Ask Lemmy

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.

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"

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.

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…

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.

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.

Back when reddit had awards, the admins would routinely award posts to make it appear like people were actually buying them.

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

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.

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.

Eipstein didn't kill himself.

I mean, the stakes seem pretty low right now.

Paul McCartney died in a car crash in 1964 and was replaced by someone who turned out to be a way better song writer.

I've seen studies claiming that toilet seats are among the cleanest spots in a public restroom, and that slamming your bare ass cheeks down on those things is perfectly safe.

I also work in an operating room, where we routinely chop condyloma off of people's ass cheeks... albeit less commonly the cheeks than the hole, but enough times to showcase the fact that the cheeks are prone to spreading and contracting contact dependent pathogens.

Those studies are bullshit - always build that toilet-paper-bird's-nest on the public toilet seat.

Edit - also if you get a skin tag that seems bigger than a normal skin tag, it's probably not a skin tag. Get that shit looked at before it's the size of a fucking golf ball. You'll save yourself a lot of time, pain, money, and worry.

Microsoft deliberately fucks with your video and audio drivers before a big update so you have to reboot

This isn't a conspiracy, it is a proven fact.

Okay I think Amtrak is not really remotely interested in providing a positive passenger rail experience, but is instead used by the automotive and railroad industry to provide a poor experience, ensuring that people keep buying cars and gas and keep the rail lines free for commercial usage.

Here is my primary piece of evidence; in e-commerce web design to increase sales your goal is to remove barriers between a motivated customer and them clicking buy. A company the size of amtrak should have a decently sophisticated process of multi variable testing and focus groups to at least someehat improve the process over time and make it easy for people to plan route trips and buy tickets.

And yet in the decades that Amtrak has been operating they user experience has barely changed and seems to do just the minimum to keep up with the times and not look stale. And it's not an overly complicated item they are selling. A very small in house team would be able to make a very usable experience in just a couple of years. But it's absolute shit. It's so frustrating and to try and plan a train trip and it always has been, for absolutely no reason.

Either this massive company has had absolute fools in charge of their web dev for decades leaving piles of money on the table due to incompetence.. OR they actually just don't care about making sales for whatever reason. I think that reason is that they exist just to keep the rail experience shitty.

My secondary piece of evidence is how poor and shitty the actual train service remains after so long in business. Train travel has not gotten better at all in my lifetime, only worse.

Local parking companies are getting rid of pay machines and forcing apps and QR codes on people so that it's less convenient to pay. They know people will have trouble so then they can fine people who are "non-compliant".

Toothpaste tubes and similar containers are intentionally designed to be inconvenient to get the full contents out of.

JFK's head just...did that.

When you buy crisps sometimes there's just.... hardly any seasoning on them?? I'm talking crisps like Doritos or BBQ Beef Hula Hoops. There can be a massive difference with the amount of seasoning between batches and I'm sure they do it on purpose to make you buy more of them so you can get that really well seasoned batch you loved again lol. i don't actually believe this but I'd be interested to know why

Joy murdered Bing Bong in Disney's Inside Out (2015).

I think Vince Neil of Motley Crue got a ridiculously short sentence for drunk driving manslaughter because his record company bought off the judge so that they could make money off him performing. I suspect a lot of famous people have that happen.

The whole adding glue to phones and other electronics is the result of Big Glue lobbying Big Tech

Mine used to be that Bill Hicks faked his death and created Alex Jones in order to sell out. Doesn’t seem very low-stakes any more