• partial_accumen@lemmy.world
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    5 months 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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      5 months 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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        5 months 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.

    • sandwich.make(bathing_in_bismuth)@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months 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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    5 months 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.

  • Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months 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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      5 months 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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      5 months 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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    5 months 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

    • tiredofsametab@fedia.io
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      5 months 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.

  • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
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    5 months ago

    The way literature is taught in school is designed deliberately to make people hate reading + studying the subtext and paratext.

    By forcing kids to read books that aren’t just old, but were written by 40 year olds for other 40 year olds, and then mandating them write reports about the symbolism of a book they didn’t even want to read in the first place, you ensure that like 80% of people will inherently associate reading and interpreting media with every negative emotion at once.

    Meanwhile you look at fandom dorks on every site and you see how invested on themes and subtext they are, and you realise people kinda naturally want to overthink media… Provided they like that media.

    But people who can read subtext and understand it are less susceptible to propaganda. So.

    • Olgratin_Magmatoe@slrpnk.net
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      5 months ago

      This one resonates with me. I fucking love science fiction, and when they forced me to read The Giver, the closest they every got to science fiction, I actually enjoyed it. And then the rest of the time I hated it all.

      If I had actually been given the chance to read some good science fiction, I would have been reading a lot more as a kid.

      • Count Regal Inkwell@pawb.social
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        5 months ago

        Right?

        With hindsight, now being more or less the target audience (a 30+ year old disillusioned with life) – A lot of the books they pushed on us (I’m in Brazil, so of course they pushed the Brazilian canon of Literature) were objectively super good?

        But y’know

        When you’re 15 years old, and have to read a book that is not only very old (thus has a vocabulary you are already struggling with, just because OLD), but is written by grown-ups for grown-ups (ergo, a lot of the fun leans on heightened versions of life experiences adults have all either lived or seen someone live through) – AND you have to do it in a hurry (because you’ve got like 4 other assignments for that week, and the deadline looms) – AND you are expected to not only get into the nitty-gritty of its themes and such, but to do so in a way that your teacher approves of?

        Like how can you not hate reading after that? I was lucky I’d been exposed to literature I liked prior to that, so instead of thinking “I hate books”, I just thought “wow all these books suck”.

        They didn’t suck. But they just… Were very much not for me?

        Like. Senhora, by José de Alencar, is a deeply enjoyable book if you’re a grown up. Two rich people who married for money and hate each other’s guts, playing the perfect husband and wife to society while shooting subtle barbs at each other whenever they get the chance? AND then they end up fond of each other after years of this? Inject that into my 30-year-old historical-romance junkie EYEBALLS please. But at age 15? I hated it.

    • otp@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      I grew up in Canada.

      My high school English teacher let us choose books to write essays on from a selection of a dozen or so that he was intimately familiar with and could tell whether someone was BSing or not.

      I don’t remember all of them, but I chose The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I also remember reading 1984 in his class.

    • wraithcoop@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      There’s a great book “The Mathematician’s Lament” that talks about how math teaching is almost guaranteed to make people hate it, but it’s maybe not a conspiracy. Or is it!?

  • chunes@lemmy.world
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    5 months 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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      5 months 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@feddit.uk
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        5 months 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.

      • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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        5 months 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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          5 months 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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            5 months 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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              5 months 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.

      • jcr@jlai.lu
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        5 months ago

        Industrial grade switches (i.e.: buttons) are expensive because of very high quality control requirements, and add a lot more parts that can fail to a car. It is the same thing that happened with mobile phones. Going with touchscreen reduce a lot the number of parts to check and parts that can fail, even if usability is very bad for the end-user.

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    5 months 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.

  • Sterile_Technique@lemmy.world
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    5 months 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.

    • yermaw@sh.itjust.works
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      5 months ago

      It probably is the cleanest part in the whole restroom. Im not looking to put my ass anywhere else either though. You’re fully right get it built.

  • MTK@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    Cats have a much more complex understanding of human behaviour and just consider us harmless and boring enough to not bother.

    As in your cat totally understands that your keyboard is special in a way and you don’t want it disturbed, but couldn’t give two shits about your wants. Or completely being aware of how unpleasant it is when they sit on you with their butthole in your face, but why not if that’s what they want to do right now?

    I think this is real and that most (not all) cats are smarter and more selfish than we think

    • potoooooooo ☑️@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Dogs are waaaaay more aware than most people seem to think. I think it’s true of most animals. We just don’t like to think about it.

      • MrsDoyle@sh.itjust.works
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        5 months ago

        I stayed out later than normal one time and missed one of my dog’s walks. He tore up a newspaper while staring at me. Rip, rip, rip. He knew I spent time looking at newspapers so he chose to destroy one, while heavily implying that if I fucked up his schedule again he would rip ME up.

      • w3dd1e@lemmy.zip
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        5 months ago

        This. My dog knows words that I didn’t teach him. I know people talk about pattern recognition and what not but that’s not all that different than human knowledge. I learn words by hearing them repeated too

        I know how to read his body language and the tone of his barks to know what he wants. He will even show me, if I ask him.

        I suspect he understands a lot more than I am capable of deciphering as well.

        • Hugin@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          My dogs know the difference between going out pants and around the house pants. We also have to say preambulate when talking about walks unless we want to excite the dogs.

      • Denjin@lemmings.world
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        5 months ago

        Dogs brains activate the same regions when the see human faces that activate in our brains. These same regions don’t activate in dogs to anything like the same degree when they see other dogs.

        Dogs are far more in tune with us that they are with their own species.

        Some of the oldest human archaeological sites have dog remains among the humans. Domestication of the dog was going on far far earlier than the first evidence we have for domestication of the first food species.

        We have evolved together as two mutually symbiotic species.

        • otp@sh.itjust.works
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          5 months ago

          These same regions don’t activate in dogs to anything like the same degree when they see other dogs.

          Probably because they use scent more than sight for being in tune with their own species.

          • Hugin@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Sent is just an id for dogs. They use body language with humans and other dogs. They also pay attention to threw same parts of human faces that we do. They don’t do this with other dog faces.

            • otp@sh.itjust.works
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              5 months ago

              Scent is how dogs (generally) primarily experience the world.

              They don’t do this with other dog faces.

              Because dogs don’t use their faces the same way that humans do

              • Hugin@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                Dogs use scent more then humans. However they still use sight and sound much morfe then they use scent.

                Dogs use body language and vocalization to communicate with each other. Watch two dogs interact they look at each other and will growl, and bristle or tail wag and play bow to indicate what they want.

                They look at faces on humans because that’s a major component of how we communicate.

                Smell is not how they communicate. It’s just how they know where other animals have been.

      • MTK@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        I agree, but that’s not a conspiracy. Scientifically speaking, we know that animals are smarter than most people admit.

        The conspiracy here is that cats are not just smarter than we think but actually one of the smarter animals in general and they are also very internal and just don’t care about us so they don’t exhibit it in ways that we recognize.

    • RebekahWSD@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Some cats are extremely smart and very devious (looking at you, mother’s cat) and some are. Well. I love them. But I’ve met cats that absolutely had nothing going on upstairs, not a single thought in their little brains.

      That’s rare though! Most are pretty smart and know how to convince us to do everything for them! And I always will do my best for them.

    • Stalinwolf@lemmy.ca
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      5 months ago

      I’ve always said that people who think cats are simple or ratty/skittish creatures have never laid with a loving cat on their chest. There are few deeper connections that a good owner and a well-loved cat. They are exceptionally bright animals.

  • magnetosphere@fedia.io
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    5 months 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.worksBanned from community
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      5 months ago

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

    • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      5 months ago

      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.

        • ArcaneSlime@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          5 months ago

          “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@sh.itjust.works
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    5 months ago

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

        • jeffw@lemmy.world
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          5 months 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)

    • cymbal_king@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      The majority of US federal agriculture subsidies go to corn production, the majority of corn production is for live stock feed. Anybody who brings up spending that money on vegetables or basically anything other than corn gets silenced pretty quick