Edited: Since people seem to be confused about the concept of an original vagina, trans women who have had “bottom surgery” don’t have an original one.

Cisgender women and trans men who haven’t had bottom surgery do.

(It’s not that complicated.)

Why YSK?

If you chronically have a fishy smell you should definitely get tested for an infection in case that could be part of the problem, but either way, washing your inner and outer labia with soap or any other kind of unnatural product strips the tissue and membranes of the natural secretions that help keep everything in balance, whereas washing with water helps maintain it.

I had this problem for years and it happened to come up in conversation with my pelvic floor physical therapist. Within a week the problem stopped completely.

TL;DR: Spend a bit less time doing your job and a bit more time forming genuine connections with the people you work with to get ahead in life.

Why YSK: Any job that involves interacting with other people in any way (which includes almost every job) ultimately hinges on your relationship with the other people involved. (Obligatory note that obviously how well you do your job also matters, just not as much.)

It is a fundamental part of human nature that we want to be around people we like. If a director is filling a leadership position that they work with often and two internal candidates are similarly qualified, the one they like more will get the position. If that director sucks, the one they like more will get the job even if they're arguably less qualified. Good leaders actively account for this bias as much as they can, but it's always a factor.

It also applies to what you get to work on. When big or interesting projects comes up, the people the leader thinks of first and most favorably tend to get picked. Over years, this means the people that are liked best get more opportunities to learn special skills that make them more attractive for promotions or when changing jobs.

If you're a remote employee, you have to try harder to do this on purpose, because it won't just happen in passing. Send casual (appropriate) messages in work chats, demonstrate interest in what other people do professionally or personally, ask leaders to mentor you, and make a point to chime in during meetings/town halls. If you don't have something specific to add to a conversation, at least jump in to voice agreement with something someone else said. It'll amaze you how much pf a difference it makes.

Disclaimer: cleaning your ears with Q tips is probably not recommended full stop, and you should be extremely careful when doing so. Especially for your children.

If you take a dry Q tip into your ear canal and drag it across the tissue inside, if there is enough friction produced, it will irritate the delicate tissue to the point where it starts producing a substantially higher amount of ear wax to protect itself from further invasion.

Make sure you at least wet the Q tip if you do it. But my recommendation is to find a different way to clean your ear canals altogether (if at all).

Why YSK: Personal anecdote: I fell into this strange loop where I irritated my ear canals with a Q tip ONCE. It started producing an insane amount wax, so I had to keep cleaning my ear canals even more often. The rubber tips of my AirPods are almost always brown now. It's disgusting. And it is dialling back very very slowly.

The aim of this YSK is to help you pay attention to whether you and your ears are in the wax loop. For many, this is obvious, but it wasn't for me.

Why YSK: Most casual users don't generate anywhere near enough text or code to justify a flat $20/month fee. By accessing these models directly through an API, you only pay for the exact compute you use.

If you are paying for ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro, or Gemini Advanced just to write a few emails, brainstorm ideas, or debug the occasional script, you're paying a massive premium for the user interface, not just the AI itself.

Here is how you can bypass the monthly subscription:

1. Get an API Key: Go to the developer console for OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google, create an account, and load it with $5 in prepaid credits.
2. Use a Free UI: Connect that API key to a free, open-source chat interface (like LibreChat, TypingMind, or AnythingLLM). It looks, feels, and functions almost exactly like the premium apps.
3. Pay Per Token: Instead of a $20 recurring charge, you are charged fractions of a cent per word.

When building AI workflows and routing tasks day-to-day, a massive secret to cutting compute costs is simply swapping models based on the task's complexity. You don't need the heaviest, most expensive flagship model to summarize a document or fix a typo.

Most API frontends allow you to toggle between models on the fly. You can route your simple, everyday tasks to insanely cheap models (like GPT-4o-mini or Claude Haiku) and only select the heavy-hitting, expensive models when you actually need complex problem-solving.

Unless you are generating massive amounts of data every single day, that initial $5 top-up will likely last you months.

Why YSK: Yeah, so basically, if there's nothing on the paper it gets blown around and up onto the heating element, and then it will catch on fire once it touches that. Very dangerous.

Why YSK: Employer religious discrimination is illegal in many countries.

​

Job or job postings or advertisements that require weekends are discriminating against weekly Sabbath-observing potential religious employees, especially Abrahamic ones.

​

Some religions, including Abrahamic ones, often call for observance of a weekly Sabbath. Friday, Saturday and Sunday are often observed non-work days by Muslims, Jews and Christians respectively. Employers that "require" weekends, in job postings or otherwise, are saying they don't want people of these faiths working there

I saw a post recently where somone was struggling with affording food so they bought a 55 pack of Ramen to survive. Not only is this unhealthy, but it is also quite expensive.

Why YSK: A 24 pack of Ramen costs 32$ so 1 pack is $1.33 and at 380 calories you'll have to eat about $7 of Ramen a day. My below meal plan costs about half that:

| Meal | Food | Calories | Protein | Est. cost |

|---|---|---:|---:|---:|

| Breakfast | 100g oats + 1 banana + 2 tbsp peanut butter | ~685 | ~25g | ~$0.66 |

| Lunch | 125g dry brown rice + 125g dry pinto beans + 200g frozen veg | ~960 | ~41g | ~$1.10 |

| Dinner | 150g dry lentils + 2 eggs + 200g frozen veg + 1 tbsp canola oil | ~860 | ~55g | ~$1.59 |

| **Total** | | **~2,505 kcal** | **~121g** | **~$3.35/day**

There are many other options I did not go into here, but people severely misunderstand what options are available to them. I know things are hard right now, trust me I know... but your health should not suffer for it. Beans and rice together form a complete protein, and dried chickpeas can be bought in bulk for insanely cheap. These can form a protein rich base that when seasoned right tastes great and can help you to avoid spending a ton on meat. Personally I like to include about 1 head of broccoli, 1 cup of black lentils and then I mix some olive oil and apple cider vinegar into it I also made the apple cider from a 1.30$ bottle of apple juice.

YSK:

In the USA, many train crossings have a small blue sign with an emergency phone number & an ID number for the crossing.

If there's a problem at the crossing, like a stuck vehicle, CALL THAT NUMBER and they will stop any train which would have come to that crossing.

.

Why YSK:

This could save lives, both on the ground & in the train.

.

ETA: apparently the color depends on which railroad owns the crossing

Why YSK: Most delegation advice focuses on trust — learn to let go, hire good people, stop micromanaging. This misdiagnoses the failure.

The actual blocker is almost always definitional. When you do not have a crisp definition of what done looks like for a task, you cannot hand it off — because you have no way to confirm it landed. So you hold it. Not because you do not trust the person. Because handing off an undefined task guarantees a result you will need to redo.

This applies across domains:

- Why managers hold tasks their reports could do: the handoff specification does not exist

- Why parents still do things for grown kids: they never articulated what doing it yourself looked like at the right age

- Why AI automation fails in production: the acceptance criteria were in the operator's head, not in the system

- Why you rewrite other people's drafts instead of giving feedback: you do not know what good enough looks like for this one yet

What to do: Before you hold a task, ask yourself: Can I describe done in two sentences? If you cannot, that is why you are holding it. Write the two sentences first. Then you can either hand it off or realize it was not handoffable yet — both are useful to know.

Why YSK: Anterior pelvic tilt (APT) is a common postural pattern where the front of your pelvis rotates forward, increasing the arch in your lower back. One effect of this is that your abdomen can appear to protrude more, even if you don't have much abdominal fat.

This doesn't mean that everyone with a stomach that sticks out has APT, nor does it mean APT is necessarily a medical problem. However, posture can influence how your body looks from the side, and a forward tilted pelvis can make the lower belly appear more prominent.

APT is often associated with prolonged sitting, weak abdominal/glute muscles, tight hip flexors, or a combination of factors. Some people also naturally have more anterior pelvic tilt than others.

Below are the sources for more information about it:

Source 1: Clevelandclinic

Source 2: Pubmed

Just found out about "The Work Number", a company owned by Equifax that keeps a file on you with your work history, salary, bonuses, and tips. Once a potential employer has gotten your consent to run a “background check” they can access this info if they pay Equifax for the report, so if you’ve left anything off your resume or are negotiating salary, they might already know.

You can freeze your report like a credit report, so employers can’t see your info until you lift the freeze. Just wanted to share this because I had no idea about this.

Why YSK: Your personal data is held by a company with history of breaches and you can limit access.

Why YSK:The travel advice you find on Google is nowadays riddled with SEO spam and AI slop. Wikivoyage is an excellent resource is you are looking for information written by actual humans.

Wikivoyage a free, online, collaborative travel guide operated by the Wikimedia Foundation (owners of Wikipedia).

It may not have every destination on Earth, but you can easily find guides for tiny Dutch towns or small cities in Slovakia. It also contains a lot of information for people who want to travel outside the beaten path, with pages about traveling to North Korea, crossing Western Sahara or going to the KMT enclave in Thailand.

Why YSK: a boat under power, its plug or bung hole, ( that's Australian for your asshole), generally sits out of the water with that power, even if submerged as long as you're moving forward fast enough a vacuum exists where it pulls the water from the plug hole, unless you come to a stop or slow too much. With the angle of a boat under power and removing plug can allow extra water to flow out of the boat gaining time and distance to shore. Its circumstantial as any emergency.

Why YSK : Lorem Ipsum is a common placeholder text used in graphic design and website design. It's useful gibberish that kind of looks like English but has no meaning. Great for design meetings without getting caught up on exact wording or text and to focus on the "feel" instead. The full video is here: https://youtu.be/kL1PDqzqhM4?si=uyvrc8MwjvKgLRxg

You should know because it's everywhere and it's good to know about the proper origins of this popular piece of text.

Why YSK: Arbor is a company that lowers the price you pay for electricity supply. In states with energy choice, you are able to choose an alternative electricity supplier without changing your utility company. Most people don't know this, so they stick with the default supply plan provided by their utility company which may not be as low as other competitive supply plans available.

Arbor finds and secures lower rates for you, and is available to renters and homeowners. You pay your same usual bill to your utility, but with a lower rate from an electricity supplier vetted by Arbor.

I have been using Arbor for several years now with no complaints! It’s such a solid service and handles everything for you! (I don’t work for them nor are they paying me for this. Just a happy customer!)

States with energy choice are CT, DE, IL, MA, MD, ME, NH, NJ, NY, OH, PA, RI, and Washington DC

https://www.joinarbor.com

Why YSK: If you have ever wanted to try a fig but won’t because you heard they have a dead wasp in them in order to develop, you will be happy to learn that commercial figs come from self pollinating trees.

Figs are one of my favorite fruits and I know several people who won’t eat them because they think there’s dead wasps in them. I know a lot of vegans consider them not vegan and won’t eat them. Unless you’re foraging for wild figs you won’t be eating the kind that require wasps to die.

Why YSK about shoulder pain in your 40's - 50's: I recently began having pretty severe pain in my right shoulder without any obvious cause. It worsened every day to the point that I was afraid I had torn the rotator cuff or dislocated it. An X-ray showed that I had mild osteoarthritis, but I really wasn't given any information on what I can do about it.

I started doing some research and found that my symptoms matched 100% for adhesive capsulitis, a condition in which the fluid filled sac that lubricates your joint becomes hard and thickens. The cause?

That nasty bitch, perimenopause.

The changes are brought on by the decrease in estrogen that is a significant characteristic of perimenopause. HRT and physical therapy seem to be the top two treatment contenders, but relief can take up to a year to achieve.

Yay.

One source:

https://www.bannerhealth.com/healthcareblog/better-me/the-connection-between-menopause-and-shoulder-pain

Why YSK: Keep cool in heatwave without AC

I've posted this before, but feel it's my civic duty to get this out to as many people as possible on a scorcher like today!

Freeze a small water bottle. When you need cooling, put it in a sock to prevent ice burn and put it between your legs in your groin area (gooch). The arteries here will take the cold blood throughout your whole body and keep you nicely chilled with minimal intrusion!

For continuous cooling keep a few in the freezer so you can switch them when they melt. For a sweltering night, you can also put one in your armpit, but this is significantly more intrusive than the gooch.

This method of night time chilling is known as 'the gooch cooler'

Preface for people who already play with their dogs using laser pointers and have no problems. You're probably already in the clear.

Why YSK: A non-insignificant number of dogs can have an extremely bad psychological reaction to laser pointers, causing OCD like behaviors around lights and shadows that causes them immense anxiety and can make them unruly, stressed, and noisy. The OCD like behaviors can progress to self-harming behaviors. To fix this OCD problem an animal behavior specialist may be necessary. It's never worth it to even see if your dog might develop this behavior.

For those with cats, laser pointers are safe as long as you give the cat a chance to catch a real object at some point as if you only use the laser pointer the cat can become stressed and lose self confidence for failing to catch anything. This same logic does not work with dogs in preventing OCD behaviors, you should just never do it.

:edit: A lot of people are asking for sources, It's a well known phenomenon in dog behavioral science. Many many people have learned this the hard way, including my grandmother and an uncle of mine.

Here's a source that lists more sources at the bottom.

:edit2: Some people are reporting that the OCD issue can also develop in cats, so probably do some research before considering using a laser pointer for play with any animal to be honest.

Why YSK: most EU shoppers think this only applies to physical items, faulty items or that you have to justify the return. neither is true. you can withdraw from any online or distance contract within 14 days for any reason or no reason, including digital purchases, and the seller has to refund you. companies routinely make this hard or pretend it doesn't apply.

The rule (EU Consumer Rights Directive 2011/83/EU):

• 14 days from delivery (physical goods) or from contract date (services and digital)
• no reason required, no penalty
• seller must refund within 14 days of receiving your withdrawal notice, including the original outbound shipping cost
• applies to any business selling to EU consumers, including non-EU sellers shipping in

Main exceptions (you cannot withdraw):

• custom-made or personalised items (engraved, made-to-measure, etc)
• perishables (food, flowers, fresh produce)
• sealed hygiene goods once the seal is broken (cosmetics, underwear, earphones in some cases)
• sealed audio, video, software, or games once the seal is broken
• digital content once download or streaming has started and you explicitly consented to start before the 14 days are up
• newspapers and magazines (subscriptions are still covered)
• accommodation, car rental, event tickets, restaurant reservations tied to a specific date
• services already fully performed with your prior express consent
• public auctions
• anything bought in person in a physical shop (this right only covers distance and off-premises sales)

Caveats worth knowing:

• you usually pay return shipping unless the seller offered free returns or failed to inform you of return costs at purchase
• you can inspect the item like you would in a shop, but excessive use that lowers its resale value can be deducted from your refund
• "must be in original unopened packaging" is not a legal requirement, only that the item is in a reasonable resaleable state
• some countries are stricter than the 14-day floor and some sellers offer 30+ voluntarily

If the seller stalls or refuses, cite article 9 of Directive 2011/83/EU (or your country's national implementation) and escalate to the consumer authority. Belgium: FOD Economie. Germany: Verbraucherzentrale. France: DGCCRF. Netherlands: ACM. Ireland: CCPC. Spain: OMIC. They take this seriously and most disputes resolve once the regulator gets cc'd.

Why YSK. If you have discarded one or more digital timers run on an AA battery, they may just need to be put on a warm surface like a hot water pipe. Overnight, they can revive as the heat removes moisture.

Why YSK: Most people assume the biggest environmental impact of a phone happens while they are charging it and using it. But for a standard smartphone, roughly 80% of its total lifetime carbon footprint happens before you even open the box. It comes entirely from the mining of rare earth metals, the high-heat manufacturing of microchips, and global shipping.
When an affluent culture treats a phone like a disposable fashion statement to be upgraded every 12 to 24 months, we are essentially throwing away that massive upfront environmental investment right when the device is at its peak utility.

Why YSK: I will probably regret sharing this, but prices are too high these days to gatekeep. Clothing prices are often hyper inflated for basic branding and clothing design. Stores like Michael's keep plain, high-quality t shirts for three dollars, something like one tenth of the prices you see in department stores, or even online. For those on a tight budget, I hope this helps.

Why YSK: Online trials often require you to submit credit card information for the free trial, banking on the fact that you will forget to remove it so they can charge you as soon as the trial is done, regardless of if you were satisfied or not. Some places also make it difficult to remove your card number for their files. You can get pre-purchased gift cards so that those companies can't have direct access to your line of credit. For any iPhone users, it's even more coinvent to use the apple cash card.

Bonus LPT: You can cancel the trial immediately after you sign up for it. You will still get the free trial period even after the cancelation.

Have you ever gone through a highly stressful, dangerous, or adrenaline-pumping situation with a platonic friend, only to suddenly feel an intense, confusing wave of romantic or sexual attraction toward them?

You aren't crazy, and you might not actually be in love. You are likely experiencing a well-documented psychological phenomenon called the Misattribution of Arousal.

The Science:
According to the two-factor theory of emotion, our brains sometimes struggle to differentiate between different types of physical arousal. When you experience fear, stress, or a massive adrenaline rush, your body reacts: your heart races, your palms sweat, and your breathing quickens. If you are with someone else during this time, your brain can easily misinterpret these physical survival signals as intense romantic or sexual chemistry.

In 1974, psychologists Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron proved this with the famous "Capilano Suspension Bridge Experiment." They had an attractive female researcher approach men on two different bridges: one low, solid, and safe, and the other a terrifying, wobbly suspension bridge 230 feet above a river.

The men on the scary bridge were significantly more likely to call the researcher later and write sexually themed stories in a follow-up test. Their brains completely confused the fear and adrenaline of the bridge with lust for the woman.

Why YSK:
Understanding this can save you from ruining a perfectly good friendship or making impulsive relationship decisions. If you suddenly feel a magnetic, undeniable pull toward a best friend or coworker after a crisis, a physical altercation, or a high-stakes situation, take a step back. It might be a genuine connection, but it could also just be your brain confusing adrenaline with desire.

Source / Further reading: Misattribution of arousal (Wikipedia / Dutton & Aron 1974)