Hundreds of years of burning coal has spread mercury compounds all over the land, so that quite often when they build a new dam for hydroelectric power it's dissolved into the water and ends up concentrated in fishes that people eat.

There's no way to make a backdoor for encryption that keeps the encryption secure. Politicians and government flunkies can't seem to wrap their pea brains around that concept.

The "magical formula" for stairs.

If this rule isn't followed when building stairs, then it feels uncomfortable and more accidents will actually happen there.

In easy terms, it says: 2x riser + tread = average step lenght, usually 63cm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Border_Gateway_Protocol

I'm surprised we don't have global internet outages more often.

Adding an extra lane to a congested road will always cause that road to be more congested, and will also increase traffic on nearby roads.

When China removed a highway, it reduced car traffic thought the entire city while not reducing the number of people travelling to and around the city.

The only solution to car traffic is viable alternatives to driving.

The longevity of concrete isn't just tied to the cylinder break strength.

Also, concrete with certain aggregates end up creating silica gel, which is bad for concrete.

An example from my field of expertise: Mixing different kinds of metals in wet environments causes the less noble one to corrode.

In german and english, the comma in numbers is swapped. So the number 123.45 in german would be written as 123,45 while ironically, the thing that we used to separate thousands from hundreds is also swapped. So one-thousand-four-hundred would be written as 1,400 in english but as 1.400 in german ...

Microwaves can cause water to become super heated and explosive upon touch.

The asphalt pavement of roads must be 4 inches thick to last forever. 3 inches lasts 5 years, 2 inches lasts one year, 1 inch is crumbling before you finish. You constantly see crumbling roads in the third world because of corruption, they don't put as much pavement down as they charge for.

Concrete being called cement.

Falsehoods programmers believe about names.

You need to test your restore procedure all the way through & periodically to have confidence in your backups

Mitigating actions are celebrated, while preventative measures are ignored, or even mocked as unnecessary.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect.

The borders between countries in the Middle East including India/Pakistan were deliberately drawn to cause conflict. Of course when that conflict started to come back home everyone was shocked pikachu faced about it. I really don't understand why people of those countries don't just throw away the map and sort it out amongst themselves like adults, but I guess expecting world leaders of a majority of countries to act like adults is a bit much to ask most of the time.

Among many other reasons, the biggest reason for me that the US stock market cannot be trusted is because market makers combine 3 techniques to create fraud and push risk to others to dilute unwitting companies and investors: borrow stocks, selling a borrowed stock to buy later, strategically failing to deliver stock.

Borrowing stocks doesn’t create a clean paper trail, can be done repeatedly, and steals shareholder votes.

Selling a borrowed stock to buy later can strategically intend to fail from the start where they don’t even have to locate (not even acquire as you might assume) a share to borrow, effectively creating new shares out of thin air. Market makers in the US can legally do this, even for the benefit of their hedge fund counterparts (sometimes under the same company).

Fails for stock delivery are allowed, so they’re a strategy. Cash in lieu is not the same as share ownership. Cash is fungible, stocks are not, and this gap can create technically infinite risk.

Inheritance.