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.

  • 2ugly2live@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    “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.

  • Lianodel@ttrpg.network
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    11 days ago

    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.

    • Zanz@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      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.

    • RobotToaster@mander.xyz
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      10 days ago

      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.

      • Javi_in_4k@lemm.ee
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        10 days ago

        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.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      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.

      • Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        10 days ago

        There’s a HUGE difference between tiktok and all of the sites you’ve posted. Wikipedia? The fuck are you on about?!

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          10 days ago

          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.

  • Thrillhouse@lemmy.world
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    11 days 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.

    • Dharma Curious (he/him)@slrpnk.net
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      11 days ago

      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.

      • GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world
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        11 days ago

        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.

        • Majestix@lemmy.world
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          11 days ago

          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.

  • LunchMoneyThief@links.hackliberty.org
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    10 days ago

    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).

  • Linkerbaan@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

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

  • 01011@monero.town
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    10 days ago

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

  • Illuminostro@lemmy.world
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    11 days ago

    The removal of The Fairness Doctrine was a deliberate psyop of The Monied Elite to dumb down the general populace of the US to accept Capitalist propaganda and rule. Well, it’s not a conspiracy theory, it’s fact. Then we were bombarded by blatant capitalist propaganda for 50 years. But, but, the worst aim was to condition the general populace to casual cruelty as entertainment.

    Witness how Congress has degenerated into The Jerry Springer Show and Judge Judy. And half of the populace think it’s funny, and there’s nothing wrong with it. Republican politicians daily lie their asses off, and there are no consequences. An entitled, malignant narcissistic psychopath is worshipped as a demigod. Congregations who watch Fox every night are literally telling their preachers/priests/pastors that Jesus is a woke pussy. That’s not opinion, it’s a fact.

    I recall reading that Goering and Goebbels both stated that a lie that is repeated enough times becomes truth in the zeitgeist. This country is in big trouble, and I think the Heritage and Federalist stacked SCOTUS is going to appoint Trump King due to an avalanche of upcoming election lawsuits.

    This country was established by rich men who didn’t want to pay taxes. But, some good things came from it. That you could speak to power without the fear of retribution. That a religious entity could not punish you arbitrarily on a whim. That the rich could not pass on their wealth and power to scions without penalty. That this country would not be ruled by a blatant aristocracy and monarchy.

    I will not live in a Trump Theocratic Oligarchy. I’m an old man, with no wife and no kids. Do what you have to do, and leave if you can. The writing is on the wall. I don’t know how much more you need to see and know to wise up, but it’s here, right in your face.

  • throbbing_banjo@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    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.

  • KoboldCoterie@pawb.social
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    11 days ago

    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.

    • Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works
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      10 days ago

      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.

      • 31337@sh.itjust.works
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        9 days ago

        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.

  • mostNONheinous@lemmy.world
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    10 days ago

    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.

    • mostNONheinous@lemmy.world
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      10 days ago

      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.

  • SkyezOpen@lemmy.world
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    11 days 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.

  • CookieOfFortune@lemmy.world
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    11 days 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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      11 days 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.

    • Illuminostro@lemmy.world
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      11 days ago

      Credit card companies do the same thing. They know the poors can’t afford to fight them. They do probe tests occasionally to see what the peasants will do.