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.

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

    • 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

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      Yeah, afaik this is pretty widely acknowledged. Both the GOP and the Dems do it. The notable example I can think of is all the public housing projects the US grudgingly built in response to Soviet housing programs, then deliberately starved of resources to convince people they don’t work.

      Starving education of resources so it can be privatized has been ongoing program for decades. Everyone’s in on it - Tech Billionaires wanted to control education so they could proletarianize coding and they largely won. Christian Fascists wanted Charter Schools so they could re-impose segregation. Democrats wanted to privatize everything so they could loot public education funds and divert the money to magnet and charter schools, while also stripping resources going to minorities. The whole purpose of property-tax funded education was to ensure that class was rigidly enforced.

  • 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.

  • WittyProfileName2 [she/her]@hexbear.net
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    1 year ago

    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!

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

        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.

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

        When I am using dating apps, I completely delete my account and remake it every few weeks.

        From my experience, they give your profile a lot of extra reach in the first 2-3 weeks or so before throttling it.

        It’s been a while since I’ve done this, though, I imagine they’ll eventually start combating that strategy if they’re not doing it already.

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

      I wonder if there’s a way to game it so you actually get matched with people you are compatible with, ie. by pretending to be someone else as far as the algorithm is concerned. Or if their algorithms are so good that you can’t even get away with that.

  • 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.

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

        I think it’s more like they can’t acknowledge it or people start frothing at the mouth and organizing hunting parties, sorta like how we decimated the wolf populations across the country

        • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          We don’t really have that much livestock (the old joke is farming here is a great way to make a small fortune if you start with a big one) and it was mostly ranchers that wanted to kill wolves for having the audacity to kill cows the ranchers didn’t want to spend money to fence in.

      • 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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          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

    • Adkml [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      From the adirondacks, this is absolutely true. Every old timer that’s spent decades in the woods has a cougar story.

    • 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

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

    • operacion_ogro [he/him]@hexbear.net
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      I 100% believe this is true and it’s what I thought of when I saw this thread. I’m a fan of a small-market team and it’s obvious that the teams with large markets are given preferential treatment. If you’re an owner, would you rather have 3 million people watching the finals or 30 million people? Their financial interest demands that bigger teams be more successful

      • 420blazeit69 [he/him]@hexbear.net
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        Revenue sharing makes that part a lot more believable, but I still find it hard to buy the idea that one group of billionaires (small market owners) would allow a group of their peers (big market owners) to fuck over their hobby (the team) for the sake of ultimately an incremental amount of money. But maybe I’m thinking too small and too recently.

    • Alien Nathan Edward@lemm.ee
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      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.

    • darkl1nk@lemmy.ml
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      1 year ago

      Or quantum suicidal people that try to deceive and hack the machinery of the universe.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      There’ve never been any time travellers because the time traveller detection agency always spots them winning the stock market and neutralizes them, .

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

  • laziestflagellant [they/them]@hexbear.net
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    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.

    • FemboyStalin [she/her,any]@hexbear.netOP
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      I’m fully on board with this one. The update to “scan” pokestops(take a video of everything around you) followed by the gutting of mobile raids sells this one for me.

      • laziestflagellant [they/them]@hexbear.net
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        To quote comrade Finger, they had a good thing going. Whales would dump money into remote raiding and that backbone supported dolphins and minnows who could both host and join raids via pokegenie, which was a completely independent third party organization that Niantic didn’t have to manage or moderate. All Niantic had to do was continue their normally scheduled content treadmill and reap the benefits.

        The whole ‘but the whales are burning through content too fast, Niantic had to stop them’ explanation doesn’t hold water for me. Wouldn’t Niantic rather have some portion of whales get burnt out and drop off the game for a while until the next content release rather than shut off that revenue stream entirely?

        I dunno, to me the only explanation that makes sense is there’s something about human movement tracking that Niantic really, really wants.

        • Finger [he/him]@hexbear.net
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          It used to be that Go had a proximity tracker that helped you search for the one’s you wanted. It was like a simpler, stress-free version of my day job. Every update since they got rid of it has been a half measure.

    • Frank [he/him, he/him]@hexbear.net
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      The feds have had to tell soldiers etc multiple times to stop using jogging apps and uploading their routes to social media. They’re posting detailed maps of where everything is at military bases and government facilitites.