chat

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.

"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.

I think the story about the passengers fighting back on United flight 93 is fake and it was shot down by the military.

Incredibly low stakes but still technically a conspiracy theory.

There's a town in Wales called Beddgelert. They have a story about how the town is named after a loyal hound who was mistakenly killed in revenge by Llewellyn the Great who believed Gelert killed his infant son. They have a statue and all the typical tourist trap shit.

Cute story except for one thing.

It's all a lie. The story of Gelert was made up in the 18th century by the owner of a local hotel, David Pritchard, who was looking to drum up tourism. There's no record of the story before then, the burial mound was erected some time shortly before he started circulating the myth, Gelert wasn't a name before then. The town was actually named after Celert, an 8th century missionary who settled there, and 13th century censuses that list the town as Bedkelert seem to support this assumption.

Eryri tourist board has taken you for fools!

Dating apps deliberately match you with incompatible people so you keep returning and paying for premium.

I go back and forth. But this week I 100% believe Justin from Canada is Fidel's kid.

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.

i dont necessarily believe it but i think the conspiracy theory that justin trudeau is castro's kid is funny

Frosted Flakes are not great, they're just paying Tony the Tiger to say that.

I'm 100% convinced that "vape disease" was just Covid. 90% sure Covid was developed in a lab. 70% sure that lab was in USA and that Covid was spread at the military games in Wuhan.

The lottery is a trap designed to catch time travelers.

Veganism is the correct path forward.

Low Steaks

Toby Keith had "Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue" pre-written years before 9/11 and wrote it generically enough so that it could apply to whatever war Amerikkka entered next.

The feds are running Pokémon Go (and possibly other copycat AR games) to harvest data on human movement and shopping patterns, and the feds are the ones who forced Niantic to dismantle the remote raiding economy and focus almost entirely on in person raids.

A development studio deliberately stopping whales from dumping money into them (ie the previously unlimited remote raid passes) is kind of a jaw dropping moment.

The US intelligence community uses the same mechanisms to control US elections that it's used all around the globe. JFK's assassination was a coup orchestrated by Allen Dulles and people loyal to him in response to getting fired, and every president is informed of this upon taking office, as a threat.

Oh wait, you said "low-stakes" and "conspiracy theory" and not "important facts."

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.

"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

Those two guys who drove to every Margaritaville were honoring Jimmy Buffet's final wish before his death. And they did him proud 🫡

The healing power of crystals is real, but very few people have had the gumption to have enough inside them to get the full effect.

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)

Definitely. Capitalists want to monoplise all parts of human existence, including relationships.

Lie detectors exist and work with high accuracy. The smear against them in media and academia is to stop the public from trying to use them on our leaders.

okay here's one i'm actually serious about that's kind of controversial: Koko the gorilla did not know sign language. in fact she did not know any language. she was very intelligent and emotionally deep, but she did not do what humans do when we communicate with each other through spoken or signed words. at most she repeated some actions that got her some reward, but she did not associate the actions with any meaning beyond the reward. her trainer did not know ASL and did not bother properly codifying the reduced version she supposedly taught Koko. instead she convinced herself of her conclusion, and having done so, worked to imbue any pseudo-signing behaviors by Koko with linguistic meanings whether they made sense or not.

I believe pretty much the same thing about everyone on youtube and tiktok who made those button boards that their dog or cat presses to "talk." i think these cases and claims are worth investigating scientifically, but so far no one has definitively demonstrated what would be a very surprising conclusion i especially find it suspect when they say things like "so far Grover has learned over 80 words!" and what they mean is their golden retriever has pressed over 80 buttons that said a word that the owner could come up with some explanation for.

Crosswalk buttons and hold open/close door buttons in elevators are just there to give an illusion of control

Food prices at the local supermarkets are fixed. Each week a different brand of a certain good (like milk or rice) gets to go on the "special price", while the rest sell for the regular price. And they keep rotating which brand gets the special. All fixed.

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.