We’ve got a bunch of new people now so let’s bring back a classic post. What low stakes conspiracy theory do you believe that you cannot prove but feels right to you?
I’ll start: I believe that dating apps have made a concerted effort to smear in person meeting people and tie it to being “creepy” through social media so you are forced to meet people online(which was the creepy option just 15 years ago)
Public programs are purposely underfunded to make it easy for people to point to why they don’t work (the average person doesn’t think about/care whether they get funding), making it easier to continue the process of privatizing everything.
Many conspiracy theories aren’t actually conspiracy theories but a consequence of profit-driven motives that give the illusion of a conspiracy theory.
The first one is just political strategy, it’s known as starve the beast
As someone who works with houseless folks this is absolutely without a doubt a thing. There are for profit companies springing up that do similar social services that I do, too, so the privatization part even applies. It’s fucked
That’s not even a conspiracy it’s the explicit neoliberal plan
Hmm not sure I like the framing here, liberals are 100% culpable as well
That’s just observable facts.
Public programs are purposely underfunded to make it easy for people to point to why they don’t work (the average person doesn’t think about/care whether they get funding), making it easier to continue the process of privatizing everything.
I 420.69% believe this is 100% true. It’s such a great feedback loop for someone wanting to dismantle it. It doesn’t work so no one uses it, no uses it because it doesn’t work, and it doesn’t work because it was underfunded and ill-equipped, and it was underfunded and ill-equipped because they didn’t want it to work. It doesn’t work so no one uses it, its perceived value is lessened so it then doesn’t work.
And then you can make great use of absolute numbers over more contextualized relative numbers/ Here’s a made up example:
why did it cost 700 million to vaccinate every American??
$700 million / 300 million Americans = $2.33 per vaccination, insanely cheap. Less than you spent on gas tax getting to and from work today.I’m always immediately suspicious when someone starts throwing around absolute numbers like that.
I’m always immediately suspicious when someone starts throwing around absolute numbers like that.
Agreed! Anyone who uses tries to use math to justify why a bad thing is a good thing goes to super hell. The one where the Doom Slayer just goes buck wild. That’s where they go.
Self assured STEM dorks and their consequences
It’s also super frustrating that these STEM dweebs have have lucrative skillsets that the “Mark€t™️©️®️ “ “values”. Because of this they can’t justify to themselves why they should go into the public sector for the betterment of the people. STEM dorks across the board would be so much cooler if they were used for public welfare and social good.
I totally understand why a regular non-CHUD publicly educated STEMheads would go private sector. They have bills and debt and all that jazz, and sadly the public sector jobs can’t give out those sorts of attractive salaries and benefits.
All of this further perpetuates the cycle original post was talking about. Nerds get their education in the public then leave to private sector which hallows out the public sector. It’s just a vicious and vile cycle.
“Smart” consumer products are intentionally spying on you. Full stop.
That’s why it’s so hard to find a not “smart” anything. The added material cost is well worth the additional surveillance, be it for the sake of ruling class parasites buying and selling the surveillance data, or for their buddies
this isn’t a conspiracy theory. they literally do this and cooperate with the feds
It’s low stakes because I believe it isn’t just done but it’s done at such a staggeringly wide scale and not many people notice or even care.
I’ve gotten into arguments about this with the cryptofash over at programming.dev lmao. literally had one of them tell me to “get over it”.
Yeah fuck that im still mad over horse armor.
NEVER FORGIVE. NEVER FORGET. Todd Howard will pay for his crimes.
I go back and forth. But this week I 100% believe Justin from Canada is Fidel’s kid.
Also, Hua Guofeng was Mao Zedong’s son. I mean think about it, they were both Chinese and they both had the same haircut.
I like this one.
Gross
Margaret Thatcher probably fucked a dog and killed it. She just seems like the kind of person that would do that, and she was tight with Pinochet.
The lottery is a trap designed to catch time travelers.
There’ve never been any time travellers because the time traveller detection agency always spots them winning the stock market and neutralizes them, .
The odds would have to be much longer for it to be effective. Sure when it’s one in one hundred million there’s almost no chance that *you" will win, but with millions of players playing every day there’s practically a guarantee that someone will win eventually.
The SEC are the real time cops. They’re a front for the Hyperextended Interval Temporal Legislation and Entropic Reduction Society (don’t panic about the acronym, they started as private bodyguards and then their mission expanded as chronological abuse became more widely known). It’s a lot easier to vet people buying Amazon and Apple stock at IPO. If you’ve got no history until 1980, then buy 10,000 shares of apple on IPO day, then do absolutely nothing else in the market for decades, then dump all 10k shares at peak that’s a pretty easy to spot profile of a time traveler.
Smart enough to time travel, but not smart enough to conceal suspicious trading patterns.
They’re different specialties, and
since the late 2400s we’ve had access tothere are ways of detecting much more complex Jump, Pump and Dump (JPD) schemes
“Nobody cares” tier stakes, but I think Nintendo made games in the dying days of the Wii U that didn’t use the gamepad at all so they could later easily directly port them over to other consoles and thus sell them to people twice.
Sure, I’ll add that to my worldview
I totally believe this, they really did give up on that controller
It would be so cool if the next console could stream menus to a Switch haha
if the next console isn’t just a switch with the same form factor and dock and controllers but a different, slightly better graphics chip and CPU, i’m going to be very unhappy
It’s Nintendo, they love to shake things up even when it’s not necessary. The next console is going to be a bicycle with an AR windshield or something
The Switch is running on a mobile chipset from like eight years ago, the next one better be more than just a little better, lol
Zelda BOTW
it actually plays better on the wiiu, because it can process more than a calculator
Zelda BOTW BTFO, damn
If I were a ghoul at Nestle, I would have spent the past couple decades propping up the shittiest local water utilities, lobbying to make sure their shittiest policies are kept and their most generous programs abolished. Having a local entity with a monopoly on providing water to the area is often the worst of both worlds in the US. You get the inflexibility of a government bureaucracy because they have no reason to improve and you get the shady billing practices of a corporation because of the insistence that we not just give people water for free. When it comes time to privatize your local water supply, many people will be chomping at the bit to bring in “competition” because they hate their local utility so much.
Major sports leagues are not rigged in the sense that winners are pre-determined, but the refs are told to keep games, serieses, and playoff races close, because blowouts and dominance are boring.
An NBA ref got busted for betting on games and IIRC talked about how the league would make the above obvious to refs (at least in the postseason). There’s too much money changing hands and too little accountability for shady shit to not happen at all, and this is the type of thing all owners could have a handshake agreement on because they’ll all profit from it and it doesn’t really prejudice any team specifically.
There is a small but self-sustaining breeding population of cougars living in the Adirondacks and possibly most of upstate New York, but this will never be officially confirmed by the various government environmental agencies because then they would have to take real action to protect them. Cougars have everything they need there and there’s really no reason to believe they’re just walking 1800 miles and not breeding.
This is the case for a lot of other heavily forested places east of the Rockies as well.
oh hey, it’s the Gippsland Panther but in America
Also the Tasmanian Tiger still exists, and proclaiming it extinct was actually the best way to protect it
is this a conspiracy??? Im from up there and everyone seems to just accept it there
Just had this discussion around a campfire in the Adirondacks. Nearly everyone agreed Wolves and Mountain Lions are in upstate NY except for the one person who said, “Well the DEC hasn’t said so, therefore they’re actually Coyotes and Bobcats”.
Even if it isn’t full blown wolves we’ve got coydogs which are a mix of coyotes and wolves which are just bigger meaner coyotes
Crosswalk buttons and hold open/close door buttons in elevators are just there to give an illusion of control
Those are both regional.
Almost no open/close buttons do anything in the US, but they’re completely honest in Japan.
Crosswalk buttons may: actually hurry up the cycle and stop traffic sooner, wait until the next red light and show a crossing indicator that it’d otherwise skip, or do nothing at all. This can change from city to city, from intersection to intersection, and even over a schedule throughout the day.
In my experience a reasonable amount of elevator close buttons have an effect, at least where I’ve been in the US
Gaylor Swift. I heard someone talking about it once and I went down the rabbithole and it’s crazy.
Go on
Cishet white women like to image Taylor is a lesbian or bi because it makes them feel like they’re supporting a “diverse” artist instead of a rich, white, cishet one
Celebrity culture is weird
I think the story about the passengers fighting back on United flight 93 is fake and it was shot down by the military.
Both can be true. The story is entirely plausible, though. People had cell-phones and the towers had already been hit.
I think there’s a cultural memory hole thing going on - Hijackings used to be really, really common and were usually resolved without too much violence. Being hijacked would definitely ruin your day, but the general wisdom was to just sit tight and wait to be rescued or ransomed or whatever. A lot of the time passengers would be released after the hijacker’s demands were met.
Pretty much the only reason 9/11 worked as well as it did is because up until then no one had tried it. Once the people on 93 knew what the stakes were it was, what, 150? 200 people against four or five armed with small knives? Most people aren’t fighters but those are still really, really bad odds.
Were cell phones usable on planes in 2001?
No, but back then some planes had payphones on the seat back where the touch screen entertainment systems are now.
100% believe it
United flight 93
Idea for a bit: Hexbear passengers on United Flight 93 having a struggle session on whether it’s okay to critically support our hijackers if they really do intend to fly the plane into the Capitol building.
I could see Mel Brooks or Monty Python pulling that. I don’t know who the equivalent screwball black comedy people are these days. Eric Andre?
Even That Mitchell and Webb Look is a decade old at this point.
Dating apps deliberately match you with incompatible people so you keep returning and paying for premium.
there’s no way this isn’t true. i have personally experienced this on those apps.
Probably it is like slot machine programming. Average is bad, but will give out a minor win timed so that you still believe that it is possible.
Frosted Flakes are not great, they’re just paying Tony the Tiger to say that.
THEY’RE GRRRRRRFINE!
John Harvey Kellogg was a surgeon who performed circumcisions. He believed they were an effective treatment for “addiction to masterbation”.
There are conspiracy theories (misconceptions?) that he popularized circumcisions in America. Or that Corn Flakes were created to curb masterbation urges - because they are so bland that obviously no one would want to jerk it after eating that.
Idk where I’m going with this, but John Harvey Kellogg was a weird fucking dude.
He did actually make cornflakes to stop people from masturbating though. It was something to do with spicy food making you horny
Is this a misconception? I’ve never looked into that but heard it before. I’m skeptical of googling this haha
Companies intentionally make it hard to find the balance on a gift card so you forget to apply the remain balance. Saving them billions for free. Even it’s just like $3 or whatever, that’s three dollars worth of dollars. It’s your $3, use it.
Agreed, but it also works both ways. If you think your card has 50 dollars but it only has three, you go and buy 55 dollar item and have to give 'em a ton of money without first realising.
The gift card conspiracy has depths beyond our understanding. A gift card or should i say GRIFT CARD!?! It’s a pyramid that extends up and down, it’s a card balance without beginning or end.
This is what they don’t want us to know. 👁️🔼
GRIFT CARD
This is explicitly the logic behind gift cards. Like this is explicitly why the exist and what they’re designed to do. Companies make vast, vast amounts of money on gift cards that are purchased and not redeemed or not completely redeemed. If anything, I’d say the conspiracy part is the idea that it’s somehow rude or gauche to send cash. Fuck that, 1.) No I do not want to be locked in to getting a stomach illness at Chili’s, and 2 please do send me cash I love cash cash is great.
