I’ll go first: r/kitty. One of the hundred grillion cat subs back on Reddit, the culture in this one was you posted a cat picture, and the only word allowed in the title or in any comments or replies was “Kitty.”

Someone is using that subreddit for covert communications, I just know it. Either on the level of “if u/PM_me_your_nostrils posts an orange cat, we attack at dawn!” or there’s some steganography going on with the pictures, but that subreddit was too stupid to be as active as it was.

  • Thrillhouse@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    My city has a local company that rents storage units and they have entirely too many locations relative to the population of our city such that I believe they’re a criminal enterprise. I believe they construct so many new buildings for money laundering purposes and to facilitate human trafficking and drug running out of them.

    Breaking news, I just googled them and one of the owners was convicted in his 20s of trying to sell poached falcons to Saudi Arabian royalty. The plot thickens.

  • eldoom@lemmy.ml
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    2 months ago

    I think that people being in overly light polluted areas for their entire lives is or at least is a major part of what’s wrong with society these days.

    When you go out at night and look at a sky completely filled with stars it makes you feel a certain way. Full of wonder, small, curious. Conversations always go in the “what if” or “what do you think about” sort of direction. It really puts you in your place in a strangely calm, thoughtful , and healthy way. And the more you can see, the better. If the Milky Way is visible it just puts you in awe.

    People don’t get to experience that very often, if at all, when they live in a populated area.

    I think that is by design.

    If you cannot just go outside and get that huge feeling of idk existential wonder, you’re going to get hard coded into your personal fears and beliefs and all that whatnot. This drives the population apart. Meanwhile, all forms of light pollution measures are either deemed too expensive or just not enforced. At least in my area. And large amounts of the population live somewhat close to an airport. Never really gets dark at night near an airport…

    Anyways that’s my ted talk about how light bulbs are ripping society apart by its very fibers. Next up is how ceilings are a conspiracy to keep the poors underfoot if anyone wants to hear it.

    • hperrin@lemmy.world
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      Cities tend to be more light polluted, but less racially divided than rural areas, though.

      I think it’s more about exposure. If you’re never exposed to a certain kind of people, some people just won’t trust them.

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        2 months ago

        Yeah, people in cities tend to be less conservative and more open minded. The more rural, which means less light pollution, are the opposite. So I don’t think that conspiracy really holds.

    • Thrillhouse@lemmy.world
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      Take it one step further and that sense of wonder is why I feel the powers that be reacted swiftly to squash psychedelics and shut down all research into them, unless the research benefitted the national security cartel, of course.

      It’s difficult for rulers to maintain capitalist control when you can eat a piece of paper and have the wonders of the universe revealed to you and realize that it’s supposed to be about loving other humans. Makes neverending consumption and 9-5 work seem really lame in comparison.

      • eldoom@lemmy.ml
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        2 months ago

        The ceilings one is way simpler.

        When you spend a lot of time in a place with low ceilings it makes you subconsciously feel trapped. After a while of it your actions and behavior will likely start to reflect that and you will probably be less likely to do anything that you can for your future.

        You don’t get that in a place with higher ceilings.

  • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Insurance companies randomly deny claims just to see if you’ll fight it. If you don’t, they’ll know they can deny more if your claims in the future. This is illegal, but if it’s a “bug” in the software or “AI” than they get away with it. Actually it’s harder with AI since people are more skeptical and have already caught them doing it. However this may be due to the AI being trained on the intentionally buggy software.

    • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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      They actually do use software to find deniable claims that would theoretically have to be reviewed by a doctor. The doctor pulls up a while page of to be denied claims and theoretically gives them the legally required review all at once in the 30 seconds before he hits the button. There is no reason NOT to feed propensity to accept fake denial into the equation. You could even white wash it by presuming that prior denials that stuck were indication of bad claims and assert you are measuring their proclivity for filing wasteful claims.

    • ultranaut@lemmy.world
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      I believe this based off my limited interactions with insurance companies. I was in a car crash that was 100% caused by the idiot who was fucking with their phone instead of looking at what they were crashing into. Their insurance company tried to stick me with months of rental fees from when my car was being repaired. I eventually filed a complaint with my state insurance commissioner and told their insurance company what’s up, they got right on it after that. Literally, that same day they had multiple people contacting me to say we’re all good now and apologizing about the misunderstanding.

  • GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Just posted about this in a different thread:

    The US senators: mitch mcconnell, ted cruz, and lindsey graham used fraud to win their respective seats in 2020. All three were in tight races according to the polls but all three won with bigger margins than was to be expected.

    This idea came from a few articles that were discussing this issue a few days after the election, then those articles all just disappeared.

    Maybe the articles disappeared because there was no fraud

    Maybe the articles disappeared because there was?

  • noughtnaut@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    So many people believe that Covid was a way to scare us all indoors, so they could change batteries in all the birds.

    That’s preposterous.

    Birds use rechargeables, that’s why they’re always sitting on the power lines. Like, duh, wake up sheeple.

    • bi_tux@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      no, you don’t understand, the feds invented the perpetum mobile, birds only sit on power lines to confuse people like you!

  • JakenVeina@lemm.ee
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    2 months ago

    Also related to reddit, since that’s where I was always inundated with this shit, before moving here: the constant stream of Genshin Impact leaks that come out, that the whole obnoxious subculture is built around, are just released by Mihoyo, intentionally, under the guise of all the anonymous leakers that constantly come and go. Seems to me like the only explanation for how CONSTANTLY leaks come out, and how they’re basically never actually damaging to the game or the company, while being REALLY effective at stirring up obsession in the fanbase, and driving people to invest more time and money into the game to be prepped to get the next new character immediately on release.

    Also how so many of the leakers would release extremely accurate stats and numbers, but then drop statements like “if I release any more than this, I’d be risking my safety” or “since everyone’s been asking about it, I’ll go ahead and confirm X, but after this I’m gonna have to go on hiatus for a while, until things cool down”. Seems like nonsense meant to either inflate the leaker’s ego, or rile up the fanbase.

  • BonesOfTheMoon@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Elon Musk is paying anti-immigration and anti-trans groups like the Tanron network to spread their rhetoric on social media.

    Oh wait that one is true. Filthy piece of shit.

  • Stern@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Personal reddit conspiracy theory as to why image hosting is on site:

    1. r/fatpeoplehate exists, does its thing (hating fat people)
    2. They get some images removed from imgur, the image host du juor of reddit at the time.
    3. They go on the offensive and start harassing fat imgur workers.
    4. The subreddit gets banned.
    5. Under a year later, reddit puts in image uploading.

    My theory is that 3 resulted in imgur hitting up reddit and threatening to block the site if they didn’t reign in fatpeoplehate. Reddit did, by 4, because the alternative was no images and that would absolutely fuck reddit up. This in turn leads to 5 to prevent that powerplay again.

    • 🐋 Color 🍁 ♀@lemm.ee
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      Wow, that was an actual subreddit? This is new information to me. My goodness… I don’t get why some people hate people because they’re overweight. It literally does not affect them in the slightest what someone looks like, and people can be overweight for a variety of reasons. We should love eachother, not hate for the pettiest of reasons.

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        I don’t condone their actions or views but I remember when that sub existed and I can shed some light on the fat hate redpill train of thought.

        They tried to justify it saying that fat people were a drain on society because of health issues. They took up space in hospital rooms that could otherwise be used for “healthy people with real problems”. Like they saw being fat as an issue that the person could fix by themselves, and they shouldn’t take up medical resources. And they drive up insurance costs for companies because being fat is like a pre existing condition etc.

        But what was it at the end of the day? A hate group. I get that America and other places have issues with weight, but the solution is not hate.

    • andrew_bidlaw@sh.itjust.works
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      Probable. And Reddit didn’t want to do so initially because, of many reasons, this way they also offload the liability on Imgur.

    • Ð Greıt Þu̇mpkin@lemm.ee
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      Either all those YouTubers collected the check from Raid without even touching the thing or they make up 99% of the playerbase at this point and it’s basically their best kept secret social club.

    • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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      I’ve always felt similarly. It’s a hustle most of the time, just pumping out content that’ll get a reliable number of views from a dedicated audience.

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    I don’t think this is too far out there but I haven’t seen it around much. Epstein was a honeypot.

    He got an absolutely disgusting sweetheart deal for his initial conviction resulting in him being released for 12 hours a day for work and a 13 month sentence. Now the attorney that cut that deal (illegally, mind you) was Alex Acosta. He was nominated for secretary of labor in 2017 and faced scrutiny for that deal, to which he said he was told epstein “belonged to intelligence” and to “leave it alone.”

    Supporting circumstamtial evidence includes ghislaine maxwells father having known connections to MI6, mossad, and the KGB, though he died in 1991 so that doesn’t necessarily imply much. Additionally, the FBI has HARD FUCKING EVIDENCE including tapes which doubt less contain CSAM, yet nobody has actually been arrested as a result.

    The issue is that this relies on taking Acosta at his word, and he’s kind of a huge piece of shit. It could be possible that he was buddies with epstein and gave him a deal and covered up the evidence because he was involved too, and presumably enough powerful people in government were involved to keep everything quiet.

    Sounds crazy when spelled out, but it’s hard to imagine why else nothing would come of the mountains of evidence that probably followed the raids, or why epstein wasn’t closely watched after his initial conviction.

  • toe@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Despite being one of the highest earning movies of all time, no body watched James Cameron’s Avatar.

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      I have never seen so much money spent on something so boring and predictable. Don’t get me started on Avatar 2, that was a 3 hour water simulation that still somehow managed to be naff because of annoying cartoony characters.

      My pet (very) silly theory is that both were a cover for military investment in fluid dynamics simulations and they had to hide hours of 3d renders and water simulations in plain sight.

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      I was dragged along to see it at the cinema in the (then) new 3D format (versus the old red/blue glasses).

      Took me 10 minutes to realise the story is Pocahontas, so I’ve always thought of it as Pocahontas Smurfs. And the 3D, while a cool novelty, gave me motion sickness something fierce.

      While clearly no money was spent on the script, it did move animation technology and adoption along quite a bit.

      Gobsmacked a sequel was made.

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      2 months ago

      I watched it in theaters six times. I love that movie. Sure, it’s the same story as like 6 other movies, but it’s got big sexy blue aliens.

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      I never watched Avatar, because i know how it will be. There’s only a certain amount of special effects that can keep me focused on something that lacks in all other areas.

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        I tried watching it like 3 times and gave up after 30-40 minutes it’s so generic.

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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      iirc last check it was about 50/50 people vs bots. The problem is people running bot farms or AI generated channels know exactly how to tailor content to the various algorithms used by big social media companies and thus actual human content is actively burried.

  • JaggedRobotPubes@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    That covid hijacks people’s brains with a parasite that makes them act like it doesn’t exist or isn’t a big deal if it does.

    I don’t actually think it’s true, it’s just that if it were, nothing would be different.