What grinds my gears

An extremely good rule of thumb in eating is that "too much and too little of something is bad for you" , and this holds surprisingly well for the vast majority of nutrients. For the vast majority of nutrients the body needs a good balance of it. Too much or too little of it is not good. However, for some reason many people do not understand this, and instead tend to go to (often unhealthy) extremes. The (rather primitive) rationale is "this nutrient is healthy, thus eat it as much as possible" and "this nutrient is unhealthy, thus avoid it completely" . Actual example: Many people eat vitamin supplements like they are candy. In fact, some people have suggested extreme overdoses of eg. certain vitamins (most typically vitamin C) as being a good thing. (There was an actual, thankfully relatively short-lived, movement that advocated eating enormous amounts of vitamin C.) Like with most nutrients, vitamins are a good example where a good balance is cr...

I recently bought a new Android smartphone because my previous one is really bad. The first time I charged it, it lasted for slightly over a week before the battery got drained. This was quite an improvement over the 3-day duration of my previous smartphone. It also demonstrated quite clearly and unambiguously that this cellphone has a stand-by time of at least one week. Now, after just a few weeks, the stand-by time has dropped to less than 2 days. This is worse than my previous ultra-cheap smartphone (which at least had a stand-by time of about 3 days.) According to the system info, the majority of the battery usage is taken by "Android OS" (which takes over 50% of the battery consumption right now.) I have searched online for info on this, and this has revealed one of the major reasons why Android sucks. Nobody has any freaking idea what causes this. People make wild speculations and there are almost as many "solutions" to the problem as there are people. O...

I divide conspiracy theorists roughly into three categories (in order of severity): Firstly, there are just your everyday people who happen to believe in one of more conspiracy theories, but don't stress too much about it. They might even never talk about it unprompted. They are simply being naive and deluded because they lack the experience and healthy skepticism to catch the argumentative errors in your typical conspiracy theory, and they happen to find the idea enticing. Secondly, there are the fanatics. These are the people to whom conspiracy theories are a religion (not a theistic religion, but a religion nevertheless.) They cannot stop talking about it, they have to constantly proselytize to others about it, and they are overall quite obsessed about it. I saw a video of a former conspiracy theorist of this type where he described what it was like, and what kind of effect it had on his life. He became "converted" after someone handed him a DVD containing the pseu...