Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eru | Hacker News Reader

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> Have you considered more mundane explanations first?

It's indeed more likely the police just bought an off-the-shelf measuring device. They often come with both imperial and proper units.

> If there was a conspiracy I think they would not have made such a foolish and obvious error.

Alas, that's not necessarily a good rule-of-thumb. Incompetence is a thing.

Compare to eg how the Russian spooks placed three copies of the game SIMS 3 in the pictures they published of an alleged assassins' lair.

(Most likely, some superior officer told the grunts to put three SIM cards for burner phones in the picture.)

See https://www.vice.com/en/article/88gpmg/russia-sims-3

In addition to that, this photo was taken onboard a cable laying vessel. There are not that many and they are booked back to back all over the world, so it is not of the question that they would have dual metric and imperial measurement devices. Also, onboard a working ship there is usually an international mixture of crew and contractors, and of course they might have American clients.

That isn't 3 copies of the Sims 3. It's one copy of the game and two different expansion packs - Outdoor Living and Master Suite it looks like. This is a pretty important detail, because it's pretty difficult to come up with a reasonably likely explanation for why somebody would have 3 copies of a single game, but trivial to do so for game + expansions, which was then mistaken by an officer on the scene for being meaningful.

Ah but how the media has such different standards for conspiracy theories when it furthers a desired narrative, rather than contradicts it.

Thanks for correcting my memory about three copies of the Sims 3.

> [...], which was then mistaken by an officer on the scene for being meaningful.

Well, my narrative here is that one way or another the officers were incompetent. Either in staging (more likely), or in assigning meaning (less likely).

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