Ask Lemmy

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.

Elon Musk is not an idiot. He was hired by other rich people like the Saudis to destroy Twitter, to prevent further incidents of public protest organization like what happened in Egypt and the Occupy movement. The degradation of the platform is intentional, and the amplification of right-wing voices helps to chase left-leaning social activists off of the platform. There is no equivalent platform for in-the-moment organization of protests.

Some US states that keep enacting highly unpopular anti-trans, anti-woke, sexist, racist legislation are doing it in an effort to get left-aligned people to move away and not consider going there, with the goal of skewing elections in their favor.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Tiktok is a Chinese psyop to turn the next generation of Americans into drooling idiots.

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.

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.

Paper straws were pushed by big corporate polluters to build a negative association with environmentalism.

Plastic straws are single-use plastics, but seem unexceptional by those standards. It's almost a meme that they're being singled out like they're the single greatest source of plastic waste, or uniquely damaging to ocean life.

On top of that, there are way better ways of reducing straw usage. I've used bioplastics that seemed way better. You could redesign the lids. You can do the plastic bag thing and charge people a nickel for a straw or whatever. Hell, you could just not give straws with every drink, and plenty of people will just drink from their cups and glasses. Instead, we get paper straws, something that is so obviously a bad idea it sounds like a joke, or a metaphor for a useless invention. Often served with cups and lids made entirely out of plastic.

So you get a bunch of people who have their drinks kind of ruined by a frustrating straw. It's a small thing, but it's just a little nudge away from environmentalism. You build an association with disappointment and inconvenience. Maybe it doesn't cause a big sway, but it makes people maybe a little more anti-environmentalist than they already were, or just less passionate about environmentalism.

Mine is most conspiracy Youtubers don't believe the bullshit they push. Its all about the money.

JD Vance was forced in as the Trump VP pick by the Heritage Foundation so that when Trump either dies or stops cooperating with them on Project 2025, they already have a man in place to take over. And that's likely the reason for the assassination attempts.

If Trump dies, they get Vance (a true believer...unlike Trump who just wants the power to stay out of prison) at the top of the ticket.

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.

There's a user here, who was '101' at reddthat, then piefed, then feddit.org, and was 911 at lemmynsfw, and is currently 911 at programming.dev, who posts a bunch of articles over a week or so, then deletes their account and moves on to another instance. They're up to something, surely. (the only real downside to this behaviour - that I can think of - is that new instances won't be able to get their posts, because Lemmy doesn't return posts for deleted users)

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

It might have just been botted, dead internet theory is more dead internet fact these days.

Alex Jones is a false flag crisis actor who's job is to distract people from the real conspiracies.

That Absolute, see also here, is something nefarious, possibly used for industrial espionage. My company is a client and using one of its IP addresses, I could see documentation that was quite concerning. In the background, it checks all of your files for anything that looks like a password, a social security number or a credit card number, then uploads these files to some server to protect them... What's really weird is that I cannot access the same information from an outside IP address, but here's a review, corroborating parts of it. Make of it what you will!

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.

The addition of microphones and cameras to things like phones, computers, watches and other technology is to normalize being surveiled as well as minimize other privacy violations. We now have fridges that have WiFi capabilities now and often in the presence of some sort of device with a camera due to phones.

The fashion world is in a war on pockets, so they can sell more handbags. The fewer and smaller pockets we have, the more accessories we need to buy. First they came for women's pockets. Now they're trying to make cargo shorts unacceptable for the same reason.

The Jan 6th temper tantrum was instigated as a response to the BLM and other Covid-era protests. The owner class was getting nervous about the working class protesting about things that matter, so they riled up some of their disposable morons to storm the Capital as a way to discredit direct action. And we're already seeing the effects; whether it's a labor strike or a student sit-in, we're told by centrists to "protest peacefully" and not inconvenience anyone, aka don't protest.

Conspiracies like flat earth are put in the spotlight to make real conspiracies look stupid.

That Target's entry into the Canadian market was designed to fail from the start so that Walmart could swoop in, take over the entire logistics chain and ensure people get to keep their jobs to quell the concerns about Walmart becoming a monopoly in Canada.

Target failed so spectacularly that from my perspective on the inside it had to be by design. When the stores first ooened there was no stock available because we were shipping goods on trailers with no skids, packed floor to ceiling at random then expecting some poor souls in the back rooms of Target stores everywhere (likely with no previous logistics experience) to unload, organize the product into categories on skids and then take them out to the aisles to be put on shelves. We should have been building skids in the warehouses for months until demand settled and could be fulfilled by maximizing trailer efficiency with floor to ceiling loads.

There were an unbelievable amount of blatant inefficiencies and Inventory Control was deliberately understaffed so we ended up with a warehouse with thousands of open rack slots but the system thought the warehouse was full. Multiple layers of this kind of shit were going on and every time we voiced concern about it, management told us to just keep our heads down.

I swear some execs with nice golden parachutes conspired to ensure Target failed so Walmart could swoop in and save the day, breaking through the public concern about monopolization.

Not mine, but there is a certain compelling logic to this: https://bruces.medium.com/the-mysterious-visit-of-mr-babbage-by-bruce-sterling-2017-7c941028c4d8

tl;dr - accepted history is that Charles Babbage designed a series of mechanical computers in the mid 1800s, and the underlying theory behind them would go on to influence work a century later when the technology had caught up to the idea, but they were never built. There are a bunch of coincidences and unexplained meetings that suggest that maybe he sold his plans to Italy who then built one of his designs in secret. This is also supported by modern attempts to build a computer from his plans - there was 1 measurement wrong across tens of thousands of parts, and it worked perfectly. Babbage was a skilled engineer but to get all that correct, on the first go, entirely from theory is maybe a bit much

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.

Cats are aliens from another planet. A much warmer planet with less gravity!

• Nothing else explains why a cat will lay in the sun on a very hot day like it’s nothing at all.
• They also radiate the heat of a small pizza oven.
• They act like we’re their servants in very un-animal-like ways.
• They push things off of places all the time, like they’re expecting them to float not fall.
• They’ll be completely normal, then take off running like their tail’s on fire, just to relish in the high gravity that allows them to jump and land a very short distance away.

Couriers have tiny cameras all throughout my home and wait for me to go to the bathroom before they show up with my parcels.

Washing machines double as portals to another dimension which is populated by sock loving aliens who want to save the cost of manufacturing their own socks. When socks go missing in the washing machine, the aliens end up getting free and clean ones. The next time you see someone who claims to make washing machines, check if they have an otherworldly affinity for socks.

They build our houses specifically to be inefficient at staying cool, then they sell us AC units and power to cool down our inefficient houses. They must be stopped.

Conspiracy Theorist culture has been coopted by the evangelical right in the wake of shit like Watergate and Iran-Contra making a non-interfered-with conspiracy theorist culture seem too dangerous to the right to be allowed to persist.

Evidence being that if you go far enough down the rabbit holes of the looney theories we all like to make fun of, you'll inevitably find some evangelical nut preaching about how it has to be that way either because they believe it says so in the bible or because they believe it's a sign of the rapture which is surely happening within their lifetime, or often both.

It's like the most dangerous kind of conservative appropriation of counterculture narrative.

content warnng: Magic The Gathering

facts: a couple of weeks ago the commander rules committee, the independent group that governs the popular Commander format, started receiving death threats after they banned some boring ass broken cards (jeweled lotus? dockside extortionist? nobody is ride or die for those)

as a result, the rules committee turned over control of the format to Wizards of the Coast / Hasbro, the makers of magic the gathering

fact: last year after some magic the gathering content was leaked, Hasbro send literal pinkertons to harasss the youtuber leaking it and recover the leaked goods

conspiracy theory: hasbro hired the pinkertons to make those death threats against the rules committee so that hasbro could seize control ove the most popular independent format of magic