• TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Probably fake, but if it’s true, people don’t know what they don’t know.

    To a whole lot of people mechanical devices border on magic. The gas goes in the hole, you push on the pedal and the car moves. That’s literally all they know. They don’t have any idea how an internal combustion engine works, much less an electric motor. They’ve spent their time learning things that are more important to them.

    I’d hazard a guess that, apart from Bill Gates, the top billionaires are clueless regarding this stuff.

    Hell, many race car drivers don’t know much about it, they just know how the car feels.

    If you know the four-stroke engine cycle--intake, compression, ignition, exhaust--, you’re way ahead of 95% of people. Add to that how a camshaft controls valve timing and you might as well be a mechanical genius.

    • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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      15 hours ago

      Yeah but there’s a difference between not knowing exactly how a car works and thinking that the exhaust is thrust. You can work that out by just observing a car, clearly they do not have enough exhaust velocity for it to achieve thrust, that should be inherently obvious.

      Thinking the exhaust is what makes the car go is like thinking that the actors live inside your television. Is the thought of an eight-year-old.

      • sit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 hour ago

        Some people got an idea of something when they were very young and never revised that idea because they didn’t get in touch with it again.

        I believed until I was like 8 or 9 or even older that the noise coming from a bottle with hot liquid in it was caused by a worm inside the bottle.

        An adult told me this as a joke, which I took for a fact and never came in contact with the subject again, consciously.

        Exhaust fumes accelerating a car feels very much similar. Kids logic

  • hirihit640@sh.itjust.works
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    2 days ago

    So 99% sure this is fake and never happened, but I’ve seen a lot of these “I’m really stupid” posts on 4chan. I imagine anon just wants to be part of a joke, even if they’re the one being laughed at.

    • dubs@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 days ago

      So 99% sure this is fake and never happened…

      You can tell its fake, because its greentext

    • diaphragmwp@discuss.tchncs.de
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      2 days ago

      Well, from what I’ve heard, the chud stuff on 4chan was once satire and people who can’t read satire came in. So maybe it’s the same here, real stupidity got mixed with the jokes.

  • M137@lemmy.today
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    1 day ago

    And a bike is driven by the air your legs push back, the wheels are only there to slow you down otherwise you’d accelerate infinitely.

  • Contramuffin@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    Technically the car is powered by the movement of the exhaust fumes… Just not in the way that OOP thinks, I would presume

    • Mika@piefed.ca
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      2 days ago

      Technically it’s also powered the way he thinks, but the impact of it is minimal.

  • village604@adultswim.fan
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    2 days ago

    This is how I felt when I was explaining to the dealership mechanic about how my car would buck when shifting up after dropping into a lower gear to pass someone.

    I called the lower gear the passing gear, and he looked at me like I was a moron.

    I was vindicated the other day because my coworker from a family of mechanics (and being one in his free time) used it.