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.
“Trad-wives” are the pick me girls’ final form. I think it’s also for women who want to do OnlyFans type work, but don’t want to be as risqué. It’s like soft core incel porn more than an actual depiction or celebration of maternity.
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.
The people who are responsible for the turtle with the straw in the nose video where from the paper straw company. That happened right before the corn plastic straws at the market and after the video all plastic straws were banned in most metropolitan areas, that banned the corn plastic “environmentally friendly” straws before they even hit the market. The paper straws have forever chemicals in them and are essentially Teflon coated so they’re not environmentally friendly at all.
When most ocean plastic comes from nets, it’s hard to disagree.
Honestly the obsession with single use plastic seems like a distraction. Every piece of plastic in landfill is oil that isn’t burnt.
Every price of plastic in the landfill is oil that was extracted, processed, and required oil burning to get processed. And we do that for something that will be used once. Plastic in the landfill is not a net positive.
Tiktok is a Chinese psyop to turn the next generation of Americans into drooling idiots.
I think that’s just a fact.
The previous generation probably said the same about MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc.
Let people enjoy what they enjoy. There will always be idiots everywhere, and TikTok emerging won’t suddenly make Americans dumber.
There’s a HUGE difference between tiktok and all of the sites you’ve posted. Wikipedia? The fuck are you on about?!
Maybe you’re not old enough to realise this, but for a long time Wikipedia was seen as being a dangerous site to learn from, because “anyone can edit it”.
Every generation goes through shit like this. Stop pretending that TikTok is special, and let people enjoy what they want to enjoy.
I’m almost 40. That reputation was only amongst teachers.
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complains about capitalist propaganda correctly identifies the ruling class proceeds to screech about evil tankies
Conspiracies like flat earth are put in the spotlight to make real conspiracies look stupid.
Tankies play a similar function in different context
Ooh, a spicy one for a place like 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.
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.
What always confuses me is why don’t they hire a few people that actually do repair and take the business? It seems like a simple way to keep the locals from getting suspicious.
In my Town Where i grew up there was such a store that hired someone to do the actual work. That went well, they hired more people, made money, expanded and stopped doing their illegal enterprise.
There used to be a very similar shop near me that was actually just a front for selling cannabis.
Its a money laundering operation for sure.
Couriers have tiny cameras all throughout my home and wait for me to go to the bathroom before they show up with my parcels.
Nah, they just have one, in the bathroom :)
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WafflePwn’s brother (the kid who tried shoving a remote up his ass because of Warcraft account cancellation) actually documented a true and genuine freakout. The parents forced the older brother to produce subsequent videos as a means of making it look like they were just making candid freakout videos all along, in order to protect the younger bother’s shattered public image (and probably social life).
Tinfoil hats on? Alrighty then:
All these Verizon outages are intentional and part of the plan to invalidate the 2024 election.
We’ll see it happen again on and around election day, maybe xitter will go down too.
Whole voting districts in Georgia won’t report in, citing system crashes, security breaches, whatever they feel like making up. Republican Secretaries of State will declare the election compromised before vote counting even starts.
Obviously there’s also a hurricane and massive flooding, hence the tinfoil hat, but let’s not forget where and when we are in history, and that The Business Plot was a real thing.
Music artists get paid to change their album titles.
Katy Perry released Prism to drown out Snowden’s revelations about the NSA Prism program
If you haven’t heard, there is a theory that the Frozen movies exist solely to make sure if you google disney frozen or any combination of that you are shown movie stuff instead of stories of Walt Disney being cryogenically frozen so he can live in the future.
In 2016, there were a bunch of creepy/killer clown sightings. At least in America it made the news pretty regularly. My conspiracy theory is that it started purely as Guerilla Marketing for the 2017 IT adaptation.
TBH ive always wanted to dress up like that and spook the shit out of the town I live in…
hope you don’t live in the US. It worked in 2016, but now… you will be shot in the fucking head.
eh probably not, i’ll do it in new york city where nobody owns guns. also won’t threaten people…
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.
“We oppress minorities to scare them away” is hardly a novel tactic
How is this a conspiracy, the whole red neck stereotype of “We don’t like your kind around here” shows how this has been part of common knowledge for a long time.
I’m not saying it’s obviously true, I’m saying I thought this was a popular belief.
Most politicians seem like grifters and change positions to whatever is popular with their base or donors though. So, it does seem like this is a part of some grand-plan. I don’t think many Republican politicians actually care about women’s sports or who uses which restroom, yet they manufacture outrage and campaign on it. This kind of stuff was on no “normal” person’s mind before media started focusing on it.
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.
If Cybertruck weren’t a thing, I might believe you.
This conspiracy can still be true, even if you assume Elon is an idiot.
Both can be true. He can be an idiot who got paid to destroy Twitter.
Okay, my conspiracy is that this is a conspiracy by Elon so people think he’s an evil genius instead of the bumbling, idea-stealing moron with an inflated budget that he really is.
The only reason Bluesky isn’t more active is because it isn’t as active, which is becoming less of an issue by the day. And I STILL see activists gathering on twitter.
People who thinks musk, trump, putin etc are stupid are … stupid I guess.
They usually have mental problems like narcissism or psycopathy and lack all kind of feelings but stupid? No.
No, they can be all those things at the same time. Heck, it helps to be all three.
It was narcissism that made Musk want to buy twitter, but stupidity that made him think it would stop people from mocking him. And he came up with naming it X, so that’s more evidence.
The only reason the world didn’t realise he was an idiot sooner was because he had enough money to buy the ideas of smarter people.
You seriously think it bothers billionaires what you think about them?
I don’t.
I think everyone would rather be adored than mocked.
Hubris is stupidity, and billionaires have a ton of hubris. Titanic sub, remember? Bet their lives on their hubris
If something looks, walks, barks and smells like a dog, chances are, it’s a dog.
The world is complicated enough as is, no need to make it more complicated.
The world is complicated enough as is, no need to make it more complicated.
But my dude, that is what conspiracy theories are for.
Fair.
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.
no, you don’t understand, the feds invented the perpetum mobile, birds only sit on power lines to confuse people like you!
Windows, Android, & Apple software used to nag you about installing updates endlessly. They don’t do that so much anymore. I think it’s because instead of alerts asking us to install updates, they now create network outages, software crashes, and other minor issues that require a restart. How often do you have some inexplicable problem, restart your device to fix it, and your machine is like “Hey while we’re in there we’re also installing this update we just downloaded a moment ago.”
The number of updates I’ve seen on my phone has decreased because it’s old enough to be done with feature updates. I got out of Windows before it got that bad.
Something I don’t miss from Windows was each app was responsible for its own updates, so you’d sit down to draw something in CAD or whatever and it would say “need to update to continue” so you’d have to sit there listening to the fans whine for a few minutes before you could start. This still happens occasionally on Linux because some software is just the Windows version running in some compatibility layer or something, but it happens a lot less because the package manager handles all that at once.
