4

Cars Have Engines In Front Because We're Afraid Of Horseless Carriages

The overwhelming majority of cars have front-engine design. Mid-and rear-engine designs are reserved for fancy sports cars and time machines. Clearly these other designs have some advantages, but there must be some principle of physics that makes putting an engine somewhere else more expensive, right? Like cost equals distance over brand name or something?

Not really. All other things being equal, it makes the most sense for a big, heavy power source to be square in the middle. It's worth pointing out that car design is a complex alchemy of art and science, and there are well-designed cars with the engine located in the front, the back, or probably hovering 10 feet off to the side in some cases -- but playing purely by averages, mid-engine wins out.

Bhakpong/iStock

Mid-engine cars have better balance and power delivery, as well as a lower "moment of inertia" -- which means that the 50:50 weight distribution allows them to turn and handle better in general. In fact, many high-end manufacturers either don't make front engine cars at all, or reserve them solely for low-end models.

In the early days of motorized cars, it was easier to convert horse-drawn carriages than to build an entirely new car from scratch. So the first adaptations of this technology put the engine in the same place as the horses it was replacing: in the front.

via Motors Town

3

Tipping Is A Remnant Of A Racist Practice

Tipping seems so obvious: Surely the Mesopotamians tipped their bartenders, or temple prostitutes, or whatever the ancient equivalent of a CrossFit trainer was (torturer?). But the truth is that for most of human history, common people bartered. Coin money was reserved for the ancient world's Rockefellers or Kardashians. So tipping a server with silver or gold would have been the equivalent of tossing in an appreciative Bugatti.

Tipping didn't come to America until after the Civil War, where it was considered "deeply un-American" and opposed by people as diverse as Trotsky, Twain, and Taft. Tipping created an automatic assumption of class division. That crap might fly in Europe, where classism is baked into the culture, but America was the land of equality. It was therefore considered rude to tip someone, since all men were considered equal. All white men anyway.

iggyLee/iStock

Americans had no problem insulting black people with currency. In 1902, a newspaper writer described tipping thusly: "Negroes take tips, of course, one expects that of them -- it is a token of their inferiority. But to give money to a white man was embarrassing to me."

Tipping eventually did catch on in America, because it filled an economic niche created after the Civil War: a way to legally oppress black people. When the first minimum wage laws were passed, they couldn't discriminate based on race. Most of the tipped jobs were occupied by black people. So the racists of the day -- using good ol' American ingenuity -- created the "tipped minimum wage" we know and love today. This made it legal to pay anyone who made part of their salary from tips far less than the minimum wage other workers earned. Shockingly, this loophole in the minimum wage law was mostly used to underpay black workers.

Geber86/iStock

2

Daylight Saving Time Costs Far More Than It Gives

Other than the annual grumble about a lost hour of sleep, most of us accept Daylight Saving Time as a necessary evil for the greater good. But is it? DST was initially adopted as a measure to save energy during wartime. It first became law during World War I, and then kept popping back up during other wars and energy emergencies. But like many other niceties suspended during wartime -- like, say, a huge chunk of our civil rights -- it eventually became a part of regular life.

Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-H1216-0500-002/CC-BY-SA 3.0

1

Grand Juries Actually Serve The Opposite Purpose They Were Intended For

In medieval England, one of the main ways to determine someone's guilt or innocence was "trial by ordeal." In this case, "ordeal" is a hilariously understated way of saying "nearly kill them through boiling water, drowning, or hot irons, and see if God saves them." So you can understand why an accusation even going to trial was a bit of a hassle for the accused. Rather than kill someone every time God was taking a nap, authorities decided to put a check on this system with grand juries, who would decide if a case even warranted going to trial.

As trials became slightly less barbaric, going to trial still remained quite a burden for common folk, so the idea of grand juries evolved with the times and were exported to England's colonies. After the U.S. split from England, the grand jury remained a right guaranteed to every American standing in a federal court by the Fifth Amendment. Grand Juries were included in the Bill of Rights as a check on prosecutorial power. Remember that our courts operate on an adversarial system, but one of the two adversaries has the considerable resources of the government backing them up. While that's an admirable goal, the modern incarnation of grand juries have all the drawbacks of being an outdated, stupid system while also retaining all the drawbacks of being a highly modernized bureaucratic waste of resources. As our founding fathers almost certainly would have put it: They suck balls and they don't protect anyone from shit.

Theo Wargo/Getty Images for Tony Awards Productions

In 2010, roughly 162,000 suspects were pursued in criminal proceedings by U.S. district attorneys, and out of all of these, only eleven failed to receive a bill of indictment by a grand jury. You are literally more likely to be struck by lightning than be acquitted by a grand jury. Unless you are a police officer, that is. One New York Chief Judge, Sol Wachtler, said, "any prosecutor who wanted to could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich."

How are prosecutors able to boast such an impressive success rate? Turns out, there is practically zero supervision for the grand jury process, and defendants aren't even allowed to be present (much less defend themselves). Grand Juries are cloak and dagger affairs conducted under a level of secrecy normally reserved for nuclear launch codes and the Colonel's secret ingredient.

And even if everything were out in the open, the usual protections for defendants in a trial do not apply to grand jury proceedings. The U.S. Supreme Courts have held that the standard for evidence admissible to a grand jury is frighteningly low: The Fourth Amendment (freedom from search and seizure) is inapplicable to grand juries, hearsay is a valid piece of evidence, and evidence presented before a grand jury can impact the inevitable trial to come. This means that in some states prosecutors can (and do) bring unreliable witnesses before grand juries and use their unreliable testimony against the defendant (who didn't get to question the witness, because they weren't at the grand jury proceedings).

AndreyPopov/iStock

Despite the fact that grand juries were created to be a bulwark against "ordeals" from false accusations -- getting boiled to death can be a real hassle -- in the modern era, they're at best a waste of resources, and at worst an unfair advantage given to government prosecutors. They're a relic of medieval law that the framers of the Constitution hoped would serve as a shield against the unfounded prosecution of American citizens, but unfortunately, often result in the unjust harassment by unrestricted prosecutors. The U.S. and Liberia are the only countries in the world that continue the practice. No offense to Liberia, but maybe that's not such a good thing.

John Martin is a history teacher who also does other stuff; you can buy things from him here. Luke Miller used to keep the skies safe as an Air Traffic Controller, but, right now, he writes dick jokes for Cracked.

For more ideas we might want to rethink, check out 5 Bad Ideas Humanity Is Sticking With Out Of Habit and 5 'Innocent' Things We Do (Are Environmentally Catastrophic).

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