• beer
• red bull
• aspirin
• tacos

I don’t do deep packet inspection on Lemmy traffic, nor am I a behavioral analyst. I simply think it stands to reason that if there are organizations who are capable of running influence campaigns that Lemmy would be a natural target. Any online forum is potentially at risk of targeted disinformation campaigns. I don’t apply this logic on an individual basis, because witch hunts are just as counterproductive as being overly credulous. But I have a pretty simple razor that if someone is trying to incite me to violence, meet offline, or divulge personally identifying information I should block them whether or not they’re some kind of operative.

I think there’s a motive. If I were the FBI I wouldn’t be too concerned about actual violent outcomes, so long as they were lone wolf attacks or the product of tiny cells of radicals. It’s like a controlled burn in a forest. You get the fire out of the way before it reaches a critical mass. “Voting doesn’t work, burn down a government building” is a real hard sell to someone with a stable job, but the people it does sell to might one day be the types of people to organize and lead a meaningful opposition. So you flush them out early and fast. Some people might die, but Director Patel told me to catch leftists, not to prevent violence. As an added bonus, each violent act turns liberals more and more against what they perceive as an inherently violent ideology. “These are terrible times, and maybe if it prevents another bombing mass surveillance is acceptable even if I don’t like it,” they might think. You don’t have to go back too far to see that mindset in action. In the aftermath of 9/11 Americans saw an unprecedented erosion of their civil liberties. Terror is good for an autocratic regime.

That being said, I will grant that there’s no evidence of this. But then again there wasn’t evidence of COINTELPRO until the FBI field office in Media PA got broken into by a group of concerned citizens. Not that I’m condoning B&E. I also don’t think it would be productive to point fingers even if there were evidence the FBI was doing COINTELPRO 2. “So and so is a fed” is actually one of the tactics used in COINTELPRO to sow discord in infiltrated groups. Just, maybe we should keep in mind that we’re bound to see some discourse here that is trying to get us to play a useful idiot.

The difference between me and a conspiracy theorist is that I can point at past evidence. COINTELPRO is a historical fact, and part of that program involved infiltrating dissident groups and acting as agents provocateur. The Church committee found that the FBI engaged in “covert action designed to disrupt and discredit the activities of groups and individuals deemed a threat to the social order.” The committee also found that the tactics employed by the FBI “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity.”

I am not saying the FBI is definitely here now. What I am saying is it would be naïve to assume that they would not be willing to run an influence operation on public forums where people skeptical of the US government gather, and it would be foolish to assume that nobody else is carrying out similar operations for their own respective interests, state-level or otherwise.

Mastodon isn’t American either and they still seized a Koliktiva server. Jurisdiction nothing. They can’t arrest you, that doesn’t mean they don’t have an interest in influencing you. And they’re one group of many who has an interest in running influence operations. Fuck dude, it could be Russia, it could be Mossad, it could be GISS. The barrier to entry is so low these days.

Lemmy is big enough to be a psyop target and has been for a while. This place is rife with feds and bots of every persuasion and they will try to influence you from every angle. As Lemmy grows it will only get worse. It’s easy to brush off pushback for criticizing nation states but also be aware that the FBI in particular has a history of trying to push people towards violent radicalism and in person meetups. Do not trust anyone online. Especially if they agree with you politically.

Bad Lieutenant II. If you dont like it we can still be friends, but the harder you judge me for liking it the funnier it gets.

i will never understand why people find it so difficult to prepare and eat avocado.

1. Slice and twist
2. Whack the pit and twist
3. Spoon

And yet people struggle. Many go to the hospital. Why? Why is this so hard?

Not the first time…

Genovia is a critical friend and ally to the United States. I stand with Genovia, both because of our shared values, which are so fundamental to the founding of both our nations, and I believe the bonds between the people of the United States and the people of Genovia are unbreakable, and we can never let anyone drive a wedge between us.

begging for meaningful action regarding how bright outdoor led displays can be at night. Forbskme of them its like they bottled the sun

What?

yes, and? Your desire to have a big hecking floofy pupper who is just soooo happy and needs to share with everyone at 5 in the morning does not override my reasonable expectation of being able to sleep during quiet hours.

i wonder why she does not have basic skills

Hasn’t that cat done enough for quantum mechanics?

Yeah, but you said you tip 5% for below average service. Are you aware of the state of the kitchen, the state of the dish pit, or the state of the running side work at all times? Because if you’re not, you have, at some point, stiffed a competent somebody doing their level best to keep the establishment from burning to the ground.

Depends on the pay structure. Tip outs at some places get high, maybe even 10% of total sales. Which would mean 2/3 of your generous 15% tip goes to the kitchen, or the busboy, or whoever, regardless of how much your server had to harangue them into doing their jobs or how much verbal abuse everyone had to endure in the process. Which, as a former server, yes, is part of the job.

If you tip 5% at a place that tips out higher than 5%, guess where the difference comes from. If you guessed the server’s own share of the tip pool, you get a cookie. Sometimes, nothing is in fact better than something.

So why don’t they just get another job? It’s fuckin hard out there, man, maybe they’re trying. You don’t know. It took yours truly 2 years to escape the industry, and I still have a foot planted there because i took a pay cut to do it. I can almost guarantee I make less money than you if you can afford to eat out more than, like, once a month.

And don’t even get me started on the servers who do make beaucoup bucks. They don’t get there on their own, they do it by shirking their side duties, taking a bigger slice of the pie, and “delegating” to their peers, which management loves because it’s “team service.” Granted, the restaurant I worked at was a shitty place to work, but that’s not exactly rare.

So what does this all point to? Tipping sucks, but trying to fight it by tipping less really only hurts the face you see.

As someone who’s worked in a restaurant, they probably wouldn’t fuck with your food. You might end up waiting a while for drinks, though.

a while ago, I wanna say 2010ish, the new CEO of JCPenney had a bold new vision for the brand. Instead of things being marked up and then perpetually “on sale,” what if they just… marked things as the price they are? Sales collapsed by 25% and the company lost a billion dollars in a single year.

There is a reason things are the way they are, no matter how stupid they look. Consumer psychology is a trip.

Edit: and the thing is this probably works on the reader of this comment as well. Consumers, when asked, will say they prefer transparent pricing structures. But their real world behavior is the exact opposite.

I have noticed that occasionally the nitpicking collides with poor reading comprehension to create some of the most annoying yet hilarious comments ever.

So like the reply ITT would be something like uh yeah op sounds like a you problem, that’s completely fucking false about lemmy. People take things way too seriously here, and everybody is way too nitpicky and judgemental.