ELI5: Why is so much importance held on the presidential election, but almost no attention is given to Congressional elections?

A)

The do get coverage, but there are a few reasons why they don’t get as much national coverage…

1) Very few races are actually competitive. Between gerrymandering of House districts and states’ entrenched political slants, maybe 50 of the 470 Congressional seats are actually races of any kind.

2) The races that are actual races, all that matters is the local voters. So here in Illinois, there is a lot of coverage of the Mark Kirk/Tammy Duckworth race for Senate because it’s a close race with the incumbent behind in the polls.

3) TRUMP. His constant antics are distracting the media away from everything else, even the more substantive issues of the presidential election. For example, this AM more coverage is going to Trump calling a former Miss Universe fat/Miss Piggy than analysis of the different plans to create jobs presented in the debate last night. 

B) 

It seems like this question was already fairly well answered above but I’d like to add to what he said a bit.

Most congressional races are lightly contested if contested at all. Meaning that very often incumbents have such a substantial lead, through name recognition and having an established track record, that their opponent doesn’t stand much of a chance. Beyond that, it’s not unusual for a strong incumbent to run entirely unopposed simply because any real challenger that would enter the race knows better than to take on a strong incumbent and instead will look for a weaker incumbent in another district or wait until a strong one is nearing retirement.

What’s amazing to me is that congress, as a whole, has an incredibly abysmal approval rating and has for a long time (I don’t know the exact numbers but it usually hovers in the high teens and low 20’s). Americans overwhelmingly feel congress does a poor job but they usually like THEIR congressmen. This is partially because of what the incumbent has done for their own district or state but that’s also part of the problem. Congressmen largely look out for their own electorate to the detriment of the nation as a whole because it gets them reelected. So what people dislike is OTHER congressmen acting selfishly for their districts and neglecting the good of the nation but when it comes to their own district or state people have no complaints.

That, IMO, is why congressional elections aren’t covered nearly as much. Short of a recent scandal, major policy misstep, or shift in local political philosophy, people love their districts and states incumbent politicians and those incumbents are almost guaranteed to win anyway so why bother covering it?

Explain Like I`m Five: good questions, best answers.

Read More

ELI5: Where do internet providers get their internet from and why can't we make our own?

Answer #1

You can make your own. Go run some fiber from your house to mine.

It costs about $50,000/mile.

We can add others to our network as you get the money.

Answer #2

The Internet is the colloquial term for Interconnected Networks. Your ISP has an arrangement with one or more other companies, who in turn have agreements with yet more companies.

Some of these organizations spend lots of money to run physical cables across the planet in the expectation that their cables will be used to transport information between the two or more points that they connected together.

You can form an organization that connects to existing infrastructure and if you’d on-sell it, your organization is an ISP. You could also set up actual infrastructure, but that’s much more costly and risky.

Different countries have rules about this mainly to do with illegal use that you’ll need to abide by and since this is big business, many roadblocks exist to prevent your little organization from competing with the incumbent.

Some towns and cities, disenchanted with incumbent providers, have started their own networks and succeed in larger and smaller degree in providing their citizens with Internet connectivity. Various freenets also exist which allow information to travel within the group but not to the wider Internet. This often bypasses legal impediments to creating an ISP.

Explain Like I`m Five: good questions, best answers.

Read More

ELI5: Is letting wounds 'breathe' a thing, if so, what purpose does it serve?

I’m a nurse and have taken a number of courses on wound dressing and healing. Here’s what I can quickly write out for you.

The goal of wound care is moist wound healing. If wounds are draining plenty of blood/pus/serous drainage and it isn’t being removed from the wound by an absorbent dressing, the tissue can become macerated and will appear white. It’s too wet, the tissue is swollen with water. This is bad for wound healing. This is maybe where people got the idea of letting a wound “breathe” to dry up some of the excess moisture.

However, letting it dry out completely is not ideal either.

Natural healing involves developing a scab, a dry cover for the wound. However, if the wound were instead moist (not wet), you would have faster migration of immune cells, new cells, growth factors, etc. as they can move through a moist environment easier. This is what topicals like polysporin (besides the Abx) help to achieve. Petroleum products will moisturize without macerating.

And the other question everyone asks: should I use peroxide to clean it? no. maybe. Here’s the thing. You can clean a wound very well with water or saline (although who has saline at home). Many wounds wash themselves out by bleeding! Peroxide will kill bacteria, but it also hurts exposed skin cells/other tissue, and that can slow healing. The surface of your skin is mostly keratin and peroxide won’t affect intact skin, but when it’s cut, the deeper layers can be affected. Basically, don’t peroxide every wound, but something like a cat bite, go for it.

*edit: I’m aware now of how many people have saline. I pour like half a liter over new wounds, so I’m not sure people have that much contact solution. I have 25/20 vision privilege so am unaware. Yes, you should see a doctor quickly for cat bites. I’ve seen people need strong antibiotics 4x a day to avoid death from cat bites. Go to ER NOW if your wound starts streaking red up your limb. Helpful to outline areas of redness with a pen and the time you marked it to show how it’s progressing.

Explain Like I`m Five: good questions, best answers.

Read More

ELI5: When sending a letter abroad, how does the receiving country's mail service get paid for their work?

There is a global unified postal service body called the Universal Postal Union . The Union creates a framework and standards so that ALL countries can exchange mail freely without forming individual contracts with every other country.

When one pays for the postage for international mail, a portion of the money goes to the home country’s postal service and a portion goes to the destination’s postal service. The portion of money exchanged depends on how much mail (in weight) each country is exchanging. This is set up so that the destination country receives money for delivering the postage. Countries that receive more mail annually get less money per kilogram of mail.

The fee paid to the destination county is called a terminal due.

Explain Like I`m Five: good questions, best answers.

Read More

ELI5: why do you see weird patterns when you close your eyes and apply pressure onto them?

This phenomenon is called phosphene.

When light hits the cells in the eye, these cells send a signal to the brain to give an image of what is seen. These cells are called photoreceptor cells, and their main means of activation is when a photon of light hits them. Another way to activate them is via mechanical stimulation (aka applying pressure to they eyes). When you apply mechanical stimulation, the subsequent activation of the cells will be random (not patterned), and when this signal is transmitted to the brain areas that are responsible for generating an image, you will see weird patterns instead of the normal images that would be generated by photon-induced stimulation.

Explain Like I`m Five: good questions, best answers.

Read More

ELI5: What exactly did John Oliver do in the latest episode of Last Week Tonight by forgiving $15 million in medical debt?

Whenever you take out a loan or get a service that you don’t pay for in advance, you owe someone money. If you don’t pay, they chase you down looking to get their money. For many of these people who are owed money, they want to spend their time performing services for people, not chasing down delinquent payers. So for a fraction of the total price of the debt, they sell the right to collect the money to some third party. That way they get some of their money back (more than they would without a bunch more effort chasing down the people who haven’t been paying).

So now the third party who specializes in chasing these people down will try to find the people who haven’t paid and get them to pay. What John Oliver did was buy the right to collect these debts, just like these third parties do, but then forgive the debts- tell the people who owe money that they don’t have to pay him back.

Explain Like I`m Five: good questions, best answers.

Read More

ELI5: Why is menthol "cold"?

The people saying it’s because of evaporative cooling are wrong. Menthol’s boiling point is 212 Celsius, much warmer than your body.

Menthol isn’t really cold, it just tricks your body into thinking it is. There’s a type of nerve cell that responds to things like temperature, pressure, pH, etc. Some of these cells have what’s called a TRPM8 receptor on their surface. When menthol comes into contact with a TRPM8 receptor it binds to it, which makes the affected cell open an ion channel that admits sodium and calcium ions into the cell. This in turn causes the nerve cell to send a signal to the brain that the brain interprets as coldness. A similar receptor, TRPV1, is why the capsaicin in hot peppers feels ‘hot’.

Basically, menthol binds to a receptor on certain temperature-sensitive nerve cells, causing them to fire, and your brain interprets this nervous activity as coldness.

EDIT: Okay, evaporative cooling probably does have something to do with it, and it isn’t necessary for a substance to reach it’s boiling point to evaporate. However, I’m willing to bet that the cooling sensation is caused overwhelmingly by TRPV8 activation.

Explain Like I`m Five: good questions, best answers.

Read More