• partial_accumen
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    10615 days ago

    Every year the government takes 1 hour away from every American with the implementation of Daylight savings time. They return the hours to each American in the fall. However, in between March (when the hours are taken) and November (when the hours are returned) over 2 million Americans die, and don’t get their hours returned to them, or their estates. This happens every. single. year.

    What is the government doing with all of these stockpiled hours of dead Americans?

    • @thericofactor@sh.itjust.works
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      1715 days ago

      Before people started measuring time, a day was a day. People worked when they felt like it and stopped before it got dark.

      When we started quantifying time, it didn’t take long before time suddenly became a commodity. All of a sudden bosses would pay by the “hour”, and no longer by what they got in return.

      Then, they started regarding the hours that they paid for as “theirs”, demanding workers to keep breaks short or peeing in bottles.

      /Rant

      • @hansolo@sh.itjust.works
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        1714 days ago

        I love when I see stuff like this online. As if farming is some luxurious fun time denied us by corporations.

        I lived in a subsistence farming community in West Africa for a couple years. Farming isn’t easy or fun.

        People woke up before the sun every.single.day to go tend to the fields. They stopped working when they were exhausted from being out in the sun all day, or when they were finished with the field. The crops and the weeds grow when they want, not when you want.

        If it didn’t rain enough, they might starve, or their children might starve. Maybe both. The backbreaking farm labor was literally a gamble with their lives. Occasionally someone would get whacked by a tool and have to ask friends and relatives to farm their crops for them, often at a cost of some of that grain later. If that injury got infected, there’s extra days or weeks you’re asking someone else to do extra work to cover for you, and you owe them for this.

        Everyone harvested crops at about the same time, flooding the market. But people also didn’t just want to eat millet alone and wanted things like cooking oil or salt they had to buy. So being strapped for cash, they were forced to sell a lot of harvest up front because they simply couldn’t afford to wait any longer for basic needs.

        I can go on and on, but if you think being a farmer is so wonderful and amazing, I would encourage you to go do some WWOOFing and spend a few months on a farm and actually doing a real farmer’s schedule and not some up at 9, done at 2:30 schedule.

    • console.log(bathing_in_bismuth)
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      515 days ago

      Those two million all happened to be born after daylight savings time but before the hours are returned. So they get to live with an extra hour.

      When they die it cancels out thus the Big Time Bowl doesn’t overflow or run dry.

  • @mriswith@lemmy.world
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    15 days ago

    That NASA has done a zero-gravity intercourse experiment.

    The 50th shuttle mission had married couple and it included spacelab. A pressurized and habitable module that could be isolated from the rest of the crew. Even before launch they were asked if it would happen, and denied it, as NASA has afterwards as well.

    It doesn’t help that several of the listed experiments was about human health, developmental biology and included animals and eggs to study ovulation, fertilization, cell division and growth.

    • @hefejefe@lemmy.world
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      1515 days ago

      Now that you bring it up, of course we’ve studied whether babies can be made in a spaceship. It’s literally the only other option for interstellar travel besides cryogenic freezing, which is far more sci-fi than spacesex. Or spacex for short.

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)
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        414 days ago

        Any generational ship will mutiny within one generation and likely die off by the second

        Interstellar travel is a pipe dream made up by people tired of saving what we already are losing

          • Angry_Autist (he/him)
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            214 days ago

            We can’t even keep the most prosperous nation on the planet from falling to fascism in 5 years how the FUCk do you think we’re gonna keep an isolated crew of highly intelligent people with access to the highest tech available?

            I know enough about human nature that the only way this works is if it started as a die-hard authoritarian religious movement and even then I only give it 1 out of 4 chances of making it 100 years into the mission

          • Angry_Autist (he/him)
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            -113 days ago

            You really don’t want to go down that line with a guy on the spectrum that has spent literally half a century thinking about space travel. You really don’t.

  • @Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works
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    5915 days ago

    I think the US government actively encouraged the UFO craze, because it drew attention away from the experimental aircraft they were testing, like the SR-71 blackbird.

    • @mriswith@lemmy.world
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      4115 days ago

      They’ve admitted that.

      Someone at Pentagon was recently investigating UFO conspiracies and found that several kept looping back to them. And they realized that at least one was directly planted by themselves during the cold war to confuse the USSR about what weapons were real or not.

    • @Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      15 days ago

      That honestly wouldn’t surprise me tbh. And area 51 being great conditions for testing aircraft: empty space, clear skies, easier to recover parts and people from than the ocean, very little human habitation.

  • @zlatiah@lemmy.world
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    5815 days ago

    Arcade rhythm games (DDR, Pump It Up, maimai, etc) are subsidized by the Japanese government to get Otakus/NEETs to go out, touch grass, and exercise

    Have you ever wondered why you can have 10-15 minutes of game time for the same amount of money as one (sometimes half) a pull on a claw machine?? /puts on tinfoil hat

      • @zlatiah@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        I know a good number of Japanese cultural stuff (including video game companies) do! Not sure specifically in cases like “hey let’s give SEGA money so they can make the funny laundromat game more popular” though. Hence why it is my low-stakes conspiracy… Would be pretty cool if things like DDR really gets a subsidy though, it is genuinely a good means of cardio

        • missingno
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          114 days ago

          Honestly that’s a good enough idea that I don’t think it even needs to be a conspiracy, they could openly advertise it.

    • tiredofsametab
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      214 days ago

      That wouldn’t generally be needed here, though. At least in the cities where most people live, they are walking and using public transit just to live, eat, etc.

  • Scrubbles
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    3815 days ago

    That a lot of non-american food is rebranded to use tacky american names to get people to try it. Too many americans are afraid to try “foreign” food, but will happily try “Cajun Jim’s Cornballs”. A couple I can think of are Aioli to “Garlic Mayo” and Chicken Satay becoming “Peanut Butter Chicken”. Sounds like mm mm good home american cookin’ to me, course I’ll try some.

  • themeatbridge
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    3615 days ago

    Touch screens in cars are evidence that the auto industry is actively trying to increase auto accidents.

      • @NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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        915 days ago

        Is that true? I’m too scared to look up prices. Electronically, touchscreens are infinitely more complex, but I can believe economies of scale brought it down lower than buttons… I just don’t want to believe that.

        • @Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works
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          1315 days ago

          I’ve seen comments from auto manufacturers outright stating this. I think they also overestimated how much consumers care about touchscreens.

          • @Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works
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            14 days ago

            Pretty much no button these days directly controls something, it’s routed through the BMS. Headlights may be one of the few that are switched without some type of computer in between, possibly power windows too?

            And they’re all on a PCB.

            • @Ageroth@reddthat.com
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              314 days ago

              Even so, each individual button needs to be connected to that PCB separately, and will only have the function of what it says on the button, or possibly a couple hidden functions through programming.
              Touch screens are essentially one connection for infinite buttons with different screens and menus.

        • @jeffw@lemmy.world
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          214 days ago

          If we turned all of global beef demand into grass-fed, we’d literally decimate our output because there’s not enough grazable land.

          Even land categorized as agriculturally grazable is often not realistically grazable (think mountains, etc)

        • Fun fact: the Native Americans that originally created the various and sundry types of corn that we have called themselves, “Walking Maize People.” We’ve analyzed their bones and found that the specific type of carbon that corn “tags” as its own ion, made up about 30-40% of the carbon in their bones, and presumably their bodies.

          Due to the fact that corn is added to almost everything that is in the US food chain, when similar analysis has been done to average US citizens, more like 60-70% of the carbon in our bodies comes from corn. We “paint” fruits and veggies with corn, we add corn as sugar to all soda, we add corn to some breads for no reason. We, the citizens of the US, are walking corn.

  • @Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    I’ve seen studies claiming that toilet seats are among the cleanest spots in a public restroom, and that slamming your bare ass cheeks down on those things is perfectly safe.

    I also work in an operating room, where we routinely chop condyloma off of people’s ass cheeks… albeit less commonly the cheeks than the hole, but enough times to showcase the fact that the cheeks are prone to spreading and contracting contact dependent pathogens.

    Those studies are bullshit - always build that toilet-paper-bird’s-nest on the public toilet seat.

     

    Edit - also if you get a skin tag that seems bigger than a normal skin tag, it’s probably not a skin tag. Get that shit looked at before it’s the size of a fucking golf ball. You’ll save yourself a lot of time, pain, money, and worry.

  • @chunes@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    Back when reddit had awards, the admins would routinely award posts to make it appear like people were actually buying them.

    • @Vegan_Joe@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      I thought this was common knowledge.

      I got awarded gold by a mod that told me they were gifted a certain number of awards from Reddit to give out (I believe they said they got 15).

      The same mod also claimed that gold-gifted responses were given prioritized visibility.

      • Hossenfeffer
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        313 days ago

        Can confirm. I was gifted a bunch of Reddit cash for… er… I dunno, being around for a long time maybe. I spent it on giving gold and silver to posts or comments I enjoyed, but I certainly wasn’t going to spend my actual money on it.

  • magnetosphere
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    2615 days ago

    The sanitation issues that happened at Chipotle in such quick succession a few years ago were corporate sabotage. At the time, Chipotle was the fastest growing chain in the U.S.

    • @rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works
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      1415 days ago

      Oh fuck yes. Qdoba undercover agents getting jobs at Chipotle for the express purpose of not washing their hands. I love it.

    • Imo they were sabotaging themselves with their lack of queso and still are with the poor distribution of ingredients in the burrito. I get my mexican food from real mexican restaurants, but even Moe’s is better than Chipotle and they should be ashamed of that.

        • “Holds a candle” better by far, and that’s an admonishment of Chipotle not an endorsement of Moe’s. Chipotle is the absolute worst cultural appropriation snax™ available, might as well go to taco bell.

  • FRYD
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    2515 days ago

    Toothpaste tubes and similar containers are intentionally designed to be inconvenient to get the full contents out of.

    • @rc__buggy@sh.itjust.works
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      1315 days ago

      But the toothpaste tube is literally the most efficient method to get all that paste in a hygenic manner. Toothpaste used to be Toothpowder. You’d dip your nasty fucking brush into the powder and scrub away. That’s pretty gross even if every individual has their own little can of tooth powder. Now imagine sharing that shit with your nasty fucking siblings.

      I mean, maybe you can buy a liter bucket of toothpaste. You would be able to get every last scrap but it might have mold on it after a year or so.

      The newer cosmetic (especially makeup) containers definitely hold back product. I’ve helped cut into many cosmetic containers as an emergency measure to use the last bit until a shopping trip can be accomplished and yeah, some of them hold a surprising amount of the product.

      Not the humble toothpaste tube though.

  • Angry_Autist (he/him)
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    2414 days ago

    Microsoft deliberately fucks with your video and audio drivers before a big update so you have to reboot

    This isn’t a conspiracy, it is a proven fact.

    • felsiq
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      414 days ago

      Does anyone have a source on this? It’s 100% believable but I’m not turning anything up and this seems like something worth knowing more about

    • @LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works
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      013 days ago

      I think it is more that the update fucks with drivers? As in, updates bring updated stuff that probably interferes with still-running old stuff.

      • Angry_Autist (he/him)
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        013 days ago

        If my experience is common, the update ‘pre-loads’ some non-locked system files as time goes on while the update is downloaded but not technically applied by the tool. So these files get changed without a reboot, and while you may not be using them at the time of overwrite, when you next load them, there are subtle incompatibilities with the previous version and your active data.

        Kind of like ‘The dll was replaced by the exe is still the old version’, and this causes a ton of small but annoying glitches, crashes, and odd audio behavior.

        Untill reboot, which happens less and less often now that windows doesn’t bluescreen every few hours.

        My conspiracy is that they are aware of it, and do not change it despite the risks it provides, to keep everyone in line with their update schedule, denying the user the rights to control their own hardware, again.

        • @LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works
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          -113 days ago

          To be fair, the very same thing happens with Linux, when you install updates but don’t restart services (or, god forbid, the whole system). Really weird tiny issues accumulate until I am fed up and hit reboot.

  • @sprite0@sh.itjust.works
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    14 days ago

    Okay I think Amtrak is not really remotely interested in providing a positive passenger rail experience, but is instead used by the automotive and railroad industry to provide a poor experience, ensuring that people keep buying cars and gas and keep the rail lines free for commercial usage.

    Here is my primary piece of evidence; in e-commerce web design to increase sales your goal is to remove barriers between a motivated customer and them clicking buy. A company the size of amtrak should have a decently sophisticated process of multi variable testing and focus groups to at least someehat improve the process over time and make it easy for people to plan route trips and buy tickets.

    And yet in the decades that Amtrak has been operating they user experience has barely changed and seems to do just the minimum to keep up with the times and not look stale. And it’s not an overly complicated item they are selling. A very small in house team would be able to make a very usable experience in just a couple of years. But it’s absolute shit. It’s so frustrating and to try and plan a train trip and it always has been, for absolutely no reason.

    Either this massive company has had absolute fools in charge of their web dev for decades leaving piles of money on the table due to incompetence… OR they actually just don’t care about making sales for whatever reason. I think that reason is that they exist just to keep the rail experience shitty.

    My secondary piece of evidence is how poor and shitty the actual train service remains after so long in business. Train travel has not gotten better at all in my lifetime, only worse.

    • @DempstersBox@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      Destroying amtrak is literally a republican agenda, for the automotive reasons you stated.

      Also, if you can spring for a sleeper car, the experience is fucking amazing. Three meals (and one boozy drink) included a day, there was a wine tasting, just all around pretty rad.

      • @sprite0@sh.itjust.works
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        14 days ago

        I have enjoyed the sleeper cars! I’m a fan of rail travel which is how i know that the user experience hasn’t changed in 30+ years!

        My favorite is the observation cars on the coast starlight.

        The trains are still infrequent, often not to schedule and with minimum available routes. Short hops are far too expensive for the experience you get as well. The only thing keeping Amtrak from working seems to be Amtrak.