Asklemmy

43788 readers

811 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

126

What things am I a dumbass about? (lemmy.nz)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

155 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Had someone contact me because a browser interface was 'down' and it was actually a cert issue. It surprised me that in an IT context, this person didn't have a basic understanding of SSL certs. They didn't even know how to add a cert exception.

It got me thinking, what basic ubiquitous things am I a dumbass about outside of IT?

Ive seen lots of 'fun facts' compilations, but it would be better to get a wide range of subject suggestions that I can spend 30 minutes each or less on, and become a more capable human.

Like what subjects would plumbers consider basic knowledge? Chemical interactions between cleaning products and PVC pipes?

What would an accountant or a landscaper consider to be so basic its shocking people can live their lives without knowing any of it?

For most areas of expertise, its difficult to know even what the basics are to start with.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

With regards to food and water safety (really, this applies to all safety regulations), you would rather get false positives than false negatives. It's better to be overly cautious than to be under-cautious. Because if we're under-cautious, then someone might get sick. So we actually want to pick a common, hardy bacteria that's easy to grow. There's several other reasons why E. coli is such a good indicator bacteria, such as:

it grows quickly, so we can get test results quickly
it's remarkably easy to distinguish E. coli from other bacteria, so much so that you don't really even need a microscope. The less technical expertise is required for water testing, the better.
they're usually safe, which lowers the amount of training required for water testers, and also lowers the risk of disease in case a test gets mishandled
they're generally more resistant to water treatment than other bacteria, typically being the last to die. So if we killed E. coli, that's a good indicator that we've also killed the other bacteria