an open conspiracy is still a conspiracy.

US military hegemony isn’t a conspiracy, it’s a popular public policy

NDAA authorizing almost a trillion dollars to the military industrial complex

Congress authorizes it. I guess you could just put “Congress” on the list. Or maybe “The Pentagon”.

Hundreds of thousands of civilians have died by US bombing in the last fifty years.

With Iran, Syria, and Yemen you could probably get to 100k in one or two years.

Nevermind our airstrikes across Latin America, the various African states, and our collaborations with Israel in Gaza.

Hell, the US can take credit for quite a few kills in Ukraine thanks to our long standing policy of playing both ends against the middle.

But you don’t get all that out of “The NDAA exists”. We’ve been passing NDAAs since The Korean War without hitting this level of mass slaughter.

I don’t think “pernicious” would describe the NDAA, no.

I mean, some of them are vague to the point of being banal. The NDAA is just the bi-annual Congressional requirement to reauthorize US military operations abroad.

Why would anyone have that marked out as a conspiracy theory on the level of MK Ultra or Operation Northwoods? No reason you’d recognize the acronym as such.

Like the man himself or the whole assassination conspiracy theory thing?

Plenty of compelling evidence to believe Kennedy was murdered at the order of ex-CIA Director Allen Dulles. Even if you don’t want to go all the way down that rabbit hole, though, there’s even more evidence to suspect Kennedy’s secret service fucked up on the job - both in the planning of the parade and in the initial response to gunfire. The “magic bullet” thesis has a number of much more believable counter-explanations, not the least being Kennedy’s security detail firing blindly from inside the car and hitting the President by mistake.

Also, very deep CIA and mafia connections specifically running through New Orleans in the 1960s, such that letting Lee Harvey Oswald spill his guts would be bad for mission security, even if he had just been a lone gunman.

However you slice the Kennedy assassination, there’s plenty of big blind spots in the story where speculation runs rampant. And those blind spots are almost certainly the result of embarrassed/implicated state officials involved in some level of cover-up.

shit like MK Ultra actually and provably happened

The downwind implications of MK Ultra get incredibly muddy. It’s one thing to say “the US government was experimenting with psychedelics” and quite another to claim “The Manson Murders were orchestrated as a domestic terrorist event intended to crush the hippie movement in California and elect Ronald Reagan.”

You could say the same about the Gulf of Tonkin. Was this an American Navy vessel crew that fucked up by accident? Or a deliberate false flag intended to bring the US into Vietnam?

Bohemian Grove is another one you can take extremely deep. It gets brought up alongside Comet Ping Pong Pizza in the “elites are eating babies to stay young forever” conspiracies.

Part of the problem with this list is that you can take any item on it and flip it like a coin to get “mundane rational accusations of impropriety” on one side and “wildly speculative deep lore of a fascist puppeteer regime controlling the country” on the other.

The used car market imploded when vehicle production dried up after 2008

This is the famous “Loo With A View” taken from a high end restaurant in Paris, incidentally.

Peak Shitpost. A++. Would expect to see it reposted again.

You will never own an EV for under $80k

Putting on my D.A.R.E. T-shirt and clutching my state issued copy of the Ten Commandments and snapping an Amazon Ring Camera on my front door, so I help the state identify any of those nasty, America hating Antifa I’ve been hearing so much about.

I’m helping!

“You’ll never own another computer cheaper than $500”

Chinese tech firms produce high end computers for less than $500

“SANCTION! TARIFF! EMBARGO!”

Apologies if I’ve touched a nerve.

Again, not clear how the US plans to neutralize long range missile capability of Iran.

Target the depots and destroy them with artillery.

You quite literally have no clue regarding the subject you’re opining on here.

This was established decades ago in excersises the US has been running since the Cold War Era.

The goal isn’t to defeat Iran in a quick war, but to neutralize the nation’s long range artillery and turn it into a free fire zone for American and Israel armies.

Ukraine isn’t Iran. It has a firm rear guard of support from the NATO block, supply lines that can re-arm and re-staff depleted arsenals and positions along the eastern front, and allied agencies ready to pick at Russia’s flanks - by seizing cargo shipping, assassinating ranking political leadership, and blowing up critical domestic infrastructure.

What the Iranians lack, at the end of the day, is friends. Nobody in the Russian, Pakistani, or Chinese government is going to send saboteurs into Israel on their behalf. Nobody is going to help them keep the Straight of Hormuz shuttered. Nobody is going to blow up Saudi desalination plants or bomb peripheral American military bases.

Once Iran military can no longer produce and deploy new ballistic missiles, the country just becomes target practice for its enemies. We (probably) won’t see a Rumsfeld-style blitz into Tehran, like they managed in Baghdad. But we will see Iranian airspace closed, critical infrastructure destroyed, and population centers targeted to effectively break up the political face of Iran into its component parts.

What becomes of a nation without a central bureaucracy, an intercity municipal system, or a functional electrical grid? This was a country already in a water crisis months ago. It is a nation functionally under siege by the most sadistic and savage militaries in history. People are going to die by the millions before this is over, simply due to disease, drought, and famine. It’s going to be a country the size of Germany experiencing what Israel has done to Gaza.

Quite literally bombed into the Stone Age.

I can explain in basic terms what is happening there. Does that help anybody?

Really depends on where the bug lives.

I would argue that it doesn’t because almost everyone writes code in higher level languages.

Most people write mediocre code. A lot of people right shit code. One reason why a particular application or function runs faster than another is due to the compilation of the high level language into assembly. Understanding how higher level languages translate down into lower level logic helps to reveal points in the code that are inefficient.

Just from a Big-O notation level, knowing when you’ve moved yourself from an O(n log n) to a O(n²) complexity is critical to writing efficiently. Knowing when you’re running into caching issues and butting up against processing limits informs how you delegate system resources. This doesn’t even have to go all the way to programming, either. A classic problem in old Excel and Notepad was excess text impacting whether you could even open the files properly. Understanding the underlying limits of your system is fundamental to using it properly.

Similarly, I could explain to you how long division works but the next time you need to divide two numbers you’re still going to reach for a calculator instead of a pencil and paper.

Knowing how to do long division is useful in validating the results of a calculator. People mistype values all the time. And whether they take the result at face value or double-check their work hinges on their ability to intuit whether the result matches their expectations. When I thought I typed 4/5 into a calculator and get back 1.2, I know I made a mistake without having to know the true correct answer.

One of the cruelest tricks in the math exam playbook is to include mistyped solutions into the multiple choice options.

What then is the point of lamenting the loss of knowledge that no one uses directly?

It’s not lamenting the loss of knowledge, but the inability to independently validate truth.

Without an underlying understanding of a system, what you have isn’t a technology but a religion.

I think the plan is to have Iran’s arsenal of ballistic missiles demolished before then.

You’re better for it.

The majority of posters are indistinguishable from bots

You’re not missing anything. Reddit is the embodiment of Empty Internet Theory. If you’re a human posting on that site, you’re a statistical anomaly. And not for long, because everyone’s getting booted.

Well, like with the Netflix question, you can keep going deeper until you hit the unknown. At some point, the person asking the question doesn’t know the questions to ask to get to that next level, though.

Stupid cephalopods. Learn to breed without dying, idiots!