Batshit insane conspiracy theories are pushed to discredit all conspiracy theories with actual evidence.
Women’s pants have small pockets on purpose to increase handbag sales.
Surveillance of the general public is much, much worse than people believe and the view of being considered weird and paranoid is deliberately encouraged.
The whole adding glue to phones and other electronics is the result of Big Glue lobbying Big Tech
Uno changes the rules every few years so that people have different ideas of which “house rules” are canon. Being “the game that people argue over” keeps it in the public consciousness much better than “that game that’s kind of fun to play two rounds of occasionally”
Companies add water to meat to make it heavier so they can charge more.
I once left a pound of frozen ground beef from the farmers market in water but the packaging was damaged, so it was watery. I patted it dry with paper towels. Months later I bought ground beef from a store and it felt like the watered patter dry beef. I even dried it using 2 paper towels afterwards…
There is advertisment in Netflix that is a company saying they don’t do this like other companies. It is real
https://aboutseafood.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/USDA-Added-Water-Regulations-Summary.pdf
A company in Canada, Lilydale, used to market their chicken as “no water added”
high-steak conspiracy theory
Frustrating if true, since I’ve heard several people float the same conspiracy while shopping in my store, despite this not being something that we do. The price of meat (at least in Canada) has just risen to absurdities post-pandemic. I don’t even buy it anymore.
Typically it’s not the chain that sells it. It is the processor before it gets to the store, think of the prepackaged meats with the weight stamped on a sticker. Or even bulk bags of parts.
My parents have a local butcher in town. It’s about half the price of the supermarket and excellent quality.
I was talking about large producers like Tyson or Foster Farms adulterating their products.
Your family is in a completely different league than them. I say this as someone who grew up splitting a cow from the farm with family members and having a local butcher do the work of splitting it into parts.
I bet the sausage they make is amazing!
This is 100% true. Have had a supermarket GM tell me about how much water they ‘had’ to pump into corned silverside to meet a price point.
This is absolutely a thing with chicken. Always go for the “Air-Chilled” chicken if you can afford it.
https://www.eatlikenoone.com/air-chilled-chicken-whats-the-difference.htm
I have seen videos of the machines injecting water into shrimps (lots of needles), this isn’t a conspiracy theory!
A similar thing is fat; force-feed cattle quickly and they get a big lump of fat (it will just melt away, but you still pay for it), feed them normally and exercise them and the fat will be in “stripes” and makes the meat taste way better.
If it was just fat! I save all the fat from cooking, but this thing… has no fat!
In the movie Moana she hits her head while trying to escape the thrashing waves. when she wakes up she’s on the beach and has magic water powers.
I believe she is actually dying and everything after that point in the movie is a fantasy in her head as she slowly dies. she knows this deep down and struggles with the concept of death immediately after when her grandmother dies, thus sending her off on a journey to save her people (herself).
she then follows Maui who guides her along to the afterlife (even takes a small detour to the underworld). when she finally meets Te Fiti the goddess is in a state of duality (life and death). only after restoring Te Fiti to her living state does she return to her people where they welcome her back to the land of the living.
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…either united 93 was shot down or the USAF was incompetent; i put odds on competence…
The majority of brands are involved in a scheme where their products lead to more consumption of another product.
Deodorant makes your armpits smell worse, needing to use more soap and continue to use deodorant.
Shampoo makes your hair need conditioner, and needs more products to look nice again needing to wash more frequently…
Soda makes you hungry and don’t rehydrate, snacks make you thirsty and aren’t satiating.
Food isn’t nourishing, take these vitamins.
Clothing is getting made from materials that hold onto smells and wear more from washing, needing to be washed more often and washer needing repairs and buying new clothes.
Apps need more resources so you need the new phone to run them.
You posted a lot of things I’ve been feeling for a while but haven’t put down into words. Thank you for this.
That’s just capitalism
You’re describing capitalism
And pretty much everyone knows that’s how it works, the disagreement is that some (very odd) people think this is a good thing.
It’s just consumption in general. It predates capitalism (as we know it). For thousands of years humanity has been using beer and wine to cut the fat, sugar, and salt on our palate so we don’t feel too full or sate and can eat more.
Humans being gluttonous motherfuckers who will consume stuff until we’re wrecked is indeed older than dirt. Some of the oldest records we HAVE of humanity involve people committing excesses of the sort.
– Having a bunch of organisations driven by profit independently come to the conclusion they can exploit this flaw in human persons to maximise their profits, leading to a systemic vicious circle where we consume more, so they create more artificial needs for us to consume, so we consume more, so (…) – Is, in fact, a product of capitalism.
My rebuttal is that only those examples of greed are celebrated and honored in the capitalistic age. There are plenty of examples of people living in a form of harmony with nature and some current countries like Bhutan who are doing better. I imagine at different points in time you had a majority of populations living this way but those histories weren’t preserved (like Native American) as well or taught as much.
I thoroughly believe that antiperspirant makes you sweat more. I used to constantly have pit stains, I was so embarrassed by it in high school. I even went to the doctor and was prescribed a hyperhydrosis medication which didn’t work and gave me a rash. So I switched to aluminum free Deodorant and my armpits basically never sweat now. Haven’t ruined a shirt with pit stains in over a decade now.
this is neither low-stakes nor harmless, it is also not a conspiracy😆
Whoops 🤭
People are always shocked when I tell them I wash my hair no more frequently than once every 3 or 4 months and without conditioner. My response is that shampoo is a relatively recent invention and people’s hair was perfectly fine beforehand, just as mine is now. I still wash with water every day when I shower and that does the trick just fine.
Eipstein didn’t kill himself.
I mean, the stakes seem pretty low right now.
Dude how do we know he’s really dead?
I was the piano wire
The way literature is taught in school is designed deliberately to make people hate reading + studying the subtext and paratext.
By forcing kids to read books that aren’t just old, but were written by 40 year olds for other 40 year olds, and then mandating them write reports about the symbolism of a book they didn’t even want to read in the first place, you ensure that like 80% of people will inherently associate reading and interpreting media with every negative emotion at once.
Meanwhile you look at fandom dorks on every site and you see how invested on themes and subtext they are, and you realise people kinda naturally want to overthink media… Provided they like that media.
But people who can read subtext and understand it are less susceptible to propaganda. So.
There’s a great book “The Mathematician’s Lament” that talks about how math teaching is almost guaranteed to make people hate it, but it’s maybe not a conspiracy. Or is it!?
I grew up in Canada.
My high school English teacher let us choose books to write essays on from a selection of a dozen or so that he was intimately familiar with and could tell whether someone was BSing or not.
I don’t remember all of them, but I chose The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I also remember reading 1984 in his class.
I kinda got this privilege in my Jr, and Sr years of high school. I had the same teacher both years because AP English, and when it came time to read either Les Miserables or Pride and Prejudice, I informed her that I had already read the book, and provided her with an oral synopsis. Instead I read Dante’s Inferno, (I was attempting to finish the entire Divine Comedy, but it took me too long to finish Paradisio, so I just did a report on the first third.) and handed in parallel work on that book instead. The same thing happened with all the required reading books, but Mrs. Sparks wasn’t surprised. I was one of those kids that read several hundred books a year.
This one resonates with me. I fucking love science fiction, and when they forced me to read The Giver, the closest they every got to science fiction, I actually enjoyed it. And then the rest of the time I hated it all.
If I had actually been given the chance to read some good science fiction, I would have been reading a lot more as a kid.
Right?
With hindsight, now being more or less the target audience (a 30+ year old disillusioned with life) – A lot of the books they pushed on us (I’m in Brazil, so of course they pushed the Brazilian canon of Literature) were objectively super good?
But y’know
When you’re 15 years old, and have to read a book that is not only very old (thus has a vocabulary you are already struggling with, just because OLD), but is written by grown-ups for grown-ups (ergo, a lot of the fun leans on heightened versions of life experiences adults have all either lived or seen someone live through) – AND you have to do it in a hurry (because you’ve got like 4 other assignments for that week, and the deadline looms) – AND you are expected to not only get into the nitty-gritty of its themes and such, but to do so in a way that your teacher approves of?
Like how can you not hate reading after that? I was lucky I’d been exposed to literature I liked prior to that, so instead of thinking “I hate books”, I just thought “wow all these books suck”.
They didn’t suck. But they just… Were very much not for me?
Like. Senhora, by José de Alencar, is a deeply enjoyable book if you’re a grown up. Two rich people who married for money and hate each other’s guts, playing the perfect husband and wife to society while shooting subtle barbs at each other whenever they get the chance? AND then they end up fond of each other after years of this? Inject that into my 30-year-old historical-romance junkie EYEBALLS please. But at age 15? I hated it.
Damn. Good one.
Pillsbury pie crusts - the kind that come rolled up, 2 in a box, come in a very standard box with the typical two big flaps at the end, one glued over the other, with two little side flaps inside. Safeway store brand pie crusts seem identical but have a slightly more complicated box. One flap peels open easily but the other flap is sort of latched into the little side tabs with little slots, making it hard to peel open. You have to rip the corners apart. It’s totally unnecessary. The simpler Pillsbury box works fine.
Until just now my low-stakes conspiracy theory was that the store brand box was deliberately designed to create the disadvantage of being a slight pain in the ass to open. I figured Safeway pie crusts, like most store-brand products, are made by a major manufacturer - probably Pillsbury - and that Pillsbury probably made them under the condition that the package be harder to open, to create a tangible difference between the products.
However, when I started typing this I casually googled and found that Safeway buys their OEM pie crusts from Albertsons. This blows my conspiracy theory but now I wonder even more why the box design is so stupid.
Pillsbury probably put money into R&D for their box design and the Safeway white label company is probably using a box design that is older, made by older machines with lower tolerance for mistakes and cheaper glues. Manufacturing engineering is a very interesting field with a lot of budget concerns.
Safeway and Albertsons are the same company (and randalls and tom thumb and about 20 other names). Lots of acquisitions and mergers over the years.
so the real question is where albertsons gets their pie crusts from.
actually fitting
I’m assuming it’s a patent problem.
I srsly doubt that the Pillsbury box design is still under patent, because it’s been used in hundreds or even thousands of products I’ve opened over a span of decades - for example, pretty much every breakfast cereal box works that way. Two main flaps, two little tabs under them at the ends. The store-brand box is something I’ve never even seen before. Could be that it’s designed to be opened along one side, with the “front” of the box opening as a lid. Then the structure would actually make sense. I dunno, next time I make pie I’ll have a closer look.
I don’t know what I was thinking when I read your original comment, but I thought you meant the ones that come in the tubes. Guess I was half asleep. The extra tabs on the corners sound like they might be for structural support so that they don’t get crushed as much when shipping or so that the box they come in can be weaker. I know plenty of the ones with the basic glued design open up on their own when weight is put on it.
Every year the government takes 1 hour away from every American with the implementation of Daylight savings time. They return the hours to each American in the fall. However, in between March (when the hours are taken) and November (when the hours are returned) over 2 million Americans die, and don’t get their hours returned to them, or their estates. This happens every. single. year.
What is the government doing with all of these stockpiled hours of dead Americans?
Your spring forward closer to paying taxes, once paid, they give your time back
Before people started measuring time, a day was a day. People worked when they felt like it and stopped before it got dark.
When we started quantifying time, it didn’t take long before time suddenly became a commodity. All of a sudden bosses would pay by the “hour”, and no longer by what they got in return.
Then, they started regarding the hours that they paid for as “theirs”, demanding workers to keep breaks short or peeing in bottles.
/Rant
I love when I see stuff like this online. As if farming is some luxurious fun time denied us by corporations.
I lived in a subsistence farming community in West Africa for a couple years. Farming isn’t easy or fun.
People woke up before the sun every.single.day to go tend to the fields. They stopped working when they were exhausted from being out in the sun all day, or when they were finished with the field. The crops and the weeds grow when they want, not when you want.
If it didn’t rain enough, they might starve, or their children might starve. Maybe both. The backbreaking farm labor was literally a gamble with their lives. Occasionally someone would get whacked by a tool and have to ask friends and relatives to farm their crops for them, often at a cost of some of that grain later. If that injury got infected, there’s extra days or weeks you’re asking someone else to do extra work to cover for you, and you owe them for this.
Everyone harvested crops at about the same time, flooding the market. But people also didn’t just want to eat millet alone and wanted things like cooking oil or salt they had to buy. So being strapped for cash, they were forced to sell a lot of harvest up front because they simply couldn’t afford to wait any longer for basic needs.
I can go on and on, but if you think being a farmer is so wonderful and amazing, I would encourage you to go do some WWOOFing and spend a few months on a farm and actually doing a real farmer’s schedule and not some up at 9, done at 2:30 schedule.
Farming? I was talking about data engineering.
I don’t think they said farming was fun, and I’m also not sure that you lived on a farm “before people started measuring time” 🤷🏾♂️
A fellow historia civilis subscriber I see
There are dozens of us.
Big Time conspiracy. I love it.
All brains should aspire to work like your brain.
Obviously those hours are taken back by the babies with the balls to be born after the redistribution.
Those two million all happened to be born after daylight savings time but before the hours are returned. So they get to live with an extra hour.
When they die it cancels out thus the Big Time Bowl doesn’t overflow or run dry.
They use them to farm the adrenechrome babies
huh?
Wait… when is this happening?
That NASA has done a zero-gravity intercourse experiment.
The 50th shuttle mission had married couple and it included spacelab. A pressurized and habitable module that could be isolated from the rest of the crew. Even before launch they were asked if it would happen, and denied it, as NASA has afterwards as well.
It doesn’t help that several of the listed experiments was about human health, developmental biology and included animals and eggs to study ovulation, fertilization, cell division and growth.
Now that you bring it up, of course we’ve studied whether babies can be made in a spaceship. It’s literally the only other option for interstellar travel besides cryogenic freezing, which is far more sci-fi than spacesex. Or spacex for short.
Any generational ship will mutiny within one generation and likely die off by the second
Interstellar travel is a pipe dream made up by people tired of saving what we already are losing
Speaking from experience? How many generation ships have you travelled on?
…speaking for most of us, just the one…
You really don’t want to go down that line with a guy on the spectrum that has spent literally half a century thinking about space travel. You really don’t.
I think the only reason to even try a generational ship is if it’s literally all we have.
We can’t even keep the most prosperous nation on the planet from falling to fascism in 5 years how the FUCk do you think we’re gonna keep an isolated crew of highly intelligent people with access to the highest tech available?
I know enough about human nature that the only way this works is if it started as a die-hard authoritarian religious movement and even then I only give it 1 out of 4 chances of making it 100 years into the mission
To be fair, there were a few years between when thee country was founded and five years ago.
It went bad in less than 20 so…
Transitional periods take time, and are generally pretty messy. Most of that is because comfortable humans are inherently lazy. The rich managed to stave off a transitional period that began in the mid 1800’s for almost a century with specific concessions to the working class, that they immediately started clawing back, after WWI and WWII. They can’t hold it back with neoliberal rot anymore, so the transitional period may now continue.
It will get better, just maybe not within our lifetimes.
Most of that is because comfortable humans are inherently lazy.
This is classist propaganda and doesn’t belong in your message
The breeding fetish makes so much more sense now. Barf.
Ooh, I do like this one.
But why the secrecy?
You don’t understand how sexually conservative the world was back then
The christians are still like this.
They still won’t let them have ANY alcohol in the US section of the ISS.
Given how US society treats alcohol, that seems reasonable. Our overall relationship with alcohol is pretty masochistically abusive.
Paying astronauts to bump uglies with tax dollars could cause a bit of a controversy.
Cats have a much more complex understanding of human behaviour and just consider us harmless and boring enough to not bother.
As in your cat totally understands that your keyboard is special in a way and you don’t want it disturbed, but couldn’t give two shits about your wants. Or completely being aware of how unpleasant it is when they sit on you with their butthole in your face, but why not if that’s what they want to do right now?
I think this is real and that most (not all) cats are smarter and more selfish than we think
Dogs are waaaaay more aware than most people seem to think. I think it’s true of most animals. We just don’t like to think about it.
There is a part of their brain that only activates when humans are around.
This. My dog knows words that I didn’t teach him. I know people talk about pattern recognition and what not but that’s not all that different than human knowledge. I learn words by hearing them repeated too
I know how to read his body language and the tone of his barks to know what he wants. He will even show me, if I ask him.
I suspect he understands a lot more than I am capable of deciphering as well.
My dogs know the difference between going out pants and around the house pants. We also have to say preambulate when talking about walks unless we want to excite the dogs.
I stayed out later than normal one time and missed one of my dog’s walks. He tore up a newspaper while staring at me. Rip, rip, rip. He knew I spent time looking at newspapers so he chose to destroy one, while heavily implying that if I fucked up his schedule again he would rip ME up.
LMAO
As someone who spends more free time with electronics and other more expensive stuff than newspapers, this would cause a big rift between me and my dog.
Aw, I can’t help but be on his side.
Same. I was very much in the wrong.
Dogs brains activate the same regions when the see human faces that activate in our brains. These same regions don’t activate in dogs to anything like the same degree when they see other dogs.
Dogs are far more in tune with us that they are with their own species.
Some of the oldest human archaeological sites have dog remains among the humans. Domestication of the dog was going on far far earlier than the first evidence we have for domestication of the first food species.
We have evolved together as two mutually symbiotic species.
These same regions don’t activate in dogs to anything like the same degree when they see other dogs.
Probably because they use scent more than sight for being in tune with their own species.
Sent is just an id for dogs. They use body language with humans and other dogs. They also pay attention to threw same parts of human faces that we do. They don’t do this with other dog faces.
Scent is how dogs (generally) primarily experience the world.
They don’t do this with other dog faces.
Because dogs don’t use their faces the same way that humans do
Dogs use scent more then humans. However they still use sight and sound much morfe then they use scent.
Dogs use body language and vocalization to communicate with each other. Watch two dogs interact they look at each other and will growl, and bristle or tail wag and play bow to indicate what they want.
They look at faces on humans because that’s a major component of how we communicate.
Smell is not how they communicate. It’s just how they know where other animals have been.
I agree, but that’s not a conspiracy. Scientifically speaking, we know that animals are smarter than most people admit.
The conspiracy here is that cats are not just smarter than we think but actually one of the smarter animals in general and they are also very internal and just don’t care about us so they don’t exhibit it in ways that we recognize.
I’ve always said that people who think cats are simple or ratty/skittish creatures have never laid with a loving cat on their chest. There are few deeper connections that a good owner and a well-loved cat. They are exceptionally bright animals.
Some cats are extremely smart and very devious (looking at you, mother’s cat) and some are. Well. I love them. But I’ve met cats that absolutely had nothing going on upstairs, not a single thought in their little brains.
That’s rare though! Most are pretty smart and know how to convince us to do everything for them! And I always will do my best for them.
cats that absolutely had nothing going on upstairs, not a single thought in their little brains.
Ah, so you’ve met a Persian cat. Pretty cats, but at what cost?
Their singing ability was definitely a cost, never let one pick any Bard or Bard adjacent class.
Back when reddit had awards, the admins would routinely award posts to make it appear like people were actually buying them.
There were a few times that users were gifted awards to give out too.
Can confirm. I was gifted a bunch of Reddit cash for… er… I dunno, being around for a long time maybe. I spent it on giving gold and silver to posts or comments I enjoyed, but I certainly wasn’t going to spend my actual money on it.
I thought this was common knowledge.
I got awarded gold by a mod that told me they were gifted a certain number of awards from Reddit to give out (I believe they said they got 15).
The same mod also claimed that gold-gifted responses were given prioritized visibility.
