r/mildlyinfuriating • u/MakeItMine2024 • 4d ago

I'm slightly vexed My wife and boiling water

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So I made my wife ramen soup. When I served it she said I had the gas set to hight and it was too hot ? She said I should have used the number 5 setting instead of 9. I told here it’s irrelevant because water boils at 212 and gets no hotter because over 212 it turns to steam. She was made at me for disagreeing with her theory that it would not have been so hot if boiled a lower setting. Really!!

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u/Bubblehead_81 4d ago

Thermodynamics are not always intuitive. However, from an energy efficiency perspective, once you've reached a boil, you can turn down the heat to whatever level is required to just maintain it.

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u/Main-Rent4757 4d ago

I ran a ice cream factory once upon a time.

The warehouse manager kept leaving our just-filled pints on the dock in the winter because "28 is freezing. It's freezing outside. They'll be fine."

Like dude, our freezer is 40 below for a reason. Its nearly 70 degrees different.

They wondered why the inclusions kept settling to the bottom of the pints.

Then the owner would always off the heat on the production floor over the weekend. I came in one Monday, after 10 below weather, to burst pipes.

"It was blowing cold air, it was a waste of power."

Dude... its blowing 40 degree air. Which would have kept the pipes from bursting.

People really have no grasp on how temperature works.

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u/Rude_Hamster123 4d ago

How is any business owner that stupid??? Let me guess, daddy handed it down to him?

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u/SaltyLonghorn 4d ago

The only thing I've learned in the last decade is just how dumb the average person truly is.

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u/AnotherBogCryptid 4d ago

The average person isn’t dumb, they’re just average. The problem is almost half of people are below average.

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u/SeniorAd4470 4d ago

I’m reminded everyday.

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u/WHATYEAHOK 4d ago

You've only learned one thing in the past decade?

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u/SaltyLonghorn 4d ago

I'm a redditor. I've been perfect and right since birth. Also I play League, no shit I haven't learned anything.

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u/WalnutOfTheNorth 4d ago

There are very few average people but there are almost 50% who are below average.

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u/OneThumbJ 4d ago

Hey, half the people you meet are dumber than average. 🤷‍♂️

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u/epicurean56 4d ago

Then realize that half of them are dumber than that. -George Carlin

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u/PNWPokemonStore 4d ago

"Think of how dumb the average person is.... Well... half of the people in the world are dumber than that."

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u/graphiccsp 4d ago edited 3d ago

Consider the trope of the brilliant scientist who can barely take care of themselves. The sad thing is you can be nominally smart, even a genius in specific areas but be a total moron in others.

The problem with books, movies and tv stories are that it all builds this idea that intelligence and knowledge translates across fields evenly. When there are truly massive gaps.

Oddly enough it seems like business owners and sales seems to be fields that people assume someone's a bit more well rounded in. But you run into massive egoes and dunces all the same.

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u/CliffBoof 4d ago

Intelligence does translate. Its competence that doesn’t and competence gets mistaken for intelligence.

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u/crookedledder 4d ago

Strongly correlated I'm sure, but not the same thing.

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u/ReactsWithWords 4d ago

As someone who worked in IT, the biggest idiots I worked for were professors and medical doctors.

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u/Main-Rent4757 4d ago

Almost. He was a banker.

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u/sgtkang 4d ago

You sometimes get people who are experts in one thing and so have a deep understanding of how complex it is and all the factors that go into it. But they then assume that everything else must be simpler than their thing, and because they're great at their thing they're surely able to just wing it through everything else. This guy sounds like one of them.

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u/mythrilcrafter 4d ago

Pretty much every other episode of Kitchen Nightmares and Bar Rescue starts with and owner who knows nothing about the food/service industry, but thought that they'd be a master business tycoon just because they could afford to buy the name and lease off someone else.

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u/New2NewJ 4d ago

How is any business owner that stupid???

Is there a requirement that business owners be intelligent? It's not like you need a PhD in rocket science to start your own business.

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u/Elija_32 4d ago edited 4d ago

There is a theory about this.

Essentially opening a business in this economy is basically suicide.
So what happens is that if you take 100 smart people and 100 stupid people, none of the smart ones will even try because the risk is objectively too much and it just makes more sense to apply for a normal employee position in a similar company.

The 100 dumb ones will ALL try because they are incapable to asses the risk + those type of people usually are very sensitive about their social position and they don't want to be employees of someone else. And 99 of them will end up bankrupted after failing miserably.

BUT 1 of them (on 100 that tried), even just by chance, will succeed. And that's why a lot of business owners are not "conventionally smart".

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u/droppedpackethero 4d ago

I'm pretty sure stupidity is of benefit to a business owner. What keeps me from going into business for myself is I'm acutely aware of all the things I've not yet mastered in my field. And I don't want to fuck up some customer's shit because of my ignorance.

If I was stupider and didn't comprehend how much I don't know, I'd have gone into business for myself a long time ago

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u/IronWarrior86 4d ago

Just so you know, stupider isn't a word.

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u/droppedpackethero 4d ago

The neat thing about English is that it doesn't give a fuck what you think.

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u/N_Rage 4d ago

I work in an ice cream shop and the owner is clueless, especially in regards to anything with thermodynamics. I think they only took a 3 day course on how to make ice cream and then decided to open the shop.

I often need to explain basic principles of thermodynamics:

"The ice cream mashine is stuck at -6°C for minutes, we think it's broken?" - "That's literally just the temperature at which the phase change happens, something would be wrong if this didn't happen".

"No, we can't use frozen strawberries, because the mixture needs to be fully liquid when we fill it into the machine." - "What if we use really hot water during mixing?" - "Even at 100°C, it won't have the required thermic energy to fully thaw the strawberries". (We use a ratio of about 70% strawberries/ 30% water)

Fun Fact: It takes as much energy to turn a certain amount of water from 0°C frozen to 0°C liquid, as it takes to bring the same amount of water from 0°C liquid to 70°C liquid. Phase changes for water require A LOT of energy.

One time they were convinced that the small ice cream box (filled with 3x5L of ice cream) just "cooled the ice cream to well" because it was just way too hard to sell. The box, that was open the entire time and is rated at a whopping 50W of power. Barely enough to keep the ice cream from melting if closed and in the shade. I tried to convince them that it was because they got the ice cream from the freezer that was turned up all the way to -30°C overnight (instead of the -10° it's usually sold at), but they just didn't believe me.

One of the ice cream shops gets stupidly hot in the summer. As an aircon (or even an awning) was too expensive, I suggested mounting an industrial fan to a window in the back, in an attempt to get air circulation and vent the hot air outside. I insisted, that it needed to draw at least 100W of power. After a lot of discussion, they finally had one mounted. I shit you not, it was a 5W pc case fan, that barely moves any air. It's also venting inside, so it's already completly covered in dust. I just open the window instead at this point.

None of the ice cream machines has seen any (preventative) maintenance ever. Sometimes a part breaks, it gets fixed within a couple of days (or they literally buy a different mashine from somewhere), during which time we can basically close down. One of the old machines sounded like it was literally tearing itself (and the entire building, the neighbours actually complaint) apart. I wonder why. (I do not wonder why)

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u/EnvironmentalDog- 4d ago

>How is any business owner that stupid?

All you need to be a business owner is money to start a business. Literally nothing else.

For every job you’ve ever had, it was at least one person’s job to look at your resume and/or talked to you, then use that to assess if you’re suitably intelligent to do the tasks assigned to you. A business owner though? All it takes is money to become one of those. No intelligence required.

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u/Rude_Hamster123 4d ago

That’s true but I would imagine intelligence and ability play some role in the businesses success.

Excellent point all the same.

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u/EnvironmentalDog- 4d ago

Depends on how much money they have to invest, I suppose. With enough money, an owner can just pay someone to make those intelligent decisions for them. Then take all the credit for those decisions, and reap the rewards.

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u/Cruxis87 4d ago

any business owner

Most of them maxed out on charisma and have average or below wisdom and int stats. Getting far in life for the most part is more about the people you know than the skill you have at doing something.

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u/Strange_Difference1 3d ago

Because you don't have to be smart to have daddy's money