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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    3 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.

    • NeoNachtwaechter@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Look around for donkeys.

      Forgers and tricksters often have mixed the falcon meat with donkey meat (cheaper, because easier to catch), at a ratio 1:1, that is, one falcon, one donkey.

      • Today@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I would like to see Tulsa King walk in there with a water bottle and confront that guy.

    • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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      We have a computer repair shop in my town that does not do computer repair. Ask them if they can fix something, the answer is always “we don’t do that.” Even simple shit like screen repair on cell phones, which they have signs on their windows saying they do. “We don’t do that.” My landlord owns the local radio station, he says they’ve tried to get them to do computer repair for them. “we don’t do that.” Factory I worked out tried them. “We don’t do that” Friend needed keyboard repaired on laptop. “We don’t do that” I’m so convinced at this point that whenever I meet a local business owner I ask them who they use for any computer repair, and it’s always the same answer as to why they don’t use this one place, that’s a big store, in the only strip mall in town. They only have one dude in the store, who’s constantly got some right wing radio or YouTuber on. There’s no other employees, no reasonable way they’re affording the outrageous rent for such prime real estate. There aren’t many businesses in this town, and almost all of them use someone from the bigger city 35 minutes away

      On top of all of that, there used to be a Mexican grocery store in town (in the same parking lot, in fact) that never actually sold any food, and would always say they were closed if you walked in. They got shut down because they were apparently part of a group that was bringing in undocumented workers. The dude who owns the computer repair place is the cousin of the guy who owned the Mexican grocery store.

  • RememberTheApollo_@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Scientology isn’t a religion or a cult-like one - at least not for the top tier.

    It’s a doomsday cult disguised as a religion to be a tax dodge. Scientology has Gold Base and Trementina base among others, all bunkers. The famous people get money, tax free, donated to their “church”, and is used to fund doomsday bunkers.

  • Drunemeton@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.
  • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
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    3 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.

    • 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.

    • michaelmrose@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

  • toe@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

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

    • hperrin@lemmy.world
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      3 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.

    • FourPacketsOfPeanuts@lemmy.world
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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.

    • kamenLady.@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

      • arefx@lemmy.ml
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        3 months ago

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

    • Brewchin@lemmy.world
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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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    3 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.

      • MIDItheKID@lemmy.world
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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.

  • IMNOTCRAZYINSTITUTION@lemmy.world
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    the stargate movie/show is “plausible deniability” soft disclosure of the real thing. they “hang a lantern” on this fact with the wormhole xtreme gag in the show.

    • Fades@lemmy.world
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      There really is a base under Cheyanne mountain and the US gov does indeed have a program that was named Stargate too :)

    • Agent641@lemmy.world
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      Along the same lines, the X-Files was saturated with silly stuff and some real shit just to muddy the waters. X-Files producer had FBI and military advisors. But that’s not the real conspiracy. The producer actually had a secret whistleblower advisor who was ex NSA who fed him real world storylines about dodgy shit the US govt was doing. Any time that they tried to censor the show, the producers were like “It’s ok, the liaisons said to run it.”

    • CheeseNoodle@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      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.

  • RegalPotoo@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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

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    3 months ago

    When windows has updated and needs to restart it purposefully gets a bit slower/buggy to make people restart the PC.

    • hactar42@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      I completely believe this. If I let my Surface Pro go too long the facial recognition will stop working and the little white light at the top will not turn off. The only fix is to reboot and let it finish updating.

    • ByteOnBikes@slrpnk.net
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      After Apple admitted they purposely slow their older tech to encourage people to buy newer versions, Im absolutely on this crazy train that there’s definitely a command to make things slower.

      • bi_tux@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        every programming language got something to slow your programm down on purpose (it has legitimate use cases) in rust that would be thread::sleep(Duration::from_secs_f32(0.025))

  • USNWoodwork@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Anti-perspirant causes breast cancer. You look at data for Japan back in the 90’s-2000s and breast cancer was like 80 times less prevalent in Japan vs the US. Now Japanese are starting to use it more and breast cancer instances are raising to be more on-par with the US. The NIH did a study that was inconclusive so everyone assumes its not true. However, if you read the study you realize exactly how inconclusive it is, and that the answer was truly more along the lines of: “We don’t know”.

  • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    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.

  • Andrew@piefed.social
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    3 months ago

    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)

    • Carrolade@lemmy.world
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      I can see instance shopping to find the perfect one, a week is about how long it takes to get a good sense of the local community. Too bad about the lost content though.

    • WindyRebel@lemmy.world
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      What does this mean? What is 101 and 911? I understand 101 to be the basic information of a course and 911 to be the number for emergencies. I’m trying to understand what you wrote here.