2y ago

One of the lead developers at my company is QA-NON and the things that they believe is nuts. He just talked to me about so much weird shit for over an hour 😫

cross-posted from: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/2218175

That fluoride makes people stupid.
That humans only contribute like 0.2% of greenhouse gases and have no impact in climate change.
That petroleum is a natural renewable mode of transportation that doesn’t come from dinasaurs
And that science is not reliable because people just say “trust the science” but get made when you “question the science” and that he doesn’t trust what he can’t replicate
And that NASA just lies and was founded by NAZIs so they just do nothing and collect government money
What is crazy to me is that this guy is great at his job and has got me unstuck from coding related problems several times. Yet, he believes in all these conspiracies 😵
I considered this guy to be smart and yet he gave me this ackward conspiracy info dump session

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And that NASA just lies and was founded by NAZIs so they just do nothing and collect government money
He gets partial credit for this one
That petroleum is a natural renewable mode of transportation that doesn’t come from dinasaurs
Also partial credit, oil is plant material, and if you disregard human scales of time oil does fit into the carbon cycle
- I vaguely remember reading something about how oil probably won't form again, because things evolved that'll just decompose the plants too quickly.
  Did I invent this inside my brain?
  
  That's coal iirc, formed mostly by the time between when trees evolved and when microbes evolved that could break down wood.
  
  Wherever you read that was wrong, most of our oil is found in rock layers dating back to the mezozoic
  What oil needs to form is decomposition in an low oxygen environment while surrounded by non-permeable rock (normally salt)
  An algae bloom in a shallow sea or salt water lake could fill those conditions.
- If you're gonna use that argument to say oil is renewable we might as well say every energy source is net zero emissions because the heat death of the universe will eventually consume us all.
- I think this QAnon person got a bit mixed up on this. It’s an old idea from Young Earth Creationism that oil can’t have come old plant material because the earth is only 6,000 years old, not enough time to form oil. Just got it mixed up with the idea that dinosaurs walked on the earth until 4,000 years ago when Noah’s flood happened.
Code monkeys are never smart, they just code.
- That's not true, we also know how to copy and paste
In my experience people with these sorts of ideas can't stop themselves once they get going, they have to just air out all the weird stuff they believe. I have traditionally 'aryan' coded features and a guy at work just started going off about how (((they))) are controlling everything and trying to extinguish us and none of our not-white coworkers have souls (???) and theres a race war coming and look at these tens of thousands of dollars in weaponry I have at my home and so on.
- White men go wild when they're talking to only other white men
  I've heard shit that made my hair curl
  
  That's the weird thing though, our workplace is overwhelmingly not white. It was like a weird solidarity thing for him to have another
  to conspire with. And he evidently got along fine with everyone else, I guess he kept the racist shit to himself most of the time.
  
  have also heard some insane stuff due to this.
  Worse of all is that I've pushed back and instead of them getting mad they play it off as a joke.
- god damn I go through this once in a blue moon. I don't even look like a white dude that would be interested in shit like that, since I'm visibly an asian dude lmfao. I do have a germanish last name however and some of the shit people have said to me has made me want to change it sometimes.
  Just as an example, when I was in the hospital once, I had this guy telling me about how I need to be the sword and shield against the beast (aka jews) and that I need to visit the homeland once more. I had to do one of those defensive smile and nod / half pay attention maneuvers just to feel safe.
  
  A staff person at the hospital? Or just like, a guy in the waiting room?
- I have traditionally 'aryan' coded features
  you're Punjabi?
  
  Unfortunately no, aryan of the
  
  variety.
That petroleum is a natural renewable mode of transportation that doesn’t come from dinasaurs
I've always wanted to tell someone who says shit like this that it's actually a deep state misinformation to maintain the petro-dollar
I had an electrical engineer who works in semiconductors tell me that Bill Gates was putting chips in the vaccine. I was so stunned I couldn't make a coherent response.
Engineer-brains can come up with the stupidest shit. Like, of course you could make a chip small enough to do that, but the real questions they didn't ask themselves were: "Why?" "For what purpose?" "What features would a chip that small even have?" "How far away could you be and reliably communicate with something that small attenuated by inconsistent depths of soft tissue?"
- New conspiracy theory: Bill Gates created the microchips-in-the-vaccine conspiracy theory so when you google "bill gates vaccine" you get that instead of his patent shenanigans.
  
  That's just true, though
That fluoride makes people stupid.
smdh tap water goblins still lap that shit up even though it's proven it calcifies your pineal gland.
- Fluoride is bad for you?
  
  no, the pineal gland thing is something chuds say. fluoride protects your teeth from acid by incorporating itself in the crystal lattice of ur enamel
  
  In concentrations about 100 times as high as what you see in most municipal water sources, it can have mild negative health effects.
- tbh even alkaline water isnt good enough at this point. does anyone know how to make basic water? id like to drink that w a squeeze of lemon
I feel a weird kinship with people like this because how we view them is just how libs view us lmao
- The fuck?
  
  Have you heard of horseshoe theory 🧲?
At the very least he's intellectually divergent, which puts him above 99% of libs or chuds (the bar is on the floor yes)
That humans only contribute like 0.2% of greenhouse gases and have no impact in climate change.
That petroleum is a natural renewable mode of transportation that doesn’t come from dinasaurs
are probably the dumbest ones
IMO a lot of programmers tend to have this "pinpoint" intelligence where they're really good at isolated problems but horrible at having accurate holistic view of reality
- At the very least he's intellectually divergent, which puts him above 99% of libs or chuds (the bar is on the floor yes)
  It doesn't put them above anything. All of these qanon people end up fascists.
  IMO a lot of programmers tend to have this "pinpoint" intelligence where they're really good at isolated problems but horrible at having accurate holistic view of reality
  They behave pretty much the same as all engineers do.
Lead dev in my group is an "electric universe" guy.
- as a lead dev myself im more of a one electron universe guy
- What is that?
  
  Fringe cosmology that rejects general relativity: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Electric_Universe
They're probably drinking too much fluoride.
Renewable petroleum is a new one for me. I knew young-earth hardliners had a non-ancient explanation for oil, but I didn't know any of them thought you could make it renewably
That petroleum is a natural renewable mode of transportation that doesn’t come from dinasaurs
Ooh, you came across one of those rare finds, an abiogenic petroleum believer in 2023.
They are rare these days, and mostly congregate on obscure forums where they also often discuss cold fusion.
- It is correct on the dinosaur thing, though. I thought the leading theory is that petroleum comes from trees that died before anything evolved that could decompose bark?
  
  petroleum comes from trees that died before anything evolved that could decompose bark
  That's coal, mostly.
  For oil it's almost entirely plankton and algae.
And that NASA just lies and was founded by NAZIs so they just do nothing and collect government money
This is false because they turn around and give the money to SpaceX
He’s low key spittin’ re nasa and people trusting the science.

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