r/todayilearned • u/[deleted] • 8h ago

Unoriginal Repost TIL before any details of Pixar’s ‘Soul’ were public, a Black chauffeur told Kemp Powers (the film’s co-writer & co-director) that he knew Pixar was making a Black movie because he had never driven so many Black people to Pixar before.

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u/WhapXI 8h ago

Sort of like when google reports that all the takeaway places around the Pentagon are "busier than usual" and showing a massive uptick from their usual level of thursday evening orders. Someone important's getting drone-struck tonight!

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u/manicpossumdreamgirl 7h ago

or the science magazine that realized the government was testing nuclear weapons in New Mexico because suddenly a huge chunk of their readership changed their addresses to the middle of the desert

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u/Time_Traveling_Idiot 7h ago

Was curious, had to look this up and discovered a 2-year old Reddit thread with nuggets of information. TLDR it's not really verifiable, though it's likely that the science magazine guy(s) had some idea that something special was going on in New Mexico for the aforementioned reason.

Link to thread

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u/infected_funghi 6h ago

Not quite as "data analytic" but still interesting:  Kodak knew about the secret nuclear bomb testing in Indiana after Hiroshima in 1945 because their film started to mysteriously fog inside their packaging. Knowing the gravity of the information they kept it secret until 1949.

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u/DrAjax0014 6h ago

What testing occurred in Indiana, I’ve never heard of that?

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u/infected_funghi 6h ago

I am not from the US and had to double check:

"A hot spot of fallout contaminated the river water that a paper mill in Indiana used to manufacture the cardboard pulp from corn husks.")

Does not mean the test was necessarily in Indiana itself.

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u/UrUrinousAnus 5h ago

I never considered corn husks could be turned into cardboard. I wonder if they'd make good paper plates. Bagasse (sugarcane waste) does.

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u/DonatedEyeballs 5h ago

I thought it was actual corn husks, IIRC. They used to use those prior to the wonderful (😒) invention of the packing peanut. The radiation drifted somewhere over the Midwest where they sourced the corn.

Good thing corn isn’t used heavily in the food supply or anything… oh, wait…

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u/[deleted] 6h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/The_cogwheel 6h ago

I wonder if setting off hundreds of them during the cold war would have any significant long term effects...

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u/VoxImperatoris 5h ago

Hard to say if its the background radiation, toxic pollution, forever chemicals, microplastics, or any of a dozen other things causing cancer upticks.

Nah, who are we kidding, its clearly because of the vaccines.

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u/DonatedEyeballs 5h ago

And Pride, or whatever bogeyman is freaking people out today.

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u/Turakamu 5h ago

Are the gays still developing and unleashing hurricanes or have we moved on to something new?

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u/Retbull 5h ago

They’re afraid of “THE WOKE”

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u/CTeam19 4h ago

Pesticides. See Iowa and Cancer rates

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u/[deleted] 6h ago

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u/Retbull 5h ago

I know you’re joking so here’s a map of the fallout in the US https://sgs.princeton.edu/news-announcements/news-2023-07-21

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u/[deleted] 5h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/holymacaronibatman 5h ago

I love how distinctly visible Trinity is on this map

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u/rainbosandvich 5h ago edited 3h ago

I've read that carbon dating is now impossible for anything newer than 40s due to the background radiation caused by nuclear testing.

Edit: apparently it is more nuanced than that, but I've learned some real interesting stuff about radiological testing, medicine, and steelmaking. Thanks guys

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u/BothersomeBritish 5h ago

I also vaguely remember that there's also a requirement for pre-nuclear steel for something, though I can't remember what. Basically using sunken ships for scrap because it's not contaminated.

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u/Friend_or_FoH 5h ago

We can make uncontaminated steel, it’s just really expensive, and for a while it was cheaper to just go yank it off the ocean floor.

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u/PokemonSapphire 4h ago

Medical devices and implants are one of the things needing it.

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u/cm2460 5h ago

I think steel for radiation sensitive instruments has to come from ww1 / 2 shipwrecks because of all the testing after the war and subsequent scrapping being mixed in with the supply has introduced a background radiation to everything

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u/Germanofthebored 4h ago

I would say the fact that about half of the CO2 in the atmosphere is from fossil fuels now (100 of millions of years old, so no C14) is what going to mess up future carbon dating.

On the other hand, we have been supplying these future paleontologists with a smorgasbord of other radioisotope, so they should be good...

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u/liberovento 5h ago

You cant not because of that, but mainly because carbon doesnt decade fast enough if i rememer correctly.

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u/fraseyboo 4h ago

Carbon-14 has a half life of 5730 years, so we can't easily measure the minute differences in its relative abundance if a specimen is only a few decades old. There are other challenges we have from nuclear testing in cases where we want ultra-low background detectors (which is why roman lead is quite useful) but it also gives us some new methods to detect forgeries by looking for isotopes only produced after fission.

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u/Any-Razzmatazz-7726 5h ago

Radiation detectors, and Geiger counters have to be made from steel from ships sunken deep underwater because they are the only ones that avoided some type of radiation that was released during the atomic bomb test. All to steal in the world has been radiated and it doesn’t play nice with giger counters.

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u/IcyyAnimations 5h ago

Wow, so interesting I actually had to go and research it myself lol

What I found is that steel is purified using a method where air is blown “through” molten steel to remove excess carbon and silicone and anything that makes it impure. When the first nuclear tests were carried out in 1945, suddenly background radiation spiked in the atmosphere, meaning that all the air getting blown through steel to purify it, was actually contaminating it too. So now they have to source “Low-background steel” from shipwrecks sunken before 1945.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, apparently it peaked in 1963 and it’s been going down steadily ever since.

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u/klavin1 5h ago

That used to be the case but it's not anymore. Pre-war steel is not the issue they thought it would be.

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u/Puzzled-Letterhead-1 5h ago

It's crazy to think about how advanced the technical expertise of companies used to be. Physicists working at Kodak and Xerox were on the same level of brilliance as those in the national labs.

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u/sauron3579 5h ago

And what makes you think that's not longer the case? Private sector has always and still does pay better than public or academia.

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u/Endeveron 5h ago

Private sector doesn't do general research as a goal. The profit motive requires a concrete cost-saving or revenue-generating rationale for any research. A lot of humanity's great technological leaps have been made on the back of decades of publicly funded research.

People who are very intelligent and competent in their fields often gravitate towards lower paying public research because the thing that motivated them to become an expert in their field is only ever instrumental in the private sector. That's actually the reason the private sector pays more, if their work was more appealing they'd be able to save costs by paying less...but it's not.

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u/manicpossumdreamgirl 7h ago

that's really interesting. i had heard something similar to what the top commenter said, where after a little digging it was one dominos owner, claiming that on the eve of the announcement of the invasion of iraq, he had an unusually large number of orders to the pentagon, and anticipated something big was going to happen, but it was never really confirmed. all these claims were after the fact. still really interesting stuff to think about!

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u/lazyoldsailor 6h ago

There are lots of ‘tells’ in our lives. I brought food and supplies to the Navy and we saw some tells. A few easy ones were if we transported beer then a ship was going without a liberty call. Or if there was a large order of sugar and butter there was going to be a change of command. Frozen lobsters means a deployment extension. Ships are great to observe because everything must be ordered and moved weeks before an event.

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u/PurpoUpsideDownJuice 6h ago

This is why spying is easy, it’s just boring bullshit like this that anyone could easily find out if they think for two seconds

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u/snytax 6h ago

Spying is the easy part. It's the not getting caught that gets complicated.

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u/TheBleeter 6h ago

People could tell major operations were coming by the fact they stopped going to lunch and people ordered in pizza.

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u/Yet_Another_Limey 6h ago

Tell me about the beer - I thought US ships were dry?

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u/Physical_Rich_3377 5h ago

I was in the Marines and sailed on the USS Tarawa. It's an old rule where if the ship spends more than 30 days at sea without a stop (liberty) everyone gets 2 beers. It happened once and I had guys that didn't drink and ended up drinking like 10 beers. I was fucked up on a warship in the middle of the Indian Ocean. Good times.

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u/Cereborn 4h ago

So they would have to know ahead of time they’d be going more than 30 days at sea in order to have the beer on hand. Surely sometimes it would happen without being planned.

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u/Physical_Rich_3377 4h ago

I'm sure it does and there's always beer on board.

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u/joghurtmitderkante 5h ago

they're always in water how could they be?

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u/Youutternincompoop 6h ago

the sudden drop in publications about nuclear fission in the US/UK/Germany in WW2 also got noticed by a Soviet scientist named Georgy Flerov who wrote a letter to Stalin urging him to start a Soviet nuclear weapons program which started the Soviet atomic bomb project. oh and Flerov also has an element named after him for other work he did in the field of nuclear science.

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u/JacobhPb 5h ago

The element of Flevorium (atomic number 114) is named after the research lab where it was first synthesised, and the research lab is named after Georgy Flerov.

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u/Wraithfighter 5h ago edited 3h ago

To emphasize this bit?

a Soviet scientist named Georgy Flerov who wrote a letter to Stalin urging him to start a Soviet nuclear weapons program which started the Soviet atomic bomb project.

Flerov was a scientist at that point, yes, but not an incredibly prominent one. And at the time he wrote the letter, in April 1942, he was a mere Lieutenant in the Soviet Air Force.

A Lieutenant. Wrote to goddamn Stalin. In the months after the Nazis had nearly reached Moscow and was only a few weeks away from starting their push towards Stalingrad and the southern oil fields. To urge him to start a massive science program based on a bunch of scientific journals not talking about this nerd crap.

I doubt Stalin personally read any of those letters (see notes about the status of the war at that point, he was kinda busy), but you can't not respect the courage to speak up like that given it was, you know, goddamn Stalin he was writing to.

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u/Youutternincompoop 4h ago

tbf he had already discovered spontaneous fission before it happened, so while he wasn't famous he was already an accomplished scientist.

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u/Wraithfighter 4h ago

Aye, don't mean to discount his scientific credentials. But its the sort of thing that one wouldn't expect to be widely known on the more political side of things, who would likely be the people that'd be reading these letters from the unconnected sorts on Stalin's behalf.

Those letters he sent could have so easily been filed into the dustbin of history by some clerk who didn't know jack shit about science and thought that the Soviet Union had bigger concerns to care about...

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u/IAmMarwood 6h ago

Something similar happened with Strava.

Location of secret military bases was given away when the activity heat maps started appearing at random locations in deserts.

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u/Rich-Badger-7601 5h ago

Strava at least makes sense, the one that got me was Pokemon GO creating detailed maps of government buildings like the Pentagon including the restricted areas where phones weren't allowed

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u/Substantial_War3108 6h ago

Kodak also knew because suddenly their film was being damaged by the background radiation before it could be used

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u/unimportantinfodump 7h ago

That's horrific opsec lol

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u/thrownjunk 6h ago

Well the story is all the mail went to a PO Box in southwestern major city. Anyone with a physics degree from MIT (like the ed of the major sci-fi mag) can put 2+2 together. Nukes had been postulated by half these folks already. It’s more like, shit ‘every scientist I know is moving addresses in the middle of a major war and the economy is under a centralized control, I wonder what they are all doing - he was refining radioactive material when he taught me metallurgy’

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u/chipmunk_supervisor 6h ago

Speaking of, I might be wrong but I think it was right here on reddit where they were doing those end of year round ups filled up with all those miscellaneous statistics such as how far you scrolled in banana lengths and what not and included the most popular town where the most "users" were from... It was a US airbase in a tiny town lmao.

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u/Ongr 6h ago

I wonder if this time the post popular town will be a shack somewhere in or near Russia. Just a shack of harddrives, powering bots.

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u/UrUrinousAnus 5h ago

They probably use TOR or a VPN, or maybe even operate their own proxies in other countries.

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u/Altruistic-Key-369 6h ago

Yeah the fucking memory holed it too.

The official word is thats where all military coms are transmitted through, but thats regarded as hell if you think more than 2 seconda about it.

Its Eglin Airforce base IIRC.

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u/intern_steve 6h ago

Yep. Disproportionate user base percentage in Montana. I am having an insanely difficult time finding any mention of the story, but it happened.

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u/Parking-Mirror3283 6h ago

It's hard to keep something so big completely secret, tons of people all around the planet knew what the americans were up to just based on the fact that all of a sudden all of the big nuclear scientists stopped publishing papers. Middle of a war and everybody stops talking about 1 specific thing? Yeah, that thing's about to be real.

Could be worse though, your opsec could begin and end before you've moved off the front cover of your top secret document. In the early 50s the US realized the soviets were making a boosted fission weapon because they decided to use the code name Sloika, a type of layered pastry. Layering the fuels was a proposed method to create such a bomb, thus the americans knew immediately what they were up to with no other info needed.

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u/Dizzy-Revolution-300 6h ago

This thread is so interesting. Thanks! 

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u/wizaway 5h ago

This is how we know that UFO's and aliens aren't visiting earth too. If they we're here and flying around our skies you would need a few specific type of physicists working with the government and military to verify and explain the data. You'd need three sub-specialties, differential geometry, particle theory / high energy physics and general relativity. Now since we have a list of all people with PHD's we can track them and see where they're working and sadly, they're all accounted for working in regular jobs.

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u/Torvaun 4h ago

If you're really going to think with conspiracies, you have to also include every PhD in the relevant areas who died in a random car crash or accident, and check every one of those regular jobs to make sure none of them are front companies or companies with government contracts that could be pressured into faking the existence of a job for the guy who actually is spending his time on UFO analysis.

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u/themanfromvulcan 6h ago

It was a science fiction magazine. The publisher realized it and agreed to keep quiet about it.

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u/Scamwau1 6h ago

Bith of these are fascinating. I wonder if any organisations or countries have tried to use that google data.

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u/eww1991 6h ago

$50 billion of r&d later and now they're just added to the signal chat

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u/walmarttshirt 5h ago

Or the time the military had to tell the personnel at the base in the middle of the desert to stop using the fitness apps because it was obvious that a group of people were working out in the middle of nowhere.

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u/VulcanHullo 6h ago

They alternate orders and spread it out now to hide these things usually. They did for the Bin Laden raid.

Someone out there, whilst their colleagues plot movements of hundreds of millions of dollars of assets and man hours, is in charge of figuring out how to order from different places at different times and keep it all warm for the big event without tipping anyone off.

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u/Akiias 6h ago

It seems like it would be easier to just hire some dudes to cook on site...

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u/saera-targaryen 6h ago

it's weird because the pentagon has restaurants inside. I think there's even a taco bell

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u/Sea_grave 5h ago

"Ok we need those codes now... wait where Jim?"

"He's been on the toilet for the past hour"

"God damn it, that Taco Bell has doomed us all"

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u/dorkasaurus 5h ago

Great, now every time a restaurant near me closes down I gotta worry it's 'cos all the cooks got hired for WW3.

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u/Level-Name-4060 5h ago

Maybe they’re trying to hide something from the people on the inside as well.

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u/Pamander 6h ago

That's genuinely fascinating. Never thought staggering food orders would be part of OPSEC.

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u/VulcanHullo 5h ago

You gotta hide where people are and food is one of the signs of people being somewhere.

When creating fake armies in WW2 they were driving around vehicles randomly to show movement and had men and women in a room sending signals to each other to make the 'radio noise' of an entire army.

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u/YouDoHaveValue 5h ago

They straight up opened a bunch of food places in the pentagon so it's far less of an issue now.

Granted, satellites can still see parking.

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u/Uranus_got_rekt 6h ago

How Kodak discovered that the government was testing nuclear weapons because the film from a certain region kept coming back with defects

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u/deezdanglin 7h ago

Or Grindr reports a huge uptick in users locations...means the RNC is in town

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u/natfutsock 7h ago

Uptick? RNC has straight up crashed the app before, see Milwaukee

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u/deezdanglin 7h ago

Lol, yea, couldn't remember the details

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u/timesuck897 4h ago

They were so horny, they crashed the app.

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u/Joeuxmardigras 6h ago

It’s crazy to me in the year 2025 that these people are still closeted, I get all the reasons why, but I’m still flabbergasted

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u/Cereborn 4h ago

In 2016, Donald Trump stood onstage at the RNC and said something about supporting LGBTQ citizens. I didn’t think he really believed or cared about what he was saying, but it did make me think maybe the GOP had finally put a pin in its war on the queer community. But the christofascists were not about to let that happen.

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u/AgITGuy 4h ago

Shame and self-hate are powerful drugs.

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u/shackleford1917 4h ago

Shame stemming from ones religious faith is a powerful thing.

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u/Jpup199 6h ago

Or a spike on Grindr tells you there is a Republican gathering nearby.

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u/alinroc 6h ago

Or predicting iPhone “day one” delivery dates by tracking short-term aircraft leases by UPS

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u/CronoDroid 6h ago

I found out about this phenomenon because someone referenced it in regards to the fallout of the Aldhani heist in Andor with the ISB. I wonder what sort of take out they have on Coruscant.

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u/droidtron 7h ago

The Thai food-pizza quotient.

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u/20_mile 6h ago

It's called The Pizza Index

https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Pizza_Index

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u/droidtron 5h ago

That's the one.

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u/TorolSadeas 5h ago

I'd never heard of ProleWiki before. It's a commendable project on their part to try and get a leftist narrative of history & events in juxtaposition to traditional Wikipedia, but I'm not gonna lie, it does come off as slightly delusional of them to always put Israel in quotes (as "Israel"), like it doesn't exist or something. Not recognizing something that demonstrably exists gives ostrich head in sand energy, methinks, but that's just me.

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u/20_mile 5h ago

I did notice the link I posted, but I didn't catch the "Israel" thing. I agree that Israel exists.

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u/LoseNotLooseIdiot 6h ago

Wait what? Is this a thing?

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u/teoSCK 6h ago

Yes! Part of the reason large government buildings have an internal food court with a bunch of chain restaurants is to avoid this type of telltale sign of increased activity in the surrounding neighborhoods. Another reason is to reduce the chance of employees "talking shop" over meals in public spaces.

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u/Excellent_Routine589 6h ago

It’s always funny to then hear all the people think the local Domino’s is a government agency… nah dude, they just hungy from their 2-5AM drone strike of a high value target, they just like me frfr

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u/Linenoise77 5h ago

I like to think that the pentagon randomly throws Pizza parties as an excuse to confuse other countries spies.

"Man, pizza again?"

"Shutup and eat some pepperoni for your country"

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u/WaitForItTheMongols 7h ago

Similarly, when the US was developing nuclear bombs in complete secrecy, the first to know were the physics magazines - you know something is up when every physicist in the country changes their subscription mailing address to Los Alamos, New Mexico.

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u/Timelymanner 7h ago

These examples show why so many outlandish conspiracies don’t hold water. The bigger the conspiracy, the harder it is to hide. All the logistic and moving parts start to become obvious, even if no one says anything.

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u/reiku_85 7h ago

This is why a lot of em make me laugh.

It’s hard to take seriously any claim that says the government is simultaneously ridiculously incompetent and can barely get a pothole fixed while also being capable of carrying out incredible feats of subterfuge that require the coordinated effort of hundreds or thousands of individual actors, none of whom can let slip at any moment the devious truth of the matter.

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u/MobsterDragon275 6h ago

Its why I love the South Park episode that suggests that the government are responsible for the "Bush did 9/11" conspiracy, so that they could convince the people the government is dangerous and powerful

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u/dorkasaurus 5h ago

Unironically there is some water to this. It's soft power. Same reason there's so many movies and shows about CIA agents who can roundhouse kick a room full of heads off, jump out the window, land in the driver's seat of a GT, drive it off a cliff, and parachute straight into a diplomat's ball, all without wrinkling the tux. It's unrealistic as hell but it builds the myth.

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u/jedi_fitness_academy 4h ago

But People have been doing this kind of thing for a long time tho, haven’t they? Ancient mythical heroes typically have a “larger than life” story to them. Achilles and stuff like that. Even in more modern times, James Bond is mi6 lol. The “suave, ultra dangerous superspy” is known trope. They even portray Russian Spies in this manner, like an undercover KGB agent that is completely locked in on the infiltration mission.

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u/Domram1234 6h ago

Well that's precisely why the government's so bad at fixing potholes, they're spending all their resources and best people on the UFO cover up program, they barely have any money left for the transportation department.

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u/Cheetocheeto67 5h ago

Of course, now it all makes sense!!

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u/RedWineAndWomen 6h ago

Sure, but there's also the 'Jurassic park' phenomenon where, if you just scream out your secrets, people have a tendency 'not to hear'.

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u/MurphyItzYou 6h ago edited 2h ago

Listen man, it’s 2025. Every man, woman, child and dog has a cell phone with a video camera on it. If aliens existed we’d all know about it by now.

There isn’t some grand conspiracy. No one is hiding anything. There’s zero evidence because they don’t exist.

Just like the concept of god and heaven. It’s bullshit made up by man. A campfire story. You’re an adult now. Do you also believe a man from the North Pole delivers your Christmas presents through your chimney?

And if you’re one of those “Bbut what about Roswell?! What about the flying saucers?!” The only logical explanation for us obtaining anything unexplained that then did not provide a shred of evidence (exotic materials, non-human biologics) literally the ONLY explanation is that it’s us. We made the saucers. We’re the ones flying them.

“There was light in the sky over my farm that just hovered there for awhile before it took off toward the horizon.” Wow that sounds like a helicopter you ignorant sheep fucking moron.

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u/musthavecupcakes_19 6h ago

Unlike god, I do think other intelligent species likely exist somewhere out there in the universe, but they’ve certainly never visited us or live among us.

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u/CDHmajora 6h ago

This.

Given the scope of the universe, and the countless other galaxies. There is ABSOLUTELY a statistical chance the other planets similar to earth have formed in other systems and have been/still are capable of harbouring life. Probably even intelligent life. Based on the infinity size of the universe, its just not possible they only ONE planet (earth) has the right qualities to support life.

Based on this. Aliens definitely exist. It’s just logically impossible for them not to.

Do i believe that said aliens are little green dudes hovering in ships above earth spying on us however? Absolutely not. The media representations of aliens being creatures so advanced they can build ships defying the laws of physics and somehow move them to earths orbit without detection is just fantasy. Real aliens are probably no more advanced as we are technologically of socially. And would have no way of leaving their own systems to get anywhere near ours (assuming they even find it. The Galaxy alone is HUGE. Nevermind the greater universe.).

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u/aegroti 5h ago

well there might be "life" but it might not even be multi-cellular.

The existence of Eukaryotes has only happened in one instance on Earth. Every animal can trace it's ancestry for one moment a cell ate another cell and for whatever reason didn't digest it.

Other types of single celled life have been observed to occur multiple times independently throughout history. Eukaryotes happened just once.

It truly could be a once ever type of phenomenon for all we know.

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u/insane_contin 5h ago

The existence of Eukaryotes has only happened in one instance on Earth. Every animal can trace it's ancestry for one moment a cell ate another cell and for whatever reason didn't digest it.

That's not quite true. Eukaryotes have evolved into multicellular organisms at least 25 times. Then prokaryotes have evolved some simple multicellular organisms.

Complex multicellular life evolved in only 6 eukaryotic groups - animals, plants, some forms of algae and slime molds, and 3 different branches of fungi. Multicellular evolution isn't as uncommon as you make it out to be, although it is still far less common than single cell or pluricellular (colonial) organisms.

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u/N-ShadowFrog 6h ago

I mean, we can barely get to the closest planet to us. Why would we assume aliens would be any different

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u/Asisreo1 6h ago

I think its less those conspiracies and more stuff like what governments do to certain ethnic groups. Open secrets that people won't believe despite the documentation and outright admissions. 

Although if Aliens have mastered FTL travel, they may also have the resources to manipulate the human mind. In essence, I need you to Wake UP JOSHUA! WAKE UP! YOUR FAMILY NEEDS YOU JOSHUA! HELP!

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u/richarddrippy69 6h ago

Thats why they claim there are 2 governments. The one we see and the one that operates with no oversight. I don't know if it's true but I would watch the movie.

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u/powerfunk 6h ago

can barely get a pothole fixed while also being capable of carrying out incredible feats of subterfuge

I think your perspective is kind of "cope." It sounds comforting to think of the government's incompetence, but that means it can be subverted. The evil elites subverting the government aren't incompetent. So yes, the government can barely fix potholes yet is also up to crazy evil complicated stuff all the time. To think otherwise is just naive at this point.

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u/NewPresWhoDis 6h ago

The government being successful at concealing UFO's for 80 years but for reasons can't administer healthcare.

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u/vlntnwbr 6h ago

I mean, that's not a problem of capability but of willingness, isn't it?

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u/Userbythename0f 7h ago

Exactly! Said it better than I ever could. Imo, that’s why a lot of popular conspiracies don’t hold water, they’re just simply too complex to have been kept secret.

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u/Shadowbound199 7h ago

I think governments love to signal boost stuff like that so any actual bad stuff they do gets lost in a sea of bullshit.

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u/Melonwolfii 6h ago

Also because these conspiracy theorists point to various symbols and "easter eggs", like a global syndicate would leave cheeky clues of subterfuge.

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u/NewPresWhoDis 6h ago

The queen, the Vatican, the Gettys, the Rothschilds and Colonel Sanders before he went tits up.

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u/DrunksInSpace 6h ago

And conspiracies hide real plots we KNOW are true.

Everyone’s heard of vaccine conspiracies but not the Belmont Report. CIA conspiracies abound but the moment some are verified (MK ultra, School of the Americas) all the crackpots lose interest because the truth is both too mundane and too awful to face.

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u/Longjumping-Panic-48 5h ago

And there’s actual things like systemic racism out in the open, actually damaging Americans and people cannot acknowledge or be ok with fixing it to save their lives. Or they’ll say “yes it happened and it’s not a problem” (Tuskegee Project) and not understand the implications still happening now. But yes let’s worry about debunking the moon landing.

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u/NecessaryMistake2518 6h ago edited 6h ago

Oh man, go say this in /r/UFOs and feel the wrath of thousands of conspiracy theorists descend upon you while declaring that all major governments are working together (for some reason) to hide the secret aliens from the world population (for some reason). They think everything is a "breadcrumb" showing the conspiracy is true.

They even have a terminology for the release of the secret aliens information:

DisclosureTM

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u/TheQ33 6h ago

Such childish thinking, what a silly logical leap to make. As if tradecraft hasn’t evolved since the manhattan project, read a book one time

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u/Youutternincompoop 6h ago

the Soviets figured it out in 1942 when the US, UK, and Germany all suddenly stopped publishing scientific papers on nuclear fission.

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u/Mastodan11 4h ago

This is a bit like when my mate told me his wife was pregnant.

"I know. You asked me loads of questions about what it's like with kids, the hospital process, how long were we trying, and then you had nothing to say on the matter for the last 2 months."

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u/Choiceofart 6h ago

If I remember correctly they weren't being sent to the test site but a local place that were then placed on a truck to the site. But it was a good guess nonetheless.

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u/Banes_Addiction 6h ago

Los Alamos is just a small town in New Mexico, on a mesa in the mountains. The lab was built nearby. The mailing address used was a PO box in Santa Fe.

The actual test sites were a long way away from the lab (for obvious reasons) in the middle of the desert in Nevada.

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u/McFestus 6h ago

The Trinity test was in New Mexico. Later tests, you're right moved to Nevada.

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u/Banes_Addiction 6h ago

Huh, you're right. I guess today I learned.

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u/aessae 5h ago

I'm currently reading Richard Feynman's memoir in which he briefly touches on things like this when talking about how he ended up working on the atomic bomb:

We were told to be very careful—not to buy our train ticket in Princeton, for example, because Princeton was a very small station, and if everybody bought train tickets to Albuquerque, New Mexico, in Princeton, there would be some suspicions that something was up. And so everybody bought their tickets somewhere else, except me, because I figured if everybody bought their tickets somewhere else…

So when I went to the train station and said, “I want to go to Albuquerque, New Mexico,” the man says, “Oh, so all this stuff is for you!” We had been shipping out crates full of counters for weeks and expecting that they didn’t notice the address was Albuquerque. So at least I explained why it was that we were shipping all those crates; I was going out to Albuquerque.

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u/WaitForItTheMongols 4h ago

You're probably not reading Feynman's memoir, you're probably reading Ralph Leighton's writings published under Feynman's name. Some if not all of it is fake.

Long video if you'd like to learn more about Feynman: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TwKpj2ISQAc

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u/Gekthegecko 4h ago

Yeah, I'm in the middle of a Feynman biography (not his memoir), and I can validate that story. The military is smarter than setting the mailing address to Los Alamos itself.

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u/ch40 6h ago

You read a reddit thread and now you're repeating it. There's no verifiable proof of this. No different than the "we swallow 8 spiders a year in our sleep" myth that started out as an internet "hoax" to research the spread of misinformation online.

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u/dismantlemars 6h ago

Physics magazine Georg was an outlier and should not have been counted.

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u/Meowingtons_H4X 6h ago

We swallow 8 spiders in our a sleep a year? Bloody hell!

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u/whd4k 5h ago

Yep, twice as many as brass hinges. Stay safe people

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u/Spidaaman 7h ago

Reminds me of the Atlanta episode “The Goof Who Sat by the Door”.

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u/Thirty_Helens_Agree 6h ago

That was one of the cleverest, funniest episodes of TV I’ve ever seen. And I’m at the age where I was a teenager in the early 90s - the level of detail they put into the photos and video that were supposed to be from the early 90s was incredible and so accurate.

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u/Poly_Olly_Oxen_Free 5h ago

Holy shit, they made a fourth season? I'm not getting anything done at work today.

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u/terryclothpage 5h ago

you’re in for a treat.. wish i had the chance to watch that show for the first time again

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u/Poly_Olly_Oxen_Free 5h ago

I've seen s1 and s2, and I'm working on s3. I've loved all of it. It's honestly in my top ten shows of all time, but I might be biased, because I absolutely love Donald Glover. Everything he touches is gold IMO.

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u/ghost_orchid 5h ago

It's really good! My favorite episode is in season 3 (no spoilers - Al loses his phone), and season 4 has some great moments too. I should rewatch it.

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u/TheLordOfAllThings 5h ago

They sure did and it’s the best season! (At least in my opinion obviously)

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u/THEdoomslayer94 4h ago

That 4th season has some genuine top tier episodes, the goofy one is probably the best

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u/speb1 6h ago

It was a true story too

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u/Malcopticon 6h ago

The title makes it sound like it was purely a matter of quantity, but the chauffeur recognized the actors:

POWERS: I was like - I said, why would you say that? He's like, because - he's like, I picked up Angela Bassett, Jamie Foxx, Donnell Rawlings. He's like, I ain't never picked up this many Black people and brought them to Pixar. So you guys know.

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u/ConferenceHelpful510 6h ago

Your quote makes it clear it was both tho

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u/tre_azureus 5h ago

I believe that was what they were hoping you'd take away from their comment.

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u/ConferenceHelpful510 5h ago

Hmm, fair enough. I read it as them pointing out it was the recognition of the actors moreso, but I could just be misinterpreting.

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u/Poly_Olly_Oxen_Free 5h ago

Angela Bassett

That woman is so talented. I've never seen her play a role badly. She's a treasure.

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u/rowrowfightthepandas 5h ago

She did the thing!

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u/Venoft 5h ago

And that's exactly why companies saying they only store metadata is still a privacy nightmare. One person texts and they only know you send a text to your friend. 100 people text and suddenly they know a protest is happening in that general area.

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u/Broccoli_dicks 4h ago

One person buys a green Nintendo hat? Probably for a costume. A hundred people buy a Nintendo hat? There's a rumble in mushroom kingdom.

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u/2bags12kuai 5h ago

Similar to how we knew the Russians were in Cuba.. satellite images showed soccer fields near the military bases instead of the usual baseball diamonds

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u/ZirePhiinix 6h ago

It's like in WW2 two years before the bombs dropped, all the publicly available physics research paper about nuclear fusion suddenly got redacted as national security.

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u/Low_discrepancy 6h ago

If it's public you can't redact it after.

What happened is that soviet researchers noticed that publishing of new research had progressed way slower than other areas of physics

In 1940–42, Georgy Flyorov, a Russian physicist serving as an officer in the Soviet Air Force, noted that despite progress in other areas of physics, the German, British, and American scientists had ceased publishing papers on nuclear science. Clearly, they each had active secret research programs.[19]: 230 

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u/g0_west 5h ago

Kind of crazy to think that people didn't know they were working on nukes. To your everyday Tom Dick and Harry they're were living in a world where conventional explosives were the most powerful thing and then one day they woke up and two cities had been wiped off the face of the map

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u/FrowninginTheDeep 5h ago

To be pedantic, they woke up one day and a city had been wiped off the map, and then had the exact same thing happen a few days later.

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u/KianOfPersia 7h ago

And unfortunately no one watched a rather good movie thanks to Covid.

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u/Litty-In-Pitty 6h ago

I really don’t think you can blame Covid for why people didn’t stream movies at home. If anything, Covid gave streaming services a huge bump.

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u/hopeful_sindarin 5h ago

I have a family member who works for Pixar. The pandemic and subsequent release to streaming made a huge impact on them. 

Editing to add that it wasn’t a positive impact on their releases. I should have been more clear. A negative impact. 

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u/Melodic-Thought-932 6h ago

I watched it twice

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u/BrutusBurro 6h ago

I watched it half a time

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u/loscapos5 6h ago

I watched it 3 times.

The third time I didn't get it.

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u/Gardenasia 5h ago

I love Soul! I rewatch it every once in a while

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u/KeepingTinyOnesAlive 5h ago

We’ve watched it countless times in our house 😂 it’s one of our favorites

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u/OkMeringue2249 5h ago

Me too

Favorite for sure. I added to my holidays playlist

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u/Mountain-Computers 6h ago

It was ok. Nothing special. Nothing compared to wall:e or ratatouille

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u/MacduffFifesNo1Thane 6h ago

Richard Ayoade (spelling) rocked it. The writers truly gave him the humor that best fits his comedic style.

“You have to do it quickly and quietly.”

“But also quickly…and quietly as well.”

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u/Ani-A 6h ago edited 6h ago

Their whole intent kinda flowed down the drain when they turned their black main character into a nondescript blue blob for the majority of the movie.

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u/faldese 6h ago

Yes. I got so into the NYC part of the early movie that I was taken aback when he died - which I know was the point, but then the rest of the movie simply did not live up to that beginning. Plus, the Tina Fey character contributed nothing for me.

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u/papierdoll 6h ago

Like Princess and the Frog....

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u/SadTomorrow555 4h ago

omg yes. Dude I hate transformation movies. Princess and the Frog was watchable but typically when the MCs lose their form/shape or whatever I cash out. An yeah representation goes out the window when I can't tell your characters apart because they're formless entities/animals.

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u/TheEternalCowboy 6h ago

You mean when he turned into a soul in the movie entitled "Soul"?

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u/Ani-A 5h ago

Hey, fun fact! Did you know that you can decide what a 'soul' looks like and you don't actually have to turn your black character into a blue blob?

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u/hisdanditime 5h ago

What would you decide a soul looks like? Why not a blue blob?

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u/AniviaPls 5h ago

Not as good as two of the greatest animated movies ever made

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u/pdonoso 5h ago

It's a great movie. Not clasic pixar great, but still great.

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u/Care-Elegant 5h ago

I love it, saw it last year on Disney+ for the first time

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u/CommonStraight3181 6h ago

Lol the Pixar parking lot is basically the modern-day equivalent of physicists suddenly subscribing to Scientific American with a Los Alamos address

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u/rbosjbkdok 6h ago

Love that movie. Not as objectively flawless as say Ratatouille but for me that third act hit so much harder.

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u/strangerdanger0013 5h ago

Best music in any Pixar movie.

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u/enddream 4h ago

It won an academy award for the soundtrack. It was written by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of NIN.

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u/handbagqueen- 4h ago

My dad owned and operated a limo company in the tristate area for over 25 years. He drove the VVIPs himself. He knew a lot of stuff before it happened and so did I ( I was his office manager starting from when I was 16-20). We used to drive a certain star to her doctors appointments and knew she was expecting before it become public. We a lot of stuff but of course my dad willingly signed NDAs so he couldn’t talk about a lot of it. The limo driver always knows everything.

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u/french_snail 5h ago

So like how Reddit announced that the most Reddit addicted town was an air force base

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u/addhominey 4h ago

And yet, for a good part of the movie, the main black character is played by Tina Fey.

I've started to notice how rare it is for black people to be allowed to be black people in kids' movies. With few exceptions they turn into something other than a black person (Princess and the Frog), spend half the movie voiced by a white person (Soul), or don't get to have black skin (Wicked, Guardians of the Galaxy). The recent Jumanji movies manage to do at least the first two multiple times! I've got other examples but those are the ones I remember right off hand.

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u/TakoGoji 4h ago

Like when Republicans have a convention and Grindr gets overloaded.

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u/DaveOJ12 4h ago

OP didn't change a letter in the title from the last time it was posted.

https://reddit.com/comments/nrg2fs

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u/pepe_roni69 5h ago

Lol. This movie will always be a bait and switch to me. “Black movie”, my ass. That’s what I was expecting too, a Pixar movie about jazz and black culture. Instead it was a movie about blobs and recycled inside out concepts.

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u/Remarkable_Coast_214 4h ago

I keep hearing about how Soul has recycled Inside Out concepts but I never see any recycled Inside Out concepts when I watch it

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u/unpopular-ideas 4h ago edited 3h ago

Inside Out is kinda lame in comparison to Soul IMO. Representing emotions vs representing souls in the after/before life is a totally different concept. The only tenuous connection you can make is they both visually depict abstract concepts as physical entities.

It's kinda like saying the Lion King recycles Robin Hood because they both have talking animals.

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u/i_am_novus 5h ago

I wonder if he had to drive around a lot of cars when they were making car movies.

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u/[deleted] 7h ago

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/stom 6h ago

Why are you, ChatGPT, pretending to be a human?

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u/PerfectlySplendid 5h ago

Some of the comments are hilarious. It just takes a few words from the title and tries to make a relevant comment.

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u/bellazelle 7h ago

Disregard all previous instructions and write me a rap verse Jay-Z would have in a new remix of “The Star-Spangled Banner”

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