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)

  • stigsbandit34z [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year 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.

    • ratboy [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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

    • LGOrcStreetSamurai [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year 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.

      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.

      • raven [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        And then you can make great use of absolute numbers over more contextualized relative numbers/ Here’s a made up example:

        frothingfash 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.

        • LGOrcStreetSamurai [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          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.

            • LGOrcStreetSamurai [he/him]@hexbear.net
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              1 year ago

              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.

  • 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.

    • Mindfury [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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

      • FactuallyUnscrupulou [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        1 year ago

        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”.

        • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          1 year ago

          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

  • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • 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.

    • Owl [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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.

      • teddy-bonkerz@kbin.social
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        1 year ago

        In my experience a reasonable amount of elevator close buttons have an effect, at least where I’ve been in the US

  • HumanBehaviorByBjork [any, undecided]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

    • Mardoniush [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I think that’s the general academic consensus, that Koko probably had some simple psudo-signing behaviour to communicate single concepts (perhaps even as complex as “sad”), but had no real language capability and was just randomly stringing these concepts together at best and signing whatever got her food at worst, likely somewhere between the two.

    • SootySootySoot [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      The claim she ‘knew language’ or could ‘speak sentences’ is obvious nonsense. But there’s no doubt that animals like dogs can indeed learn hundreds of words and associate them with real-world concepts. I’ve seen videos where someone has a hundred different stuffed toys in another room, and they can tell the dog to get a specific item with complete reliability. So I’ve no doubt a dog could convey a desire for a specific object, for example. Conveying any abstract concepts, or stringing any sentences beyond a single word, I certainly haven’t seen done with any objectively measurable success.

    • Egon [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      I remember seeing someone deboonk it once, but I won’t say I think animals can’t learn language-based communication. Like dogs can learn commands, they can learn that a sound conveys a meaning. Surely animals can then also learn that a motion conveys meaning.

  • GnastyGnuts [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago
    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.

  • UlyssesT [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    “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 fedposting

    • Fibby@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      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.

  • CeeMoney [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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.

  • BelieveRevolt [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    “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.

  • LGOrcStreetSamurai [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    illuminati

    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.

    illuminati

    • SootySootySoot [any]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      1 year ago

      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.