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Why do hangovers get worse as you age?
Alcohol metabolism is a two-step process in the liver, where enzymes first break the alcohol down into acetaldehyde. Acetaldehyde is highly toxic – between 10 and 30 times more toxic than alcohol itself. The enzymes in your liver are next tasked with breaking down the acetaldehyde further, into a non-toxic substance called acetate. But your liver can only metabolize about one drink per hour – so if you’re drinking more quickly than that, not all of the acetaldehyde gets broken down. In that case, the acetaldehyde is released into the blood stream to wreak havoc around your body, resulting in the awful feelings associated with a hangover.
The liver capacity to cope with the toxicity of acetaldehyde decreases as we get older. Acetaldehyde is directly detoxified in the liver by an antioxidant called glutathione. As age increases, glutathione generation capacity is decreased, so cells may not be recovered or repaired rapidly.
- since_ever_since
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(This is Tom Hanks people!)
Why do people blackout when they drink too much?
Blackouts happens because alcohol affects the hippocampus (the memory part of our brain.) Blackouts usually happens when you consume alcohol very quickly like shots. The hippocampus essentially shuts down during a blackout and no longer creates memories. Think of it like a tivo. Your tv shows still runs as time goes by, but the recording has stopped.
- josh1200
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Why does diarrhea come so quickly when food takes hours for the stomach to digest and days to pass through the intestines?
So your bowels are like a long train track and your food is like a set of cars on the track. Transit time between Point A, your mouth, and Point B, the chute, is a bit flexible but normally operates on a regularly scheduled basis.
When you eat, you put cars on the track and send them to Point B. As these cars go to Point B, they lose passengers (nutrients) at various points in the thin tunnel portion (small intestine). The journey isnt complete and the journey has already altered the shape of the car pretty significantly giving a rusty color. Once in the larger portion of the tunnel, the cars are checked for stray passengers and are hosed down a bit so that transition out of Point B isn’t so bad. Sometimes, the train cars park juuust outside the gates of Point B so they can exit at the best time for the operator (toilet).
Now, all of this goes fucking nuts when you load a bad set of train cars at Point A. The track sensors located everywhere along the track, detect this alien set of cars and sends a distress call to the Supervisor (your brain). The Supervisor wants to handle the situation without having to phone the Manager (your consciousness) about the craziness on the tracks and also wants to make sure you never know it was on the tracks. It has to make a choice now: send it back to Point A violently and somewhat painfully risking tearing the tracks, or send it to Point B as fast as fuck? Depending on where it’s located on the track, it’ll choose the best route.
Let’s use the destination Point B. The Supervisor hits the panic button and puts all the train cars that are on the track (in your body) on overdrive. The tunnels are flooded with water and lubricant to speed all the cars up and get them the hell out of there as quickly as possible. Cars collide with each other, and previously well formed cars are just flooded with water and lubricant that they are just a soggy, shadowy reminder of their former glory state.
The Media (pain) hears about the car collisions immediately begins filming live the high speed, flooded train cars out of control. They want to knos how an alien set of train cars were put on the tracks and they want someone to pay for such carelessness. The Manager is just watching the horror unfold on Live TV but cannot do anything to stop it, because the Supervisor was deaf and he had not installed a means of communicating with him after hours in the office.
- jiggity_gee
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What’s the difference between AMD and Intel? Why do gamers prefer Intel if it’s the same GHz
Cock rate doesn’t give the full picture of the performance think of it like the gas mileage of a car. Intel makes cars(processors) with higher mileage or in other words they are more efficient then AMD processors. You can have an Intel processor that’s clocked lower than an equivalent AMD processor and still have it outperform or be on par the AMD processor because Intel’s architecture designs get more work done per clock cycle.
On top of that Intel cpu’s are known on avg for being much better at single threaded work than AMD’s cpu’s and Intel has hyper threading which allows one physical core to act like 2 logical cores further increasing performance whereas AMD really doesn’t have an equivalent to hyper threading.
As a result Intel cpu’s are usually more expensive then AMD’s though.
- HeavyDT
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What made The Beatles so revolutionary for the music industry? And why are they regarded as one of the most influential bands of all time?
1. The Beatles wrote their own songs. Before, most Pop acts were given songs to sing by their producers. After The Beatles, it was more expected that a band would create its own music. I may be wrong, but I understand that the current model has drifted back to a “You write, I perform” model.
2. The Beatles had two exceptionally talented and one very talented songwriter in the band. This meant that every album had unusually high quality songs in every slot. The norm before The Beatles was that a hit single was followed by an album that contained that hit single plus a whole lot of garbage quickly thrown together.
3. Many of the hooks, tricks, teasers you hear in pop music today were invented by The Beatles in the studio – because they couldn’t play live concerts anymore. They couldn’t even hear themselves, much less have their audience hear them.
4. The Beatles made it possible to incorporate other musical techniques into pop, ranging from string quartets to Indian sitars to pure noise like guitar solos played backwards.
5. And, alas, drugs. You can hear the change in music when they started smoking weed, and again later when they started dropping acid. I’ll leave everone here to imagine the impact on society from that.
- Eternally65
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What is post masturbatory guilt?
Actually, it’s Oxytocin hormones being depleted within your body. Your body has a constant reserve that is stored in the posterior pituitary gland (by your hypothalamus) in your brain. Post masturbation (assuming you have achieved orgasm) you feel a sense of disinterest and a lack of motivation; the oxytocin neurohormones your body develops, as well as partly the prolactin neurohormone, are exhausted. You hence associate this to the boredom, disinterest and/or guilt. Oxytocin and Prolactin take an average of 15 minutes to be produced again.
- LazyProductivity
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Why are banks only open Monday through Friday from 8-5, which is literally the only time that most people can’t go to the bank due to work?
The actual target customers of banks are not individuals, but businesses. Businesses have far more cash to deal with than you do, and it typically isn’t worth their time to stay open for your transactions during the weekdays. The banks are open when businesses are open and making deposits, which only makes sense.
- Phage0070
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How can countries like Germany afford to make a college education free while some universities in the US charge $50k+ a year for tuition?
Most EU countries have a higher tax rate than the US, combined with significantly lower military spending and smaller populations than the US.
In 2011, Germany had a tax revenue of $1.551 trillion. In that same year, the US had a tax revenue of $4.218 trillion
The US had a population of 311.6 million. Germany had a population of 81.8 million.
Then, on top of that, of their $4.218 trillion the US spent $693.485 billion on military. Germany spent $48.8 billion.
So the US only had 2.71x more tax revenue despite having 3.8x more people – and then the US spent 14.2x more on their military than Germany.
- TheFirstAndrew
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How does an explosion actually kill you?
The shock wave basically rapidly compresses your body and everything inside. Organs rupture, veins explode and even the eyes in your head can explode. And if that doesn’t get you, rapid heating off the air can sear your air ways and cook you from the inside out. And then if that doesn’t get you, there’s debris (shrapnel)…. indiscriminate pieces of rock, metal, and anything else slamming into and or tearing through your body. ….. All in all. .. something to avoid
- Opee23
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What does a CEO of a large company do in a “typical” week, and why is he (usually he) paid so much?
I am not the CEO of a large company, I am the CEO of a rather small company, but maybe this answer will be helpful:
There is no “typical” week, as my job is a non-specialized function. Thus, I typically spend my time working on X (see below), plus facilitate decisions on whatever critical issue has been escalated to my level. I say “facilitate” instead of “make” because sometimes I’m not the best person to make a decision, but instead I push people to sharpen their thinking, confront ambiguity, etc, in order to render a decision, especially on tough issues.
X is defined as an always-varying combination of 1) things in my key areas of personal strength, 2) areas where, especially in a small company, we have not yet hired key people to lead that area but which still need to be done, and 3) areas where quality of execution is not sufficiently developed to achieve key strategic aims.
In #2 and #3, potentially none of those areas may lie in my own areas of personal strength. As such, one other key activity for a CEO is to recruit the right people to the company who have the expertise to lead work in those areas better than he/she can.
Ever since taking this job, I’ve discovered several things that I think result in CEOs being paid a lot more than other corporate officers. It’s been an interesting journey.
1) The CEO is responsible for everything. In a regular job, there are always problems that come up that you don’t necessarily need to be responsible for – it’s your co-worker’s area, or you can kick it up to your boss, it belongs to another department, etc. Even if you are an VP or other executive, a problem may come up that is just in some other exec’s department (e.g. if you are VP of Marketing and a tech problem comes up, it’s the VP of Eng’s issue, and vice versa). If you are the CEO, there is no other such person. Every problem is your problem. Yes, you can delegate, but you are responsible for the person handling it correctly. 100% of problems at the company are your problem. This is true for no one else.
2) You are the public face of your company, no matter how much you don’t care to be. When you think about a company, good or bad, you think of the CEO as the ultimate authority on everything. You probably don’t know the VP of Corporate Communications at Microsoft, or the CFO of Tesla, but I’ll bet you know the CEO’s names. The CEO becomes personally synonymous with the company, especially when someone has a complaint.
2a) In a failure, you must be willing to be the sacrificial lamb to the public. This is something that comes with the job, and is not a job requirement for any other executive position. Sometimes other executives take a fall publicly when something goes wrong, but it is usually because of something egregious directly going wrong in their organization. On the other hand, there are multiple macroeconomic or external disaster scenarios which can affect a company negatively and if the CEO is nothing less than brilliant in overcoming them (not always possible), it’s part of the CEO’s job to resign or be fired, and usually shamed publicly. This is known and accepted as part of the job. If you’ve had any other job, this was probably not part of your job description. ![:)]()
3) The job doesn’t end. In many jobs, the job can end when you go home or on vacation. Even in other crisis-response-type positions (ER, police, fire, datacenter ops), you have on-shift rotations and downtime. Not so for a CEO. Whatever key strategic initiative, ongoing crisis of the moment, or existential threat to the company will always be on your mind, and you are always subject to having a high-priority issue escalated to you. This is related to #1, i.e. you are responsible for everything, in that if there is something that truly requires your attention, no one will say “Wait, he/she’s off-duty, don’t bother them.” You are always on duty; your downtime is when you leave the job.
4) You actually have less power over your environment than you have in any other job. This is a counter-intuitive thing that people often don’t realize about positions of authority. The degree of control you feel you have over your life is a ratio between the size of the sphere of things you can directly control (“Sphere of Influence”) compared to the size of the sphere of things whose effects you need to worry about (“Sphere of Concern”). When you have a front-line, entry-level job, you may feel that you have little power, but the ratio of power-to-concern is quite high: you can affect how you are doing your job, and things you can’t control include your boss, certain things about your work environment, and customers you come into contact with. If you become a manager, you control the entire team (but not really – people may defy you if you are not convincing enough), but now you have to be concerned with things that happen in other teams, elsewhere in the company, and an even larger demographic of customers. As a CEO, you have authority over the entire company (though again not true control over every individual’s free actions), but you need to be worried about all the users and customers, competitors, large-scale industry trends, macroeconomic forces, regulators and governments, the press, etc. Thus, being a CEO requires developing extreme mental equanimity in the face of feeling nearly totally powerless – and still being able to make effective decisions using the limited resources you can control.
These are the things I’ve noticed that separate the job from other high-level executive jobs. Certainly there are other factors (mentioned in other comments here), like being good at building relationships with key outside parties, having a lot of industry contacts, and being great at decision-making, but those are true of many executive-level positions. Thus, I believe that the salary differential arises largely from the fact that:
- the CEO role involves a qualitatively higher level of life stress and personal risk-tolerance,
- subsequently far fewer people are willing to take on such a role, and
- the pool of such people intersected with people who are actually good at doing the job is therefore incredibly small,
- intersected further on a per-industry basis (Alan Mulally from Ford could not have been a CEO for Microsoft).
This leads to an acute supply-and-demand problem, i.e. the “I’m not getting paid enough to deal with this shit” issue, wherein plenty of otherwise talented executives who would be CEO candidates are happy to just stick with not taking that extra step – keep in mind that anyone with the combination of characteristics necessary to be a successful CEO has lots of options – so you end up with a highly illiquid market of candidates, and thus boards and compensation committees have to come up with really unique compensation packages to induce those people to take the job.
- yishan
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