (coreboot).

I am a researcher studying diseases. You have no idea how many mice get killed without generating any data. There's a rule in place whenever you want to work with animals that you need to plan ahead and only use as few animals as you need to get the data that you're looking for. But things in research basically never happen according to plan. It could be due to a variety of factors: unexpected failures, overlooked factors, technical errors, or just simple negligence when performing an experiment. A lot of data and samples obtained from killed mice are discarded for one or more of the above reasons.

I get that mouse experiments are important to prove that our findings can translate to actual living animals, but I personally will not touch a mouse because, frankly, the "useful data per mouse" ratio is way too low for me to justify using mice.

In HVAC, I've been called out to look at the air con in an office block and person A is cold but person B right next to them is hot, there's nothing we can do to help that.

One simple solution that seems to work each and every time is the placebo effect. I say ok, give me an hour, I'll adjust the parameters and check over the system operation. I then sit in the plant room for an hour paying on my phone, come back to see if it's better and 9 times out of 10 they're both suddenly happy.

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.

Oil and gas workers are normal people with children and dogs that care about the environment and they do a pretty good job on average of protecting the it. But accidents do happen in the industry, and when they do, it's sometimes not a simple "cleanup on aisle six" scenario. I've seen grown men on their hands and knees mopping up drops of oil in a cow pasture more than once.